Rending and Weaving the Fabric: Constituting a Representative Canadian Lieu-de-Mémoire Ian M Kenny In partial completion of the requirements for rMA Cultural Analysis Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam
Table of Contents 3. Note on the Title 4. Introduction: Sketching a Settler-Colonial Reality 12. Chapter 1: Resistances to History and Institution: Two Memories of Ossossané 23. Chapter 2: “Ongwe” 34. Conclusion: “Remember, Resist, Redraw” 39. Bibliography
A Note on the Title
A rend, for those who work with fabric, is a rift. It is a long crack, a rip, or a tear. When material is rent, efforts are often made to patch it, mend it, and make the fabric whole again. As a verb, rending refers to the processes of tearing or ripping apart. It is, in and of itself, a seemingly destructive act. There are many ways to imagine the processes of memory, and the idea of memory spun as thread, combined to create a larger piece of fabric, has been with Western societies since the Fates began spinning the threads of life in Greek myth. When the fabric of memory is rent, one might imagine a sort of destruction. Rending, if taken in the context of memory studies, belies a discursive slippage. The crack, far from ruining the fabric, provides a breathing space, an interruption in what are sometimes smothering narratives of memory. The processes of memory are not benign. Memory is shaped, controlled, and articulated: it is mediated to us, by us, and for us. By rending and weaving the fabric of memory, the title of this thesis alludes to the negative processes of memory-making that often accompany nationalism, where clean and smooth memories turn into united histories, marshalled by the will of the powerful against Others. By rending and weaving the fabric of memory, we can picture a productive disruption; a re-wiring or re-articulating; a movement to a polyphonic texture. Metaphors for memory, be they of networks, of soundscapes, of speech acts, or of pieces of fabric, all point to the same features of memory itself: that it is inescapable, involves more than one position, and connects a version of the present to a past, and ties us further to an idea or glimpse of a proposed common future. Further, these analogies deal with the tricky business of who articulates what memories, to whom, and to what outcome? They gesture to what James Young has called the texture of memory (Young 1). By calling attention to the structures, narratives and locations of memory – to its texture – we can begin to question how memory comes to be formed. Memory-making is a generative and selective process. The goal of this thesis is to help imagine what productive disruptions to this texture entail, how they re-articulate what we believe we know, and how unsettling feelings and experiences can have productive outcomes for memory unchained from its current trajectories. It is a call to re-examine, re-member, and re-story.
Introduction Sketching a Settler-Colonial Reality Spring 1636: The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead. Members of the Wendat settlement of Ossossané prepare the bones of their deceased kin for reburial in a communal ossuary. Every decade, the Wendat hold such a feast to lay to rest their loved ones, and mark and consecrate their ancestral territory. This is part of the process of moving their village to new and fertile lands, as the soil has been depleted from agricultural use. Invited to the ceremony is the newly arrived Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit Missionary, sent to convert the Wendat from their savage culture to Christianity and its enlightened ways. Brébeuf will later testify to this witnessing in his diaries, which will be published and read in France. The ceremony, he says, is “foolish and useless” and “a picture of hell” (qtd. in Seeman 78). In Brébeuf’s eyes, the Huron-Wendat have much progress to make in order to become good Christian subjects. He hopes to harness their fervour and care for their dead (which he greatly admires), and supplant their traditional ceremonies with the Christian celebration of Mass, in order to save them from eternal damnation.
_______
Autumn 1876: Indian Residential Schools and the Indian Act. Adopted by the Canadian Parliament in 1876, the Indian Act outlines in detail the proposed solution to the “Indian problem”. Indigenous children between the ages of five and thirteen will be removed from their families and communities to isolated Residential Schools in an effort to stamp-out their culture. This re-education process involves imbuing indigenous children with Christian values to make a homogenous and civilized Canadian populace. In the words of the Minister of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, this ought to take the form of killing the Indian in the child. What the Government and the Churches involved do not foresee—or perhaps, choose not to—is the physical and psychological traumas, abuse, and even death that the children who attend the schools will experience there. Over 100 years later, in 1992, the last Indian Residential School will close, marking the beginning of the Canadian Government’s inquiry into the schools, calling the system “a cultural genocide” (What We Have Learned 5). _______ December 1927: Emily Carr exhibits in Ottawa with the Group of Seven. At what is now the Canadian Museum of History, in Ottawa, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven exhibit paintings and artworks that depict the artists’ interpretations of indigenous life in Canada. Carr’s paintings will become lasting—some say iconic—cultural images, that are preoccupied with Aboriginal Canadians. Carr claimed in a lecture a few years before that she lamented the passing of the Noble Savage. For her, “their artefacts ought to be to us Canadians what the Ancient Britton’s artefacts are to the British. I would gather my collection before they have passed into silent nothingness” (Carr, Lecture on Totems). Carr harkens back to an imagination of a non-existent pre-Columbian Canadian history. Carr’s artistic success is predicated, however, on the very destruction of the indigenous traditions and communities that she paints. Having first created the conditions for the decimation of indigenous life in Canada, White Canadians—such as Carr—now “turned around and admired [their] own recreations of what [they] had destroyed” (Francis 49).
June 2011: Prime Minister Stephen Harper Offers an Apology. In the House of Commons, Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly apologizes for the Indian Residential School system, which marginalized and oppressed 80,000 Aboriginal Canadian Children, and brought about the deaths of unknown numbers of others. The long tenure of the schools perpetrated incredible personal and cultural damages on Aboriginal Canadian communities, leading to generations of indigenous peoples who were forbidden from identifying with their cultures, and unable to learn their traditions, customs, and languages. Prime Minister Harper apologizes for what he calls a “sad chapter in [Canadian] history” (qtd. in Regan 1). The objectives of the schools were based on “the assumption that aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal… Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country” (qtd. in Regan 1). The Prime Minister’s speech coincides with key action points proposed by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, tasked with evaluating this system. Despite the gesture at reconciliation, to date, few of the Commission’s suggestions have been implemented in Canadian society, despite financial restitution for those who survived their time in the schools.
_______
April 2016: Attawapiskat Suicide Attempts. Between the months of September and April of 2015-2016, 101 of the 2,000 citizens of the remote Attawapiskat First Nation attempted suicide. The community declared a state of emergency after one particular Saturday night, when eleven people attempted to commit suicide, among them a child of 11. Due to deep funding cuts to Canada’s indigenous healthcare budget, Chief Bruce Shisheesh notifies the Government that the community is in a state of crisis, requiring immediate help as they do not have the resources to counteract their present state. “There are no services at the moment, no counsellors in the community”, reports Deputy Grand Chief Rebecca Friday, on account of the backlog of work and the overwhelming volume of suicide attempts (Rutherford). Chief Shisheesh identifies serious depression, drug use, and alcoholism as causes of the suicide crisis, but the combination of the lack of funds and their remote location means the people of Attawapiskat are not a priority for the Government: “When a young person tries to commit suicide in any urban school, they send in the resources, they send in the emergency team. There’s a standard protocol of response. The northern communities are left on their own”. He ends with an obvious and dire statement: “We need help in Attawapiskat” (Rutherford).
_______
Popular national culture describes Canada as a mosaic. Made up of people from across the planet, many Canadians describe their country as a nation of immigrants, and a place of opportunities. And yet the above vignettes draw attention to a much more confusing reality: if Canada is indeed a mosaic, then some groups profit while others suffer. It is, perhaps, a less equal nation than most residents imagine. This is, of course, not really a surprise. Seldom are national slogans or mythologies actually real; it is rare, if ever, that the image a nation puts forward is identical to its reality. Caught up in the identificatory process of national myths and narratives, Canadians often imagine themselves and their nation as peaceful and non-confrontational. Far from the dominant national narrative, and therefore far from the everyday mind, is the long history of settler-colonialism that defines Canadian past and
present. And this, in turn, foregrounds a continued settler-colonial future. As a systemic implementation of imperialism, settler-colonialism colours all facets of contemporary life: governments, institutions, social groups, media, and knowledge production all articulate a settler-colonial reality to varying extents and conclusions. Within this system, Euro-Canadians (or more broadly, settlers) have benefitted and continue to directly benefit from the insidious march of imperialism at the collective and particular expense of the indigenous peoples who have continuously lived in Canada, known as the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. Indeed, indigenous peoples worldwide are presently caught-up in struggles for the right to self-government, and for the recognition of different and diverse lives and of the atrocities that invading societies and cultures perpetrated against them. These struggles for recognition are almost always oppositional to the sanctioned national histories of the places in which imperial systems produced indigenous peoples as societal Other: these dynamics are readily found in Canada. What connects these two disparate societal groups are the dynamics of memory and how it is narrated, articulated, and produced. One (either knowingly or unknowingly) is bent on the containment of indigenous peoples, repression of their rights, and the triumph of Western progress over supposed primitivism; the other caught up in a constant battle to attain cultural recognition and societal equality on all levels. These dynamics are woven into the Canadian fabric of cultural memory. Memory studies thus recommends itself as an essential facet of negotiating settler-colonial relations in present-day Canada. For, as Arjun Appadurai notes, “the personal archive of memories, both material and cognitive, is not only primarily about the past, but is about providing a map for negotiating and shaping new futures” (Appadurai 288). Settlers and indigenous peoples are caught up in an ontological dance, wherein one defines and is defined by the presence of the other. Memory, thus, is a sufficiently broad term and area of study through which to examine, complicate, and propose different futures for these binary identities.
Like any other modern nation-state, Canada has a complex past. Despite efforts by historical myths to create a recognizable, smooth national narrative, Canadian history is caught up in the oppressive history of imperialism. In the North American context, this articulates itself in particular through the formation of a settler-colonial society, wherein the aftereffects of this system are far from contained in the past. Settler-colonialism is rightly pointed out as a unique mode within the wider system of imperialism: Patrick Wolfe describes that “the primary object of settler-colonialism is the land itself… [it] is at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation, but replacement. The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct—invasion is a structure, not an event’” (qtd. in Veracini 9). The destructive replacement strategies of settler-colonialism can account for a modern day Canada wherein Aboriginal Canadians, and indigenous peoples more broadly, are still produced and articulated as the societal Other in opposition to white, Euro-Christian values. Settler-colonialism sustains its systems and structures that it was formed with historically into the present day. This reproduction of systems and modalities is a key feature of settler-colonialism, as it seeks to replicate itself as it spread further through the moving site of the frontier. “Settler colonial phenomena possess a mimetic character, and a recurrent need to disavow produces a circumstance where the actual operation of settler colonial practices is obscured behind the occurrences” (Veracini 14). Self-sustenance, reproduction, and simultaneous denial are integral to this form of imperialism that was employed historically in Canada: its effects (how it is felt and seen in the present) must be
uncovered, as they lie uncomfortably (but for the purpose of this thesis, productively) close to Canada’s cultural surface.
This thesis aims to identify and disrupt contemporary Canadian cultural memory. Canada is a settler-colonial nation that attempts to ignore its colonial structure. This structure has been detrimental (sometimes fatally) to indigenous peoples that dwell within Canada’s borders. In this work, I propose to challenge Canadian cultural memory by analyzing the national heritage site of Ossossané as a multi-faceted lieu-de-mémoire. Rather than the “peaceful” history that many Canadians and Canadian institutions sustain, I will explore the importance of both indigenous narratives and ugly or uncomfortable memories to re-interpreting the fabric of Canadian cultural memory. I make use of many sources, concepts and traditions in order to expose the ways in which the varied perspectives within (and of) Canada allow for different narratives of Canada to come forward conclusively in the present.
Throughout this thesis, I argue that settler-colonialism can be identified in almost all forms of Canadian life in the dynamics of both institutional and personal memory. Due to its mimetic and reproductive character, settler-colonialism always necessarily involves the politics of memory and memorials on a national scale. This includes not only what, but how a nation remembers. In his text Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Beneto Rosaldo arrives at an understanding of imperial nostalgia (an active part of both personal and institutional memory-making) that is specific to “postcolonial” nations such as Canada. He says: Curiously enough, agents of colonialism—officials, constabulary officers, missionaries, and other figures…—often display nostalgia for the colonized culture as it was ‘traditionally’ (that is, when they first encountered it). The peculiarity of their yearning, of course is that agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed. Therefore, my concern resides with a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed (Rosaldo 69). Rosaldo’s conception ought to be extended to include people who actively reproduce settler-colonial systems through memory work and subsequent actions based thereon, on a daily basis. This group might be said to include most members of a national society. Rosaldo notes that imperial nostalgia is peculiar, as people come to desire something only after it has been destroyed. Problematically, this form of nostalgia also directly objectifies the people that belonged to that previous traditional system as objects of the past. In other words, this has very real effects for indigenous peoples as they stand in the way of settler-colonialism, and linear, historical progress. Settlers refigure(d) indigenous people in imagined ways that never, properly speaking, existed. “Imperialist nostalgia”, Rosaldo claims, “revolves around a central paradox… someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to intervention […] In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a past of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination” (Rosaldo 70). How can we account for this paradox? How might a nation such as Canada (and the individuals within it) articulate and re-imagine vast historical procedures and present realities—those complicit with “brutal domination”— that they fundamentally do not wish to remember, and actively cover-up with a reflexive “innocent yearning”? Such are the processes of memory-work and production which underlie my
interest in this study. Imperial nostalgia yearns for something which it destroyed, and then turns about and re-imagines what that might have been: it rarely, if ever, stops to engage with what truly was, or continues to be. Rarely, if ever, does it stop to consider other accounts, other voices, that tell a different story. Imperial nostalgia erases or overshadows other narratives of memory, thereby removing the difficulty of tracing and remembering some things, glossing over the ugly cracks with other, more favourable, histories. As a result, imagination seems to play a pivotal role in imperial nostalgia as it is fruitful for understanding present-day settler-indigenous relations in Canada. Allow me to pause for a moment to sketch these two figures. Though seemingly reductive, settler and indigenous are the essential societal classes analysed in current Canadian decolonial projects.1 In Canada, settlers mainly occupy the role of the revisionist imperial nostalgic (to varying degrees and outcomes), while indigenous peoples occupy a seemingly homogenous and totalizing position as societal Other (though this is of course reductive).2 This complex dynamic is further complicated as settlers engage in the appropriation, articulation, and subsequent dissemination of the image of indigenous peoples as imaginary “Indians”. While historically inescapable, the identity of indigenous peoples as imaginary constructs has seen some change in recent years: for the first time in post-Columbian history, indigenous peoples are able to articulate who they are on their own terms. It is in light of this hopeful movement that this project is undertaken, so that we might move beyond the boundaries of the terms settler and colonial, and forge new identities.3 Canadians have struggled with these labels and dynamics for centuries: the fact that indigenous societies were being studied during the later stages of Canadian colonial history seems on the surface to be a gesture by settlers towards interest in indigenous cultures. And yet, we may also refract this fascination through the spectrum of imperial nostalgia and the mimetic nature of settler-colonialism. This is highlighted in The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (2011) by Daniel Francis. Francis writes about the creation of the fictitious image of the Indian by settler-Canadians. “From the first encounter, Europeans viewed aboriginal Americans through a screen of their own prejudices and preconceptions. Given the wide gulf separating the cultures, Europeans have tended to imagine the Indian rather than to know Native people” (Francis 24). The people undertaking the varied studies on indigenous cultures and who fashioned the image of the “Indian” were primarily settler-Canadians, employed by museums and galleries to do precisely what Emily Carr suggested in the above vignette: to gather objects of study from indigenous communities “before they passed into silent nothingness” (Carr, Lecture on Totems). Indigenous scholar Marcia Crosby notes that 1 See Paulette Regan’s seminal text, Unsettling the Settler Within (2013). 2 I would like to acknowledge that though I frequently use both settler and indigenous as terms, the definitions thereof are not meant to be totalizing, but to represent an important location of contention for analysis as facets of individual characters. In short, settlers are not just settlers, and indigenous peoples are not just or only “Indians”. 3 I want to make it very clear that my engagement with the image/imaginary “Indian” is not to perform yet another peripheralizing colonial move: as a settler-Canadian myself, I feel that engaging with these oppressive tropes is essential for understanding the current state of the decolonial project in Canada, and the necessity for settlers to recognize their complicity in a society that continues to benefit from the very people and lands which it invaded and sought to replace. I seek by means of the engagement with historical Canadian conjunctures to address the present day failures of the settler memory.
The portrayal of indigenous people as victims, contaminated by European culture and dying rather than changing, has benefited those who have participated in its construction. This is not to say that aboriginal cultures did not go through dramatic changes that were violently imposed on our communities. However, we did not all die. We are still here—altered forever, and without the ‘authenticity’ that some, nostalgically, would like to impose (Crosby 270).
Crosby’s statement highlights the uncomfortable reality of Canadian projects to imagine the Indian. This fashioning often involved gathering misappropriated and stolen objects, removing them from their context, and imbuing them with new ones. Troublingly, this work was regularly done without the consent of the living descendants of the indigenous communities and cultures which were under investigation. This meant that they were studied, rather than learned from, as they were imagined as dead, rather than the living, rapidly-changing cultures that Crosby describes. This is corroborated by the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) excavation of the Huron-Wendat ossuary at Ossossané in 1946 without the consent of the living Huron-Wendat, an object and occurrence which is of great importance to this thesis. Archaeologist Kenneth E. Kidd notes in his study “The excavation and historical identification of a Huron ossuary” that: “the unusual opportunity of excavating a Huron ossuary presented itself” and that “a special grant from the Province to the Museum for archaeological purposes enabled work to begin” (Kidd 359). Kidd’s excavation offered the ROM, and the Canadian government by extension, the chance to study and narrate the pre-Columbian Canadian past that Carr had so fervently discussed in her lecture a few decades before. Kidd describes the opportunity he took advantage of to ground the settler-colonial interpretation of Canada’s long and complicated history with archaeological permanence. He narrates his and the museum’s excitement about “the possibility that the ossuary in question was one which, the French Jesuit, Jean de Brébeuf, saw in use in 1636” (Kidd 359).
Brébeuf’s account was somewhat legendary, and it is little wonder that the museum was interested in finding the location of his fabled Feast of the Dead. The manner in which this was done, however, is what is questioned and reinterpreted throughout the remainder of this thesis. The ROM’s fascination with Ossossané is but one of many such ventures in Canada’s rounding-up of indigenous artefacts. Notably, permission to undertake the excavation at Ossossané was neither sought by the museum nor given by the descendants of the Huron-Wendat, resulting in the museum simply removing the bones of their ancestors from the land (Kapches, Introduction). The extent of this settler-colonial project and fascination are tracked by Mima Kapches in her article “Ossossané Ossuary: The Circle Closes”. The grave goods and remains of the Huron-Wendat were circulated (again without approval) to museums both within Canada, the Commonwealth, and the United States (Kapches 5-7).4 4 This illicit removal has its twin in many sites across present-day Canada. After the destruction of the Indigenous Haida communities on Haida Gwaii (known until recently to Settler-Canadians by their colonial name, the Queen Charlotte Islands) by European missionaries, grave robbers and archaeologists alike ransacked the remaining communities of their ancestral heritage and remains for major museums around the world (“Who owns ancient art? CBC radio documentary, accessible at www.cbc.ca/ideas). Current curators of the Haida Friendship Centre estimate that tens- to hundreds- of thousands of artefacts and remains were removed illegally and without consent from Haida Gwaii.
The safety that settlers find in evaluating and studying an already defeated society is twofold in present-day Canada. This is the view taken by settler-Canadians toward the Huron-Wendat and many other indigenous peoples both in the past and present. Firstly, it fulfills the mindset of the settler-colonial society in its prediction about the death of “Indians” by which to define itself; and secondly, it allows for the creation of a settler-colonial history that faced and beat the adversity of the frontier, tamed nature, and created a new society in its place. In settler narratives, indigenous peoples are the unfortunate but unavoidable casualties of the colonial process. This in turn gives birth to a lingering oppressive mindset. It fails to recognize and remember the atrocities of colonialism for what they were, and figures settler-Canadians as the heroes of a frontier drama rather than the much more nuanced and damning narrative of the oppressive invader. The reality that the vignettes present highlights the often inconceivable paradox at work in Canadian society: how can a country that instituted systems that perpetrated serious and ongoing oppression against indigenous peoples who are also Canadian citizens account for its easy-going and liberal-minded (inter)national (self-)image? To phrase the question differently, to what ends and by what means have people disconnected from historical fact and fabricated a version of the past, narrating this new “history” in harmful ways? These narratives have been taken-up and taken-in by everyday Canadians. In her work on the effects of the settler-colonial project in Canada, Paulette Regan describes the extent to which Canadian Indian policy dealt with the cultural, economic, and political “burden” of indigenous peoples. It was an assault waged by all fronts of settler society (racial, moral, and cultural) with the backing of Canadian churches and the Canadian Government.
Canadian Indian policy found its principle inspiration in the assumptions of nineteenth-century evangelical religion, cultural imperialism, and laissez-faire economics. The Indians were to be led, by whatever means possible, to ‘civilization’ […] Economic self-sufficiency was also part of this agenda … [to] ensure that the native population no longer constituted a burden on the public purse […] The intolerant ethnocentrism of the Anglo-Canadian elite, which was closely tied to prevailing notions of racial superiority, precluded the possibility of the co-existence of the culturally diverse peoples within the same political entity. Tolerance… would have implied a residue of self-doubt […] Instead, the lingering guilt arising from conquest and appropriation was assuaged by the myth of duty and the delusion of parental responsibility (Regan 95).
This later stage of settler-colonialism might be best described as one designed to cover the tracks of the imperial plan. By hiding the history of Canadian Indian policy that was so totalizing under the saccharin auspices of “parental responsibility”, we can begin to trace the internalization of the myth of Canada as a peaceful settler nation. Having its roots deep in all facets of Canadian culture and history, an image of a settler-colonial reality begins to take form. One of the questions that this thesis uses as an initial point of inquiry is found in the project at hand: how do nations resist the power that imperial nostalgia and myths exert (through people and institutions), and move towards recognition of different historical and present realities? This is as much a question about the creation of an ethically minded society as it is a methodological question for the memory studies project undertaken herein. It is precisely this incongruous and damaging settler-colonial reality that allows for a cynical and productive engagement with its creation, articulation, and re-imagination.
I begin this project in Chapter 1 by localizing the global processes of imperialism. As such, I will engage with the National Historic site of Ossossané, investigating a number of its features. It is a lieu-de-mémoire that helps problematize and expose the various ways in which settler-colonial cultural memory overwrites and smothers indigenous narratives of memory. Lieux-de-mémoires are the physical and social locations of cultural memory, and as such, I want to explore Ossossané to make productive rends in the fabric of Canadian cultural memory, to show an alternative version of the site that is symbolic and representative of not only settler-colonial narratives, but also indigenous ones. As such, I will examine the Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead as witnessed by Jean de Brébeuf in 1636 and its subsequent study/interpretation by the Royal Ontario Museum, and a current re-storying of the site by contemporary Canadian author Joseph Boyden in his novel, The Orenda (2012). In addition to an analysis of the above cultural objects, this thesis will also explore whether or not land/landscape plays a more central role in the memory-making process. Through the recognition of different narratives and the portrayal of the events that took place there, my goal is to expose a complex understanding of Canadian cultural memory that is multiple in texture.
In Chapter 2, I propose to re-examine the object-site of Ossossané as the point of departure from which to problematizing the relationship between traditional conceptions and processes of memory-making and the dynamics of landscape and memory. I propose that landscape at Ossossané acts as a chronotope that blends together space and time in a way that helps interpret the narratives of memory in new ways. Traditionally separated by the dominant settler-colonial narratives, I analyze space and time together at the site in an effort to produce new meaningful connexions for how memory studies is done in settler-colonial contexts. By analyzing both the 1636 Feast of the Dead and the reinternment Feast of 1999 I offer critical reflections not only for Ossossané and narratives of Canadian cultural memory, but also for memory studies as it is preoccupied with the monument as an extension of the landscape, rather than the landscape as essential features of lieux-de-mémoires. Before I begin with an analysis of Ossossané through its varied lieux-de-mémoires, I will make note of the “unsettling” methodology that this thesis employs. In the Canadian context, Paulette Regan has developed what she calls an “unsettling pedagogy” for her research into the atrocities of the Indian Residential School system in Canada, and what she identifies as an ongoing imperialist mindset (Regan 2010). Regan’s emphasis on unsettling characterizes both her style of research, as well as the position she writes from as a scholar. In her text Unsettling the Settler Within, Regan states that “[t]he conflicts we face today have deep historical roots that can be traced in the stories that we as settlers tell and retell ourselves about our ‘non-violent’ past, invoking the myth of benevolent peacemaking” (Regan 69). Here, I make use of Regan’s educational approach as methodology to begin my research from a radical place of not knowing. I start from a position wherein I do not propose “right” or “good” solutions for indigenous people and their particular struggles, but that I examine my own cultural background as a settler, in the hopes of “unsettling” myself, and the ways in which I and others like me remember. This is also productive for questioning how memory-making processes function, and how a Western memory studies approach does not have sufficient scope to fully interpret Ossossané or Canadian cultural memory.
Chapter 1
Resistances to History and Institution: Two Memories of Ossossané
Figure 1: Parks Canada sign of the ossuary at Ossossané in what is now Southern Ontario. Image courtesy of
www.waymarking.com. Though the sign and grounds are administered by Parks Canada and Heritage Canada, a picture of the sign is not available on either web archive.
In 1956, Frank Ridley of the Royal Ontario Museum erected a sign in a forest on the shores of Georgian Bay in Southern Ontario. The sign was inherited with the sale of the land from the ROM to Parks Canada with the above information inscribed on it (Kapches 2010). Made of simple wood and painted letters, hung on a post-and-beam structure above a rock base, the sign is plain, unassuming, and forlorn, presently hanging at an awkward angle. If the curious passerby reads the sign, does as suggested and follows the library references, they will encounter a full account of the Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead in 1636 described by Jean de Brébeuf.5 Brébeuf is a well-known figure of pre-Canadian history: a French Jesuit missionary, he was sent with explorer Samuel de Champlain’s first mission to the fledgling colony of Nouvelle France in what is today Canada, and since 1930, venerated as a Catholic Saint.6 Other than the sign and its suggested references, there is no further information that 5 Further discussion of the Feast of 1636, hosted by the Attignawantan Tribe of the Huron-Wendat Nation can be found in Seeman and Birch & Williamson. 6 Further reading on Brébeuf’s mission in Nouvelle France and the Feast of the Dead can be found in The Jesuit Missions: A chronicle of the cross in the wilderness. Marquis, T. G. L. Released by Project Gutenberg, 2008.
helps a viewer interpret the site, nor is it marked as a place of significance, despite the deeply intertwined and problematical narratives that the sign hints at.
The Feast of the Dead was a ten-day long sacred mortuary ceremony which took place once every ten to twelve years during the relocation of a Huron-Wendat village. The Huron-Wendat would move their villages once the soil was depleted from agricultural practices, setting out for new, fertile locations no more than a days’ journey from their former site of residence (Birch & Williamson 2015). As such, the Feasts were essential cultural ceremonies for the various tribes and communities of the Huron-Wendat, as they commemorated their continued presence in their ancestral lands by interning in a communal ossuary the bones of the deceased who died while residing at that village before moving to another location. Brébeuf’s account is the only written record of the Feast of the Dead of 1636, which is one of the largest of such ossuaries that has been discovered to date. The Jesuit Missions, A Chronicle
of the Cross in the Wilderness describes that “[t]he Jesuits were witness to this weird
ceremony [the Feast of the Dead]. They saw the naked Indians going about their task in the pit in the glare of the torches, like veritable imps of hell” (232). Near the end of his journal entry, Brébeuf calls the ceremony “foolish and useless” and “a picture of hell”, suggesting that if the ceremony were to continue in the future, it would need to be imbued with Christian meanings and values (Seamen 78). Brébeuf’s account appeared almost mythological in its telling, as he described (with limited perspective) the processes of reburial undertaken by the Huron-Wendat as they reinterred almost one thousand deceased relatives at what researchers believe was the height of a series of regional wars between various indigenous groups. The Huron-Wendat and the neighboring Iroquois Confederacy fought one another in the early days of French colonialism, and competed for trade routes and hunting grounds while being pushed ever-further away from their homes (Osterhammel 334).
The sign at Ossossané acts as a guide to a large depression situated behind it— impossible to visit and off limits to the public—, where, until 1946, the commingled remains of the Huron-Wendat lay buried in their communal resting place. Between 1946 and 1947, the Royal Ontario Museum—who had long sought to discover the site of the fabled Feast of the Dead witnessed by Brébeuf—, carried out a “modern excavation” under the leadership of archaeologist Kenneth E. Kidd that yielded “grave goods of both aboriginal and European origin including: shell beads, projectile points, textiles, pipes, bone pendants… and copper bangles” (Kidd 361). In 1999, a second Feast of the Dead was performed at Ossossané by the Huron-Wendat who had long been seeking restitution for the injustices committed at the site. Far from closing the narrative of the site, the intermediary period highlights essential tensions in settler-indigenous relations in Canada.7 The report on the excavation states that “the heritage value of the Ossossané sites derives from their historical and physical significance” in specific relation to the French items that the archaeological team found in the ossuary, rather than the burial and cultural practices of the Huron-Wendat (Kidd 360). This sort of fascination was common for cultural institutions across Canada at the time, as a nation attempted to form a communal narrative of memory that posited indigenous peoples and their cultures as things of the past. This helped to differentiate in the historical narrative the “savage” (indigenous) heritage of Canadian history, and its accepted and glorified counterpart, made apparent by the interest in early European settlers/invaders.8
7 The 1999 Feast of the Dead at Ossossané will be revisited in the subsequent chapter.
8
In the national register of historic places, the site at Ossossané consists of two geographic sites, separated by a few kilometers: the Huron-Wendat village of Ossossané itself, and the ossuary pit. For the purposes of the paper, only the ossuary pit and the sign will be further investigated.
This damaging cultural view of superiority helps account for the gaps and dangerous perspectives in the narrative presented in Brébeuf’s journals and the ROM archaeological report. Brébeuf’s witnessing is confusing, as he is an outsider to the Huron-Wendat: with limited communication abilities and awareness, and could only guess at what he saw and heard, ultimately offering a skewed interpretation of the ceremony and its participants. In his journals, the Huron-Wendat remain mostly silent, studied by Brébeuf as if he is an early ethnographer, commenting on the societies that he comes across and relaying the information back to curious French readers. Brébeuf’s journals were essential in forming European conceptions of indigenous peoples, as Brébeuf lived among the Huron-Wendat for twenty-four years, and his studies of their customs and language were used to instruct other Jesuit missionaries in the colony.
In the ROM report, the Huron-Wendat are written about as objects of museum fascination: the archaeological remnants of a dead society, reduced in importance for merely their contact with the French. Despite all of this, the Huron-Wendat First Nation is still alive, displaced by the forces of colonialism and moved to a reserve hundreds of kilometers away from Ossossané in Wendake, Québec.9 The ROM report is dubious in two interrelated ways. Firstly, no permission was given for the dig by the Huron-Wendat, as they were deemed neither important to the excavation nor worthy of consultation. By not including the Huron-Wendat in the excavation of the ossuary, the report performs a damaging ethnographic objectification of Huron-Wendat culture, giving them little to no agency or voice. Further, the removal of the bones from the ossuary is tantamount to grave robbery. These facts expose the report as similarly one-sided as Brébeuf’s journals, rendering the academic and cultural contributions dubious at best.10
The sign and museum report present a Eurocentric reading of the non-European histories of the Huron-Wendat. These pseudo-memorials narrate an objectifying ethnographic perspective of both Ossossané and the Huron-Wendat, obfuscating their continued cultural presence. This narrative also represents a disrespectful intervention into the memory of the site that takes away sovereignty and agency of the very people to whom it belongs. The combination of these two facets of the memorial as it stands currently converge to create a settler-colonial narrative of memory that reflects the problematical nature of settler-indigenous relations in Canada. This all-encompassing narrative—a blanketing fabric—of settler-colonial interpretation creates an exclusive narrative of memory at Ossossané.
After making myself aware of the available information that the sign references, I began to question the role of government institutions (such as the ROM and Parks Canada) in representing a Europeanized history of indigenous peoples. I found myself asking questions about the lack of information the colonial narrative provides, and the injustices which were carried out at the site in its name. How trustworthy can a narrative of a lieu-de-mémoire such as this be, when it is written without local cultural knowledge, from the perspective of agents of an invading/dominant force? What is missing, and what has been intentionally left out of this narrative both historically and presently? These questions mark the beginning of the process of rending the fabric of memory. I intend to do this by interrupting the settler-colonial 9 The Indian Act of 1876 established a system of relocating Aboriginal peoples to Indian Reserves. The Act has been revised several times since then, but the system of land allocation by the Canadian federal government is still in effect. For further reading, see Unsettling the Settler Within. Paulette Regan, 2010. 10 Ownership of the Ossuary at Ossossané has since been returned to the Huron-Wendat Wendake First Nation, despite being so far removed from the site.
narratives of Ossossané with other stories and perspectives. I propose to re-constitute Ossossané as an object-site that is representative of a plurality of narratives from both settler and indigenous perspectives.
I will rend the fabric of memory at Ossossané by engaging with Alexander Etkind’s theories of hard and soft sites of cultural memory, and by calling attention to James Young’s theory about the texture of memory. Following the theoretical standpoints of Etkind and Young, I move recognize lieux-de-mémoires as dynamic and multi-local objects of analysis, broadening the site of Ossossané from ossuary and sign to the texts and narratives that surround them. Studying Ossossané also helps with tearing the broader fabric of settler-colonial memory, as the two are inextricably linked, informing and being informed by one another. Ossossané presents itself as an important site due to its multi-layered and multi-media nature.
Ossossané is and ought to be a fluid site, dynamic in construction, that accommodates a multiplicity of memories and cultures that move beyond what is canonically “Canadian” and suggests a reinterpretation of this category of belonging. I will argue that the sign at Ossossané is therefore a dubious object of cultural memory: that it is a misleading memorial with a one-sided narrative, that fails to accurately tell the story of a place that it intends to represent. In order to vivify memories of Ossossané in the present, I will analyze the sign at Ossossané as the site of hard memory with a contemporary soft memory counterpart in the narrative presented by the fictional Huron-Wendat Warrior, Bird, in Joseph Boyden’s 2012 novel The Orenda. In order to locate and understand the broad scale of cultural memory at work here, both the sign and the novel will be read in concert, combining the stories and weaving together the complicated narrative that characterizes the histories and presents of Aboriginal Canadians and indigenous peoples dwelling in Canada, brought about by the focus on settler-colonial subjects and systems. Historically, presently, and culturally, the two narratives are codependent: at best, settler-colonialism forever altered indigenous cultures in Canada, and at its worst, attempted to eradicate them entirely. As such, the process of rending and reconstituting the fabric of memory as I have proposed it is not to make new or better memories and narratives surrounding Ossossané. For, those newer and better narratives would run the risk of being smooth in their texture, which brings with it the danger of memory at the site stagnating, becoming embalmed. Rather, I suggest to interrupt and add to the narratives at the site, both rending and then vivifying the memory with present context, to make it relevant and recognizable. Ossossané: hard and soft memory and the recollective act As a lieu-de-mémoire, the sign at Ossossané is an incomplete form of what Alexander Etkind calls memory hardware. In “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany” (2004), Etkind lays out a theoretical framework for encountering two different yet interwoven sources of cultural memory. In addition to hardware, Etkind discusses memory software. He explains
[t]he hardware of historical memory—for example, monuments—stay mute and, practically speaking, invisible unless they are discussed, questioned, interpreted; in other words unless they interact with software, which is the current intellectual and political discourse. On the other hand, the software—public opinions, historical
debates, literary imagery—would pass away with every subsequent generation or even fashion if it were not embodied in and anchored by monuments, memorials, and museums (Etkind 40).
Etkind describes monuments as the hardware of historical memory: paying testament to a past that they signify, they mark our awareness of a specific lieu-de-mémoire, which is— typically—linked physically to an event, important to the workings of cultural memory of a given group. The use of the word “hard” in conjunction with memory connotes something unmovable, enduring, or unchanging. By reading these associative words into Etkind’s notion of hard memory, the necessity of interrupting is imbued with greater significance due to the settler-colonial nature of the memory that the sign signifies. The hard memory enshrined at Ossossané is the same sort of memory—different narratives with similar political and cultural discourses—that can be found throughout Canada. The hard memory at Ossossané points out the ways in which settler-colonial memories are physically embedded within this lieu-de-mémoire.
I propose to supplement Etkind’s memory hardware and software with James Young’s understanding of how monuments and memorials function culturally. In The Texture of
Memory (1999), Young states that “[b]y creating common spaces for memory, monuments
propagate the illusion of common memory… both the reasons for memory and the forms memory takes are always socially mandated, part of a socializing system whereby fellow citizens gain common history through the vicarious memory of their forbears’ experiences” (Young 6, my emphasis). As such, I take cultural memory to be those recognizable narratives which are told and retold, enshrined within a culture and their collectively remembered past. This past need not be factual, but is always and necessarily something recognizable to the broader public. The reality of commonly remembered pasts is troubling at Ossossané: the narrative promoted by the sign presents the Huron-Wendat as a distant memory, and not part of a contemporary Canadian story. Lieux-de-mémoires such as Ossossané are the hard locations (monuments, memorials) of these cultural memories, giving tenuous credit or even problematical birth to the damaging narratives that they help anchor. By engaging with Young and Etkind together, we can better understand the social and cultural ramifications (the processes) of the narratives of memory at Ossossané. Etkind states that locations of hard memory—monuments without texts—are incapable of delivering a narrative which is recognizable, and as such, stay mute. I disagree with Etkind, however, about the muteness of such a monument in a Canadian context. Ossossané is one site of many that link Canadian colonial histories with actual places: as I have shown in the introduction to this thesis, the force of these narratives is so totalizing that they are anything but mute. Rather, the sign at Ossossané is overbearing in its one-sided representation, calling attention not to its muteness, but rather, to the ways in which it makes previous settler opinions and views of indigenous cultures present. In this respect, the sign complicates precisely the theory of hard and soft sources of memory, as it appears to be doing the work of both. On the one hand, the sign is linked indexically to the ossuary, and through its scientific and academic pretensions claims a sort of hard narrative. However, it is precisely those pretensions which obfuscate the potential softness of the monument by quietly disavowing it: as such, the sign can also be read as a directive form of soft memory through the references to Brébeuf and Kidd. Etkind theorizes that these soft memory objects need physical monuments to anchor them to a place. Without this anchoring, they would remain susceptible to the whims of taste in depicting the cultural event at hand, and might lose their significance altogether. The sign
at Ossossané points us somewhat too conveniently to its proposed objects of soft memory, suggesting them as reference material. And yet, the objects of soft memory that the sign presents, that of Jean de Brébeuf’s account of the Feast of the Dead and the subsequent ROM archaeological report from 1936—though important to study to have a complete understanding of the settler memories of the site—leave the indigenous subjects of the narrative largely voiceless. The soft memory, herein, does little to nothing to help interpret the hard memory of the sign. The interpretation is already part of the monument itself, fixed, and unmoving.
This lack of true complication and interpretation simply verifies in some distant history what the sign presents as contemporary fact. Taken together, they comprise a fabric of memory in which the dominant settler-colonial narrative of Ossossané is repeated again and again, woven and re-woven with increasing authority. Etkind’s theorization is compelling, and suggests my reading that the hard and soft memory objects at Ossossané as they are presented obfuscate indigenous narratives of the site, asphyxiating them beneath layers of settler-colonial narratives of memory. Though the site itself is rigid, it cannot be ignored that something is being covered-up. I turn to Young, as the narratives of the Ossossané memorial objects ought to be problematized and understood in light of vivifying memory in the present, before turning to a potential soft-memory solution in my reading of The Orenda.
By asking contemporary questions of representation and right, I submit that the settler-colonial narratives at work at Ossossané can be productively fractured. In his text, Young urges academics and theoreticians to vivify memory in the present, calling attention to the processes involved in constituting memorial spaces and questioning the narratives that make up our shared understanding of past and present. This vivification advocates to make memory “alive”, suggesting an interpretation of Ossossané as a dynamic lieu-de-mémoire. In his introduction, Young remarks on the interconnectedness between memorials and those that remember, linking the creation of the memorial with the very people who created it. By returning to the memorial some memory of its own genesis, we remind ourselves of the memorial’s essential fragility, its dependence on others for its life […] Instead of enshrining an already enshrined memory, the present study might provide a uniquely instructive glimpse at the monument’s inner life—[of] the tempestuous social, political, and aesthetic forces […] Taken together, these stages comprise a genuine activity of memory, by which artifacts of ages past are invigorated by the present moment even as they condition our understanding of the world around us (Young 14-15). The genesis of memorials in their varied forms ought to be examined in order to understand not only what is remembered, but how, to what extent, by whom, and to what ends. As Young states, memorials condition the way we view the world around us, and this changes from age to age. The call to return to the creation of the memorial is a call to examine its foundations and its structure as it influences the ways in which people remember in the present. Young describes this as part of the texture of memory, and that the work of uncovering and interpreting, of vivifying objects and narratives of the past with knowledge and perspectives of the present, is essential to the task of remembering. Young continues:
We should also ask to what ends we have remembered. That is, how do we respond to the current moment in light of our remembered past? This is to recognize that the
shape of memory cannot be divorced from the actions taken in its behalf, and that memory without consequences contains the seeds of its own destruction. For were we to passively remark only the contours of these memorials, were we to leave unexplored their genesis and remain unchanged by the recollective act, it could be said that we have not remembered at all (Young 15).
As Young states, if we do not examine the actions taken on memory’s behalf, the recollective act itself does not accomplish its ultimate task of understanding the form and function of memory. Memory is, for Young (and me), bound up in actions and consequences. The consequences and actions taken on behalf of settler-colonial narratives of memory in Canada—the creation of reserves, of Indian Residential Schools, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—all point to the very real ways in which how and what we choose to remember affects lives, collectives, and nations forever. Recollection, therefore, is a political act. In the case of Ossossané, rending the fabric of settler-colonial narratives of memory is an act of both recollection and reconstitution; of dismantling and vivifying.
The Orenda: Vivifying memory in the present
In this section, I return to the notion of soft memory as proposed by Etkind, re-interpreted through the additions of Young. Etkind’s theorizations only go so far as to mention that memory is multi-modal: but for soft memory at Ossossané to do the work of interrupting that is required, I propose to analyze narratives beyond the accounts of the sign and its associated objects. Below I will analyze Joseph Boyden’ novel The Orenda in order to vivify the narratives of Ossossané in the present. I propose that Boyden’s novel be read as a piece of memory software that interrupts, adding a differing voice to the settler narratives of the site, as part of a politically charged recollective act described by Young. Published in 2012, Boyden’s novel is a recent work of Canadian fiction. Boyden is of both indigenous and European descent, and his novels are a cultural exploration in the field of Canadian fiction. Boyden is often credited with sensitive treatment of indigenous issues, and has become a well-known Canadian figure, with a host of award-winning and bestselling novels. As an object of memory software, The Orenda presents itself as a source that is imaginative in its retelling and gives a contemporary lens to the historical, settler-colonial narrative of the Feast of the Dead and the time of early contact between the French Colonists, the Huron-Wendat and the Iroquois that is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Boyden’s novel presents solutions to the problematical narrative of Ossossané. Rather than relying on an objectified view of the Huron-Wendat to inform the memory of the site, here they are given a voice: where before we were presented with a Eurocentric focus to the memory of Ossossané, we now gain a narrative centered on the Huron-Wendat themselves.
Boyden’s novel traces three parallel, interwoven narratives: that of a Jesuit missionary, Brother Christophe—who in the novel comes to represent and re-articulate the memories and views of Jean de Brébeuf as recorded in his journals—; Snow Falls, an Iroquois captive of the Huron-Wendat and young medicine-woman; and the Huron-Wendat warrior, Bird. Snow Falls and Bird both provide distinctive depictions of indigenous narratives. Whereas most colonial retellings focus on the inhumanity of Indians or on their helpless victimhood, Boyden’s novel presents both Bird and Snow Falls as thoughtful and well-rounded characters in a world that is more than vanquisher/vanquished. This is not to say that I turn a blind eye to the suffering of indigenous peoples at the hands of settler-colonial forces: rather,
I read Boyden’s novel as an attempt to see the varied positions and narratives within the broader cultural, political, and social happenings of the time. Both Snow Falls and Bird actively reject being colonized, and in the waning days of their village and the imposed winter of their tribe, their stories repopulate what often become nameless and faceless colonial narratives with both body and soul. Erasure is the subtle power of settler-colonialism, as it offers such a complete revision of history as to almost disallow the imagination of lived experiences, of people, and of their stories. This is here overcome in two distinct yet inseparable movements. Boyden is responsible for giving the Huron-Wendat a historical voice through his novel. This is integral as it reaches back into the past and imagines a narrative that rights historical and cultural wrongs and confronts the way things are in the present. This is achieved by connecting the novel to the physical site and by means of its literary structure. The novel’s subversive potential, I argue, can only be fully realized when it is dialogically linked to Ossossané and treated as an object of soft memory. The combination of these two movements create a dialogue between text and memorial site that rends the settler-colonial fabric of memory while simultaneously proposing an important solution that alters the historical narrative of the 1636 Feast of the Dead and vivifies it with the tone of reconciliation and restitution of the present.
Though the entirety of the novel can be read as a sort of memorial text, for the purposes of this paper, I will analyze Bird’s perspective and participation in the Feast of the Dead in the chapter entitled “Wash you with my tears” alongside the narrative of Brother Christophe as he informs his French readers in the chapter “The feast of the dead”. At the beginning of “Wash you with my tears”, Bird prepares the bones of his wife and daughters for re-internment in the communal ossuary, at the very same Feast of the Dead witnessed by Brébeuf (Brother Christophe, in The Orenda). Told from the perspective of the first person narrator, we inhabit the mind and body of Bird as he undertakes the melancholic task of preparing his kin for re-burial.
I hold you in my arms, my love. Since your passing to the land of Aataentsic and Iouskeha so many years ago, this is all I’ve ever wanted again. And I have wanted to cradle our daughters again, too, and now I finally do. We are all together once more […] The three of you aren’t heavy on my shoulders as I carry you to the place of the Kettle. I stop at some of your favourite spots along the way. The place where the river splashes into the Sweet Water Sea. The cliff overlooking where the waves crash below it. The field that blossoms with berries in the late summer. I remember our life together in the village I have now left for good (Boyden 75).
The first-person narration pierces through the dominating haze of treating indigenous peoples as amorphous societal Other, rending the fixed, enshrined, and one-dimensional fabric of the settler memory of the site.
Addressed entirely to his deceased wife and daughters, Bird tells the painful story of re-experiencing and confronting the death of his family in a way that is at once physical and emotional. He gives body and soul to the otherwise person-less narrative of Ossossané. Bird also situates the Feast of the Dead and the Huron-Wendat settlement within a different conception of landscape than that presented in settler-colonial narratives about the New World. The Canadian frontier is often presented as a brutish and wild place: by offering a different perspective of the location of the narrative, the Feast of the Dead shakes off its colonial placement and suggests a natural, local, and native place, inhabited by First Peoples
who lived their lives according to their traditions and customs. Bird’s narrative not only about the Feast, but also the world of his people, reclaims the setting of the Feast from the colonial narrative and repositions the Huron-Wendat where they historically and rightfully belong: as native to their place, encountering and interacting with foreigners with different ideas and cultures. The above—and following excerpts of the novel—tell a story that cannot be denied as being completely different from that presented on the sign at Ossossané: Bird, his tribe, and his nation all sing out their story, shattering the silence that they were wrapped in, and reclaiming the land that they lived and died in. The community reburies the bones of their family members to consecrate and trace the memory of their people. At the ceremony, Bird and his tribe commit their loved ones to the land. With my own two hands I place your bones into the ossuary and mingle them with the others so you will never be lonely. I sing your song as the tears flow down my face, my song weaving into those of the others until we are all one great voice. You are with me right now, my love. I can feel your hands upon my face and our daughters’ arms wrapped around my waist. We are one again, at least for now, and as we cover you with the warmth of the beaver furs, I whisper to you that it won’t be too long now before we are finally together again (Boyden 76).
Bird’s narrative re-iterates the indexical nature of the site and contrasts the dominant hegemonic narrative of repression that is articulated on the sign. By supplying bodies and voices to the narrative of Ossossané, The Orenda stands in stark contrast to the settler narrative presented, and approaches symbolic and memorial representation for the Huron-Wendat. Bird narrates the performative and participatory Feast of the Dead which blurs the lines between life and death, between present and past. In their essay, “Navigating ancestral landscapes in the Northern Iroquoian world” Jennifer Birch and Ronald Williamson find that “[a]s communities of the dead, abandoned villages and their associated ossuaries were part of a larger set of continuing spiritual responsibilities to meaningful places in the landscape” (Birch & Williamson 139). Not only are Bird and his fellow tribesmen carrying out an act of mourning, it is also a memorial ceremony of commemoration, imbued with meaning by people, with a plurality of memories that have been otherwise misinterpreted, condemned, or forgotten. The private narrative of Bird blends into and gives voice to the communal narrative of the Huron-Wendat as they sing their respective songs for their loved ones, and jumps through history to a shocking confrontation with how things are in the present. Boyden achieves this through the juxtaposition of narrators between “Wash you with my tears” and the previous chapter, “The feast of the dead”. The earlier chapter is narrated by Brother Christophe as he describes in a missive to his Father Superior in France the formal aspects of the Feast of the Dead. Boyden has Christophe describe the feast in similar language and structure to its historical source material, Jean de Brébeuf’s journals. Christophe begins his pseudo-anthropological account with, “I share with you, my dear Superior, and with any other readers my journals might find back in France, the most splendid thing I’ve yet to see in this heathen land” (Boyden 70). Christophe continues the epistolary chapter with similarly descriptive language, calling the Huron-Wendat “barbaric” (Boyden 70) and “ghastly” (Boyden 70) “sauvages” (Boyden 73), and their mortuary customs “frightening” (Boyden 72). He regularly uses the word “heathens” to describe the Huron-Wendat, setting up the cultural divide linguistically by means of the descriptive and condemnatory religious term (Boyden
72). Christophe’s language intentionally mimics that of Brébeuf’s and subsequently the dominant settler-colonial narratives of Ossossané by means of the epistolary structure (designed to “report” on the exotic Feast of the Dead) and through the use of specific, supercilious, and condescending language. When Bird begins the subsequent chapter, “Wash you with my tears”, he begins with the phrase, “I hold you in my arms, my love. Since your passing to the land of Aataentsic and Iouskeha so many years ago, this is all I’ve ever wanted again” (Boyden 75). Boyden’s choice of words throughout the brief chapter make the divide between Bird and Christophe, their cultures, and their narratives, shockingly apparent. Bird’s chapter is filled with words and phrases that describe the personal importance of this sacred ritual, as quoted at length above, rather than the arrogant and oppressive account given by Christophe.
The soft memory of the narratives in The Orenda question present “post-conflict” Canada, a state which may be legally within grasp for the descendants of the Huron-Wendat and other indigenous peoples, but is decidedly not the case in memorials and Canadian cultural memory. The site itself as a locus of hard memory is one which makes present the past: to take a less confrontational tone, the sign erected by the staff members of the ROM and other settler-colonial memorials bring the Feast of the Dead into the foreground, begging questions about status, history, and the plurality of memory at stake in what has now been termed a National Heritage Site of Canada. The novel helps vivify the object-site of Ossossané with contemporary knowledge and indigenous perspectives. By linking the two objects together, the circle of the community widens, and the problematical narrative presented by the sign is questioned, recapitulated, and re-imagined in a productive way. The imagined narrative becomes integral as the only proposal to date that acts as a counterweight to the equally imagined settler-colonial narratives of Ossossané and the Huron-Wendat. The sign and other memorials are steeped in a settler-colonial historical attempt to represent the Huron-Wendat that is objectifying, damagingly ethnographic, and fictional itself. Analyzing the narratives of The Orenda with Ossossané is therefore an integral move that confronts, as Avery Gordon states, that which is “concealed, [which] is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us” (Gordon 4).
__________________________
In this chapter, I sought to rend the fabric of settler-colonial memory by locating and constituting a potential symbolic object-site in the Ossossané lieux-de-mémoires. By suggesting broadly that lieux-de-mémoires or memorials are not just physical locations but can be extended to texts, narratives, and histories of place, I follow Young in his theorization that the texture of memory is multiple. Ossossané is an object-site that is symbolic of the broader discourse of settler-colonial memory at work across Canada. Recognizing this breadth subsequently moves away from the smooth historical narratives that settler-designed memorials of the past perform, and instead posits a rough-hewn memory that is predicated on interruptions, resistances, and alternative narratives. Not everything can be concealed by the settler-colonial fabric of memory at Ossossané. Like snow blanketing the landscape, some things remain exposed, uncovered by the supposed order and smoothness that the narrative brings. The things that stick through, that escape being blanketed, no matter how small, demand recognition and exploration, revealing the forms and objects that lie incompletely covered beneath.
