215 Children

 

A nun shaves a child's head on arrival at a Residential School:
Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan

The discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of 215 First Nations children at the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia has shocked many people, both in Canada and elsewhere. Today, 6th June, there is a gathering outside Canada House in London to commemorate these children, some of whom seem to have been as young as three. At our online event on Thursday, with two First Nations poets, we observed a minute of silence. This horrific discovery may at last serve to draw attention to the true horror of the Residential School system. I hope so. But the grave has come as no surprise to First Nations people themselves.  Richard Jock, CEO of the First Nations Health Authority, acknowledged that the discovery was deeply distressing for Indigenous people, but at the same time pointed out: "That this situation exists is sadly not a surprise and illustrates the damaging and lasting impacts that the residential school system continues to have on First Nations people, their families and communities.''  There has been a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Residential School system, led by the Indigenous Justice Murray Sinclair (who spoke at ORIGINS 2013), which reported in 2015. There have also been numerous autobiographies, novels and films. In London, we have screened WE WERE CHILDREN and INDIAN HORSE. Yet, in spite of this, people still seem astonished. The crime against humanity is systematically ignored. Why?

I suspect it has something to do with the acknowledgment of responsibility, and the need for reparation that is consequent upon it.

I'd like to explore this in reference to a similar, though not of course identical, case in Ireland: the Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes, published last October. Here too, there was a mass grave of children whose burials went unrecorded, at the home in Tuam, operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours. Like First Nations children in Canada, the children of unmarried mothers in Ireland were placed in the "care" of Catholic orders, where many were abused, where many died, and where few or none were deemed worthy of a recorded or humane burial. They lived and died beyond the gaze of society.  

When the commission's report was discussed in the Dáil, Catherine Connolly (who Chairs the house), quote Hannah Arendt's important aphorism in relation to German guilt for the Shoah: "Where all are guilty, none is." Connolly was objecting to the idea that "society" should be blamed for Tuam, since the guilty individuals were clearly the nuns charged with running the home. If, Arendt argues, everyone is regarded as guilty then there is no risk attached to acknowledging guilt, and injustice comes to appear inevitable. It can actually become very convenient, even narcissistic, to declare guilt, and we could perhaps read some public apologies by contemporary political leaders for historical wrongs in this way.

Connolly, however, continued to argue: "You're saying here today that we are all responsible. I am not responsible, my family was not responsible, the people I know were not responsible."  This is where she parts company with Arendt, who was very careful to differentiate between responsibility and guilt.  Without asking anyone to acknowledge a guilt or blame which is clearly not theirs, Arendt still insisted that we can and should be held politically responsible for the actions committed by the states of which we are citizens, not least because we have inherited whatever may have been gained through those actions.  It is only by an acknowledgment of that collective responsibility, and meaningful action to redress the harm done, that we can truly be reconciled to historical injustice.  

This is what makes attempts to shift all the blame for Tuam or Kamloops onto the Catholic Church disingenuous, and what renders expressions of disbelief and sorrow from Canada's settler populations and (yes) the UK woefully inadequate.  In the same way that much of Britain's modern wealth is founded on slavery, it is also drawn from the systematic plundering of Indigenous lands and resources, and a key element of that was the campaign to destroy Indigenous culture and de-humanise Indigenous people, of which the Residential Schools formed a significant part. 

If we are genuinely shocked by the discovery at Kamloops, then let us be shocked into a recognition of the need for a genuine reparative justice. Let us explore how sovereignty over unceded territory might be returned. Let us look at who decides what happens to natural resources. Let us consider what should happen to the vast wealth that corporations and individuals have amassed through ongoing processes of colonisation. This call resonates with the recent words of the Indigenous Australian artist Richard Bell: “We need a new constitution for a new republic... There’s got to be a day of reckoning. There has to be exchanges of money and land. That cannot be avoided. Until then, we’re never going to say that you [non-Indigenous people] belong here. You won’t be able to say that until we say you can.”

Weesageechak Begins to Dance

RELaps by Aria Evans

I've been in Toronto this week - thanks to the British Council here - for Native Earth's annual new writing festival, called after the Cree Trickster Weesageechak.  Being a trickster festival, "new writing" turns out not only to mean rehearsed readings, but new dance pieces presented as work in progress, and even extracts from a musical and an opera.

This is the 29th edition of the annual festival - from a company that will be 35 years old next year.  It dates back to the landmark moment in indigenous theatre, when Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters exploded onto the stage and offered a contemporary voice for First Nations cultures in North America.  Since Tomson, there have been a number of Artistic Directors - when we brought the company to the first Origins Festival back in 2009, it was led by the wonderful Yvette Nolan.  Today, the AD is a dynamic young Plains Cree man from Edmonton, Ryan Cunningham.  I first met him in Brisbane back in March, and we've had a lot to talk about....  Ryan has curated a festival that deliberately ranges very wide - not only in the forms showcased but also in the content.  For one thing, he's managed to bring over some Indigenous Australian artists from Mooghalin: Billy McPherson's play Cuz was read by First Nations actors from Canada, suggesting all sorts of parallels - and differences.  But more striking for me was the number of pieces - often the most striking pieces in dramatic or theatrical terms - that were made by First Nations artists but which resisted easy categorisation as 'First Nations work'.

The work of First Nations artists is often reduced to mere representation - as if they existed merely to report on the state of their peoples to an otherwise unknowing world.  Of course, that is never their own agenda: although there is inevitably a certain preoccupation with important questions about the meaning of indigenous cultures and identities in a world that largely shuns their traditional values and continues to marginalise their communities.  At its most sophisticated, for example in Daniel David Moses' Almighty Voice and His Wife (the Native Earth piece at Origins 2009), theatre becomes a space to deconstruct the process whereby identities have been written onto native peoples, and a process to articulate an historically informed response through the live body in the current moment.

In this year's Weesageechak, there was certainly an element of this - but I found myself most drawn to pieces in which the First Nations identity of the artists was (at least apparently) coincidental.  The young choreographer Aria Evans presented two pieces - a solo called link and a two-person piece called RElaps.  The latter was particularly strong - looking at emotional violence in intimate relationships.  Even more surprisingly, perhaps, the last night of the festival was a reading of a new script by a very well-known Canadian playwright, Brad Fraser - whose Métis identity has not hitherto been exactly proclaimed.  Brad's play, called Ménage à Trois, deals with the unraveling lives of three friends over a period of several decades - there's a particular emphasis on shifting gender and sexual identities from the 70s to the present, and on parent-child relationships.  The dramaturgy is deliberately fragmented, so that a scene from 2016 can be juxtaposed with one from the 70s.  The three main characters are each played at various points by three actors of different ages - a scheme made all the more complex by the fact that one character changes gender..... 

It's not remotely confusing, though.  In fact, it feels very like the mental and emotional processes through which human beings tend to think about their personal stories.  A moment from the distant past suddenly acquires new meaning in relation to the current moment.  It's like Eliot's Four Quartets in its sense of all time being eternally present.  Or even J.B. Priestley - when I talked to Brad after the reading, he acknowledged the influence of An Inspector Calls and  Time and the Conways.  If it's possible to imagine J.B Priestley crossed with Angels in America - that's sort of what this play is...   Except that I think it's an indigenous play as well.

At no point is any character mentioned to be First Nations.  Very possibly none of them are - although in last night's reading, every actor was a First Nations person, and that was very resonant.  For one thing, the gender change is something that would not surprise more traditional Cree people - as Tomson Highway has pointed out, the Cree language has no genders, and fluid gender identities characterise Cree Trickster figures like Nanabush.  At one point in the play a female character, Kit, is given the latest thing as a gift in the 70s - a digital watch.  She comments that this is a new way to look at time - that it doesn't go in circles any more, but in a number line.  The play seems deliberately to resist this, following the circular, indigenous, natural sense of time as a circular movement - time as something repeated and re-visited constantly, rather than time as a constant journey forward towards some "goal" or other.  At the end of the play, a child conceived in the 70s is reflected in one born in the present - and there is a sense that one is the spiritual sister of the other.  That attitude to time, history and spiritual connection - nestling within a play that seems on the surface to be very urban, postmodern and ironic - is surely about bringing indigenous ideas and spirituality into the contemporary space where First Nations people live today.