“17. Countering the Legal Archive on the Death of Neil Stonechild: Analyzing David Garneau’s Evidence (2006) as an Aesthetic Archive” in “Unsettling Colonialism in the Canadian Criminal Justice System”
Chapter 17 Countering the Legal Archive on the Death of Neil Stonechild Analyzing David Garneau’s Evidence (2006) as an Aesthetic Archive
Josephine Savarese
He wasn’t a man, he was just a kid, he was my little boy.
Stella Bignell, mother of Neil Stonechild (quoted in CBC News 2005)
I had been told by an Indigenous artist and fellow professor that I shouldn’t show the work because of the Cree prohibition of showing images of the dead. I thought the painting and issue too important not to show it. It was not just about Neil but also about the policemen who did this. As a part way measure, I thought about showing it with a veil over it. I consulted two Elders. They said that sometimes artists had to break protocols for a greater good. One said that artists aren’t necessarily shaman or contraries, but they may act like them from time to time, guided by more than human requirements.
David Garneau, email message to the author, June 2021
This chapter examines possible reasons why recreating a post-mortem portrait of an Indigenous teenager, Neil Stonechild, that magnified suspicious facial markings consistent with police handcuffs was an urgent project for David Garneau, the acclaimed Métis artist and Saskatchewan-based visual arts professor. I analyze this painting by drawing from various sources, particularly writings by David Garneau, who has described Indigenous creative works as gesturing toward renewed, more sovereign futures for Indigenous communities and nations. In 2013, Garneau stated that art “can be a way for the marginalized, refused and repressed to return” (16). Evidence (2006), Garneau’s painterly enlargement of Stonechild’s face depicted the youth with his eyes closed in death. The slashes across his nose silently rebuke the legal archive’s minimization of the damaging actions that contaminate current relations. The chapter theorizes the ways Garneau’s painting operates as a counter to the colonial archive, thereby offering a visual reframing of past and current events, including incidents of police violence.
In “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” Garneau examined ways art can generate deeper realizations about colonialism’s disruptive, genocidal legacy (2016, 21–41). Garneau’s argument that art offers an alternative space where Indigenous and settler communities can unite by “sharing in a discourse” about “histories, responsibilities, and transformation” is important to this chapter (39). For Garneau, art and authentic human relations commingle in the third space in ways that undermine “the colonial desire for settlement” (39). While not referencing archives specifically, Garneau has denounced the “colonial attitude” that drove archival practices (23). He rebukes the “scopophilia” or the colonial “drive to look,” characterized by the “urge to penetrate, to traverse, to know, to translate, to own and exploit,” which motivated the effort to create archival collections (23). Evidence operates as a counter to the colonial archive, thereby offering a visual reframing of past and current events, including incidents of police violence. Joscelyn Jurich states that remembrance-focused artistic endeavours “create haunting lessons for the viewers,” rather than merely serving as memorials (2016, 450)—which resonates with statements by David Garneau.
In a May 2009 interview with the Dunlop Art Gallery, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Garneau invited viewers to see Evidence as something beyond a memorial; it was a reminder, “a memory, a more permanent memory of an actual event.” He noted, too, that there was something about the autopsy image that “resonated” beyond the fact that Neil Stonechild was an Indigenous youth. Garneau reported that he was struck by the fact that “there was a young man in the snow,” presumably referring to the youth’s vulnerability juxtaposed with the severe conditions (Garneau 2009). For Garneau, there was something visceral—something felt rather than thought—about freezing to death. His embodied reaction was partially based on the knowledge that most Prairie residents were familiar with being very cold and lost at night. He was compelled to draw the image immediately, to preserve it on a large scale.
Garneau’s painterly enlargement of Stonechild’s face, with his eyes closed in death and with the slashes across his nose prominent in Evidence, silently rebukes the legal archive’s minimization of the legacies of violence, dispossession and displacement that linger into and haunt the present. While the painting depicts one death, its significance goes beyond a singular fatality. As this chapter reasons, it gestures toward the damage resulting from the destruction of Indigenous sovereignty, including the depletion of lands, resources, cultures, human spirits, and the targeting of Indigenous bodies, brought home in 2021 by the discovery of suspected children’s remains in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. By July 2021, more than one thousand possible unmarked graves had been discovered on the grounds of three former church-run residential schools (Austen and Bilefsky 2021).
In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), Laura Ann Stoler emphasized the centrality of the archive in the political, social, and economic domination of Indigenous peoples and in their disenfranchisement from their lands. In an earlier article, Stoler explored the “logos and pathos of empire” to “read /along/ rather than /against/ the archival grain” (1992, 35). In this chapter, I engage with Stoler’s curiosity about attending closely to “the rough interior edges of governance” that open to reveal the “displaced histories folded within them” (1992, 35). I trace these rough edges by examining the two differing responses to Neil Stonechild’s death: the judicial inquiry and the more gestural commemorative painting, Evidence.
Photography, Art, and the Archive
Sometime in 2000, David Garneau learned from a news report that an autopsy photograph of a deceased Indigenous youth, Neil Stonechild, was circulating on the internet (Garneau 2009). The photograph was originally taken as part of the police investigation conducted in November 1990, when Neil’s frozen body was discovered at the outskirts of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. While shaken, Garneau immediately made a charcoal drawing of it on a large, light blue canvas slotted for a landscape painting, as he felt “a great injustice” had occurred. Garneau worried that “ideas,” or notions about unnatural deaths and “events,” like Stonechild’s death, would be “swept under the carpet and forgotten” (CBC News 2009).
In the painting, Neil is larger than life while clearly deceased. It is a technique that, as Shawn Michelle Smith notes in Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography, leaves the subject of the photograph “both absent and close at hand” (10). Like the artists Smith studied, Garneau reinterprets the autopsy image to “trace, bend, pierce, truncate, extend, and fold time” (1). He compels us to take up what Smith calls the “unfinished work of racial justice” (14).
In Evidence (see figure 17.1), Neil Stonechild’s face, his body stilled in the quietude of death, is magnified to the size of the 4 feet by 5 feet frame. He is shown with his eyes closed, his face cut, marred. Garneau notes that the decision to meticulously recreate Neil’s frozen and marked appearance in the autopsy photograph was driven by a need to reclaim the colonial image taken of Stonechild. The deep grooves across Neil’s nose, visible in the autopsy image, are particularly noticeable in the enlarged work. He is the sole figure in the frame, emphasizing his solitude and loneliness at the time of his death, his unnatural disconnection from his family and community. The fact that he was rendered silent, without even the capacity to cry out, is clear from his sealed lips, which may be read as symbolic of the silencing of Indigenous peoples, more generally. As part of his act of reclamation, Garneau decided to recreate Stonechild’s image with a protective Indigenous screen in the form of an overlay of red dots to symbolize Métis beading (Garneau 2014)—a detail that marks his painting as different from the original photograph.
Even though he was hesitant to display Evidence because he was “concerned that the depiction of a First Nation person in death would violate cultural norms” (CBC News 2009), he ultimately did so to ensure that we remember Stonechild’s story. Because Neil’s circumstances moved from being a relatively obscure, local incident to being international news, Garneau observed that Neil Stonechild led a “second public life or a social life” due to the media attention. (CBC News 2009). The Neil Stonechild depicted by Garneau helps us mourn the young man remembered by his family—the athlete, beloved brother, son, and cherished friend who died alone in a barren field in 1990 (Reber and Renaud, 13–24).
For Garneau, the painting was important as “the evidence of this act,” the harm done to a young man (Garneau 2009). Evidence is a smaller scale marker of the violence experienced by Neil Stonechild and other Indigenous men that mediates that public life his death engendered.
Garneau’s painting has importance beyond the meticulous artistic rendering. It becomes a decolonial archive that engages with the “larger story,” the multiple deaths of Indigenous men and, by extension, erased and disappeared Indigenous women, the destruction of Indigenous societies, life-worlds, languages, dreams, cultural practices, and connections to ancestral lands (Garneau 2009). In interviews, Garneau has stated that he was motivated by a refusal, an unwillingness, to characterize Stonechild’s death as a concluded event. While Evidence was “a history painting” that depicted “something that happened in the past,” Garneau has stressed that Neil’s death had not been “fully digested,” a finding that remains true even to the present day (CBC News 2009).
Evidence records feelings and facts that lie outside of the colonial styled archival record created by the courts and judicial inquiries. Martine Hawkes reminds us that the court is not the “only place for creating and holding memory” (31). Hawkes cites the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to illustrate how inquiries reinforce certain forms of testimony that correspond with the linear fact-finding process favoured by lawmakers. Even in the “cut-short testimonies” of the judicial hearings Hawkes references, it is clear that “the event continues” in memories, stories, and other forms of haunting (29). Her conclusion that the stories of “living with the losses” excluded from legal processes can be found elsewhere in “memoir, film, and art” is significant to this scholarship (31). As Hawkes reminds us, the physical remnants preserved in archival collections are not the complete record—there is much that is “invisible or lost” (2). For Hawkes, creative works correct the obscured and hidden details omitted from traditional archives that affirm state power.
Because Evidence stands as a record of the violence experienced by Neil Stonechild and other Indigenous men, it serves as a bridge or pathway to greater acknowledgement and reparation. According to Garneau, works like Evidence that resist easy resolutions have the potential to forge “new” relationships, knowledge, and works, including the “performances, texts, works of art” that comprise the counter-archive (Garneau 2016, 39). Such products invoke open-ended and complex readings that both “require decoding” and “resist decoding,” which may ultimately foster “further personal transformations.” When conciliation is the aim, these transformations are experienced by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons. Through such decoding, settlers are able to acknowledge their privilege, become freer of their colonial attitudes, and take steps toward the “non-colonial” practices that Neil Stonechild’s death and other suspicious fatalities, including the recent discoveries of suspected remains, remind us are urgent priorities (24).
The inquiry report into Neil Stonechild’s death documented harsh truths about Indigenous–settler relations. In “From Stonechild to Social Cohesion: Anti-Racist Challenges for Saskatchewan,” Joyce Green argues that the 2004 Stonechild report brought home the point that “racism kills” (2006, 515). The inquiry process and the report findings provided “a moment of opportunity” and issued a “call to arms” to confront biased, racialized policing (515). At the same time, the failure to link deadly policing practices with deeper structural issues led the Commissioner to see Neil Stonechild’s death as “an incident, decontextualized from the political and institutional culture of racism and the specifics of colonialism in Saskatchewan” (519).
Here, I also expand on Juliane Collard’s argument that legal inquiries that are meant to offer an opportunity for open testimony in fact reproduce the “exclusionary and discriminating patterns” that serve to silence the dissonant (2015, 780). I pinpoint the colonial logics embedded in the inquiry process and findings, thereby muting its liberatory potential. I agree with Collard that the testimony introduced during an inquiry is often problematic in muting “the sounds, scars, shouts, screams, enacted sayings, gestures, and ritualized performances of witnesses” that provide authenticity (790). Collard doubts that the inquiry format is an appropriate vehicle for the aims of “reconciliation and collective memory making” in judicial investigations that probe “systemic gender and race violence” (781). For Collard, the inquiry process exerts control over Indigenous memory and constrains the writing of history by excluding legally “irrelevant” evidence.
Evidence offers potential remedy to these inadequacies of the archives generated through colonial truth finding forums, including the propensity to mute Indigenous claims, knowledges, and historical accounts. Drawing on the work of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer that challenges “conventional notions that the archive” is only “a series of evidentiary documents,” and drawing on their own research in Colombia and Uganda, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá and Erin Baines maintain that the archive “is living” because it is “embedded in the day-to-day lives and surroundings of the survivor-witness and inscribed on the bodies of tellers and listeners” (2011, 413). Riaño-Alcalá and Baines extend beyond formal documentation to examine “performative (poetry, song, drama and dance); embodied (scars and physical illness or injury and emotions) and memoryscapes (landscape and material markers of memory)” (413–14). Their study of “emplaced acts of witnessing” (413) presents a shared interest in ways artists and community workers create safer spaces where bodies can relax and experience ease.
In On Photographic Violence (2009), Canadian human rights and visual scholar Sharon Sliwinski affirms Garneau’s decision to grant enormous significance to a solitary image. For Sliwinski, the defacement of a family portrait photograph by scratching out the faces, the only personal item a Muslim family reclaimed when they returned to their home after the Bosnian War, contains a powerful undertone of violence and dehumanization. Sliwinski’s finding that images provided a “uniquely moving testimony of the catastrophe’s reach” echoes some of what Garneau’s reworking of the autopsy photograph accomplishes. Evidence transports the viewer to the frozen fields where Neil’s injured body lay for several days (312). For Sliwinski, “the wager” of her paper was that “attending these registers—thinking through this ‘acting out’ of genocide in pictures—sheds new light on the nature of human violence writ large” (305). Sliwinski argues that “spectators meet the painful, piecemeal work of mourning head-on” when they view the war images she surveyed (312). Her belief, following Judith Butler, that the grief resulting from even a single image may suggest “an alternative ground for imagining community” helps build the case for Evidence as a disturbing tribute aimed at unsettling indifference and fostering more heartfelt responses. Neil Stonechild lives on in Evidence as a ghostly, steadfast witness to the growing record of casualties from state violence.
Garneau’s artistic documentation of Neil’s death promotes a deeper reckoning beyond the formal, legalistic pre-occupations of the inquiry process. The painting is a reminder that witnessing, remembering, and the likelihood of closure are uncertain after genocide, like the one that Indigenous peoples in Canada experienced (Hawkes 2018, 7). In this chapter, I argue that the Stonechild Inquiry is an archive of sorts that granted authority to colonial procedures and truths by amplifying concerns about Indigenous–police relations thereby minimizing the broader context of racialized injustice.
Legal archives, like Western archives in general, are imbued with the colonial truths that advocates are disrupting and challenging (Collard 2015, 789–90). In citing Evidence as an aesthetic counter-archive, this discussion works to further expose some of “the blind spots” that Rona Sela, a researcher of visual history and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, critiques in “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure–Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives” (2018, 202). With Sela, it is possible to explore ways that archives, including legal archives, underscore what she calls a “Western colonial world view” that perpetuates “the writing of colonial history for the benefit of the colonizer” (202). Sela’s description of archival collections as “imagined sites of institutions that create histories using mechanisms of erasure and concealment” applies to archives created during legal investigations, like the Stonechild Inquiry (215). Her observation that Western archives treat colonized people with “tactics of silencing, fabrication and false image of the non-Western” corresponds with this endorsement favouring a creative response to Neil Stonechild’s death (210). For Rona Sela, an alternative reading of historic events has merit because it “alters our knowledge about the past, providing new tools to confront the present, an ‘archival turn’” (216). In a similar way, Evidence neutralizes some of the “colonial biases,” the domination of settler narratives, in the archives by making room for other stories, such as the immense grief and demands to end state-sanctioned violence from Neil’s untimely death (216).
Sela’s finding that the “archives of Western knowledge” used to document colonized people are not examined by “indigenous criteria” informed this chapter. I assert that Western legal norms shaped the Stonechild Commission findings, muting Indigenous truths about the scale of police violence (210). Sela’s reminder that archives are “measured, evaluated and categorized according to criteria of the Western World” was important to this chapter’s quest to penetrate the alternative truths and visions hidden in a painting (210). Featuring Neil Stonechild as a deceased victim and an incapacitated witness undermines the regimes of colonial truth, made plain in Sela’s work.
Marking Epistemic Absence in the Archive
Writing in a North American Indigenous context, Ashley Glassburn Falzetti, a scholar from the Miami Nation of Indians of Indiana, underscores the importance of research that works to undermine the “colonial powers” that maintain the archive (2015, 137). Falzetti favours “pushing against the epistemic role of indigenous erasure in the settler imaginary” (113). The obscurity of the Miami Nation in historical accounts of the colonial occupation of Indiana prompted Falzetti to ask, “What might it look like if we began marking epistemic absence in the archive?” (113). In an article she co-authored with Melissa Adams-Campbell and Courtney Rivard, Falzetti promotes further exploration of the “unique role of archives in supporting state power” (Adams-Campbell, Falzetti and Rivard 2015, 109). Falzetti and her co-authors question the absence of Indigenous communities in the archives and insist that they “are somehow incorporated into the national narrative, even as Native peoples’ sovereign rights are fundamentally denied” (110).
This erasure, or absence, from the archive that these authors underscore is relevant in the context of Neil Stonechild’s death and Garneau’s painting. When Garneau scrutinized the troubling autopsy photograph, Neil’s story was relatively unknown outside his community. After the discovery of other frozen bodies of Indigenous men, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police task force was established in 2000 to examine the suspicions about police involvement in these cases. Due to the task force probes and mounting public pressure, the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild was established in 2003 (Reber and Renaud 2006, 273).
A prominent judge, Mr. Justice David Wright, presided over the lengthy public hearings that lasted for over 43 days (Chartrand 2005, 262). During its tenure, the Commission heard from 63 witnesses and reviewed 197 exhibits. The transcripts comprised over 8,000 pages of text. Justice Wright’s 2004 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild is the most comprehensive record on the events leading to Neil’s death. In conclusion, Justice Wright expressed “profound sympathy” for Stella Bignell, Neil’s mother, and his family (Wright, 2004, 211). Justice Wright worried that “a chasm” separated “Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people” in the City of Saskatoon and in the Province of Saskatchewan (208). For some, this observation minimized the troubled racialized histories in Saskatchewan described in J. W. Daschuk’s in Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (2013). More recently, Erin Morton described Canada as existing in the “pervasively colonial present, secured by the wealth this white settler state and its white settler citizens possess through land exploitation, histories of slaveholding and anti-Blackness, and Indigenous elimination and erasure” (2019, 455). Morton reproaches the “targeted violence against Indigenous peoples” and the assertion of settler privilege to title over Indigenous lands (455).
Garneau briefly commented on the Stonechild Inquiry in a 2009 interview, describing it as a “good thing” given that “the events of the [judicial] inquiry” had transformed policing institutions (CBC News 2009). Garneau has, however, criticized another legal proceeding, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2016, he questioned its methods for gathering evidence from Survivors (23–24). For Garneau, promises of healing and forgiveness were used to compel Survivor testimony even though these concepts are rooted in Christian rather than Indigenous belief systems (24). Garneau affirmed those who opted not to participate were exercising what he called “indigenous refusal” (2016, 23). Garneau’s call for rebellion against performative and confessional forms of testimony affirms the Indigenous persons who opposed the inquiry and its preoccupation with Survivor stories rather than systemic change (29).
In writings over the last decade, Garneau has argued that actions aimed at social change in the form of art of advocacy can generate results that cannot be “easily appropriated, measured and contained” (2016, 39). While art making is not a cure-all, it can be a catalyst for change. In his 2018 talk, Garneau elaborated on the more facile reconciliation currently in play in Canada, stating “If we are not careful, reconciliation light will ease past difficult truths to focus on the palatable reconciliation” (Garneau 2018, 38 min, 54 sec). In this context, Evidence may foster meaningful “conciliation,” an “extra-judicial process” that Garneau links to harmony and Indigenization (2016, 30). For Garneau, conciliation is a viable exit from settler colonialism—this is so because it is “not the erasure of difference or sovereignty” (2018, 19:41). Furthermore, conciliation “is not assimilation” (2018, 19: 44). A small act like pausing to reflect on a painting like Evidence might serve as an opening for settler guests to access respect and to touch into accountability.
While Evidence is better known, it is part of a series the artist created in response to the Saskatoon law enforcement practice of deserting Indigenous men in remote, often unsurvivable locations. Garneau’s 2008 collage painting, Starlight Tour (see figure 17.2), assembles images that relate to other, similar deaths of Indigenous men. The inclusion of the word “boy” may be intended as a reminder that Stonechild was still a youth when he died. He was often described as a man, a description that positions him as more threatening.
Another painting in the series, Lost, shows Neil Stonechild’s frozen corpse in the centre of the painting. He is depicted stretched out, face down in the snow, showing the youth as he was discovered by two construction workers five days after his disappearance. Lost is based on a photograph also taken during the original police investigation.
David Garneau’s series is a touchstone for this discussion of the limitations of Western archives produced by courts and legal inquiries. While intrigued by the entire collection, I conduct a more exacting examination of Evidence to determine its importance as a counter-archive that troubles the more clinical, legally based approach of the judicial inquiry. The painting gestures to the absences and omissions within the historical documents, including police files and the record created by the Commission of Inquiry that investigated Neil’s death. In interviews, Garneau expressed hope that persons who viewed the painting would see it as “more than a post-mortem portrait” (CBC News 2009).
By presenting the public with this series of images, in which Evidence is an anchoring piece, Garneau places Neil Stonechild’s death and the deaths of other Indigenous men on record in ways that the inquiry and the subsequent report did not. In this way, these paintings, which reflect painful Indigenous stories and experiences become part of the “national narrative,” as Adams-Campbell, Falzetti and Rivard (2015) insist they must.
Archiving Loss
For Martine Hawkes, it is important to consider what is present in the archives created after difficult events as well as what is omitted from official records, thereby encouraging a level of forgetfulness. To remedy archival shortcomings, Hawkes presents art works as an important resource to store and share memories that defy straightforward expression. She reminds that we “must sometimes go outside of the archive machine to find and to tell what we lose in the archive and in the events that the archive records” (2018, 112). In a 2006 essay, “Transmitting Genocide: Genocide and Art,” Hawkes reasoned that creative work disrupts minimizing or forgetting genocide, thereby making its repetition less likely. Hawkes endorses aesthetic productions that expose some of the hidden layers of tragedies that elude traditional archives. In her 2006 article and her 2018 manuscript, Hawkes cites the installation Što Te Nema, or “Why are you not here?,” created by Bosnian-American artist Aida Šehović. The installation is a tribute to the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995. In Što Te Nema, delicate porcelain coffee cups, or fildžani, donated by Bosnian families are assembled in urban centres and filled by passers-by with strong Bosnian coffee. Šehović’s display is dedicated to the disappeared persons who cannot participate in daily activities, like sharing coffee with loved ones. The “full cups remember and welcome those who are no longer present to drink the coffee and to share in the conversation” (Hawkes 2018, 122).
For Hawkes, art performs an important commemorative role by challenging the normativity of genocidal violence. Artistic works, in contrast to legal exhibits and witness statements, provide “a mode of giving testimony and providing catharsis about events which are not easily approached or discussed” (2006, para. 8). Hawkes’s examples range from Picasso’s Guernica to the children’s artwork from the Rwandan genocide, the “War Rugs” of Afghanistan and larger installations such as Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin (para. 5). For Hawkes, art can address the gaps in understanding that remain even after the conclusion of a legal tribunal. As a result, art has been proven to be “a powerful medium for representing such atrocities and attempting to find healing after genocide” (Hawkes 2006, para. 5). Artistic expression disrupts more clinical documentation of acts of violence, which is important because such events are intrinsically “difficult to comprehend” (para. 8).
Hawkes suggests that we might become motivated to alter our methods of approaching and remembering tragedy if the impact of creative work is felt. In 2018, Hawkes asserted that the art archive functions in laudable ways, as a “gate-opener” rather than the “gatekeeper,” as a “facilitator of storytelling and memory-keeping” (109). David Garneau’s painting, Evidence, serves as a memory-keeper that resists the erasure of Neil Stoneshild’s story from the archive by acknowledging and welcoming Neil Stonechild into public spaces where audiences honour his absent presence and present absence.
Shui-Yin Sharon Yam’s scholarship also helps theorize ways that artistic works like Evidence reject the “moral codes” that “abject and alienate” Indigenous people (Yam 2019, 84). Drawing on Julia Kristeva, Yam reminds us that the role of artists like David Garneau is not to “sublimate the abject, to elevate it” but rather to “plumb the abject” (84). In Yam’s words, this means that the “rhetor” or, in this case, the painter, can “more provocatively challenge the dominant patriarchal social order,” which I argue is also racialized and based in colonialism (84). In its seemingly deliberate focus on difficult subject matter, Evidence embodies what Shui-Yin Sharon Yam calls a “subversive counterdiscourse” in her analysis of censorship by social media platforms against images of physiologic births (81).
The Importance of Cultural Interventions
In “‘They Give Evidence’: Bodies, Borders and the Disappeared,” Australian scholar Suvendrini Perera affirms the power of Indigenous testimony in redressing injustice:
In the face of ongoing regimes of racialised punishment, Indigenous people across Australia have opened ways for the rest of us to think about the responsibility of giving evidence. The tenacity of their insistence holds the present accountable to the past and reminds us of the duties of the living to those who have died. (637)
Perera’s comment underscores the importance of David Garneau’s art and his writing on art’s role in calling upon settler and Indigenous communities to acknowledge colonial wounds. Garneau’s written commentary helps discern what Evidence accomplishes, even though the painting was finished prior to some texts cited. Writing in 2013, Garneau identified a special role for the artist as a “provocateur” or “agent” who moves playfully “between and among disciplines and cultures to create startling non-beautiful, needful disruptions, and to build hybrid possibilities that resist containment by either colonial designs or Indigenous traditionalism” (Garneau 2013, 15).
Evidence invites alternative truths beyond the neat and more tidy findings generated by the Commission of Inquiry. As a result, Evidence holds space for new understandings and new relationships shaped by a more politically, culturally, and economically sovereignty. Evidence invites us to resist the drive toward an oversimplified reconciliation. In a 2018 lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, Garneau rejected what he labelled “reconciliation light” and its erasure of “difficult truths” to make a “palatable reconciliation” attractive (2018, 38:55–39:03). For Garneau, the mainstream version of reconciliation is based on the “myth that there was a time of Native-settler conciliation” (2018, 39:09). A truer reconciliation would “emphasize truth” (2018, 39:11). It would encourage “perpetual comprehension of the historical facts and living legacies of the First Peoples under colonization, the land dispossession, the aggressive assimilation of children into foreign ways of knowing and being” (2018, 39:15–39:27). It would “embrace conciliation as a continuous communion, negotiation, trust, and treaty, which includes reparations and Native sovereignty” (39:28–39). Without these traits, reconciliation, for Garneau, is a “non-Indigenous thing, a colonial thing” that fails to displace settler entitlement or to reshape relationships (2018, 39:41–44).
Evidence visually gestures toward alternative truths that go beyond official accounts of the Starlight Tours, including the more benign findings of the judicial inquiry. In contrast, by showcasing a deceased Indigenous teenager with suspicious markings on his face, the painting symbolically hints at the historical and ongoing state violence described by scholars in this collection. In her examination of white settler colonial violence, Erin Morton asserted that
the white settler state needs Indigenous peoples, especially women, to disappear in order to maintain its sovereignty, and it also constantly apologizes for past violences to “reconcile” its present and move on with its “simultaneously murderous state of affairs,” in order to show that settler statecraft also constantly needs to rearticulate what whiteness means and does—and even, indeed, should do, in terms of what constitutes “violence” that is necessary to preserve state order. (2019, 438)
Given that documentation of the historical factors that propel these disappearances and erasures is largely absent from or reframed in historical archives, it is understandable that writing against traditional archives has become a pressing decolonial project for scholars.
Canadian Scholarship and the Stonechild Archive
For a Canadian socio-legal scholar, Renisa Mawani, the current interest in the shortcomings of the archives, was “animated by the cultural turn and shaped by the challenges of poststructuralism, subaltern, and postcolonial studies” (340). It has also prompted interest in the development of alternative or oppositional archives that convey truths based on the lived experiences, stories, and knowledges of persons and nations who withstood and are withstanding the destruction rendered by Western imperialistic expansion. Mawani’s finding that “law’s archive” is a location from which law “derives its meanings, authority, and legitimacy,” holds significance for this analysis (2012, 341). Mawani argues that “Law’s authority, albeit shaky and uncertain, is founded on the proliferation of documents and documentation that renders law not merely proximate or similar to the archive but as the archive” (352). This reasoning extends to inquiries, including the Stonechild Commission.
For Nicole Lugosi, the Stonechild Inquiry exemplified the hegemonic forms of truth-telling relied on by law. While ground-breaking, she notes, the inquiry muted the racism behind the deaths. In avoiding harder discussions, the report granted Neil’s family and supporters with a type of “phantom justice,” which Lugosi describes as “an apparition of redress without material substance” (312). While acknowledging that “an inquiry [was] fundamentally a good thing and a step towards redress,” Lugosi wanted stronger recommendations to counter discriminatory policing (312).
In 2014, Sherene Razack noted that the inquiry was remedial, what it truly confirmed was that the “frozen fields of the prairie” were “a space where reality [was] up for grabs, a space where law . . . authorized its own suspension” (61). For Razack, the fatalities were not accidental. They legitimated settler colonialism and its biopolitics. She argued that “the structural relations of settler colonialism produce and sustain ongoing, daily evictions of Aboriginal people from settler life—evictions that are inevitably violent” (53). Rather than galvanizing reform, the inquiry exposed the “widespread collective indifference to Aboriginal death” (61). In Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody, Razack further emphasized that Indigenous peoples are routinely exposed to a “paradigmatic and foundational violence” (2015, 79). Her view that violence is obscured and denied in the “terrible silences” of formal narratives and legal proceedings is important to this chapter (2015, 79).
In an article capturing a conversation with Indigenous filmmaker Tasha Hubbard, Razack evaluated Two Worlds Colliding, a documentary on Neil Stonechild’s fatality, among others. Sherene Razack reasoned artists were better placed to bring attention to state-sponsored violence. While disappointed the film failed to firmly connect the “freezing deaths” to residential schools and to violence by the police, Razack praised filmmaking as a decolonial aesthetic resource (326). Hubbard agreed that films should better expose the “intended outcome of the violence: continued appropriation and access to the land” (329). Hubbard acknowledged that “The layers of violence need to be exposed, understood, and written into Canada’s national narrative” (322). She hoped her film fostered some of these ends.
While lukewarm on the end-product, Razack stressed that art and filmmakers can effectively bring troubling findings about Canada’s colonial past and ongoing violence to the forefront. Filmmakers and researchers were empowered to confront “settler society’s overwhelming investment in a story of cultural difference rather than a story of the violence of colonization” (329–30). Aesthetic work challenges “the desire to look away and to stop counting the bodies found in the snow” (330). Razack urged filmmakers and creative workers to explore colonialism more deeply. Garneau’s effort to, at the very least, gesture to the systemic factors that propel colonial violence align with her vision. In the exchange with Hubbard, Razack held that artists must:
Find a way to get us back to the issue of the occupation of the land, and what white settlers must do to dispossess Aboriginal peoples. Find a way to remind us what the lynching of Blacks accomplished, and what the brutalizing of Aboriginal peoples and their extermination secures. Remind us that this is not simply two (culturally different) worlds colliding but a collision between colonizers and colonized, a violent, deadly collision. (327)
Reading along the grain, Razack’s statements help identify the gaps in the formal records of the freezing deaths, even within the more creative filmmaking approach. The conversation between Hubbard and Razack expose some limitations of formal records, affirming artistic responses or the significance of the counter-archive, particularly if cultural works fully expose Canada’s ongoing colonialism. In Razack’s view, the film was a corrective to the inquiry process which was limited in its capacity to expose the “sociopathology of state-sponsored colonialism” (331).
Evidence as a Counter-Archival Intervention and as Archival Mobilization
Garneau’s Evidence seems to gesture to what Perera (2006, 653) calls “the dynamic of invisibility/visibility.” Using art as a counterpoint, Perera addresses the SIEV X tragedy, the sinking of a poorly maintained fishing vessel in international waters between Indonesia and Australia on 19 October 2001. Nearly four hundred asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran who were trying to unite with family members in Australia disappeared into the sea when the boat capsized, resulting in Australia’s surrounding waters becoming “awash” with “phantom bodies” (638). Official responses were muted, referring to the catastrophe as a “maritime incident” while rejecting calls for a judicial inquiry. Perera’s focus on how this “maritime space of exception” was created and her look at the ways the “nameless bodies of the dead and disappeared” in this troublesome space come to be manifest “as evidence, as political bodies” is insightful to this scholarship (638). When Perera writes that “The meanings of these wounded, fragmented and scattered bodies will not be contained and incorporated by necropolitics,” she seems to affirm ways the bodies of the dead ooze and leak, refuting benign, de-politicized scripts of disappearances (649).
Perera examines an installation They Give Evidence, created by Dadang Christanto, an Indonesian-Australian artist. Perera cites Christanto’s series of standing naked figures, with outstretched arms holding the remnants of burnings, drownings, beatings, and other mutilations as an entry way into her examination of the “ways in which nameless bodies of the dead and disappeared are made present in contemporary Australia as evidence, as political bodies” (638). The generic figures are stripped of indicators of identity. They are, however, marked “in an order of contemporary political violence” (638). Christanto’s bleak work caused Perera to reflect on factors also inherent in Garneau’s work, namely, “the relations between the bodies of living and dead, between modalities of bearing witness and giving evidence, and the role that the bodies of the dead play as border or threshold spaces marking separation and connection and functioning as ongoing bearers of powerful political meanings” (638).
For Perera, the bodies lost during the SIEV X operate “as at once shameful spectacle and shameful national secret” (653). Her comments may also be relevant to the freezing deaths of Neil Stonechild as well as the fatalities of the other Indigenous men deposited in remote areas, often in freezing temperatures. When the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) opened a hotline for members to report police wrongdoing in April 2000, they were flooded with calls (Barnsley 2000). The volume of reports was cited as proof that there was something systemically wrong with the justice system. Neil Stonechild, seen in Evidence, and Garneau’s Starlight Series more generally, show the human faces in the hidden record of violence that the FSIN exposed.
Danielle Taschereau Mamers’s work examines art by a self-described Cree/Halfbreed, German/Polish artist, Cheryl L’Hirondelle.1 In examining L’Hirondelle’s project, Treatycard.ca, Mamers describes L’Hirondelle’s work as a “counter-archival intervention that destabilizes settler colonial law’s claims to authority” (2018, 48). Mamers asserts that art undermines “the colonial knowledge-power project”—an observation that seems to have application to Garneau’s painting (56). Evidence portrays settler violence, reversing the more prominent narrative of Indigenous threat. The painting draws into question assumptions about Indigenous perpetrators by showing an Indigenous victim, presumably injured by state violence. Evidence might be seen as a visual archive that gestures to “truths” outside of and beyond colonial findings, including those that appear in legal archives generated by the Commission of Inquiry. While Garneau did not originally create the painting for public viewing, his interest in showing the work as a “counter-archival disruption” developed over time (48).
As is the case with L’Hirondelle, Garneau insists on probing less comfortable, less sterile truths. While Garneau set out to record a disturbing image, his immediate response was largely visceral because the impact of the gruesome was felt at a bodily level. While somewhat prepared for the gruesome post-mortem image he located online, Garneau acknowledged that he found the picture “stark” (CBC News, 2009). The autopsy image evoked negative emotions; Garneau found it “ugly,” “sad,” and “depressing” (CBC News, 2009). In interviews, Garneau described the painting as “jarring” and “upsetting.” Garneau reported that he was disturbed by the painting. In fact, he was “constantly in knots” when considering his creation (2009). While some gallery viewers described Stonechild as at “peace,” Garneau questioned whether it was his role to “determine whether he’s at peace or not” (CBC News, 2009).
While determined to document the tragedy, Garneau has reported that he initially created the art piece for his private collection, as it was “too brutal, ugly, to exhibit, to be art” (2014, n.p.). He also wanted to uphold Indigenous cultural norms that prohibit the display of a deceased person. However, a few years later in a sweat Garneau saw “dancing little flashes of light and Neil” (Garneau 2010, 30). Guided by this vision, Garneau was inspired to lay “a field of red dots over [Neil Stonechild’s] cool face” (30). The red dots were an intuitive gesture. Later, he showed the work to a Knowledge Keeper, Rodger Ross, during a conversation about exhibiting the work. Ross described the screen of dots as a protective veil keeping Neil’s unrest safe from the living. This protective cover allowed for the portrait of Neil to be exhibited. Evidence was first displayed at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan in 2009 in the group show titled Diabolique. The painting was later exhibited in other Canadian venues, including Galerie de l’UQAM in Montréal in 2010 and Oakville Gallery in Ontario in an exhibit curated by Amanda Cachia (also in 2010).
From the vantage point of this scholarship, it is significant that Evidence is currently part of the permanent collection of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, now SK Arts, an organization that supports Saskatchewan artists through funding and advocacy. At the end of the Diabolique exhibition tour, the Saskatchewan Arts Board asked to retain the work. A former employee, Carol Greyeyes, was instrumental to the process. She developed a written contract, or a “keeping protocol,” that outlined the terms (Garneau 2014). In the protocol, it was agreed that the painting would only be loaned to or exhibited by an Indigenous curator. Furthermore, the Stonechild family would be notified in advance of any exhibitions. Notably, the Saskatchewan Arts Board collected the painting under the Cultural Property Export and Import Act (RSC, 1985, c. C-51). The painting was proclaimed under s 32(b) to be “of such a degree of national importance that its loss to Canada would significantly diminish the national heritage.” It further meant that the painting’s “[outstanding] significance and national importance” exceeded “the collections and mandates of individual organizations.” Given the unique arrangement, it is not surprising that the process for the transfer took over three years. In his 2014 conference presentation, “Strange Evidence,” David Garneau disclosed that no other works of contemporary art were afforded this treatment, to his knowledge (n.p.).
Garneau points out the significance of the inclusion of the painting in the Saskatchewan Arts collection where it exercises a shadow presence as a marker of state violence. In an email, he stated the recognition by a reputable organization meant the piece would “‘haunt’ the official archive for some time to come” (David Garneau, email message to author, 7 May 2017). Garneau wanted the work “in such a collection/collective memory” (Garneau 2017). Its inclusion in this esteemed collection was “as important as the work itself in terms of the larger project of trying to reverse Indigenous erasure” (Garneau 2017). For Garneau, works like Evidence and the inquiry into Neil Stonechild’s death have achieved something important in making him “visible” (Garneau 2017). Adding the painting to the collection of a non-Indigenous institution was significant. It resulted in “a small change to policy, a little shudder, a precedent that may influence the collection and status of other works, and the need to have appropriate custodians—Indigenous bodies, minds, protocols, and relationships to manage them” (Garneau 2014). Reflecting in 2021, Garneau stated that he tries to have his more significant paintings placed in important collections, so that they augment, disrupt, and challenge institutional archives (email message to the author, June 2021).
Making Visible Indigenous Presence
Given its notable status, Evidence disrupts what Danielle Taschereau Mamers describes as “settler colonial ways of seeing” that minimize colonial harm (2017, 5). For Mamers, the “aesthetic force” of the various artworks she analyzed presented “clear lines forward, and away from the delimited, eliminationist gaze of the state” (2017, 180). Following Judith Butler, Mamers reasons that we need “ways of framing that will bring the human into view in its frailty and precariousness, that will allow us to stand for the value and dignity of human life, to react with outrage when lives are degraded or eviscerated without regard for their value as lives” (2017, 183). In exposing settler violence, Evidence performs a role that is similar to the Indigenous artworks Mamers studied. The creative work and stories by Indigenous artists honouring Neil Stonechild, including Garneau, reinforces Mamers argument that aesthetic works show “the incompleteness of sovereign frames by making visible the Indigenous presence that persists in spite of the colonial politics that envisions erasure as an inevitable conclusion” (18).
Statements by Saskatoon artist Jeff Crowe, Neil’s best friend at the time of his passing, affirm ways that Neil haunts colonial spaces and is remembered by friends. In 2015, Crowe attended an event marking the 25 years since Neil’s death. Crowe stated there was always a memory of Neil wherever he went in the City of Saskatoon. For Crowe, it was “like he’s still here” (CBC News 2015). The artwork that Crowe creates is dedicated to and stamped with a symbol for Neil. Crowe reports that he feels his friend’s presence when he paints; for him, Neil is “there” (CBC News 2015). Crowe’s devotion to his best friend, even long after his death, affirms the importance of acknowledging what Mamers describes as methods of seeing that reject “the narrow frames of settler colonial agents and instead [marked] Indigenous life as fully present, mattering, and self-determining” (180). In authorizing Indigenous losses, Evidence contributes to the space of remembering and to the felt encounters with Neil by his close friends, like Jeff Crowe. More recently, an Indigenous artist, Kevin Wesaquate, working with youth from Artistic Minds, created a mural in Saskatoon that depicts Neil Stonechild. The aim is to change the narrative to focus on Neil’s capacity and positive legacy (Eneas 2021).
Jeff Crowe’s recollections and other remembrances may help us see ways that Evidence makes space or retains openings for factors, findings, emotions, and memories that extend beyond the lengthy legal proceeding. As a visual source of more hidden truths, Evidence gestures toward the as yet unrealized and more deeply Indigenized futures that might, at least, end the genocidal actions perpetuated against Indigenous men, like Neil Stonechild, and against Indigenous women. These two topics are united by scholar Joyce Green who discusses the murder of women and men as comparable tragedies (2006). Garneau’s painting points toward what Natalie J. K. Baloy calls the “hard but important work of dismantling spectacular and spectral settler colonial conditions” (2016, 228). For Baloy, efforts like Garneau’s artistic work challenge us “to reorient ourselves relationally to each other and the Indigenous land we all live on” (228).
Conclusions
Throughout this chapter, I explored whether Evidence might be read as a counter to or a reframing of the legal archive. I reasoned that Evidence is a lasting record of the harms to individuals and communities and a rebuke of the inadequate documentation of Indigenous histories. I tracked ways that Garneau’s oversized reproduction of Neil Stonechild’s face goes beyond acknowledging individual tragedy to reminding us of the collective harm of the ongoing genocide that reverberates daily in Canada and other Western nations.
Garneau’s disturbing painting serves as an alternative to formal documentation on the case, such as the inquiry report and the evidence collected during the original investigation, which the Commission re-scrutinized. Additionally, I addressed two main research concerns relating to the archives. To begin, I revisited the Stonechild Inquiry as a legal archive based on the evidence gathered during the inquiry. While important, researchers have pinpointed the shortcomings of the Stonechild Inquiry including the ways it skirted structural racism. Writing about archival limitations more generally, scholars, including Hawkes, Sela, Falzetti, Mamers, and others, offered critical insights on Western archives that informed the chapter. Scholarship specifically written in response to legal forums, specifically the Stonechild Inquiry, helped pinpoint some of the limitations in the inquiry record. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, this chapter examined Evidence as the type of creative archive I endorse to remedy archival inadequacies, including the propensity to mute Indigenous claims, historical accounts and lived experiences. While legal truth-telling forums feature in human rights discourse, this chapter established that these mechanisms often fail to capture the victim accounts and experiences often made prominent in aesthetic responses.
By displaying Neil’s wounds, Evidence forces us to see the hidden “white settler violence” that “remains a persisting condition in the practice of Indigenous elimination and erasure” even while “barely recognized” in the stories of settler valour shared in families and transformed into “national texts” (Morton 2019, 456). Garneau seems intent on ensuring that Neil Stonechild’s death remains an open wound, continually raw, always festering, until the time when the colonial harm that propelled his death is acknowledged and remedied. By creating a painting meant to have lasting impact, Garneau invites Neil Stonechild back to occupy and haunt settler spaces. The ephemeral, ghostly presence Neil Stonechild exerts in Evidence may galvanize settler society toward what the artist calls “non-colonial activity” by stretching beyond the legal archive to make the harms of structural inequity even more real and apparent (Garneau 2016).
Garneau’s writings and texts guided this reading of an artwork as an alternative record—even those written after the Starlight Series paintings, including Evidence, were finalized. Taken together, the interviews and articles by Garneau cited here underscore the need to creatively envision the historical present while also remembering past harms. In “Apology Dice: Collaboration in Progress,” written with Clement Yeh, Garneau shared a perspective on art’s role in helping us imagine and act beyond colonialism and violence: “What art does do—and what is difficult to measure—is that it changes our individual and collective imaginaries by particles, and these new pictures of the world can influence behaviour. Queer pride parades and Idle No More do change how we see and treat each other and ourselves” (Garneau and Yeh 2015, 76).
Art making, in general, has merit as a path toward something beyond a forced and seemingly impossible reconciliation (2016, 30). Garneau’s caution that “we should not be in such a rush to let our words imagine a reconciled, healed future” seem particularly relevant in the contemporary context where Indigenous deaths continue. They also may help us discern what the careful study of a visual image may reveal (2016, 39). Namely, it offers an opportunity to reflect and move carefully against the backdrop of spiritedness, anguish, hopefulness, and brutality that Garneau appears to reference (39). Garneau reminds us that what is needed is “the expression and production of non-colonial thought, action, relations, and objects centered in [Indigenous] bodies, experiences, communities, and territories” (Garneau 2018, 39:57) as well as modes of being that coincide with “living well in shared territories managed according to principles that arise from this land” (40:15).
In a 2009 interview with Amanda Cachia, then curator of the Regina-based Dunlop Art Gallery, Garneau stated: “Evidence was just that, a piece of evidence. It’s someone from the community saying: ‘Let’s not forget this.’ The end result of the inquiry was that there was insufficient evidence to make a determination so in many ways it’s an open wound. It’s there!” (Garneau 2009) Evidence may, therefore, affirm what Hawkes states is the most important teaching from the “testimony-without-testimony” of Survivors who struggle to coherently share their stories. This lesson is made plain in the narrative fragments left after tragedies, which, for this chapter, includes the stories and tributes to the freezing deaths, including the loss of Neil Stonechild. The lesson, according to Hawkes, is: “Loss. Loss eludes the archive” (2018, 86).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Garneau, professor of visual arts at the University of Regina, for his patience and feedback over the decade that this chapter was in development. I also gratefully acknowledge the support I received from Belinda Harrow, at SK Arts, who allowed me to make connections and also gave me the opportunity to view Evidence up close. Finally, I thank jay s.c. (Joshua Sallos-Carter) for their transcribing work and research assistance.
Note
1 See “Cheryl L’Hirondelle: Bio,” http://www.cheryllhirondelle.com/bio.html, accessed 13 December 2022.
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