Truth and Reconciliation- healing ethnocide and ecocide

teepee at the TRC, photo by  Riva Benditt

I spent today at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's event in Edmonton, where I live.  For those who are not Canadian, or who may not be in touch with the Residential School issue, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been holding gatherings all over Canada, enabling residential school Survivors to tell their stories, find healing in the sympathy of others who have experienced similar trauma, engage with traditional healers who can help them with their healing journeys and set the record straight.

Residential schools were explicitly racist in agenda, seeking to assimilate and Christianize Indigenous children by forcibly removing them from their families and institutionalizing them.  Some got to go home for a couple of months in the year.  Others not.  Children were deliberately placed apart from their siblings, and forbidden to speak their languages.  Many died of disease.  Some died attempting to escape, freezing to death trying to go home. Sexual and physical abuse of various kinds permeated these institutions where the power of those in charge was rarely overseen or checked. (This occurs in non-indigenous settings as well, as with the Mt. Cashel orphanage in the Maritimes).

The US had its Trail of Tears (the forced march of the southern tribes to Oklahoma, and other such genocidal removals), and in Canada we had instead schools of tears.

The mere telling of trauma suffered by individual children, or the parents or relatives of those who were in residential schools, is neither the object nor the stopping place.  First, the truth must be told, and the wider public must hear.  The government of Canada and the major churches have already made official apologies.  But the degree of disruption of language, culture, community, emotional and physical health, and traditional knowledges has created a huge rupture in all Indigenous communities in Canada.  As one speaker addressing the issue commented today, it's not about simple oh, they were wrong, and were blinded by their religion.....the policies of assimilation were part and parcel of the colonial enterprise, here in Canada as well as other places around the world.  The assault on language and culture, and the attempt to transform Indigenous peoples into "civilized Christians" was about the extension of empire, access to land and resources, clearing the way for development of hinterlands and ecological conversion to agricultural landscapes or to promote forestry and mining where the land was not suited to agriculture.  In short, for nation building.  Today I heard my friend Alestine, who experienced 12 years of residential schooling in the NWT and has since gone on to a University degree and a Masters in Environmental Studies, lament not only the personal difficulties of being in residential school, but the loss of opportunity to learn her culture "hands-on" .  Her passion for language preservation and the documentation and transmission of traditional knowledge is I think what she has done to make up for the loss of her birthright.  She was fortunate to have elder relatives who could still teach her when she came home.  She is making significant contributions to building a better future for her people.

The fallout of the residential school social experiment have been huge, not only in loss of language, threat to aboriginal spiritual beliefs and hand skills, but also in community health, as whole communities of traumatized children stumbled toward personal healing and empowerment and tried  to figure out how to parent, when they themselves had not been allowed the love and nurture of parents, how to own and set goals when finally they could, how to deal with the legacy of pain, internalized worthlessness and repressed anger at their mistreatment.  The collective trauma ricochets, and affects the generations who come after.  Their cost is measured in violence against women and in general, people on the streets, numbing pain with alcohol and other substances, dysfunctional communities, and many in the prisons, far out of proportion to the population.  The statistics are widely known.  The ultimate responsibility, in the colonial nation-building process itself, is rarely acknowledged.  Ways forward are challenging.

In other work that I do, I work with communities to preserve traditional knowledge of plants, of the land, traditional skills. Trying to build a bridge over the generation(s) of disruption.  Trying to restore health through facilitating reconnection to the land.  My friend Linda, Kaska language and culture teacher, and Elders we worked constantly emphasize the need to get people out on the land, to rebuild the skill set that nurtures self-sufficiency, spiritual balance and pride.  No easy task.  The world is changing quickly. iPads and smartphones and facebook are alluring.  

2012 project to document hide processing

Making moosehide is hard work.  Spending time on the land to learn skills is hard to square with school periods and parental consent forms.  Teaching appropriate reverence and respect for the land, the medicines, and the animals and plants that provide food is also a challenge. Fetal alcohol exposure lowers the capacity of many children to learn.

So the reconciliation and healing phase of truth and reconciliation is very wide ranging.  Not only must social relations be mended, understanding sought from the rest of the people who now occupy the country we call Canada, but knowledge of language, of stories which bring traditional wisdom, and connection to the land and its foods  and medicines must be re-established.  Only through all of these can we retreat from the brink of ethnocide and ecocide and walk toward health.

I wanted to share some images of positive approaches to repairing the loss of connection to land; these examples are from the Plants for Life Camp held by the community of Deline, NWT on the Great Bear River at Stick Creek, summer 2006.
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Elders and youth together picking blueberries on the land

Close up of blueberries, healthy food from the land

Pot of Medicine the Elders were cooking to show the youth how to make healing teas.

Hai Hai.  Meegwetch. Masi cho. Misiy co. Sugosinlá.
Thanks for listening.

"Tradition" is a Moving Target

I've often fantasized having a bumper sticker on the back of my car with the words tradition is a moving target.  People often think of traditions, or traditional people as somehow frozen, a fixed form rigidly reproduced set by authority at some unspecified time in the distant past.  Essentialized and objectified.  Such readings of "tradition" figure largely in determinations of aboriginal rights, of allowed and disallowed techniques of harvesting and using fish and animals and berries, of relationships to landscape (which has relevance both in popular discourse and in treaty negotiations and court cases).  Such notions also figure in judgements of what is "authentic" or "inauthentic" in Aboriginal arts and crafts.  I recently viewed a video on German Indian re-enactment posted on the web by a Canadian First Nations woman.... the German participants used considerable rhetoric about how Indigenous North Americans, and their knowledges, were endangered and disappearing, and how these German admirers were preserving and carrying on the traditions....somehow failing to acknowledge living Indigenous North Americans, and their agency in moving their cultures, arts and identities into the present and future.  "Preserving the knowledge of the Elders"– something that has in fact occupied a good deal of my professional life– does not negate creativity, adaptation, resilience, or changing meanings and contexts.  And I have always striven to show that people I work with are contemporary Canadians, my teachers, friends, collaborators and sometimes neighbours.  Their knowledge is not fossil knowledge of the past, but knowledge that can be brought forward for now, and for the future.
Use of new materials, for example, does not render art less "authentic"; the authenticity resides in who creates it, in its meaning, in intent and purpose, in linkage with past in which it is rooted.  Silk screen prints, for example, were not a traditional way to depict Northwest Coast crests, which were displayed on wooden screens, in woven dance blankets (gwiis halaayt or Chilkat blankets)....in making this statement we run into two difficulties: one, what is the relevant time horizon for "traditional"? and two, in what way is the new hybrid form of silk screen prints made by Indigenous artists depicting Indigenous themes not traditional?  (Even the question of production of art or craft for sale is certainly now "traditional" if we can take practices from the 18th and 18th centuries as "traditional." Certainly in terms of cuisine, for example, no one would argue that boxty, made of potatoes that originated in Peru, is not traditional Irish fare, and certainly no one would contest the traditional nature of a Thanksgiving dinner featuring turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, all introduced to European and Euro-American cuisine in the 16th and 17th centuries.)  Museums and collectors all accept these art pieces as "traditional".

Another example of "tradition" that comes to mind is the beautiful appliqued art form usually known as "button blanket" (gwiis gan mala).  (The blanket shown here is a Haida example from a Totempole raising and Longhouse dedication in June of 1978.  It's iconic to me because of the contemporary context, and the presence of the little girl, now probably 40 years old). Abalone shell was a treasured embellishment on the Northwest Coast long before the advent of European trade goods.  Crest form chiefly blankets displaying prerogative and authority displaying appliqued House, Clan or moiety crests are widespread up and down the Northwest Coast, and are certainly taught in traditional form by older knowledgeable women teaching younger ones how to cut, applique and embellish the blankets, though fulled red, navy or black woolen cloth is certainly not Pre-Contact.  Social relations in who draws the pattern, and who stitches blankets for whom continue to display ancient patterns of clan or house reciprocity and gender roles as well. Now I have learned that people use computer applications to draft complex and precise patterns for the appliqued figures.  Hybridity, and evolving tradition both. So tradition is not a reified set of practices, or products, it is a process which creates linkage between past and future through the constantly shifting moment of the present.
Iain Davidson-Hunt and Michael O'Flaherty have described cultural landscape as emergent in a similar vein.  Contesting now entrenched notions of heritage conservation as the preservation of things, of forms, they contend that preservation of cultural landscapes must instead by approached from the perspective of the set of relationships between people and land, and the customary practices (themselves evolving) that have shaped, and continue to shape the land.  The relationships are what is required to create and maintain a cultural landscape.  Many traditional peoples are deeply in relationship with their homelands, conceiving of themselves as part of the land (for example, Catherine McClellan and Council of Yukon Indians book on Yukon First Nations in the last quarter of the 20th century is entitled part of the Land, Part of the Water).  I discussed these issues in an earlier blog on the Hortobagy Salt Steppe World Heritage Site in Hungary, and I've also written of these matters in Trail of Story, Traveller's Path, Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape (available through Creative Commons on the AUPress Website at http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120163).
The difference of perspective on what heritage conservation is speaks to conceptual separation or integration of humans the land, and the other entities that share it, that is, whether people are part of ecosystems, in webs of relationship with the biophysical environment and integral to the environments of which they form a part, or separate from them and potentially destructive of a pure and vulnerable "nature".   The crux of the matter, then, is are we part of "Nature", or separate from, and potentially destructive of it?  Are relationships with the land, with the natural world, so to speak, to be conceived of as relationships of mutually supporting entities, or will "Nature" be stripped of all of its richness, its rights, its agency to be objectified and commodified, to be bought and sold, reduced to monetary value and universal exchange? How will we deal with the rights and relationships of Indigenous peoples to homelands in our complicated pastiche of nation states, settlers, immigrants, migrants and globalization?