(PDF) Is the TRC a Text?

camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 269 12 Is the TRC a Text? clint burnham My teachings come from the mouths of people whose ability to read was basic at best … yet they were unequalled in their ability to relate a story, a story that flowed like water in a stream, soothing, calming, then at times angry, raging like rapids released from the icy grip of winter. – Duncan Mercredi, “Achimo”1 Even in the worst catastrophe, there is something unknown and cherished to be discovered. – Lee Maracle, Memory Serves: Oratories2 In this chapter, I explore what it means to talk about the trc as a text, ar- guing, specifically, that The Survivors Speak, an archive of trc testimony, can be productively approached as a work of literature. Here I am already blurring some distinctions (for example, what is the difference, if there is one, between “text” and “literature”?) and I will keep doing so, speaking of the testimony’s status as an archive and of its relation to the trc as an event (but also a performance); thinking of the digital, mediated, and visual culture aspects of The Survivors Speak; and making an argument for the concept of “orature” as a useful way in. My working thesis is that the literary – or the camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 270 270 Clint Burnham Canadian literary – both is and is not an adequate criterion for understanding or interpreting The Survivors Speak. It is an important or adequate criterion in the strategic/canonical sense that I want to argue for the aesthetic value of the testimony qua orature. But to call The Survivors Speak literature is also inadequate – and here the reasons are more complex. In the fitting sense of any negative critique, my critique is in solidarity with, but also questions, anti-colonial and decolonizing politics and methodologies. To declare the testimony as literary is a move in danger of losing sight of the specificities of its event: the archival and performative natures of the testimony on the one hand, and the colonial question not only of the literary but also, specifically, of Canadian literature on the other.3 From 2009 until 2015, members of the Truth and Reconciliation Com- mission (trc) toured Canada, taking testimony, in private and public ses- sions, from survivors of residential schools.4 The schools themselves, first established in 1883 with the last ones closed in 1996 (these being industrial schools in the Northwest), had the frank purpose of assimilation, of “killing the Indian in the child.”5 Over 150,000 students attended the residential schools, almost always under compulsion of law: 86,000 survivors are still alive today and 6,750 testified at the trc hearings. Documentation from the trc was first released in an interim report, and the historical document They Came for the Children in 2012. Then, at the culmination of the Commission’s activities on 31 May–1 June 2015, a 388- page Executive Summary and a 260-page selection of testimony, The Sur- vivors Speak, were released. In December 2015, a further eight reports were issued, including historical surveys of the residential schools, the northern and Métis experiences, a report on missing children and graves, and calls for actions. All of the reports are available as freely downloadable pdfs and, with the exception of The Survivors Speak, the 2015 documents were pub- lished by McGill-Queen’s University Press in soft and hardcover. The Survivors Speak is divided into thirty-two sections, organized both chronologically (“Life before residential school,” “Forced departure,” “The end”) and also thematically (“Language and culture,” “Strange food,” “Class- room experience”). Located in the different sections are also photographs of survivors, 112 in total. Within each section, testimony varies in length. Sometimes it is presented as a block quote of five to ten lines, and sometimes it is embedded grammatically into the expository frame that conveys a sum- mary of survivors’ experiences to the reader. All quoted testimony is identified camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 271 Is the TRC a Text? 271 in the text with the speaker’s full name; the figures in the photographs are likewise identified by full name. All text is footnoted: there are 740 endnotes, which repeat the speaker’s name, the date of the statement to the trc, a statement number, and occasionally a note on translation. A “media archeology” of The Survivors Speak would trace the following events, archives, and media storage protocols. As it toured the country, the trc solicited testimony at “statement gatherings,” which included seven na- tional events (in Winnipeg, Inuvik, Halifax, Saskatoon, Montreal, Vancouver, and Edmonton between June 2010 and March 2014) and seventy-seven local hearings in smaller communities.6 Testimony was given either in public or in small private, curtained enclaves for audio recordings; much of the testi- mony was also videotaped. The recordings are now stored at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, and will be available online, depending on privacy agreements signed by survivors. Testimony was also transcribed by a team at the trc, and a selection made from those transcriptions for publication.7 Media theory can also help us understand the process by which The Sur- vivors Speak is transmitted from survivors’ recorded testimony as a digital publication, and the methodologies at work in this chapter. Here we can think about the archive as a Foucauldian space of gaps and ruptures, but also as that which is “less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate,” a matter not of “teleology and narrative clo- sure” but of networks, the temporality of data movement, and, indeed, of testimony itself not as a Lacanian “missed encounter with the real.”8 That is, these tropes of absences and gaps theorized by media critics Sven Spieker and Wolfgang Ernst demand a reading practice that locates gaps in the archive symptomatically in the text. My argument is that a reading practice that engages with a poetics of testimony as orature indigenizes or decolonizes the archive via a formalist encounter with the text. This is no doubt a dense and compact (not to say contentious!) proposition, and I leave it with the reader to determine if I have been successful. The Critiques Before discussing and quoting from the testimony more directly, I want to address two different critiques of the testimony, the trc, and the process of apology, reconciliation, and confession. I will be brief, and specific, choosing camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 272 272 Clint Burnham not to delve into larger questions of other national trc processes, the apology industry, or philosophical questions of reconciliation. The first critique – more of a caveat – has to do with the trc process and other forms of resti- tution. As part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2007 (which itself followed a lengthy history of not only such quasi-govern- mental inquiries as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples [rcap; 1991–96] but also long-standing efforts beginning in 1987 by such groups as the Shubenacadie Residential School Survivors), “two regimes of com- pensation” were established.9 The Common Experience Payment was ap- portioned to anyone who attended residential schools, while the Independent Assessment Process (iap) adjudicated individuals’ claims of harm. Over 38,000 survivors have made claims under the iap. Specific to our interest here is the fate of testimony at the iap, which has become a matter of political contention between Canada’s federal government, the churches that admin- istered the residential schools, the Assembly of First Nations (afn), and the trc itself. Contentious issues included the confidentiality of submissions to the iap; the possibility or requirement that survivors would have to give their testi- mony twice, both to the iap and to the trc; and, as former afn leader Phil Fontaine remarked, the concern that “stories of aboriginal-on-aboriginal abuse at the schools could prove damaging to First Nation communities.”10 While the trc is calling for iap transcripts to be transferred to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, others have called for the documents’ destruction, and the Catholic Church and the afn has expressed concerns over issues of privacy. Unlike the iap transcripts, The Survivors Speak is first of all a public archive, digitized and readily accessible online.11 Some names are redacted, and some testimony has been translated from French or from Indigenous languages, including Inuktitut, Cree, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Swampy Cree, and Woodland Cree. If this is a procedural framing or caveat about testimony and the legal pitfalls thereof, my other critique is political, and comes from the work of Indigenous theorists and artists, including Gerald Taiaiake Alfred and David Garneau. In his essays “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconcili- ation” and (with Clement Yeh) “Apology Dice: Collaboration in Progress,” Garneau has made the forceful case that “conciliation,” rather than “recon- ciliation,” is a more apt term for this process and, especially, that in its focus on emotional statements, allocation of payments, and public display, the camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 273 Is the TRC a Text? 273 “trc is a pain generator, a testimony and tear-stained tissue collector,” and, most damning, “the official Truth and Reconciliation is primarily a non- Indigenous project designed to reconcile settlers with their own dark history in order that they might live in this territory more comfortably and exploit these lands more thoroughly.”12 Similarly, Taiaiake Alfred has argued for abandoning the “pacifying discourse of conciliation” and using “restitution as the first step towards creating justice and a moral society,” a “decoloni- zing” project rather than one that advances colonialism.13 The TRC as Literature, Performance, and Photograph These are important critiques of the politics and process of the trc, but in no way do I take them to mean that the testimony given at hearings should be discarded like a “tear-stained tissue,” as so eloquently described by Garneau. Rather, I would argue that for precisely those decolonizing reasons – and not to reconcile (we) settlers with (our) history, and not to make us comfortable – we should use the methods of literary and cultural analysis to interpret The Survivors Speak.14 One of the ways we should do this is to think of how that document, that pdf, functions as an archive, an archive of a performance, a performance documented with text and photography. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that The Survivors Speak is a guide to an archive (the archive of the trc), which then preserves a document of a performance of the thousands of performances by which survivors told their stories, narrated their lives, and, in particular, their lives at residential schools.15 That performance – the range of survivors’ testimony – may have been private, only for members of the Commission, or it may have been public. To discuss that performance more closely, I turn to a photograph in Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The photograph was taken by Piita Irniq, himself a survivor. This photograph depicts two Inuit people giving testimony in Nunavik in 2011. It is an interesting photograph because you can see those testifying (they are not named) and the community from which they come. On the back wall of the community hall is a large painting of an aiviq, or walrus, its tusks framing the doorway and mirroring the open coats of the commu- nity members; in March, in the North, you keep your coat on, even inside. camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 274 274 Clint Burnham 12.1 Kuujjuaq community hearing, Nunavik, March 2011. Prominent in the shot are the tissues mentioned by Garneau – in boxes on the front table and on a chair, in a community member’s hands, held to her face.16 People lean forward to listen: the man in the foreground places his hands flat on the table, as if imploring the Commission members (from whose point of view the photograph is taken) to pay him heed. The man next to him looks thoughtful, perhaps sad, which is the demeanour of most of the community members we can see. What does it mean to argue that the survivors’ giving of testimony is a per- formance and, further, that we can talk about such performance via a pho- tograph, a photograph that is part of a digital archive of that testimony? The trc events themselves, as many accounts and video documentations have shown, were highly staged and theatricalized. Even as survivors were guided in their testimony (with explanatory sessions, health support workers, and opening statements by “mentor survivors,” if you will), elements of the events, down to Luke Marston’s bentwood box, contributed to what Niezen calls an “ontological invulnerability” of the testimony: “as anthropologists have long camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 275 Is the TRC a Text? 275 recognized, [there is] no better way to cut through distractions and focus at- tention than to convey messages through ritualized performance.”17 Here I also give a nod to the debates that have taken place recently with respect to “liveness,” documentation, performance, and the archive in the works of Peggy Phelan, Phillip Auslander, Diana Taylor, and Rebecca Schneider.18 In Performing Remains, Schneider encapsulates this debate over the constructed nature of liveness, the role mediation plays in creating that illusion of liveness, and, further, the role of still photography with respect to performance.19 This last role is germane to our text – our image-text, if you will – because the photograph is taken by a survivor, who himself appears, in both words and in a photograph, later in The Survivors Speak. So the photograph in this case is part of the performance, is part of the testimony. This is all the more true if we think of the deleterious role that photography has played in a colonial context. Edward Curtis’s work is only the most (in)famous on the subject.20 One thing the photograph does is to remind the viewer that the stories and testimony collected in The Survivors Speak come from a community, a community or communities that were torn asunder by the colonial forces of residential school education. But community in a broader sense is also present, in the text and in the sheer number of voices – hundreds in total –that, even when collected as a dozen or so for a given chapter, will sup- port one another, disagree, add to the reader’s knowledge, and create the reader’s knowledge. But what is this knowledge that is being created? Before turning to the text of The Survivors Speak, let us revisit the title of this chapter, which asks the question, “Is the trc a text?” For some readers, the answer will, thus far, be “no” – I have not really talked about texts; I have talked about a photograph, and some critical-political frameworks. My title refers to the titles of two earlier publications. The first (and most recent) is Warren Cariou’s essay “Who Is the Text in this Class? Story, Archive and Pedagogy in Indigenous Contexts.”21 Cariou discusses the complexities involved when Omushkego Cree storyteller and Elder Louis Bird joins Cariou’s uni- versity class to impart traditional Cree stories. The class has no printed textbooks and allows students to develop their listening and memory skills. When Cariou poses his question, he is inquiring into whether a text can be an oral performance, or the memory of the same. He is also echoing the second publication my title refers to: Stanley Fish’s influential book Is There a Text in This Class?22 camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 276 276 Clint Burnham At least that was my hunch when a student brought Cariou’s essay into a discussion of The Survivors Speak. So, leery of my own propensities for bringing everything back to theory, I e-mailed Cariou to ask him.23 But, yes, he assured me, “when I was writing this piece I was thinking back to [Fish’s] work from the ’80s, including the stuff on interpretive communities. … I still think Fish in that era has a good sense of the fluidity and contingency of speech-acts and interpretive communities that fits well with the sensibil- ities of the Indigenous storytellers I’ve spent time with.”24 So we already have, thanks to Cariou’s appropriation of Fish to an indigenous context, a more fluid notion of what a text can convey: not just the printed word but also, perhaps, orality. To which we can, of course, add the insights of the last thirty years of cultural studies, which allows us to discuss the photo- graph as text, or “reading a film,” and so on, but in a more specific way: can we not see precisely Fish’s and Cariou’s interpretive communities in the audience in the photograph? What Do I Mean by “Orature”? What do I mean by arguing that The Survivors Speak, a collection of orature, is a work of literature? It is partly a matter of reading, of interpretation. I want to use the tools of literary analysis to think about this text; for example, consider how little summary, transition, or exposition is to be found in the framing narratives of The Survivors Speak. But to speak of the formalism of orature means also to think about the overdetermined nature of the stum- bles and repetition that characterize the narrative as structural indices of trauma. It means to think about the way language was simultaneously a form of indoctrination (students were forced to learn English or French) and a site for punishment (for speaking traditional languages). It means to pro- pose a First Nations poetics (to be found, for example, in the stories of Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson). Finally, in a more universal way, it means to think about orality in general, from its literary representations (William Gaddis, George V. Higgins) to the everyday. These poetic contor- tions of the oral, then, are a way of thinking about the testimony in terms of a call both for an “indigenist” methodology (Marie Battiste) or even Len Findley’s exhortation to “always indigenize!” and for the universalism of the event, in the sense that the poetic characteristics of the text embody the demand on the part of the trc (its calls to action) for education, for activating camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 277 Is the TRC a Text? 277 the archive. To read The Survivors Speak as literature, as orature is signifi- cant, first of all, because of how residential school students were indoc- trinated, often through the most violent of methods, to abandon their traditional languages and to learn, speak, and write English or French. Here is Peter Nakogee: “That’s where I had the most difficulty in school because I didn’t understand English. My hand was hit because I wrote on my scrib- blers, the scribblers that were given on starting school, pencils, erasers, rulers and that, scribblers, and textbooks that were given. ‘Write your names,’ she said, so they don’t get lost. But I wrote on my scribblers in Cree syllabics. And so I got the nun really mad that I was writing in Cree. And then I only knew my name was Ministik from the first time I heard my name, my name was Ministik. So I was whipped again because I didn’t know my name was Peter Nakogee.”25 Nakogee’s testimony has been translated from the Swampy Cree, and thus is already, ontologically, an example of resistance to the residential schools: even though punished as a child, he did not forget the use of his traditional language. Equally important here is that he is already writing: Nakogee tells us he “wrote on [his] scribblers in Cree syllabics.” Here is an indication that we must not fall into a primitivist myth of First Nations or Indigenous orality, seeing orality as intrinsically and exclusively Indigenous, or, worse yet, naturally so. Rather, if Nakogee’s testimony is a kind of second-order orality (speech about writing), it is also yet more evi- dence of the important role that Indigenous writing has had, Margery Fee tells us, since the eighteenth century.26 The very real trauma that we are talking about here, in depriving children of their language, is apparent in Lily Bruce’s testimony: “I was just getting dressed into pyjamas, and I never, I never spoke English. [crying] My auntie was told to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to speak Kwak’wala anymore. I told her, ‘But Auntie, I don’t know how to speak English.’ And she says, ‘Well you’re gonna have to learn pretty quick.’ [crying] She said, ‘From now on, you have to speak English.’ I don’t know how long it took me. I kept my mouth shut most of the time. I’d rather keep quiet than get in trouble.”27 Bruce’s auntie was a student at the Alberni residential school and thus, on Lily Bruce’s first night at the school, was told to impress upon Bruce the im- portance of speaking only English. As might be expected, crying is mentioned often in The Survivors Speak, over one hundred times (but also, a few times, survivors mention not crying when being strapped, as a point of pride). The decision of the editors of The Survivors Speak to emphasize the crying needs camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 278 278 Clint Burnham to be highlighted: it is virtually the only expository signal of affect in the text. It is a choice that reminds us of Garneau’s “tear-stained tissue” remark. Here we can also agree with Audra Simpson’s trenchant critique of “the rec- onciliation hustler tour” and where, in another context, she writes that “to be a subject of pity, or sympathy … is not an efficacious model of political subjectivity in an historical field of collective captivity, the condition that some indigenous critics might argue, is the correct approximation of current native ‘conditions.’”28 Notable here is that Lily Bruce is crying as she tells her story of not being allowed to speak her Kwak’wala language. Bruce’s crying breaks through the temporalities of testimony and archive, and achieves, as we will see in a later excerpt with Benjamin Joseph Lafford’s “Wow,” a present-ness, a live- ness, an audible now-ness.29 The abundance of accounts in The Survivors Speak dealing with the loss of language is authoritative. Geraldine Shingoose tells us: “I just remember, recalling the very first memories was just the beatings we’d get and the lick- ings, and just for speaking our language, and just for doing things that were against the rules.”30 Margo Wylde couldn’t speak French, and said: “I felt I was a captive.”31 William Antoine spoke Ojibway and didn’t understand English: the teacher “would get mad at me.”32 Marcel Guilboche, Andrew Bull Calf, and Alfred Nolie all describe being strapped for not knowing En- glish.33 Said Bull Calf, “the only language we spoke was Blackfoot.”34 Calvin Myerion describes the cruel paradoxes: “I was told not to speak my Native language, and I didn’t know any other language other than my Native lan- guage” and “my brother, who had been there before me, taught me in, said in my language not to talk the language.”35 Percy Thompson recalled being slapped in the face for speaking Cree: “Was I supposed to learn English words, so the nun would be happy about it? It’s impossible.”36 Meeka Alivaktuk, who “came to the Pangnirtung school … with no knowledge of English,” was slapped on her hands: “That’s how my education began.”37 And yet while Arthur Ron McKay wet himself because he could not at first speak English, “I just kept going and I couldn’t speak my language but then I was speaking to boys in the, ’cause they came from the reserve and they speak my language. We used to speak lots, like behind, behind our supervisors or whatever you call it. That’s why I didn’t lose my language.”38 That Peter Nakogee and Meeka Alivaktuk (and twelve others in The Survivors camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 279 Is the TRC a Text? 279 Speak) testified in their traditional language shows, in however marginal a way, that language loss has not been total. Important, too, is the determi- nation and drive of the survivors, not only to remember and to recount but also to reflect, often acerbically, on that cruel oppression: “It’s impossible,” Percy Thompson said. “That’s how my education began,” added Meeka Alivaktuk. “Our supervisors or whatever you call it,” retorted Arthur Ron McKay. Indeed – what do you call it? As noted earlier, The Survivors Speak is broken up into thirty-two sections, arranged both chronologically and thematically. Each section has a title and typically an epigraph, from one of the survivors’ stories. The first section, “Life before residential school,” includes the epigraph: “We were loved by our parents.” The first story is from Bob Baxter: When I think back to my childhood, it brings back memories, really nice memories of how life was as Anishnaabe, as you know, how we, how we lived before, before we were sent to school. And the things that I remember, the legends at night that my dad used to tell us stories, and how he used to show us how to trap and funny things that happened. You know there’s a lot of things that are really, that are still in my thoughts of how we were loved by our parents. They really cared for us. And it was such a good life, you know. It, it’s doing the things, like, it was free we were free I guess was the word I’m looking for, is a real free environment of us. I’m not saying that we didn’t get disciplined if we got, if we did something wrong, we, you know. There was that, but not, and it was a friendly, friendly, like a loving discipline, if you will.39 Baxter’s narrative is typical of The Survivors Speak’s first section in how it beautifully captures a prelapsarian past, often what seems to be a time before contact or capitalism, one where traditional land-based practices (hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering) abound, with traditional foods, family life, and, especially poignant, the role of storytelling, songs, and legends. And even here, in remembering a gentle and idyllic past, the narrative itself skips and jumps: “as you know, how we, how we lived before, before we were sent to school.” And: “It, it’s doing the things, like, it was free we were free I guess was the word I’m looking for.” Baxter also delineates the quality of family discipline (if you want to call it that, but he does), again in that camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 280 280 Clint Burnham beautiful, hesitant way: “I’m not saying that we didn’t get disciplined if we got, if we did something wrong, we, you know. There was that, but not, and it was a friendly, friendly, like a loving discipline, if you will.” It is crucial to note how this quotation works in terms of the overall struc- ture of the book (or archive, or pdf …) that is The Survivors Speak. The coherence here of a past, a before, with the structure of the book itself poses an interpretive conundrum, for we have to keep in mind that The Survivors Speak is an arranged narrative. We should not be naïve and expect – or as- sume – that Bob Baxter necessarily told this story at the beginning of his narrative, or that he told it before anyone else. I want to hold onto this notion of temporality (what, in structuralist po- etics, is called the distinction between story and plot), and turn to a passage from Benjamin Joseph Lafford’s account of taking a train to the Shubenacadie residential school in Nova Scotia: So that morning, we heard the, told my brothers we had to sit over here and wait for the train to come. So we heard a train, we heard a whistle and we said, and my brother said, “Oh, that’s the train coming to pick us up, pick us up.” I said, “Okay,” you know. So when the train came, they put us on, Indian agents put us on, the rcmp put us on the train. Told us to sit over here. So it doesn’t matter, so we left from Grand Narrows. Every station we stopped at, there was children. Native chil- dren, that had long hair when I looked out the window. And I went, “Wow, there’s more children going on the train, prob- ably they’re going the same way as I’m going.” So at that time it didn’t matter to me, so every station we stopped, there was Native children, girls and boys. And there was rcmp and an Indian agent lining them up, put them on the train, put them on the seats. No one’s talking about anything, I didn’t know them. Every station, and by the time we got to Truro, there was full of Native people, Native children on the train. Wow, there was a whole bunch of us. Had long hair, you know, had no clothes to take with them.40 Again, as with Baxter’s narrative, we have here syntax that has been torqued, or broken, or intervened into, with gaps, repetition, elisions: “we heard the, told my brothers.” We have temporal shifts: “rcmp and an Indian agent lining them up, put them on the train, put them on the seats.” We have camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 281 Is the TRC a Text? 281 deictic references to the telling of the story, that is to say, to its performance: “had long hair, you know”; and interjections that do the same work: the repetition of “Wow, there’s more children” and “Wow, there was a whole bunch of us.” 41 These temporal and deictic shifters are both aspects of performance and examples of what Paul de Man, referencing both literary analysis and theatre, calls “anacoluthon,” “parabasis,” and “buffo.”42 The last two terms come from Greek Old Comedy and Italian commedia dell’arte, respectively: the former refers to points at which the Chorus addresses the audience directly, while the latter “is the disruption of narrative illusion, the aparté, the aside to the audience, by means of which the fiction is broken.”43 “Anacoluthon,” while not deriving from performance or theatre, denotes a syntactic-temporal shift in a narrative, even at the level of the sentence. De Man is using terms from theatre and literature (he cites Proust as an example of anacoluthon). Why should we now bring such a vocabulary to an oral account of what is certainly not fiction – what is already, perhaps, oral history? In some ways, my answer is framed by the question. Precisely because this is a text that contains oral testimony, it is easy, if not predictable, to read it for its Truth (and here I capitalize the noun to denote both the trc itself and the notion of an actual Truth, not the mutable, or postmodern, truth often bandied about). And the Truth in this testimony, in this orature, then, comes not only from its content, from the accounts of the survivors, but also from the form, from the shifting and temporal cuts, from the “Wow” that brings a child’s perception of a train trip, in the 1950s, into the minds and ears of readers in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Here the work of Lee Maracle may be helpful, not only for ethical or polit- ical reasons (the urgency with which we may feel to bring indigenous critical frameworks to bear on indigenous texts) but also for how it both adds a new dimension to how to think about The Survivors Speak and offers a useful counterpoint to de Man’s stress on the meta-performative. There are two ways in which I read Maracle’s notions of oratory, as developed in the ora- tories, or essays, collected in Memory Serves: in terms of the relationship between oratory and memory, and the meta-generic or meta-theoretical way in which Maracle develops her concept of oratory. As developed in the essay or oratory titled “Memory Serves,” memory is directional, a matter of reconstruction or remembering, and yet it is not merely a matter of recall, especially in the Salish and Stó:lō traditions of the West Coast. Here the camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 282 282 Clint Burnham Stó:lō word/concept Sqwa: lewel is significant: felt ideas or felt thought, or, as she expressed it in an oratory in June 2016, “think feel.”44 Further, as she develops the concept of oratory throughout Memory Serves, oratory is a master-signifier, “unambiguous in its meaning,”45 but also a way of “ques- tion[ing] the direction from which looking occurs” and “directed at that which is not seen, not known, at what is cherished and hidden,”46 about “searching for what lies beneath the obvious,”47 imagining “what direction each of the pathways” leads from others’ stories. Finally, like critic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Maracle sees stories and oratories as inseparable from theory. Consider, again, Benjamin Joseph Lafford’s first sentence: “So that morn- ing, we heard the, told my brothers we had to sit over here and wait for the train to come.” Between “we heard the” and “told my brothers” we only see a comma, an indication that when transcribing Lafford’s statement, there was presumably a short pause. Perhaps the missing subject of the predicate “told my brothers” is the “rcmp and an Indian agent” mentioned at other times in Lafford’s statement. There is a gap here, a void, which is only ap- parent if we refuse to see Lafford’s memory as unidirectional, if we listen as Maracle calls on us to listen. This gap is also a temporal or syntactic shift, an anacoluthon that forces the reader to reorient themselves, to think about their direction. Then, in that same sentence, the deictic shifter “here” does the work of a buffo or parabasis, as with the “you know”s and the “Wow”s elsewhere in Lafford’s testimony: they point to the moment of the telling, flattening time, changing the direction of time, bringing the past into the pre- sent (into two presents: the present of the performance, of the testimony on 28 October 2011 in Halifax, as well as the present of the text, of the digital archive that is The Survivors Speak). The “Wow,” the “you know,” the “here” are here, are saying Wow, are saying Wow to you and to me. The challenge is to allow Maracle and de Man to guide us to what is cherished (Maracle’s word) in The Survivors Speak. It is the Wow that is cherished. A formalist analysis as I am proposing here triangulates between the medium-specificity of The Survivors Speak, the historical Real of colonial- ism, and an inscription of that colonialism to be found in the literary qualities of orature. Lafford’s “Wow” travels through the time of the archive and its media, resisting the legacy of the residential schools before he even arrives at Shubenacadie, marking that resistance in an archive that itself is unsettled. camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 283 Is the TRC a Text? 283 Conclusion I want to be clear here about what I am not saying. I am not arguing that the statements of survivors provide the only record of residential schools, nor that such records should be read as typical or paradigmatic of the ex- periences of Indigenous people in Canada today. There exist many memoirs, statements, and other accounts of those experiences, from Basil Johnston’s canonical (if I may put it that way) Indian School Days (1988); other novels and memoirs such as Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (2012), Bev Sellars’s They Called Me Number One (2013), and the recent (rough-hewn) and autobiographical The Education of Augie Merasty (2015); and documentary films such as Our Voices, Our Stories (Barb Cranmer, 2015) to scattered accounts that exist in other volumes (such as Marie Annharte Baker’s AKA Inendagosekwe [2013]) and the abundance of online records (including but not limited to weweresofaraway.ca). The Survivors Speak is, nonetheless, a key document that offers, in its compressed form, a compendium of first-person accounts that can bring both literary and historical (and thus, in both senses, political) nuances to questions of the residential schools and reconciliation. Equally crucial, however, is the need to avoid constructing a new paradigm or stereo- type of the suffering Indian, the abject survivor, and to avoid reinforcing a discourse that ignores the strength, courage, and hard work of survivors to get compensation and reconciliation onto the national agenda. As a worker on the Commission reminded me recently, the trc itself, as a process coming out of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, was in effect paid for by the survivors. By examining critically the cultural representations of The Survivors Speak as archive, as event, as literary text, as performance, and as visual object, we can better understand the impact of the residential schools, and the resistance to that legacy, which continues today. no t e s 1 Duncan Mercredi, “Achimo,” in Indigenous Poetics in Canada, ed. Neal McLeod (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), 17–22, 18. 2 Lee Maracle, Memory Serves: Oratories, ed. Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2016), 239. camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 284 284 Clint Burnham 3 The term “orature” was coined by Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu (d. 1977) in the early 1970s. Pio Zirimu used it as early as 1970, at first interchangeably with “oral literature,” but later defined more precisely to mean “the use of utterance as an aesthetic means of expression.” Ng g Wa Thiong’o, “Notes Towards a Performance Theory of Orature,” Performance Research 12.3 (September 2007), www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/ref/Ngugi_Orature.html (ac- cessed 4 March 2019). The term then surfaced in a Canadian context in 1993 in the first edition of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English as a category of “Traditional Orature [from the] Southern First Nations.” Terry Goldie and Daniel David Moses, eds., An Anthology of Canadian Native Liter- ature in English, 4th ed. (Don Mills, on: Oxford University Press Canada, 2013), iii. Lee Maracle has categorized her texts as “oratory,” with “concate- nation” between speaker and community privileged over self-expression, for “the point of oratory … to create a passionate feeling for life and help people understand the need for change or preservation,” but also, crucially, oratory is understood in a meta-theoretical sense, as in her “Oratory on Oratory,” Maracle, Memory, 172, 165, 229–50. Please see the final section of this chapter for more engagement with Maracle’s oratories. 4 Residential schools were in existence before Confederation, including the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, which operated from 1834 to 1970, making it “the longest operating residential school for Aboriginal people in Canadian history.” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume I, I–IV (Mon- treal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 66. There were eleven schools still operating in the 1990s in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Quebec. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 2, 1939–2000: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume I, I–IV (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 103. The trajectory of residential schools in Canada’s north is distinct in many ways. 5 The phrase “killing the Indian in the child” is often “but incorrectly attributed to Duncan Campbell Scott, though his actions as the head of the dia [Depart- ment of Indian Affairs] between 1913 and 1932 suggest that he might have agreed with the idea.” Dan Eshet, Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools (Toronto: Facing History and Ourselves, 2015), 123n11. camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 285 Is the TRC a Text? 285 6 Truth and Reconciliation Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commis- sion of Canada (2015), 29. 7 In March 2016, I interviewed the editor of The Survivors Speak, a former broadcast journalist, who did not wish to be named out of deference to the survivors. As the editor described the process to me, most material came from statement gatherings but also other events, including sharing circles. The inter- views were unstructured. Survivors were asked to talk about their residential school experiences, and what they thought about reconciliation. Most of the testimony was collected at national events. After material was transcribed and after a rough selection, material was checked or verified from recordings again. See also Greg Bak, “More Is More: Towards a Theory and Practice for Archival Decolonization” (keynote address, Archives Society of Alberta annual conference, Canmore, ab, 5 May 2016). 8 Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 113–14. Ernst draws here on Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2008). A “deep” media archeology would trace a temporality (what Ernst calls a “micro temporality”) from testimony to recording, transcription to selection, digital publishing to cloud storage, downloading to interpretation. See also, in this regard, Wendy Hui Kyon Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2011). 9 Ronald Niezen, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 36, 43. 10 Bill Curry, “Battle Lines Drawn over Preservation of Documents Detailing Abuse at Residential School,” The Globe and Mail (4 June 2015): www.the globeandmail.com/news/politics/legal-battle-to-preserve-stories-of-residential- school-abuse-to-begin/article24813412/ (accessed 4 March 2019). 11 Of course, there still exists a “digital divide,” and access to high-speed Internet connections is one of many infrastructure failings that bedevil remote and First Nations communities. See, for a discussion of Internet media and indigeneity, the public art project and exhibition catalogue, Lorna Brown and Clint Burnham, eds., Digital Natives (Vancouver: Other Sights, 2012). 12 David Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” West Coast Line (Summer 2012): 28–38; David Garneau with Clement Yeh, “Apolo- gy Dice: Collaboration in Progress,” in The Land We Are: Artists and Writers camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 286 286 Clint Burnham Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, ed. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall (Winnipeg: arp, 2015). A more recent version of “Imaginary Spaces” is in Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, eds., From Arts of Engage- ment: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). 13 Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, “Restitution Is the Real Pathway to Justice for Indige- nous Peoples,” taiaiake.net (accessed 16 February 2016). Essay adapted from Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough: University of Toronto Press/Broadview, 2005). 14 Taiaiake Alfred has also made the cogent argument that it is a mistake to con- tinue to define Indigenous people in terms of colonialism (see Cutting Copper: Indigenous Resurgent Practice, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Universi- ty of British Columbia, 4–5 March 2016, www.belkin.ubc.ca/events/cutting- coppers-lalakenis). Similarly, Cheyenne Turions has questioned the politics of the call to “decolonize” as also indebted to a colonial logic. Finally, Raymond Boisjoly works out this logic in his koan-like utterance there is no way that things are supposed to have been. Cheyanne Turions, “From Where Do You Speak? Locating the Possibility of Decolonization in Krista Belle Stewart’s Seraphine Seraphine,” and Raymond Boisjoly, “Questions without Answers: Needs, Justifications, Explanations, Meaning,” Wood Land School: Critical Anthology – A Symposium on Directions in Indigenous Contemporary Art, Or Gallery, Vancouver, 11–13 March 2016. 15 Here, by “performances,” I mean the testimony of survivors, and not other cul- tural performances proper (drumming, dancing, music, oration by elders and officials). This characterization of testimony as performance is in no way an argument that the testimony was contrived, inauthentic, or otherwise dubious. Rather, with the greatest respect for the survivors’ histories and trauma, it is a way of recognizing their courage and seeking to determine the ethical and po- litical valences of the work they have done in coming forward – including, cru- cially, the performance of not attending, not testifying. Such non-performances have in turn to be distinguished from what Sarah Ahmed calls “nonperforma- tivity.” See Sarah Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7.1 (2006): 104–26, and Anna Carastathis, “The Nonperformativity of Reconciliation: The Case of ‘Reasonable Accom- modation’ in Quebec,” in Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, ed. Pauline Wakeham and Jennifer Henderson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 236–60. camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 287 Is the TRC a Text? 287 16 Niezen provides a detailed ethnography of precisely the role of tissues, and their collection, at trc events, noting that they were often ceremonially gath- ered and, at the close of the event, burned in the sacred fire (Niezen, Truth, 65). At the 2016 Chutzpah! festival in Vancouver, for a screening of Our Voices, Our Stories (Barb Cranmer, 2015), a documentary on the St Michaels Indian Residential School in Alert Bay, members of the irsss (Indian Residential School Survivor Society) were on hand as counsellors, with boxes of tissues. Here we have two problematics: on the one hand, the spectacle of the “suffer- ing Indian,” on the other, the way in which survivors are called on to be nur- turers for emotion-wrought settlers. 17 Niezen, Truth, 67. 18 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2003). 19 Schneider, Performing Remains, 90–2, 94. 20 Umeek of Ahousaht (Richard Atleo) writes of an Edward Curtis photograph depicting a Nuu-chah-nulth bowman: “I am filled with that familiar sense of fear, oppression, helplessness, and powerlessness that I felt as a small child of seven years when I entered residential school.” Pam Brown, et al., old images/new views: Perspectives on Edward Curtis (Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology, 2008), n.p. Gwich’in artist and performer Jeneen Frei Njootli has more recently made the forceful argument that Indigenous people have been working with photography since the nineteenth century. See Paul Chaat Smith, “Every Picture Tells a Story,” in Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 1–6. 21 Warren Cariou, “Who Is the Text in this Class? Story, Archive and Pedagogy in Indigenous Contexts,” in Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, ed. Deanna Reder and Linda Morra (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the author and editors for very generously allowing me to read the essay in manuscript. 22 Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1980). 23 That is, we supposedly work now in a “post-theory” era. In this context, see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s description of how “theory works … within Nishnaabeg thought,” which makes it clear, for instance, that she does not mean “theory in a Western context, which by nature is decontextualized camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 288 288 Clint Burnham knowledge” and that she is more interested in “our embodied theory, [such as] our Creation stories.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabbeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3.3 [2014], 1–25: 7, 11, 14. I should add that I would like to trouble the “decontextualized” versus “embodied” antinomy. 24 Warren Carriou, e-mail to Clint Burnham, 30 January 2016. Cariou is implicit- ly bringing two slightly different concepts of Fish’s into his class, his essay, and our e-mail. Fish’s phrase “is there a text in this class” has at least two mean- ings: “is there an assigned text in this literature class?” and “do we assign priority to meaning residing in the text or in readers’ interpretations?”; this is “decided,” Fish argues, depending on which interpretive community one occupies. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 307. 25 Peter Nakogee, Statement to the trc, Timmins, 9 November 2010, trans. from Swampy Cree into English, in The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015), 48. 26 Here Margery Fee’s work is important. See, for example, her chapter “‘They Never Even Sent Us a Letter’: Literacy and Land in Harry Robinson’s Origin Story,” Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” From Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015). 27 Lily Bruce, Statement to the trc, Alert Bay, 4 August 2011 (The Survivors Speak, 48–9). 28 Thanks to Warren Cariou for pushing me on the resonance of the “crying” in The Survivors Speak and to Smokii Sumac for the Audra Simpson references. See Simpson, “The Chief’s Two Bodies: Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty” (keynote address, Unsettling Conversations, Unmaking Racisms and Colonialisms: r.a.c.e. Network’s 14th Annual Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, October 2014); and Simpson, “Comment: The ‘Problem’ of Native Mental Health: Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the (non) Efficacy of Tears,” Ethos 36.3 (2008): 376–9, 379. A clarification is, perhaps, necessary here. As noted in the main text, survivors mention crying more than one hundred times in their testimony; in addition, in six different survivors’ testimonies, they themselves cry, as noted with “[audible crying]” or “[crying].” 29 At other times in The Survivors Speak, the annotation “audible crying” is used. 30 Geraldine Shingoose, Statement to the trc, Winnipeg, 19 June 2010 (The Survivors Speak, 50). camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 289 Is the TRC a Text? 289 31 Margo Wylde, Statement to the trc, Val d’Or, 5 February 2012 (The Survivors Speak, 47). 32 William Antoine, Statement to the trc, Little Current, 12 May 2011 (The Survivors Speak, 47). 33 Marcel Guiboche, Statement to the trc, Winnipeg, 19 June 2010 (The Sur- vivors Speak, 48); Alfred Nolie, Statement to the trc, Alert Bay, 20 October 2011 (The Survivors Speak, 47). 34 Andrew Bull Calf, Statement to the trc, Lethbridge, 10 October 2013 (The Survivors Speak, 49). 35 Calvin Myerion, Statement to the trc, Winnipeg, 16 June 2010 (The Survivors Speak, 48). 36 Percy Thompson, Statement to the trc, Hobbema, 25 July 2013 (The Survivors Speak, 49). 37 Meeka Alivaktuk, Statement to the trc (translated from the Inuktitut), Pangnirtung, 13 February 2012 (The Survivors Speak, 49). 38 Arthur Ron McKay, Statement to the trc, Winnipeg, 18 June 2010 (The Survivors Speak, 47, 53). 39 Bob Baxter, Statement to the trc, Thunder Bay, 25 November 2010 (The Survivors Speak, 3). 40 Benjamin Joseph Lafford, Statement to the trc, Halifax, 28 October 2011 (The Survivors Speak, 26). 41 There are many moments in the testimony of notable repetition. A few examples include: “My mother opened the letter and I could see her face; I could see her face, it was kind of sad but mad too.” Josephine Eshkibok, Statement to the trc, Little Current, 13 May 2011 (The Survivors Speak, 13). “[My father] said, ‘I, I will, I will go, I would go in jail, I will go in jail if I didn’t let you go.’” Paul Dixon, Statement to the trc, Val d’Or, 6 February 2012 (The Survivors Speak, 15). “I didn’t have a wife at the time and I felt that was a good place for her, so I wasn’t really fully aware of the, you know, the negative parts of, the parts, negative, negativity of residential school ’cause really, I guess, when I look at the residential school issue, you know I saw, you know, physically, I guess, bet- ter than what I experienced at the reserve.” [Name redacted], Statement to the trc, Key First Nation, 21 January 2012 (The Survivors Speak, 19). 42 Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 163–84. 43 Ibid., 178. camlot interior 3.qxp_Layout 1 2019-08-12 7:00 PM Page 290 290 Clint Burnham 44 Maracle, Memory, 1–49, 2, 14. Also in conversation with Cyndy Baskin, Toronto, 1 June 2017. 45 Ibid., 161. 46 Ibid., 231. 47 Ibid., 232.