Day: March 23, 2014

(Bonita Lawrence on Indigenous Studies and Anti-Racist Studies)
Official policies, laws, and governing doctrine are important works to be examining in our criticisms and investigations of colonialisms and Canada. The Indian Act’s racist, sexist, and violent history continues to enforce how our government defines and relates indigeneity. I am currently fascinated with the interactions of ‘official’ policies, specifically the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, and ‘unofficial’ policies such as Canada’s idea of itself as a “cultural mosaic”.

What interests me about the Multiculturalism Act is the way it is wielded by the Canadian nation state to form a visage of inclusivity. Indeed, my first encounter with the act was in elementary school, where we were taught about it in comparison to the United States’ melting pot ideology (pdf). All of the rhetoric the act deploys reminds me very much of a certain Canadian set of optics—apologetic, polite, embracing of cultural diversity. These tactics on one hand make Canada seem like a very liveable place while on the other, making critical discourses around say, Canada’s violent and erasing past (and contemporary direction) of colonialism, hard to have. Section 3.1 (f) of the act states that the act will “encourage and assist the social, cultural, economic and political institutions of Canada to be both respectful and inclusive of Canada’s multicultural character” (Canadian Multiculturalism Act 1988). This becomes a sort of flattening of race and ethnicity to ‘work together’ and build this cultural mosaic of hybridity and nationhood.

Bonita Lawrence, a Mi’kmaw woman, and Enaksh Dua work together from both sides of Aboriginal education and anti-racist education (respectively) to pose dialogue on how the two are seen to be at arms with each other (pdf) in their article “Decolonizing Antiracism” (2005). Overwhelmingly the anti-racist pedagogies they cite and view “has maintained a colonial framework” (136). That is, it does not work to acknowledge that being indigenous is different from being a person of colour in Canada. A multiculturalism act that puts all races and ethnicities on an ‘even’ playing field in hopes of mutual recognition, visibility, and benefits does not do a justice to the complicated ways to how race and indigineity relate and intertwine themselves, particularly through the lens of a nation state.

I wish to draw a parallel of what Lawrence and Dua place as a missing of the mark by the academy to not work decolonization into its anti-racist pedagogies, and what I position as the Canadian public for failing to make this connection as well. Amnesty International’s response to the culture of violence and silence against Indigenous women permeating throughout Canada was published in 2004 (pdf). It traces a violent set of inaction from the Canadian government, media, and citizens in the murdered and missing women across Canada. The report seethes that “[v]iolence against women, and certainly violence against Indigenous women, is rarely understood as a human rights issue” (4). This functions as a reminder that the Canadian public has a heavy-hand in ignoring, normalizing, and producing violence against Indigenous women.

These moments of intervention by activists and scholars such as Lawrence and Dua, or organizations like Amnesty International begin to paint a broader picture of the ways in which Canada is operating under a cultural mosaic which, like physical mosaics, covers a dark and derelict base—Canada’s own continuing erasure of indigenous peoples. I see this sort of masking of all races and ethnicities as ‘one’ uniform and ‘knowable’ thing to be a direct parallel to Coleman’s position of a certain type of white supremacy–that is, the mosaic appears to us to be white because it is mirroring and paralleling the histories of white supremacy and colonialism our nation is built upon.I think it is no accident that these fictive constructs are reproducing dominant powers and sensibilities–whiteness dominates and affects how we come to understand even anti-racist studies if not intervened upon.

Works Cited

Amnesty International. “Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence Against Women in Canada.” Stop Violence Against Women (2004). Web.

Canadian Multiculturalism Act Statutes of Canada, c.9. Canada. Department of Justice. 1988. Department of Justice. Web.

Henry III, William A. “Beyond the melting pot.” Time 135.15 (1990): 28-31. Web.

Lawrence, Bonita. “Race, Ethnicity & Indigeneity | Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies | York University.” YouTube. YouTube, 21 June 2010. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.

Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. “Decolonizing antiracism.” SOCIAL JUSTICE-SAN FRANCISCO- 32.4 (2005): 120. Web.

Williams, Lynn. “The Indian Act (1876 to Present).” News for the Rest of Us. Rabble.ca, n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2014. Web.

“I planted him in this country
like a flag.”

-Margaret Atwood, “The Journals of Susanna Moodie” 

I first heard of Susanna Moodie, as I suspect many English majors hear of Susanna Moodie—through the poetry of Margaret Atwood. I was nineteen and backpacking through Montreal. I had just been broken up with and thought it a good idea to leave my province for another one. I spent a lot of time at the Grande Bibliothèque, poring over Atwood’s poetry and books. I was determined to have a Canadian experience and what better way than to explore Canada on my own, through the eyes of one of our most celebrated authors. Susanna Moodie was thrown at me, at a time when I was feeling alone, destitute, confused. I took out her Roughing it in the Bush  (1854), and never returned the text. This is a confession, I think.

I am not trying to draw a direct comparison towards moving across Canada as a nineteen year old and Susanna Moodie’s complex negotiations of emigration. I am, however, interested in the ways that these two ideas of leaving, coming to new space, re/defining the self in relation to this space, and starting anew can be read as distinct parallels. Thinking (or feeling) through these ideas laid out to us of second Edens and empty and negotiated lands draws me to her introduction where she describes the “Salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country” (Moodie) (emphasis added). I am fascinated by this idea of proximity in the works we are examining. What does it mean to be close to the country you have left? How does physical proximity factor into what ‘home’ can or should become? She writes in Chapter 11 of a fear that moving away from the ‘mother country’ becomes an “approaching ill” (Moodie). She goes on to say that this fear“strove to draw [her] back as from a fearful abyss, beseeching [her] not to leave England and emigrate to Canada” (Moodie). In this way, proximity becomes a way of talking about ownership. This image of a vast, “unwasted” Canada that she explores again and again only becomes less terrifying as she lays claim to it, settles it.

This double idea of an Eden at once beckoning the many English subjects who develop a “Canada mania” (Moodie) and also offering the harsh and cold realities of the earth after the Fall begin to come to light in her introduction. It is a true testament to the Enlightenment that this text offers explicit ways of knowing or coming to know Canada as a settled space. Both absencing and ignoring the fact that Canada was not absent, not ‘unwasted’, but was home to many complex and wildly differing nations and peoples before contact, Moodie’s work begins to rewrite Canada through this proximity to knowledge. Only by getting far enough away from England, and close enough to a “real” or “factual” account of settling Canada does Moodie begin to at once complicate the ideas of Eden (eg by pointing to the “cold winds and drizzling rain” in Chapter 2) , as well as paint Canada as the tax-free paradise that immigrants might come to expect. Indeed, though it is a rough gift, an “empty” “unsettled” Canada is built by Moodie as a gift from god.

The resurrection King performs of Moodie in the café scene in Green Grass, Running Water (1993) can be read as a delicate and complicated investigation of power in-text. Achilles Mbembe, a post-colonial scholar speaks to great lengths of what “conviviality” looks like in his “On the Postcolony” (1991). I turn to his complicated reading of colonialism and Africa because I think the ways in which King reanimates Moodie is a toying with these notions of conviviality (friendliness or ‘liveliness’). Moodie is brought back in a satirical way (as is King’s specialty). Immediately he renames her as “Sue” (184), and has her explain in a contemporary context that her and her companion Archie have been “roughing it” (184) in dingy hotel rooms. What King is doing here is acknowledging the deep-histories that Moodie summons in the Canadian literature canon, and toying with them, making them unrecognizable and ‘unconvivial’. Mbembe speaks of satire and humour in the discussions of postcolonialism, pointing to an unfriendliness or satirical changing in works to alter or challenge overarching stories of power.

Margaret Atwood came to speak at UBC two years ago about zombies. I remember asking a rather pretentious and long-winded question on the nature of zombies to her—she wasn’t too interested as I recall (and I don’t blame her the question was maybe reserved for a paper and not a Q&A). I am once again reeling with the thoughts of what a zombie in-text can look like. If we can read Moodie’s reconvivial state in Green Grass, Running Water, as a zombie-type character, then there is perhaps room to think about the ways in which Canada as a consumer of Moodie’s work in our building of “Canadian canon” (which also includes Atwood’s work) works in the same ‘mindless droves’ that zombies do in our ongoing history of ‘forgetting’ or ‘making invisible’ First Nations peoples.

Works Cited