On the Call for a Residential Schools National Monument
In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called "… upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors and their organizations, and other parties to the Settlement Agreement, to commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools National Monument in the city of Ottawa to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities." As we reckon with this "call to action" number 81, and bear witness to recent and ongoing public repudiation of contentious monuments, it becomes apparent that the logic of such a monument must be questioned. On the surface, it would appear that a counter or therapeutic monument (for which we have models) might best suit call 81's objectives. I argue that the 144 Indigenous-led commemoration projects funded through the Indian Residential Schools Settlement, which reflect contemporary Indigenous commemorative approaches, forms, and practices for remembering and healing from traumatic pasts and their ongoing legacies, are those most relevant to the Residential Schools National Monument project. They can inform its process, design, siting, and programming, which may enable it to resist, counter, redefine, and perhaps even decolonize the "national monument." In this article, I both critique call 81 and seek to contribute to this possibility.
Dans son rapport final, la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada a demandé « […] au gouvernement fédéral, en collaboration avec les survivants et leurs organisations de même qu'avec les autres parties à la Convention de règlement, de commander un monument national sur les pensionnats et de l'installer de manière à ce qu'il soit accessible au public et très visible dans la ville d'Ottawa, et ce, pour honorer les survivants et tous les enfants qu'ont perdus les familles et les collectivités concernées ». En considérant cet appel à l'action et témoignant des répudiations publiques, récentes et en cours, de monuments controversés, il devient évident que la logique d'un tel monument doit être mise en doute. En surface, il semblerait qu'un monument thérapeutique (pour lequel nous avons des modèles) pourrait mieux satisfaire les objectifs de l'appel 81. Je soutiens que les 144 projets de commémoration dirigés par des Autochtones et financés par la Convention de règlement relative aux pensionnats indiens–laquelle reflète les approches, formes et pratiques commémoratives autochtones contemporaines utilisées pour se souvenir du passé traumatisant ainsi que son héritage continu et pour en guérir–sont les projets les plus pertinents pour le Projet de monument national sur les pensionnats. Ils peuvent en renseigner le processus, la conception, la détermination du site et la programmation, ce qui pourrait lui permettre de résister, de contrer, de redéfinir, voire de décoloniser le « monument national ». Dans cet article, je critique l'appel 81 et tente de contribuer à cette possibilité.
counter-monuments, commemorations, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, national monument, critical heritage, calls to action, healing heritage
contre-monument, commémorations, Commission de vérité et réconciliation, monument national, critique du patrimoine, appels à l'action, patrimoine curatif
[End Page 57]
By themselves, monuments are of little value, mere stones in the landscape.
In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) called on "the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors and their organizations, and other parties to the Settlement Agreement, to commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools National Monument in the city of Ottawa to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities" (TRC 2015, 238–39). As we reckon with this "call to action" number 81 and bear witness to recent and ongoing public repudiation of contentious monuments, it becomes apparent that the logic of such a monument must be questioned. Nonetheless, the Residential Schools National Monument—through its inception and development process, in its form and effects/affect, and in how it engenders response—could redefine the national monument, or perhaps depart so much from this concept that it counters or resists conventional conceptions of both the "national" and the "monument." This article attempts to both critique and contribute to this very possibility by drawing attention to findings from the 144 Indigenous-led commemoration projects funded through the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), together with Indigenous counter-memorial discourses in the context of remembering and healing from the cultural genocide of the Indian residential school system in Canada.
Between 2011 and 2014, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC)1 fulfilled the commemoration component of its IRSSA obligations by making a sum of 20 million dollars available to Survivor, Indigenous community, and "reconciliation" advocacy groups.2 Accessing these hard-won funds through the TRC, Indigenous groups designed and participated in commemoration projects on an unprecedented scale. The resulting 144 commemorations bore little resemblance to anything before seen in Canada. More accurately described as counter-monuments [End Page 58] and memorials, these projects inaugurated unique reclamative and healing commemorative forms and practices, unsettling conventional Canadian understandings of the monument.
Any critique of the call for a national monument (or similarly of call to action number 82, which makes the same demands of provincial and territorial governments) must first consider it in the context of the other TRC calls to action; together, they form a layered approach to commemoration. Indeed, a number of calls to action that are not contained in the commemoration section of the report—for example, the museological and educational calls to action—are nevertheless commemorative.
Call to action number 79 falls under the commemoration section of the TRC calls to action and pertains directly to the discussion of a national monument. Directed at the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, it calls on "the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal organizations, and the arts community, to develop a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration" (TRC 2015, 238). We may expect this framework to provide ongoing support for the types of Indigenous-led commemoration projects that were made possible by the IRSSA commemoration fund.3 Indeed, these projects and what they tell us about contemporary Indigenous approaches to commemoration related to Indian residential schools,4 should equally inform thinking surrounding the called-for national and provincial/territorial monuments.
The disparity could not be greater between Canada's "official" commemoration program (the National Program of Historical Commemoration managed through Parks Canada) and the TRC in terms of what each deems to be both worthy subjects and legitimate forms of commemoration. Whereas the former endorses subjects for positive heritage values and, where sites are concerned, insists on commemorative integrity, the latter bypassed values-based heritage discourse. Indeed, in administering the IRSSA commemoration fund, the TRC strove to support culturally oriented Survivor-driven commemorations, which encompassed a broad range of commemorative forms and activities. Consistent with the National Program of Historical Commemoration, the government of Canada's Policy on National Commemorative Monuments on Federal Lands in Canada's Capital Region is prescriptive with respect to both form and subject. For example, the policy both defines the commemorative monument as "the sculptural element or art work and the associated landscaped site" and determines the "key symbols [that] help Canadians know and celebrate their history and heritage" (Canadian Heritage 2018). In contrast, Indigenous groups reinterpreted "the monument" in their IRSSA-funded TRC projects and created an array of alternative monuments across Canada. In order to make healing and Survivor-oriented commemoration possible, it is [End Page 59] necessary to reconcile dissonant understandings of commemoration and of the monument and expand commemoration's compass in policy.
It may be argued that the TRC's reconciliation framework for commemoration responds to the needs of Survivors, their families, and communities, while a state monument serves a broader pedagogical imperative, without which the history and legacy of Indian residential schools would fade from public memory. In this sense, the monument can be theorized as being for "all Canadians," including Survivors, their families, and communities. Moreover, it may be argued that other monuments to victims or therapeutic monuments provide the necessary models with which to create a sensitive residential schools monument. Given that the TRC has provided no evidence of broad Survivor consultation on the need for a national monument, I suspect its motivation was—as is the case with every monument—rooted in the desire to make an indelible claim on history. The apparent lack of attention to Survivor motivations for a national monument raises the question of how and to what extent they will be included in the process of its development.
If Canada's commemorative policies and frameworks compel us to inform and celebrate some aspect of the difficult heritage of residential schools, we must then pay tribute to the resilience of Survivors and the persistence of Indigenous nationhood through cultural genocide. If a monument is to a people or peoples still living or with living descendants, should it not also be for them and by them, that is, for their commemorative uses in ways determined by them? Is with them enough? This is not to suggest or reinforce an "us" and "them." I am suggesting, rather, that the monument be questioned and considered (by all) in the light of evidence on commemoration projects actually designed and implemented by Survivors and their advocates.
First, a few questions—none of which I purport to answer, but all of which ought to give us pause. If the work this monument is doing is not motivated by Survivors, who indeed is the monument for? Does working with the federal government to erect a national monument on unceded Algonquin territory in Ottawa implicate Canadians in ongoing colonization? Does entering the field of Canada's memorial landscape, which includes monuments to controversial historical figures dotting our country, not legitimate and reinscribe its values, mnemonic form, and history? How does one approach the development of a monument to history that is not history, but rather something with a living legacy, with living counterparts? Who is qualified to design such a monument? How would it be achieved and by whom? Would reassembling the parties to the Settlement Agreement (in particular, the government of Canada and the church entities) to create the monument not reassert and authorize these same power structures, further disempowering Survivors and intergenerational Survivors?5 Could the process of creating the monument be decolonized given this [End Page 60] dynamic? Could the monument itself be decolonized and decolonizing? Could a counter-monument be created?
Monuments Post-rupture
In post-TRC Canada, we find ourselves among nations compelled to remember, equally faced with the challenges of memorializing difficult heritage and the opportunity to recreate national identity on a new moral footing. The Indian residential school system is Canada's critical event, and indeed its "national crime,"6 as was recently brought to public consciousness by the TRC. In response, we find ourselves in a post-rupture moment—a period of societal and national redefinition. Discussing how monumentalization and memorialization were mobilized by the German Democratic Republic to build shared identity following German reunification, historian John Gillis emphasizes the historiographical dissonance that hindered the creation of a shared identity, which resulted in years of contentious historical revisions in the form of museum memorials, commemorative signs, and overhauled exhibits (1994, 169). Art historian Annie Gérin suggests that monuments enable "mnemonic promiscuity," selective identifications with the past that privilege some narratives while evacuating others as "bits of inconvenient history" (2006, 229). While multivocal approaches would seem to offer a necessary corrective to such dissonances, historical promiscuities, and revisionist impulses, these too are problematic.
In his critique of the unsuccessful attempts of Chile's truth commission to interpret the roots of human rights violations and maintain multivocality,7 Claudio Fuentes8 emphasized, "For some the state's job is to reflect a plural memory, the memory of all sides, of a society as a whole. … [However,] the state has an essential role in defending and promoting human rights" (quoted in Brett et al. 2007, 9). Within this view of human rights, the state then would seem to have an obligation to arbitrate narratives arising from multiple and conflicting points of view. As Fuentes further asserts, "public policy must embrace the ideal of 'Never Again.' … Public policy can never be neutral in the face of unjustified violence or flagrant violation of human rights" (9). A commitment to multivocality could compromise the Residential Schools National Monument just as easily as a commitment to arbitrating narratives, particularly if the motivation for the monument's construction prioritizes national reconciliation over the healing needs of Survivors. Drawing attention to further complexities in state attempts to memorialize dark pasts, heritage scholar Denis Byrne suggests, "there are also situations in which the bereaved have pointedly refused to have their loss represented in the form of monuments" (2009, 241). It is [End Page 61] not surprising that Indigenous critics of official reconciliation ask, "Given the origin of Canada, what can descendants of squatters or settlers offer Indigenous peoples by way of reconciliation?" (Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T'lakwadzi 2009, 139).
Picking up the thread of monuments to victims, it bears mentioning that these apprehensions and the suspicion of monuments they articulate are nothing new. Renewed critique and counter-monumentalization practices emerged following World War II largely because of the activity of Jewish scholars and artists (Gillis 1994; Huyssen 1995). The postwar critique questioned and ultimately rejected pre-existing forms of monumentalization, which were found to be better suited to celebrating heroic deeds than to remembering traumatic pasts. James E. Young asserts that "the monument has increasingly become the site of contested and competing meanings, more likely the site of cultural conflict than one of shared national values and ideals" (2000, 374). On the logic of disappearing, invisible, and other counter-monuments, Young opines, "They have attempted to build into these spaces the capacity for changing memory, places where every new generation will find its own significance in the past" (374). Horst Hoheisel's Aschrott-Brunnen Monument9 and Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz's Monument against Fascism10 are perhaps the two best-known examples of counter-monuments that "return the burden of memory" to the people (Young 1992, 276). Quentin Stevens, Karen Franck, and Ruth Fazakerley (2012) bring precision to the usage of the term counter-monument as they compare English and German usages and expose two major types of counter-monument: anti-monuments and dialogic monuments. In their consideration of the Aschrott-Brunnen Monument and the Monument against Fascism as paradigmatic anti-monuments, they emphasize aspects that differentiate anti-monuments from conventional monuments in terms of subject, form, site, visitor experience, and meaning. Danto contends that monuments "commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings [and make] heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life" (1998, 153), while Stevens, Franck and Fazakerley suggest that anti-monumental works recognize "darker events," offer formal inversions and oppositions, are sited to privilege unexpected encounter, invite visitor response, and resist prescriptive interpretation (2012, 955–61). Coupled counter-monuments placed in critical juxtaposition to existing monuments, considered dialogic by Stevens, Franck, and Fazakerley, can work to convey context and open up space for new interpretation and meaning. Although they do not distinguish between monuments and memorials, they do assert that designs can be both anti-monumental and dialogic (955–61), allowing dialogic monuments that are not explicitly anti-monumental to effectively use monumental form against itself. [End Page 62]
Defacement and Vandalism as Correction and Supplement
On the 198th anniversary of Sir John A. Macdonald's birth, 11 January 2013, photographs of a vandalized monument to Macdonald in Kingston, Ontario, appeared on Twitter; they were retweeted 36 times and reached over 22,0000 followers (Lowes 2013). The spray-painted words "murderer," "colonizer," and "this is stolen land" challenged Canadians to remember Macdonald differently, and frustrated planned official commemoration activities.
This counter-commemoration received nation-wide attention, inciting extensive news coverage and countless debates. Bringing critical perspective to public art, Gérin reminds us that vandalism of monuments has been a documented form of resistance and political protest in Canada since as early as 1773, when a bust of King George III, "a symbol of the might of the British Empire," installed near l'église Notre-Dame in Montreal, was repeatedly vandalized until its removal and disposal by invading Americans in 1775 (Gérin and McLean 2009, 3). In Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, editors Nelson and Olin emphasize the monuments' agential properties as they invoke anthropologist Alfred Gell's interpretation of monuments as "a particularly motivated form of an art object. … Rather than a means of symbolic communication, the art object … is a means of acting, a way of transforming the world" (2003, 7).
Not restricted to the domain of artists, public art, in particular participatory art, has increasingly become a way of resisting official heritage, mediating its message and creating counter-monuments. Gérin discusses the repeated vandalism of Pierryves Anger's public artwork, Le malheureux magnifique, 1972, as evidence of the Derridean supplement at play, and suggests that the graffiti draws the work in its material and immaterial aspect into dialectical argument, mirrored by a similar dialectics of memory and praxis (Gérin 2006, 323). Generative of palimpsest and pastiche, Gérin asserts that layers of supplementation, "the radical flirtation of language with spatiality," articulate new identities in renegotiating the power of representation and function as visual social correctives to monologic narratives (323). With respect to public monumental art, Gérin asserts a dialectical relationship between different types of authorship: those who commission and donate the work; those who accept or take possession of it, site it, and install it (with or without subinterventions); those who participate in its unveiling; and those who supplement it (323). She further argues that "memorials reflect the type of society desired by their sponsors through material contributions to collective memory and the production of historical myths" (331). Public art and its supplement(s) then become a powerful social corrective and means by which the public can mediate heritage and memory. [End Page 63]
In "Witness and Trace: January 25 Graffiti and Public Art as Archive," Cassie Findlay characterized the removal of graffiti generated during days of protest leading to the Egyptian revolution in Tahir Square, Cairo, as "an act of politically driven memory vandalism" (2012, 178). Noting the political—even revolutionary—efforts of Khaled Fahmy and the National Archives of Egypt's Committee to Document Jan. 25 to maintain this important link between the Egyptian people and their own history, Findlay asserts, "When a trace becomes a record by virtue of being part of a recordkeeping system, it assumes a new identity—one which brings with it greater power and possibility for societal understanding, reform and reconciliation" (179). Archiving-as-resistance then appears a worthwhile complement to art-as-resistance approaches.
In some circumstances, supplementation cannot offer remedy. Rather, the enduring presence of the offending monument inhibits healing. Interviewed in a CBC news article on the removal of a monument to Edward Cornwallis (Governor of Halifax 1749–52) from Cornwallis Square in Halifax, councillor Shawn Cleary, who voted in favour of the removal, stated, "It had become an impediment to building a new relationship with the Mi'kmaq people [upon whose heads Cornwallis had placed a bounty in 1749] here in Nova Scotia" (Patil 2018). Indeed, as Darlene Gilbert notes in the same article, "[Cornwallis] was put there … to remind us and our parents that they [the English] had control of us" (Patil). Recent protests and counter-protests over the proposed removal of a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted in violence, exposing an undercurrent of white nationalism, sparking international reaction, and prompting the removal of Confederate monuments in multiple municipalities across the United States (Suerth 2017). Of course, removal is not a promise of destruction, and it is likely these displaced likenesses of Robert E. Lee and others will nestle into Confederate cemeteries awaiting history's reconsideration. Yet, their removal en masse creates the potential for thoughtful recontextualization as is evidenced by Hungary's Memento Park or Lithuania's Grūtas Park.
Counter-monumental and Memorial Practice
Artists whose works embody resistance, supplementation, and counter-monumental and memorial practice are Leah Decter and Jaimie Isaac with (official denial) trade value in progress, and Christi Belcourt with Walking with Our Sisters. Described as "an ongoing interactive project initiated by artist Leah Decter, curated by Jaimie Isaac and activated in collaboration, (official denial) trade value in progress enacts exchange and elicits dialogue about contemporary conditions of settler colonialism and processes [End Page 64] of decolonization and reconciliation in Canada" (Decter 2018). The work takes the form of a large canvas comprising several Hudson's Bay Company point blankets stitched together. In hand-stitched lettering, it features excerpts from both former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Apology to Survivors of the residential school system and his speech at the 2009 G20 summit wherein he asserted that Canada has "no history of colonialism" (Ljunggren 2009). Visitors are invited to write comments in a guest book that accompanies the artwork; later, through public "sewing actions," their words are added to the canvas as stitched graffiti and discursive supplement (see fig. 1).
Participants in sewing action for (official denial) trade value in progress at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Aboriginal Gathering Place, 2014. Photo reproduced with permission of Leah Decter.
Walking with Our Sisters continues to circulate across the country as Canada braces itself for the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and related monuments are unveiled in Winnipeg and Saskatoon. This project is a "commemorative art installation for the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Canada and the USA" initiated by Métis artist [End Page 65] Christi Belcourt.11 It invites participants to create moccasin vamps, where "the tops of moccasins [which are] intentionally not sewn into moccasins … represent the unfinished lives of murdered or missing Indigenous women [and are] exhibited on a pathway to represent their path or journey that was ended prematurely" (Belcourt 2018). With thousands of vamps made and donated by participants in Canada and elsewhere, exhibition bookings into 2019 and a Facebook membership of over 22,427 members (as of September 2017), Walking with Our Sisters is a powerful public counter-monument. Just as the Gerzes's disappearing monument stimulates supplementation, dialogue, and remembering, these forms of commemoration provide a forum for sharing authority and practicing heritage as a political action and corrective to monolithic or temporally constrained narratives. These brief examples offer evidence of the critical, multivocal, dialectical and dialogic, discursive, resistant, corrective, and possibly healing potential of counter-monuments. Examples such as these signal the growing diversity of commemorative expressions and should be taken into account when considering the National Residential Schools Monument, which is intended to commemorate the resilience of Survivors, but must also be a memorial to those who did not survive or are not surviving.
Similar to Walking with Our Sisters, the National Residential Schools Monument could be both counter-monumental and a memorial. Consistent with Arthur Danto's view, Marita Sturken distinguishes memorials from monuments in terms of their subject and role in society: monuments to signify and celebrate victory, memorials to never forget lives sacrificed (1991, 120). Putting the memorial's problematic ascription of the sacrificial subject aside for a moment, if we consider Walking with Our Sisters as a memorial, we might go a step further and consider its therapeutic values in terms of both the profound respect it offers to murdered Indigenous women and girls, and its acknowledgement of the torment suffered by families and loved ones. Examining commemoration in a post-apartheid South African context, Sabine Marschall asserts, "The distinction between the terms 'monument' and 'memorial' has elicited some debate both locally and internationally" (2010, 10). Marschall accordingly stresses the "untranslatability of monument and memorial distinctions across languages" (118), which complicates Sturken's clean delineation.
The linguistic challenge is echoed by Stevens, Franck, and Fazakerley (2012, 951) in their discussion of the German monument typologies of Mahnmal (an admonishing monument), Denkmal (a monument that reminds), and Ehrenmal (a monument that honours). This typology is relevant in the context of monuments to victims, or memorials, and to Kirk Savage's discussion of the "therapeutic monument," "a monument whose primary goal is not to celebrate heroic service or sacrifice, as the traditional didactic monument does, but rather to heal a collective psychological [End Page 66] injury" (2006, 106). Savage refers to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as the first therapeutic monument in the United States, which established a design standard for the therapeutic monument as a distinct type and created "a powerful model for how monuments help traumatized groups heal" (106). Here, listing names of the fallen becomes a focal point of the monument. However, as Savage notes, "the problem of justification inherent in the therapeutic monument becomes increasingly acute as we move further away from the war memorial prototype" (106). Citing the national monument in Oklahoma City as one with no justification, only victimization, he further states, "The invocation of sacrifice and martyrdom is a time-honored way of fixing the collective significance of violent death, and if that invocation is rejected, some other explanation is needed" (106). Without explanation or justification, the monument becomes traumatic.
The case of Walking with Our Sisters is similar. However, to the degree possible given the senselessness of the deaths of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it is also a restorative and healing commemoration of lives lived. Instead of names, it offers vamps, gestures of incredible beauty and variety made by many who will never visit the exhibition but who nevertheless contribute to its materiality and substance. Considered in this light, perhaps it is not the mirror-like surface of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which reflects visitors' empathy in superimposition with the names of their kin, nor the processional walk the memorial compels, but the collective encouragement of visitors to leave something of themselves behind—to make and remake the memorial—that is therapeutic. Harriet Senie interprets these initially unexpected (but now typical) tributes to signal the conflation of the function of memorials with those of cemeteries (2016). This is fair to say, but as in the case of making vamps for Walking with Our Sisters, perhaps these contributions also constitute a commemorative (and healing) practice of collective making. Senie, like Savage, views the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—with its names, reflective surfaces, and participatory experiences—as a prototype. Applied instrumentally, however, the very design standards intended to be therapeutic could actually inhibit healing. As with interpretations of the sometimes-subtle differences between monuments and memorials, linguistic and cultural dissonances factor. In the case of the National Residential Schools Monument, a listing of names could prove problematic. Their presence would legitimate the replacement of Indigenous names and identities with Christian ones imposed by the schools, names which, for the most part, cling to their bearers even in death. Rather than honouring the resilience of Survivors and the endurance of Indigenous cultures under conditions of cultural genocide, this inscription of names could undermine these very accomplishments. Survivors have determined for themselves what is therapeutic in the context of commemoration and [End Page 67] established a range of commemorative forms and practices that resist a single "design standard." While a much more thorough (and perhaps cross-cultural) discussion of therapeutic and traumatic monuments could ensue, I believe the best evidence of what "should be done" with respect to the call for a national monument comes from Survivors.
Commemorative Practices of Indian Residential School Survivors, Their Families, and Communities
An extremely valuable source of information for research on the IRSSA commemorations is a study by Anna Brace of residential school commemoration projects that occurred before the implementation of the IRSSA commemoration fund. Brace's research focuses on the sites of the former residential schools, themselves unintended monuments of the school system, and involves information derived from interviews, news sources, and various archives. According to Brace, "of the 139 schools identified for inclusion in this study [corresponding with the 139 schools recognized in the IRSSA], information leading to the coding classification and analysis was only available for 50% (70) of the structures" (2014, 32). This study speaks to the existing fabric (tangibility) of the remaining sites and considers how planned and ceremonial destruction and loss can be reconciled with Canadian heritage infrastructure. Brace's findings are reproduced below:
• 47% (27) of classifiable structures have been adapted for reuse at least for a portion of time, with a small number including a commemorative component.
• 61% (43) of classifiable structures were destroyed—information of the causes is lacking or anecdotal.12
• 12% (5) of all destroyed buildings were done so in a ceremonial manner.
• 31% (18) of classifiable structures had more than one classification attached, demonstrating the dynamic nature with which communities addressed them.
• 24% (11) of sites had multiple entries and of these entries 61% show some form of continued use with development being the most common form, closely followed by relatively equal levels of replacement and ceremonial use.
• 22% (10) indicated the presence of some form of commemorative marking on the site.
Brace notes, "The number of structures and sites that have been left continuously vacant since their closure is particularly low, demonstrating the involved nature that many Aboriginal communities have had in establishing strategies to address these structures and sites" (34). [End Page 68]
Supplementation for Brace is a form of layer-making, which she describes as an alteration whereupon an artifact becomes a multi-layered object, and where sites, "initially constructed for a particular purpose … take on additional significance through the use, change or even removal of their tangible fabric" (10). Accordingly, layer-making occurs also in destruction. Invoking Viejo-Rose (2011), Brace asserts, "Acts of destruction shape memory by: adding new memories; adding new meanings; creating new associations with perpetrators, discourses, contexts, and sites of destruction; and, consigning to the realm of memory those sites that are destroyed" (2014, 59–60). Peake Hall, a dormitory of the Alberni Indian Residential School in BC, provides an example of this. Reputed to be "one of the worst Canadian residential schools in terms of the violence it imposed on Indigenous children" (Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T'lakwadzi 2009, 143), the dormitory was actively and ceremonially destroyed in an event hosted by the Tseshaht First Nation on whose territory the school was situated. Survivors and their families participated in the demolition where "sage and cedar were burnt with the pieces of the building pried off with crowbars and sledgehammers," in order to "cleanse and allow the trapped spirits to be finally freed" (143). Both a political and a healing action, the demolition was similarly an act and practice of reclamation, returning power to the communities from whom it had been stolen. In her survey of the 139 IRSSA schools, Brace (2014) noted that many schools had been demolished by fire, some ceremonially, some by accident, and others of unknown origin and circumstances.
Despite the momentum toward healing that has been gained over the past three decades by the Survivor-led healing movement (Spear 2014), the persistence of settler violence remains evident even in processes and mechanisms of apology, redress, reconciliation, and heritage. According to oft-cited settler/ally scholar Paulette Regan, "Settler violence against Indigenous peoples is woven into the fabric of Canadian history in an unbroken thread from the past to the present. …We must work as Indigenous allies to 'restory' the dominant culture version of history … as told by Indigenous peoples themselves" (2010, 6). In "Indigenous Storytelling, Truth-telling, and Community Approaches to Reconciliation," Jeff Corntassel, Chaw-win-is, and T'lakwadzi explain that storytelling is integral to the project of Indigenous cultural endurance and discuss the Nuu-chah-nulth practice of haa-huu-pah, which involves "teaching stories or sacred living histories that solidify ancestral and contemporary connections to place," core teachings that form the basis for regeneration (2009, 137).
The profound rupture to the continuity of traditional storytelling practices effected by the residential school system has fundamentally inhibited regeneration, leaving Survivors, their families, and communities with a limited toolkit with which to reconcile their histories and fractured cultural inheritance. Community-based [End Page 69] approaches to reconciliation that involve but are not limited to processes of storytelling contribute to restorying and the restoration of cultural practices under threat. If Survivor resilience and cultural persistence are what the called-for national monument is intended to commemorate, then perhaps a community-controlled mechanism for ongoing storytelling should figure prominently in its design.
The IRSSA Commemoration Fund
Mandated to support Indian residential school commemoration in accordance with the Commemoration Policy Directive, Schedule J, of the IRSSA,13 and to "submit to the Parties of the Agreement a report including recommendations to the Government of Canada concerning ... the ongoing legacy of the residential schools" ("Schedule N"), the TRC seized its twofold opportunity to inspire a needed reinscription of Canada's memorial and place-based heritage landscape. A "lasting legacy" component—or monument—was a rated requirement in the TRC's call for applications for IRSAA commemoration funding. Although many of the successful applicant groups did indeed erect monuments, their projects revealed other priorities. The resulting monuments destabilize normative understandings of "the monument," making space for commemoration as a healing practice.
Despite limitations and constraints imposed by both the TRC and the AANDC, the 144 mostly Indigenous-led commemorations offer evidence of contemporary Indigenous approaches to commemorating difficult histories and legacies, as well as of contemporary Indigenous commemorative forms. Had call to action number 81, compelling the creation of a national monument in Ottawa, been informed by an analysis of these 144 projects, commemorative practice might have been wrested from the monument's orbit, or at the very least, something akin to a counter-monument might have been framed. Taking advantage of this historical interstice between call and as-yet-unrealized response, and for the purposes of contributing to its critique, I offer a snapshot of research conducted on the 144 IRSSA-funded commemoration projects,14 and consider what these projects bring to the discussion of a national monument.
Framing the Fund
The funding limits and guidelines for the $20 million commemoration fund set out by the IRSSA were articulated in the Commemoration Initiative Call for Proposals Guide (TRC 2011), which suggested three elements communities could consider in conceptualizing their projects: [End Page 70]
1 lasting legacy initiatives (e.g., monuments, plaques, traditional structures),
2 one-time events (e.g., feasts and gatherings [with the caveat that they must contain a lasting or permanent component]), and
3 cultural components (e.g., workshops, development of materials/resources, performances).
Proposals were evaluated against a grid that weighted lasting legacy components and collaborations, while linking to other aspects of the IRSSA, such as TRC statement gathering, TRC national events, TRC closing ceremony, and TRC community events, as well as important dates such as the anniversary of the federal apology.
As part of a larger research work examining Indian residential school commemoration, I performed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the IRSSA commemoration projects using project descriptions gathered from proposals and reports provided by AANDC (since divided into Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada) as source data. Below is a glimpse of what it revealed:
• Most of the applicants were First Nations: Individual First Nations and small multi-community First Nations groups were the most active applicants/ participants in IRSSA commemoration.
• Survivors were actively involved: Most projects list Survivors as applicants, participants, or both.
• Commemoration took place in home communities: Most of the commemorations took place in the applicants' home community, not on the site of former residential schools.
• The TRC was not invited: Most were not collaborations with the TRC, nor was the TRC invited to participate or witness them.
• Their purpose was to heal: The most significant driver of the projects was to create opportunities for healing. This was expressed through the numerous cultural and therapeutic healing features of the individual projects. Reclaiming culture through cultural ceremonies and practices was a major theme of these projects. Many of the features of the commemorations correspond with stages of a healing journey.15
• They were culturally driven: The vast majority of the commemorations involved ceremonies, which came in the form of sharing circles, feasts, powwows, storytelling, give away ceremonies, and healing activities. These were aimed primarily at Survivors, yet often extended to family and other community members.
• Reconciliation happened at the level of family and community: The focus of the commemoration was the coming together of the community, honouring Survivors, [End Page 71] and transmitting experiences in a culturally safe and appropriate environment. This fostered reconciliation between family members and entire communities. Very few projects directed reconciliation efforts toward the larger Canadian populace.
• Survivors were actively honoured: Honouring Survivors through memorialization was also a common theme.
• Some commemorations were documentary in nature: Some projects focused on documenting stories and creating educational products and archives, suggesting public education as an alternative or complementary focus of commemoration. Many projects also involved recording and archiving stories for younger generations.
• Monuments were created: Nearly two-thirds of the IRSSA-funded commemorations involved the creation of some type of monument or memorial. Reasons for this most certainly include the explicit and implicit references to monuments as suitable and appropriate examples of a lasting legacy component in the funding guidelines.
• The monument was reinterpreted or culturally interpreted: Many of the projects developed variations on conventional plaques and monuments, which ranged from traditional sculptural structures (such as totem poles) to abstracted art installations. These monuments, which included within memorial and medicine gardens, memorial walks, burial grounds, and arbours, were imbued with meaning, some bearing the names of the Survivors.16
• The monuments remained in the community: Most of the monuments were not situated on the sites of former Indian residential schools, but rather in the communities themselves, which allowed community members to extend the practice of commemoration (and remembering) to the quotidian. Some memorials, such as gardens and walks, required ongoing tending and care. For applicants and participants, developing a monument afforded the opportunity to reflect on and control their own narratives, including its language of inscription, both figuratively and literally.
• Artists were engaged: Artists figured in at least 18% of the activities; if combined with the numbers for the production of documentary and creative works, this rate rises to 53% (Cooper-Bolam 2014).
By and large, the 144 commemorative projects did not attempt to mirror federal heritage programs or processes, with one notable exception: the joint commemorative project of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF), which attempted to create a heritage plaque program similar to that of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. This national project was the largest of the 144, and one of the few that attempted to hold commemoration events [End Page 72] on the sites of the former schools—built landscapes since rehabilitated and repurposed, rendered derelict through neglect, or since demolished, bearing little trace of their former use. This outlier project attempted—as did the TRC—to reinscribe the Canadian memorial landscape with the traces of Indian residential schools as an historical corrective to the near absence of physical markers of a cultural genocide in which Canada was and will always remain implicated. Despite these aims, significant challenges and iterative shifts saw the project transformed from a plaque program rooted in Western modes of heritage conservation and commemoration, into a culturally competent heritage program dedicated to ongoing healing, ceremony, and community-based commemorative practice. Similarly, what was intended to be a plaque became both a counter-monument and ceremonial object—a work of contemporary Indigenous art upon which communities are encouraged to inscribe their own meanings (see fig. 2). The project itself was subject to an iterative decolonization process (to the degree possible given AANDC and Treasury Board policy and funding constraints)17 that resulted in a complete reorientation of both process and outputs. Through a collaborative design process, participants were able to produce new understandings of the work that can be done through commemoration of the history and legacy of Indian residential schools.
While the inherent critique of the idea of the monument observable in these projects merits much further study, their reordering of the relation of commemoration to the monument is what most concerns us here. In the context of IRSSA commemoration, the monument performed a function beyond memorialization. Commemorative expressions and forms were personal to, and integrated within, the community, becoming a part of daily life. Memorial practice and cultural practice were intimately tied. The commemorations prioritized healing and community-based reconciliation. Education was a secondary focus. Despite the provision in the Commemoration Initiative Call for Proposals Guide (TRC 2011) ascribing increased project value to proposals that included the TRC in their commemoration events and faced with the prospect of diminished funding as a result of excluding the TRC, the participants nonetheless chose not to invite the TRC to their commemorations. Instead, they oriented their projects inward, toward their own communities. It is significant that the IRSSA commemorations were not caught in the orbit of the monument as conventionally understood, although the creation of monuments was ostensibly the raison d'être for the IRSSA Commemoration Policy Directive. Instead, monuments figured as one element within larger commemorative constellations, all of which were determined at the individual community level.
It is no coincidence that, as the TRC was grappling with its mandate, the Indigenous arts community was coming together to reconsider "the monument." [End Page 73]
AFN/AHF commemorative monuments mid-fabrication. One hundred thirty-nine monuments were produced, one corresponding to each Indian residential school recognized in the IRSSA. Photo by Tania Budgell, reproduced with permission of the Legacy of Hope Foundation.
The Advisory Committee for this project developed requirements for the development process, design, fabrication, and distribution of the monuments. Five of these requirements follow:
• Communities must be in control of the monuments.
• The artists responsible for the monument design need to create an object in which narratives would be contained, rather than on which they would be inscribed.
• The shape, form, texture and iconography of the monument must respect First Nations, Inuit and Métis traditions.
• The process leading to the design, making and production of the monument must respect First Nations, Inuit and Métis traditions.
• The [host] community will decide what they want to include in the narratives, in their own time.
An excerpt from the collective statement of the artists—Ursula Johnson, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Marianne Nicolson, Mathew Nuqingaq, and France Trépanier—who collaboratively designed the monument, provides insight on how they further shaped the monument and envisioned its future use:
Charged with the responsibility to create an inclusive and participatory container to mark the place where every residential school was located and/or where every community was affected, we collectively decided to depart from the western concept of heritage commemoration and designation, and instead create a dynamic and versatile marker as much celebrating achievements as honouring loss; significant for Survivors and communities, past, present and future. We were honoured to be asked to reclaim the Indigenous role of artist, to be in the service of the people making images and objects that while being utilitarian, remind people of their spirit and through use become animate, alive and integral.
[Requirements and artist statement excerpted from: Assembly of First Nations. 2015. The National Indian Residential School Commemorative Marker. Ottawa: AFN.] [End Page 74]
For example, "Stronger Than Stone: (Re)Inventing the Indigenous Monument," an international symposium held in 2014—six months before the release of the TRC final report—brought together artists and scholars to explore the future of Indigenous monuments and counter-monuments. The symposium aimed "to establish models for the commissioning and production of new, 'Indigenized' memorials which will help all people to better understand the nature of collective or cultural memory and human interdependence with the land."18 "Stronger than Stone" was conceived by four artists/curators, among them Jeff Thomas, an Onondaga artist and independent curator. Seize the Space, Thomas's decades-long and well-known public interrogation of the Champlain monument in Ottawa and the absence/ spectral presence of the kneeling scout at the base of its plinth,19 is both critique and counter-monumental practice, well predating the TRC. It may be inferred from such sources, which offer insight into contemporary Indigenous public, cultural, and artistic commemorative practices and current Indigenous counter-memorial discourses, that Survivors may be better served by a Residential Schools National Monument that is an anti-monument.
An Anti-Monument in Ottawa?
For Gillis,
the anti-monument movement represents a radical turn not only aesthetically but epistemologically. Its advocates reject the notion of memory sites and want to de-ritualize and dematerialize remembering so that it becomes more a part of everyday life, thus closing the gap between the past and the present, between memory and history. By dematerializing memory, they also wish to strip it of all appearances of objectivity, thereby forcing everyone to confront her or his own subjectivity, while at the same time acknowledging a civic responsibility not to let the past repeat itself.
(1994, 17)
Byrne posits the idea that the performance of commemoration "behind the scenes," which is comparable to Gillis's notion of the dematerialized quotidian practice of commemoration, constitutes a kind of counter-heritage. If a Residential Schools National Monument in Ottawa can inspire a practice of counter-heritage, then how, by whom, and (perhaps more important) for whose benefit might this be achieved? In an era when the Langevin Block building has been renamed in order to remove the association with Indian residential schooling (Southey 2017) and when the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario has called for the removal of [End Page 75] the name of Canada's first prime minister from public elementary schools (Nasser 2017), how can we reconcile the siting of a monument in Canada's capital, the birthplace of the residential school system as policy, the unceded territory of the Algonquin, and a place that is inaccessible (and even hostile) to the majority of Survivors?
For many Survivors, Ottawa may hold what Lynn Meskell calls a "negative heritage" value, referring to "a conflictual site that becomes the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary" (2002, 558). There were no Indian residential schools situated in Ottawa. Ottawa's places of memory in relation to the residential school system were rather administrative offices where decisions affecting the lives of Indigenous children were made without the input or consent of parents; the House of Commons where Indian policy and expenditures were debated; and, even Ashbury College, the alma mater of Indian Affairs chief architect Roland Guerney Orr and the inspiration for a generation of residential school buildings. As Meskell states, "negative heritage occupies a dual role: it can be mobilized for positive didactic purposes (e.g. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, District Six) or alternatively be erased if such places cannot be culturally rehabilitated and thus resist incorporation to the national imaginary (e.g. Nazi and Soviet statues and architecture)" (558). Applying this logic to the case of a National Residential Schools Monument in Ottawa, one wonders if such a monument could be anti-monumental, therapeutic, and dialogic in a way that could culturally rehabilitate Ottawa—proxy of the Nation—for the post-TRC era. If existing monuments are any indication, once erected, the Residential Schools National Monument will endure and the only measure by which we will be able to gauge its value will be by the responses, resistance, and supplementation it inspires. [End Page 76]
Trina Cooper-Bolam is a doctoral candidate in cultural mediations at Carleton University. Previously, Cooper-Bolam held senior positions at the Aboriginal Healing and Legacy of Hope Foundations—organizations working to transform the legacy of Indian residential schools. Also a practicing exhibition designer, Cooper-Bolam is working with the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association and Algoma University to transform a former Indian residential school into an interpretation centre.
NOTES
1. The title Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC) was changed to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) in November 2015. Two years later, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced restructuring of the department into two entities, Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. AANDC is referred to in this article, since it was the title of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development during the implementation of the IRSSA.
2. For over 165 years, beginning in 1831, the Canadian government, together with five church entities, operated Indian residential schools. These institutions of care became sites of trauma for the over 150,000 children who attended them, and were the subject of Canada's largest class action lawsuit and settlement to date—the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA).
3. Stipulations pertaining to the IRSSA commemoration fund are articulated in Schedule J—Commemoration Policy Objective of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
4. I use Indian residential schools in its legal sense, as defined in the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. This is not to reinforce the notion that these schools were only designed for and attended exclusively by First Nations children. Rather, the IRSSA makes clear these schools were also attended by Métis and Inuit students. I use the terms residential schools and the residential school system at later points in the article to refer to Indian residential schools more inclusively.
5. These are the same power structures responsible for designing and administering the residential school system. Certainly, this call affords the government of Canada and church entities with the opportunity to redefine their relationship to and with Survivors; however, with this opportunity comes the risk of perpetuating historical imbalances, especially where issues of funding and management are concerned.
6. This assertion has often been repeated, including by Canada's former prime minister Stephen Harper. It was first expressed by Peter Bryce in The Story of a National Crime, Being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada, and was repeated later by John Milloy in his report on Indian residential schools for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and in his A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System (2017).
7. Multivocality is extended in this situation to encompass Pinochet apologists.
8. Claudio Fuentes is the former director of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO).
9. As discussed by Young (1992, 288), in 1987, the city of Kassel, Germany, invited Horst Hoheisel to create a monument to commemorate the Aschrott-Brunnen fountain donated to the city by Jewish entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott in 1908, and destroyed by Nazi activists in 1939. Rather than mount a replica of the original fountain, Hoheisel inverted the original design, which was fabricated and countersunk into the City Hall Square as a negative-form monument.
10. Germany's disappearing monument against fascism in Harburg, features an obelisk plated in lead, described by Young (1992) as having "a steel-pointed stylus with which to score the surface with graffiti attached at each corner by a length of cable [whereafter] … one-and-a-half-meter sections are covered with memorial graffiti, the monument was lowered into the ground, into a chamber as deep as the column is high [and whereupon] … after several lowerings over the course of several years, nothing will be left but the top surface of the monument, which will be covered with a burial stone inscribed to 'Harburg's Monument against Fascism'" (276).
11. See Belcourt, Christi. 2018. "About." Walking with Our Sisters. Accessed 14 February. http://walkingwithoursisters.ca/about/.
12. Brace mentions that she encountered multiple anecdotal comments indicating that the fires were started by Survivors.
13. Recognizing the need for commemoration, healing, and recognition, Survivors and their advocates fought for the inclusion of a commemoration component in the IRSSA. The purpose of commemoration is defined in IRSSA Schedule J, as "honouring, educating, remembering, memorializing, and/or paying tribute to former residential school students, their families, and their communities and acknowledging their experiences and the broad and systemic impacts of the residential school system" (Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement 2006).
14. This article provides highlights from my unpublished master's thesis (Cooper-Bolam 2014).
15. IRSSA projects were evaluated against a hybrid healing and decolonization framework. The majority of them provided elements that correspond with stages of a healing journey (Cooper-Bolam 2014).
16. How and in what language their names were displayed was determined by the applicant group. This aspect of the IRSSA-funded commemorations warrants further study, especially as it compares to such elements in other memorials.
17. AANDC was responsible for administering contribution agreements to IRSSA commemoration fund recipients and abided by Treasury Board guidelines and spending authority timelines that constricted and constrained the project.
18. This quote is from the Stronger than Stone website, which is currently unavailable (Stronger than Stone 2014).
19. The Indian scout was removed in 1999 at the behest of the Assembly of First Nations and later relocated in Major's Hill Park.
