Hello readers,
Last week in ASTU 100A, my class had the opportunity to visit the “c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city” exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver. This exhibition was centered around the ancient Musqueam burial ground and village cite c̓əsnaʔəm, which few people know – including myself prior to this visit – is located just before the Arthur Laing Bridge, in Vancouver’s current Marpole neighborhood. Ćəsnaʔəm continues to be a cite of great cultural significance to the Musqueam people, and was historically “first occupied almost 5000 years ago and became one of the largest of the Musqueam people’s ancient village sites approximately two thousand years ago”.
At this exhibit I was informed that in 2012 a condo company retained a permit to build on the c̓əsnaʔəm Musqueam burial ground. This act was met with fierce resistance from the Musqueam community and other activists when the bodies of several Musqueam ancestors (including those of two children) were overturned during the project’s excavations. After a 100 day vigil in honour of the disturbed ancestors and in protest against the project, the construction was eventually halted.
The contention over construction on the c̓əsnaʔəm burial ground can be critically considered using the philosopher Judith Butler’s theoretical lens from her work “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable”, of which we just read the chapter “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” for ASTU 100A. Although written in the context of society’s attitudes in times of war, it seems fitting to use Butler’s central theoretical question of “when is life grievable?” to reflect on the 2012 c̓əsnaʔəm incident, and by extension more generally on the colonial divisions between “us” and “them” that still plague mainstream Canadian society. At its essence, Butler’s approach inquires into why it is that “we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others”, especially on a public scale (36). One of the conclusions that Butler reaches is that it is the extent to which we recognize ourselves in other people that leads us to mourn for them. Butler continues by stating that those who we cannot recognize ourselves in (largely due to the ways in which we are socially conditioned to view “us” and “them” by factors such as the media and the culture we are raised in) are then considered “ungrievable” or a life “that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (38). Considering the treatment of the c̓əsnaʔəm burial ground, it could be argued that even today in our celebrated multicultural Canadian society, the mainstream public’s apathy towards Indigenous ancestors alludes to a greater issue of a mainstream Canadian view of Indigenous lives as “ungreivable”. As many of the protestors to the c̓əsnaʔəm construction project pointed out, such a gross disrespect to the ancestors laid to rest there would have never occurred at a “white person’s” or settler’s cemetery. Furthering this idea, perhaps Mount Pleasant cemetery – with its spatial location in the heart of Vancouver, balanced neatly on the edge of the city’s East, West, South and North neighborhoods – is a cite of public mourning that, using Butler’s theory, is a clue as to who it is that we as a nation consider to be a part of “us”.
On this note, I would like to end this blog post by pointing to another group who has been unjustly excluded from the Canadian “us”. The 26th Annual February 14th Women’s Memorial March – a political act of public grieving – is coming up to commemorate the lives of and the injustice faced by the missing and murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This event also draws public light to the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls in this country, which is an issue of human rights (as Amnesty International reported in 2004) that has largely been enabled by a sense of indifference from Canadian public. The historic lack of media attention and serious political action regarding these women and girls is further proof as to how we have drawn the distinction between greivable and ungrievable lives here in Canada. However, after reading Butler’s article, I think it is exactly events like this march that can work towards the dissolution of the boundaries of “us” and “them”, “mournable” and “not” in our society. As Butler writes, “The very fact of being bound up with others establishes the possibility of being subjected and exploited… But it also establishes the possibility of being relieved of suffering, of knowing justice and even love” (61). I wholeheartedly believe that we can achieve the latter in this country if we can publicly recognize that there was a long, long time before Canada was a settler nation, before the Marpole area was a box-store-cum-auto-sales belt, and before Indigenous peoples were denigrated to an “ungreivable” status.
—-
Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. Frames of war: when is life grievable?. Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.
Hi Kihan!
Thanks so much for the great post, it really got me thinking. I found it interesting the way you applied to a different situation Butler’s question of “who is grievable?” Especially because we are familiar with the Canadian treatment of First Nations through study in our sociology class. The thought that the settler Canadians never truly considered an aboriginal life as fully humanly lived and thus ungrievable is a depressing one, but an analysis that fits the history. We obviously seem to have drawn the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as soon as we arrived, and stuck to it tenaciously. It makes me think, what defines those two groups? Is it appearance? Culture? Population size, related to our ability to ignore them?
Also please forgive my generalized use of ‘we’. I can hardly say that the ‘we’ are white settlers of the past, not when you bring up the issue of the burial ground being constructed upon. It would seem that certain dominant influences in society still hold the belief that the First Nations history is not worth remembering. For a quick side note, in my town there are three massive apartment buildings on top of a First Nations burial site, so while it doesn’t make it any better, I’m glad that the project you’re talking about didn’t go through.
I think the question of who is grievable can also be thought of as who is hearable? (I know, not technically a word, but neither is unspeakability, and we use that all the time) You could say that society still finds the lives of the indigenous unlived, ungrievable, because of the very fact that the project was initiated. It comes into conflict with the uproar that followed, eventually leading to the dissociation. So we see that it is not an all-dominating assumption as it once was in Canadian history, but still unfortunately crops up.
One point that really got me thinking was your speaking about Mountain View Cemetery. Like an awful Vancouverite, I was only dimly aware that there was a cemetery there at all, let alone one with such symbolic (open for interpretation) centering in the middle of the city. So I decided to look into it through the Butlerian lens of who is grievable, and more especially, who is memorable? Because evidently, according to some, First Nations would not be among those worth remembering. What I found was fascinating, so thank you for sending me down this rabbit hole. I found that the cemetery is made up of different sections, largely for different groups of people. The first thing I realized was that there were tracts devoted to the victims of large scale accidental deaths. Trolley crashes, steamboats sinking, railroad explosions. Is one thing that makes death worth remembering the shocking, the unexpected? Was it, in that line of logic, expected that the First Nations should die out, unspectacularly? Is that part of what made them ungrievable?
There is also tracts for babies; mayors have their own land; firefighters and veterans have their place, and of course the rich are represented. These are memorable in a different way; the babies have their innocence, the mayors their power; theres heroism in those who serve, and the rich have their prestige. All these attributes commanded commemoration, and were grievable. There was no viewable section devoted to First Nations. However, this could be admittedly due to many other factors that I am unaware of. I also noticed that the Jewish section was grouped in with the Chinese section and the section where Japanese workers who died in the Rogers Pass Avalanche are buried. This collection of the marginalized may or may not have been a coincidence. What’s important to your point is in the Chinese and Japanese sections, groups traditionally marginalized, there were recent updates, with installations being brought in to honour their respective cultures. Across town, at around the same time as these installations were added, condos were being constructed over the c̓əsnaʔəm Musqueam burial site. It just so clearly highlights that even as we’ve supposedly moved on from our racist past, we still find the First Nations lives less grievable, even as we accept the humanity of other groups we marginalized. So, yes. What does make a life grievable?
Sorry for the long tangent, truly got very excited about this.