My theory is that there are at least three factors at work on my mood this morning. One, sheer bloody-mindedness says, "spring forward? I'll show you springing forward!" and promptly goes back to sleep. Two, it is the sort of miserable grey day that I hold responsible for the emotional quality of most Celtic music and therefore vicariously for my current desire to eat a pound of potatoes and drink a bottle of whiskey in front of a peat fire. Three, I just completed Maria Campbell's Half-Breed.
I had already been thinking more than usual (for me) about indigenous politics in Canada because of the recent visit of Ann Laura Stoler to our department. During her engaging question and answer period (which was almost more enjoying than the lecture simply because of the delight of watching this woman's elastic brain leap from topic to topic with nary a sign of effort or strain) she brought up to the problematic of comparison or commensurability: what do we consider worthy of or capable of comparison, and why? She used the example of Americans refusing to discuss American foreign policy as a form of (neo?)imperialism, in part due to the paradigmatic status of British-Indian imperialism which prevent us from perceiving the technologies of empire as both indefinitely various in their forms and violent in their technologies. In encouraging the finding of unlikely connections, she pointed out the historical fact that, when attempting to find a workable model for apartheid, South African bureaucrats came to Canada to observe the reserve system and considered it an ideal example that they later drew upon significantly.
After the lecture we (the graduate students) had a long and lively discussion with Dr. Stoler about indigenous politics in Canada, touching on the shockingly recent abolishing of residential schools as well as contemporary examples of indigenous uprising that remain in our living memories: Oka and Caledonia. I also brought up the recent book by Christie Blatchford, Helpless: Caledonia's Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us, and the active protests at U Waterloo that prevented her from discussing this book (check out a typically anger-inducing National Post editorial on the event if you feel like getting your ire up). Dr. Stoler was surprised to find out the sort of information about Canadian politics that in no way trickles into American media, and we in turn were surprised (or at least I was) that a scholar so interested in writing "a colonial history of the present" didn't realize that the nation directly to the North was writing and rewriting this history every day, through biased media and deeply prejudiced books like Blatchford's, through ongoing protests and the creation of new sites of identity-articulation, be they digital archives or resistant documentaries.
It was in this context that I sat down yesterday to read Half-Breed, and began to wonder why I, as a Canadianist and a self-proclaimed anti-racist feminist academic have not thus far been more concerned with indigenous politics in this country. The baldness of Campbell's narrative, the impossible textual ellipses of personal and systemic trauma revealed more through the constant gaps in an otherwise "straightforward" narrative, the scarred and racialized and abused body so carefully never made-manifest yet so present throughout the text, all made me feel the shocking presentness of this 38-year-old memoir. Further, the scathing indictment of Canadian civil politics, of Canadian civility as a blanket that dehumanizes indigenous people in the guise of (white, colonial) care and compassion (and again re: Stoler I am thinking of the colonial politics of sentiment her), all revived viscerally my sensations of outrage when I read the publisher's description of Blatchford's book, which I will share here:
It officially began on February 28, 2006, when a handful of protesters from the nearby Six Nations reserve walked onto Douglas Creek Estates, then a residential subdivision under construction, and blocked workers from entering. Over the course of the spring and summer of that first year, the criminal actions of the occupiers included throwing a vehicle over an overpass, the burning down of a hydro transformer which caused a three-day blackout, the torching of a bridge and the hijacking of a police vehicle. During the very worst period, ordinary residents living near the site had to pass through native barricades, show native-issued "passports", and were occasionally threatened with body searches and routinely subjected to threats. Much of this lawless conduct occurred under the noses of the Ontario Provincial Police, who, often against their own best instincts, stood by and watched: They too had been intimidated. Arrests, where they were made, weren't made contemporaneously, but weeks or monthlater. The result was to embolden the occupiers and render non-native citizens vulnerable and afraid. Eighteen months after the occupation began, a home builder named Sam Gualtieri, working on the house he was giving his daughter as a wedding present, was attacked by protesters and beaten so badly he will never fully recover from his injuries. The occupation is now in its fifth year. Throughout, Christie Blatchford has been observing, interviewing, and investigating with the tenacity that has made her both the doyen of Canadian crime reporters and a social commentator beloved for her uncompromising sense of right and wrong.This story of equality before the law is an old one in Canada, and it is a myth that is still being deployed to claim total political equality while ignoring both cultural difference and the impacts of systemic racism and colonialism. All of which is to say, this morning I do not feel like we are springing forward at all. I feel like we are staying unbelievably still.
In Helpless she tells the full story for the first time - a story that no part of the press or media in Canada has been prepared to tackle with the unflinching objectivity that Christie Blatchford displays on every page. This is a book whose many revelations, never before reported, will shock and appall. But the last word should go to the author:
"This book is not about aboriginal land claims. The book is not about the wholesale removal of seven generations of indigenous youngsters from their reserves and families - this was by dint of federal government policy - or the abuse dished out to many of them at the residential schools into which they were arbitrarily placed or the devastating effects that haunt so many today. This book is not about the dubious merits of the reserve system which may better serve those who wish to see native people fail than those who want desperately for them to succeed. I do not in any way make light of these issues, and they are one way or another in the background of everything that occurred in Caledonia.
"What Helpless is about is the failure of government to govern and to protect all its citizens equally."
