Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (cite: Coulthard, 2014) is a 2014 book by Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene). The title inverts Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (cite: Fanon, 1952) to situate the analysis in the context of settler colonialism in northern Turtle Island (Canada).
Coulthard argues that the politics of recognition — the demand that the settler-colonial state acknowledge Indigenous rights, title, and identity — has become a mechanism of colonial governance rather than a path to liberation. Recognition, when granted by the colonizer on the colonizer’s terms, reproduces the colonial relationship by making Indigenous freedom dependent on settler approval. Coulthard proposes grounded normativity as an alternative: ethical and political frameworks rooted in Indigenous relationships to specific lands and practices, rather than in the terms the colonial state offers.
The book is central to contemporary debates on settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and the refusal of liberal recognition frameworks.