Abstract
This book by the late Naomi Angel, whose life was cut short in 2014, was edited with respect for her intellectual contribution by her friend and visual culture scholar Jamie Berthe, and by Dylan Robinson, Stó:lō ethnomusicologist (also Angel’s thesis external examiner). They believe the significance of Fragments of Truths resides in opening spaces for conversation that challenges the “burden of reconciliation” and “decolonization’s complex and layered subjectivities” (p. x). Rooted in visual culture and cultural memory, Angel draws attention to the dialogic nature of remembering and forgetting within and around the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (IRS TRC). In particular, she explores the multiplicity of truths (‘fragments of truth’) deployed and mobilized by social actors undertaking reconciliatory pathways between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Because Angel conducted her thesis fieldwork in 2008–2012 and the final IRS TRC report was only published in 2015, the editors incorporated new references, updated relevant political events, and integrated some of Angel’s unpublished writings. The result is a hybrid text written by multiple hands and illustrated by a significant number of photos found in government and church archives or taken by Angel during her field work. As Angel explains, ‘Throughout the book, in discussing the IRS system through the lens of visual culture, I argue that any call for reconciliation is also a call for a profound shift in collective ways of seeing’ (p. 18).
Angel positions herself as a researcher, considering how her mixed Japanese-Jewish-Canadian identity may have helped her understand marginalization within the Canadian ideologies and practices of Canadian multiculturalism, but she also describes the “complicated ethical challenges and relations of power in being an ‘outsider’ conducting research with Indigenous peoples” (p. 12). The theoretical framework is also presented in the introduction, with Angel notably borrowing Rothberg’s conception of memory as productive and noncompetitive—a concept that could have been more theorized—and asserting an “understanding [of] public memory as multidirectional” (pp. 14–15). While studying the forms and modes of memory within the TRC apparatus, Angel engages with the complex project of reconciliation within Canada as a settler nation, which means studying the ‘role of affect and the uses of testimony and performance at IRS TRC events’ (p. 18). Returning to the TRC’s earlier moments is an invitation, say Robinson and Berthe in the Preface (p. xii), to reflect on how a ‘political affective space’ (as Angel called it), whether the National Gatherings, Indigenous creations, media and historical narratives, sites of RS, and so on, has the potential of unveiling and reclaiming multiple experiences of “truths” (pp. 10–11). To carry out this vast project, Angel develops a unique qualitative methodology that draws upon “a wide array of materials, including old photographs, daily rosters, financial records, postcards written from staff to their families, press coverage of the schools, and personal diaries of former staff” (p. 15). Angel also uses her own reflexive writings published on a blog during her research, interviews with survivors, and institutional and private archives. As an observer during two National Gatherings (Winnipeg, Inuvik), Angel listened to testimonies, assisted in performances, and visited several sites of former residential schools, compiling journal entries recalling her experience of those spaces and relations, thus acknowledging the limits of her “own settler subjectivity within the narratives” (p. 15). In this regard, it is worth noting that she developed a “technique of reflexivity” (p. 16) that, she claimed, prevents the appropriation of Indigenous people’s voices by incorporating field notes and first person into her writing.
In chapter 1, “Reconciliation as a Way of Seeing”, Angel explores the settler-Indigenous relationship in Canada by examining “iconic representations of Canadian and Indigenous identities” (p. 52). As she argues, the history of reconciliation in Canada is embedded in a regime of contrast (identification/alienation) that recognizes the colonial authority, but also acknowledges the opportunity for the colonized or oppressed subject to look, see and being seen (pp. 46–47). Angel claims that the Canadian myth of a “tolerant nation” becomes a “site of contestation” (p. 21) in the reconciliation process. She argues that the values of inclusiveness, peace, and benevolence, often presented in the settler’s imagination, is irreconcilable with the project of forced assimilation of the IRS system (described as “cultural genocide” in the TRC final report in 2015) and the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma. This radical separation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is challenged with the establishment of the IRS TRC, which, even as a tool for nationhood, can be “a site for engaging in political processes of Indigenous self-determination,” thus “assert[ing] their own versions of the past and disrupt[ing] narratives that attempt to write them out of Canadian history” (p. 43).
In chapter 2, “Images of Contact” Angel questions “why certain specific images, and types of images, have tended to circulate so frequently as part of the IRS TRC but also in wider media discussions in Canada about Indigeneity and the legacy of the IRS schools” (p. 59). The central theoretical argument is that photographs are evocative tools that represent multiple layers of social relationships and contexts of production, like the IRS daily photographs that produce and maintain the “colonial institutional gaze” but simultaneously suggest “a kind of resistance” when one looks beyond a particular image and what remains hidden (pp. 56–57). Articulating both the political and the private, Angel argues that IRS images can be considered as “colonial debris”; that is, “material traces that remain after the long event, some of the visual waste and ruin produced by the IRS” (p. 58). She adds that those visual representations of the past, translate a moment of contact (“contact zone,” p. 58) between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples that can be seen as tensions that enact the relationship between visibility and invisibility (visual subject and object; p. 59).
As an illustration, Angel selects two images frequently coupled together as an iconic representation of the IRS system: the before-and-after images of a young boy usually identified as Thomas Moore (whose full name is Thomas Moore Keesick from Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation) who attended Regina IRS in Saskatchewan in 1890s. In the first picture, the boy has long hair and wears traditional dress (representing the trope of the “savage”), while in the second picture, the boy has short hair and is dressed in a school uniform (representing the trope of the “civilized”; p. 59). Those types of before-and-after pictures were used by the churches that ran the IRS to justify their work, recruit staff, and demonstrate “evidence of efficacity of the schools” (p. 65). Therefore, those images speak both to the idea of Canadianness and Indigeneity, representing a prescriptive vision of the future (p. 71). Ironically, as Angel attempts to find out more, the original picture of Thomas Moore could not be found and learning about his life represented an archival challenge since, just like many other cases, the records disappeared after the closure of the schools. In short, the photographs of Moore Keesick have embodied “the contact zone of both colonialism and reconciliation” (p. 76), as did other kinds of images, artworks, and songs that were shared during the TRC.
In chapter 3, Nations Gather, the reader has a feeling of rupture in the manuscript, first, because Angel’s analytical focus leaves the specificity of the IRS’s photographic representation, to focus on what she calls the “political affective space” generated by the TRC in Canada. Second, the change in scale of analysis comes with epistemological considerations of the dual role of witness and testifier that implies bearing witness to the story of others (e.g. ancestors) and giving testimony as survivors (p. 94). However, as a researcher, Angel also experienced emotions and affects, and even though words had been spoken and heard, some were not audible or translatable, but could be felt. She thus decided to write the chapter in the first person and include field notes (as for chapter 4), thus including herself in existing conversations and continuing to play a part in the “restorying” practice, to borrow Lee Maracle’s words (p. 94). Those two aspects are very interesting and rich for the conversation on the “labors of listening” (p. 97), especially in supporting Angel’s reflexivity on the “challenges of working within emotionally charged sites” (p. 92) but breaks with the previous two chapters’ tone. Using this approach, Angel discusses the dialogue about public memory and forms of “truth” (“fragmented truth” since no absolute recollection is possible when speaking about violent conflict and injustice) that emerged during two of the seven IRS TRC national gatherings (Inuvik, 2011; Winnipeg, 2010).
One of the strengths of the chapter is to mobilize a wide range of literature in trying to conceptualize the affects as “forms of thinking” (p. 91), for example, acknowledging the political agency of survivors in the act of giving testimony and bearing witness to trauma, and presenting these memories as evidence of survival and the need to decolonize. This chapter’s contribution is to engage sensitively with memory work of communities, survivors, artists, and others, in staged performances, traditional ceremonies, public testimonies, and so on. It is through Angel’s recollection of feelings, doubts, and unanswered questions that the reader grasps the expression of ‘affective sovereignty’ (p. 126) as a way to oppose the ‘affective regulation’ (p. 122) imposed on the children in the schools, who were forbidden to cry, dance, nurture ties with the family, and reaffirm intergenerational kinship (p. 124), while pressing Canadians to look into difficult truths about their nation’s past and present.
In chapter 4, Reconciliation as a Ghostly Encounter, is about reclamation, resilience, and resurgence as Angel visits IRS historical sites (Mission, British Columbia; St. Paul, Alberta; Keeshkeemaquah Reserve, Manitoba). Although the introduction of this section could have been more explicit about the methodology used to interpret the IRS sites, she treats those landscapes as “colonial debris” (p. 125). Relying on photographic personal and public archives, this treatment allows the reader to visualize the rubble of the IRS system, whether a physical structure exists or has been demolished or replaced (such as by a public park). Angel goes one step further by “conceptualizing reconciliation as a ghostly encounter” (p. 159), meaning that reconciliation continues to be called into question by local communities and activists, since there are always “buried memories” linked to those landscapes that render reconciliation as something that can never be fully realizable. The language of haunting (inspired by such authors as Avery Gordon (2008) and José Colmeiro (2011)) is not an invitation to put away “specific and ongoing violence of colonialism” (p. 159), but on the contrary, “haunting can tell us about whose stories have been left out, about silences, and about gaps in the historical construction of the past” (p. 126). This is illustrated during the tour of the Blue Quills school in Alberta, when Angel’s group entered the floor where the dentist had been and a survivor said, “the smell of dental fluoride came flooding back to me” (p. 139), confirming that the body is also a mode of remembering. Depending on the context, haunting becomes a “practice of power” and a “strategy of resistance” by Indigenous peoples (p. 127), like the writing (graffiti) of names and dates on the wall of the Portage la Prairie IRS Manitoba (a powerful “declarative statement of existence,” p. 143). After Angel shared one picture online (on her blog), a commenter left a remark saying that it was his father’s name, who had been taken at a very young age to this school. As Angel describes it, this man’s ‘youthful transgression reached out through time and space, like an apparition, to touch his son: a father’s presence still felt’ (p. 143).
The conclusion could have been a little more thorough in reminding the readers about the research objectives and the approach undertaken, but it echoes the author’s intention to trace memory expressions of the IRS experience, inscribed for the most part in the TRC period of 2008–2012, to reveal active communities of remembering in visual media. Therefore, Angel declares that the work of ‘reconciling’ Canada is both personal, even intimate (e.g. it can happen between daughter and mother learning to speak their Indigenous language), as well as political, since it is based on the promise of shifting relations and ways of seeing between Indigenous peoples themselves, and with non-Indigenous peoples. Different ways of seeing, being, and understanding mean that dominant iconic representations are “disrupted, contested, and renegotiated” (p. 52); consequently, those fragments of truth are disseminated, remembered, and forgotten.