Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Fragments of Truth: Indian Residential Schools and the Challenge of Reconciliation in Canada

2023; Michigan State University; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/rhetpublaffa.26.2.0144

1534-5238

Margaret Solice,

Religious Education and Schools

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools (IRS) published its final report, testifying to Indigenous peoples' experience of brutality and violence in the Canadian residential school system. Writing on the meaning and significance of reconciliation in 2012, author Naomi Angel defines the term as "an act of creation. It is about new conversations and discussions, about creating new archives . . . [it is] not only about creative collaboration, but collaborative creation."1 Published eight years after Angel's death, Fragments of Truth engages in a dialogue with the present regarding Canada's project of reconciliation. The book is the published form of Angel's dissertation manuscript with updates provided by Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō ethnomusicologist and one of Angel's research collaborators, and Jamie Berthe, a scholar of visual culture and imperial histories. Rhetorical scholars, particularly those interested in the archival turn in rhetorical studies, will find not only that this work offers a wealth of theory but that Angel's archival research is exemplary.Fragments of Truth is structured by an introduction, four primary chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction should be understood as required reading, as it defines and justifies key terms, historically situates the use of TRCs, explores the ethical dimensions of the author's research, and provides chapter and argument primers for the reader. The four chapters are divided according to theme, progressing in their degree of materiality. Chapter one details the history offered in popular discourse related to the Canadian IRS system; chapter two attends to the archive; chapter three considers testimony provided at IRS TRC events; and chapter four turns to the material sites of former IRS schools. The conclusion returns to what it means to call for reading truth and reconciliation as new ways of seeing.In the first chapter, "Reconciliation as a way of Seeing," Angel reads the myth of a Canadian national identity of benevolence and tolerance against the history of the IRS system. Citing tactics in the determination of historical knowledge by the Canadian nation-state—namely the insistence on land acquisition as the starting point of history and the refusal to recognize the legitimacy transference of historical knowledge through the oral tradition (as is common by Indigenous people)—Angel argues that acts of suppression conceal narratives of violence and allow a mythos of benevolence to emerge and circulate. Turning to the picture, "Mountie Meets Sitting Eagle," Angel surveys literature that argues that the image falsely conveys a benevolent actor, the Canadian national mascot known as Mountie. Angel calls for a deeper reading by offering an analysis of Chief Sitting Eagle that identifies features of stoicism, skepticism, and suspicion. Doing so complicates and calls into question the presumed relationship of peace between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Tracing the statutory changes with respect to Indigenous peoples, Angel identifies three significant legal moments and their respective modes of thinking: 1) the Royal Proclamation of 1763 with separateness and self-governance; 2) the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 with a policy of assimilation and a call for unity over diversity; 3) the Indian Act of 1876, which called for restrictive control of Indigenous life and provided the statutory framework for the IRS system. The analysis is not limited to government policy. Angel makes an important observation for scholars conducting research on the topic, noting that despite heavy involvement by the church, the Canadian government's move toward secularization means that much of what occurred is absent from the government archives. Contrasting the relative lack of memories of the IRS system by the Canadian public with survivors' memories and the postmemories of their kin, Angel shares moments of abuse as well as camaraderie between students that were revealed in the TRC process. Angel places the Canadian TRC in a historical and global context, highlighting the advances made by Indigenous peoples in Australia and chronicling the advancements made through representation in Canadian government. Present throughout are the values underpinning the process of assimilation encompassed in the words, "Conceal," "Desire," "Grateful," "Attempt and Remain," and "Purchase, Wealthy" (44–47). Concluding with a discussion of iconic images in Canadian and Indigenous identities, Angel draws from the scholarship of Robert Hariman and John Lucaites on visual rhetoric to transition to the second chapter. Reconciliation becomes a call for a shift in relations of looking, seeing, and being seen.2In the second chapter, "Images of Contact," Angel analyzes how images circulate in the TRC process and considers how these images are recuperated and re-narrated in the present. The work examines archival photographs of "everydayness" in the IRS system, as well as how they are read in various moments. Drawing from Christopher Pinney's concept of "looking past," Angel offers a thoughtful rereading and resignification which might "challenge how images have been assigned meaning" (58). This act of resignification is a kind of "sifting" through collective memory for "colonial debris" which identifies the IRS system photographs as moments of "contact" between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (58). One kind of image identified is the "before and after," depicting a child before the IRS system and after. Angel's analysis highlights the presence of common tropes and points to the church's strategic use of such images. Temporally, the images reflect attention to the future in their projection of the idealized modern Canadian subject, as well as the past with the potential for re-envisioning the "before" pictures as encounters with pre-colonial subjects. The second image is "The Long Goodbye." Deploying the "civic skill" of watching photographs, and considering their presentation over time, Angel traces the photograph to modern encounters through the TRC process (76). This reveals the negotiation of photographic meaning and the recuperation of the past that occurs with reading photographs as memory screens. An important aspect of this memory recuperation process is the digitization of the archive. While digital archives can increase access and decentralize information, the process of digitization also poses risks in the iterative process.Chapter three considers the role of affect and the use of testimony and performance at the IRS TRC events. Angel's approach to engagement puts front and center the politics of affect in the research process by including a mix of first-person perspective field notes and reflective analysis. The goal, Angel explains, is both to complicate the presumed objectivity of research and posit the validity of recognizing multiple testimonial truths. The presence of the first-person "I" throughout the chapter serves as a reminder that the information being shared is the voice of testimony filtered through the author. The testimony considered includes that of survivors and, on occasion, perpetuators of violence from the IRS system. A "rumination on the dynamics of reconciliation," this chapter offers one possible interpretation of necessarily fragmented events (124). Significant in its detail is that, in the process of sharing experiences, survivors create spaces where public displays of affect become powerful sources for political intervention.Images of haunting offer new inroads for engaging in dialogue about the past; in the final chapter, "Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter," Angel applies this framework to her experience visiting the "colonial debris" of physical school structures. Despite the materiality of the sites, Angel does not find a stable reading of their meaning. Instead, what exists is a "palimpsest, layered and textured by memory" (139). Building from various works on haunting, Angel calls for understanding ghostly encounters in the context of Canadian Indigenous epistemologies, which understand ghosts as figures in both dream and waking life. Additionally, haunting, and the unsettling experience that comes with it, is a way to complicate and "unsettle" colonial relations by rejecting the impulse to adopt the identity of the empathetic spectator (129). The theme of unsettling and transformation continues in the discussion of place and memory. Rejecting the impulse to stabilize an ontology of place in memorials and monuments, Angel turns to Pierre Nora's reading of memory as a site of constant negotiation, or "milieux de memoire" (132). Thus, while reconciliation constitutes an unearthing of truths, it is also always engaged in new meaning and memory making. In the same way that the documentary, The Learning Path, seamlessly moves back and forth between original archival footage and modern reenactments of daily IRS experience, so too does the return to sites of former IRS buildings (133).3 Angel offers the metaphor of "dancing with ghosts" to complicate the direction of haunting as occurring by multiple identities with various pasts and presents (134–135). Read as "a beating heart of episodes," physical sites hold memories of trauma, abuse, and neglect, but also resilience and courage; previous lives haunt the grounds, but so, too, do new presences fill the sites with new and emergent meanings. Reading reconciliation as a ghostly encounter thus constitutes an encounter with the past, which opens the possibility of continual renegotiation and the ability to see beyond the tragic past to future possibility.Assessing the potential of reconciliation as new ways of seeing entails accepting the experience of unease that often arrives with remembering, revisiting, and revisualizing. In the conclusion, Angel explores this dynamic through a film examining the Canadian school system, Jules Koostachin's Remembering Inninimowin.4 The film follows Koostachin's journey learning the Cree language and reconnecting with her family in the aftermath of the IRS system. Reflecting on her own interpretation of the film in a later interview with Koostachin, Angel notes the barrier established with the refusal to provide translation for audiences viewing a final emotional moment shared between mother and daughter. But this is a moment of misrecognition. Koostachin does not refuse a translation to protect the emotional intimacy of the moment but to share her experience of not yet having the language to translate her own mother's words.Fragments of Truth is a detailed, genuine, and emotional engagement with truth and reconciliation. Angel's work effectively challenges the temptation towards determinism in returning to histories of violence and trauma, highlighting the potential for healing and new futures to emerge in the process of truth and reconciliation. Dylan Robinson and Jamie Berthe have beautifully conjured up memories, invigorating new life into Naomi Angel's work on Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. Weaving together scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, the project facilitates perspective exchanges, leading to new ways of seeing, particularly in the wake of trauma.