Kanata: Appropriation or Erasure?

There is tension in this short poem by Joséphine Bacon. Listening and being heard. Speaking or being condemned to silence. “Mute, you have so much to say.” The silence evoked in the poem, to my mind, echoes a set of colonization processes ingrained in the societies of Canada and Québec, within politics and institutions such as schools, the media, healthcare, and child welfare services — processes that impact Indigenous women, in particular. An invitation to talk has been issued by Bacon. But has it been heard? Since the 1990s, Indigenous artists and authors have urged stakeholders in art circles to establish collaborations, to encourage Indigenous participation.Jeannette Armstrong, “The Disempowerment of First North American Native People and Empowerment through Their Writing,” Gatherings: The En’owkin Journal of First North American Peoples 1 (1990): 143–45; Maria Campbell, Doreen Jensen, and Joy Asham Fedorick, Give Back: First Nations Perspectives on Cultural Practice, Gallerie Women Artists’ Monographs no. 11 (North Vancouver: Gallerie Publications, 1992). Today, many have accepted and are participating in the exchange. Yet although this urgent message was finally understood by playwright and director Robert Lepage, as the newspaper La Presse reported in April when he was awarded the 2019 Artiste pour la paix prize,Marc Cassivi, “Faire la paix,” La Presse +, Arts et être section, screen 4, 24 April 2019, https://bit.ly/2X7lr8F. the realization did not come about smoothly. Collaboration is nevertheless a favourable outcome of any art-related project that encompasses and represents the stories and imaginaries of Indigenous Peoples. More and more Indigenous People are engaged in the public space, including the mass media, and demanding their rightful place. Since the 1960s, Indigenous women have often been the instigators of significant political mobilizations, such as the amendments to the Indian Act and the Idle No More movement, which was founded by groups of Indigenous women in Canada (Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean, and Nina Wilson) and Québec (Mélissa Mollen Dupuis and Widia Larivière). It is also women who, for many decades, have advocated for the implementation of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by organizing protest marches and flash mobs all over the country. Sociologist and art critic Guy Sioui Durand has noted that Indigenous women artists, in particular, have been the driving force behind a movement of affirmation.Guy Sioui Durand, “L’onderha,” Inter: Affirmation autochtone, no. 122 (winter 2016): 4–19, www.erudit.org/fr/revues/inter/2016-n122-inter02349/80412ac/. Like these women before us, those who have shared their voices and journeys, we have supported the movement denouncing the play Kanata, “we” being a group of four indigenous women academics and artists — Cyndy Wylde, an Anishinabeg doctoral student at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue; Maya Cousineau-Mollen, an Innu poet; Alexandra Lorange, an Atikamekw master’s law student at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM); and myself, Caroline Nepton Hotte, of mixed Québec Abenaki-Ilnue origin and a doctoral student at UQAM — and around twenty signatories who chose to denounce Lepage and Ex Machina’s creative process. If “cultural reappropriation,” in the sense of biskaabiiyang and aanjigone, is an internal movement of our Indigenous communities, to my mind, it could and must also be achieved in concert with non-Indigenous citizens. Prior to this controversy, the public information on the play that we had was rather fragmentary. We knew that it would be presented by the Paris-based company Théâtre du Soleil in France, the United States, and Québec, and we knew, according to our contacts in the Indigenous theatre world, particularly in western Canada, that no Indigenous person had collaborated on its creation. By writing an open letter, signed by around twenty indigenous cultural representatives and their allies, published in Le Devoir,“À propos de ‘Kanata, épisode 1, la controverse,’” opinion letter, Le Devoir, 15 December 2018, www.ledevoir.com/opinion/libre-opinion/543673/a-propos-de-kanata-episode-1-la-controverse. we wished to invite the theatre company to work toward reconciliation. With the idea of “decolonizing” attitudes firmly in mind, we made concerted efforts to initiate a dialogue based on Indigenous values. In this case, we were demanding that a leading figure in the theatre world — a Québec man — and his team decolonize their creative process and avoid excluding our voices, on stage or in the creative process. Yet “decolonization” is not simple and must first be addressed by “ourselves,” Indigenous Peoples. It must begin with a relearning of cultures, as Mohawk author Taiaiake Alfred and Nishinaabe professor Leanne Betasamosake Simpson state. The latter uses the concept of biskaabiiyang to discuss what some call “cultural reappropriation”: to make the necessary efforts to understand the languages, values, traditions, legends, and other aspects of our nations. “Biskaabiiyang does not literally mean returning to the past, but rather re-creating the cultural and political flourishment of the past to support the well-being of our contemporary citizens.”Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing on our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (ARP Books: Winnipeg, 2011), 51. Added to this is the concept of aanjigone: prudence before judging others’ actions. This would be the basis for creating our institutions, practising our traditional activities in our territory, participating in our ceremonies, drawing on our knowledge and know-how, and so on. If “cultural reappropriation,” in the sense of biskaabiiyang and aanjigone, is an internal movement of our Indigenous communities, to my mind, it could and must also be achieved in concert with non-Indigenous citizens. The concept of resurgence, as Simpson writes, helps people understand our battles for decolonization: “ continues the work of dismantling heteropatriarchy as a dispossessive force. It calls for the formation of networks of constellations of radical resurgent organizing as direct action within grounding normativities and against dispossessive forces of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy.”Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 34. Our group’s approach was aligned with these anticolonial reflections and we hoped that our voices would be heard. It’s important to remember that the socio-historical context in Canada was — and still is — marked by the undertaking of two inquiries, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the Public Inquiry Commission between Indigenous Peoples and certain public services in Québec: listening, reconciliation, and progress, the latter arising from allegations of violence by Sureté du Québec police officers against Indigenous women in Val-d’Or. Two authors of the letter, Cyndy Wylde and myself, had each worked on one of these inquiries. I had heard Indigenous women from western Canada often say, “No story on us, without us.” Yet how should we address this demand in art? Is it feasible? Numerous questions were raised in the letter to Le Devoir on the subject of traditional values, in the spirit of biskaabiiyang and in the refusal to accept the erasure of Indigenous bodies. Did we attempt to collaborate on stage or in the creative process? Was the play produced in a spirit of reconciliation, as recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Ariane Mnouchkine and Lepage invited the group of signatories to meet in July 2018. They were accompanied by co-author of the play Michel Nadeau and met for over five hours with around thirty Indigenous social representatives and artists. A Mohawk elder welcomed everyone to the meeting. We formed a large circle, and, following Indigenous tradition, used a talking stick to give all participants the opportunity to express themselves. At no point did the collective demand that the play be stopped. At no time was there any question of cultural appropriation or racism. Before knowing the content of the play, it was difficult for us to understand whether there had been any cultural appropriation or “racism.” We knew only that there had been no collaboration with Indigenous Peoples or any form of Indigenous representation; if there had been any consultation, it was brief. We believed that, in the current Canadian socio-historical context, the creative process of the play was problematic. The collective denounced the lack of ethicsPast abuses and research have caused immense harm to Indigenous People, especially to women. Numerous research protocols in the Indigenous community have been published over the past decade. They could serve as a valuable source of reflection for artists wishing to collaborate with Indigenous Peoples. and the absence of cooperation with Indigenous People, particularly women, who are doubly discriminated against. The explanations by Lepage, Nadeau, and Mnouchkine didn’t convince us that there had been any long-term collaboration or that meetings with Indigenous People to prepare the play were an ethically viable process of consultation in this time of reconciliation. Between a profound desire for change and reconciliation and government discourse, when the time comes for concrete conciliation, in art, some fear that they will lose their artistic freedom, a freedom facilitated by a system and institutions that have been in place for so many years. In the case of Kanata, there was no conciliation. The play was presented in Paris in December 2018; further performances were cancelled. Apart from the fact that private funding for the play was withdrawn, we know no other details. The play was modified following our meeting and certain scenes were eliminated. The team had, above all, preserved the historical perception, by a French artist, of the story of Indigenous women murdered in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by serial killer Robert Pickton, whose name is still almost taboo in western Canada. As Abenaki filmmaker Kim O’Bomsawin, who made the documentary Ce silence qui tue, noted after she went to Paris for the premiere, it wouldn’t have been possible to present the play in Canada — especially not in Vancouver, where the violence of the tragedy is still very much alive in people’s minds. Even though Lepage issued a mea culpa in April 2019, saying that “conciliation requires action by people like me, who have the means, the resources, the renown, and the ears of the public,”Robert Lepage, quoted in Cassivi, “Faire la paix” (our translation). it was too late. Lepage and the artists involved in Kanata considered themselves allies of Indigenous cultures, yet it seems only right to ask who should define the role of allies in Canada’s colonial context. The message sent to Le Devoir was an affirmation of Indigenous political bodies, of their sovereignty in the imaginary territories of the performing arts, and of the rightful place of Indigenous voices in these performance spaces, in Québec and elsewhere. Reaffirming a point made by Mohawk professor Audra Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson asserts that “the bodies of Indigenous women are legal targets for death, disappearance, and elimination because we are signifiers of a political order that is a direct threat to the political legitimacy of settlement.”Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 115. As a last point, there’s reason to believe that something other than cultural appropriation is at play here — perhaps an appropriation of the bodies, voices, and stories of Indigenous women. But, above all, there is an elimination of women’s bodies, voices and journeys, and sovereignty. And it’s when art projects make space for Indigenous bodies and voices that gauging the success of the meeting is possible, as was the case when, several weeks after the Kanata controversy, the chamber opera Chaakapesh, le périple du fripon, written by composer Matthew Ricketts and Cree author Tomson Highway, and directed by Kent Nagano, was presented with a narrative in three languages: Innu, Inuktitut, and Cree. Florent Vollant, who translated Chaakapesh into Innu, expressed it well: “An opera in Indigenous languages is a first, especially with a thousand-year-old Indigenous narrative. We’ve never seen that before! For once, we’ve appropriated something well!”Quoted in Stéphanie Vallet, “Chaakapesh, le périple du fripon : Hymne à la réconciliation,” La Presse +, Arts section, screen 4, 6 September 2018, https://bit.ly/2X19Enx. Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft

Kanata: Appropriation or Erasure?

Suggested Reading

Bling-bling, Everytime I Come Around

Chantiers Unstable Construction Sites