“6. “You’re Reminded of Who You Are in Canada, Real Quick”: Racial Gendered Violence and the Politics of Redress” in “Unsettling Colonialism in the Canadian Criminal Justice System”
Chapter 6 “You’re Reminded of Who You Are in Canada, Real Quick” Racial Gendered Violence and the Politics of Redress
Carmela Murdocca
“You’re reminded of who you are in Canada, real quick,” explains Carolyn Henry, an Indigenous woman who lives near London, Ontario. She drove 1,200 miles to relive and describe a night in Maniwaki, Québec, in June 2007 when two officers from the provincial police force, the Surêté du Québec (SQ), offered to drive her and a friend back to a campground where they were staying after a night in town. She describes her experiences to journalists for an investigative documentary report by Radio-Canada’s Enquête, a Canadian French-language television newsmagazine series. Driving with the crew from the television show, Henry explains that the officers drove them to a deserted area outside of town and left them to walk back to the campground. “I thought it was like a game to them. Something funny. They knew we were scared. They knew they had power. Those officers did something wrong. They knew they did something wrong. How many times have they done it, I don’t know?” (CBC Radio-Canada 2016, at 15:25). The fear and harm Henry suffered made her painfully aware of the role of violence in defining the contours of who is regarded as fully human in Canada. Being subjected to the racialized and gendered violence of policing is a reminder of who and where you are. It is a reminder of the racial dehumanization that is expressed through state agents that help to sustain the white settler state.1 In this particular case, Henry feared for her life in view of the knowledge that policing has racialized and gendered life and death consequences for Indigenous women.
Since 2007, Henry has attempted to make three formal complaints to the SQ.2 Her experience, along with many others’ experiences of rape, sexual and physical assault, Starlight Tours, and other forms of racial, gendered, and sexualized violence, came to light following the investigative documentary report by Radio-Canada’s Enquête, in October 2015.3 As will be explored through the use of the testimonies of Indigenous women, the documentary films referenced in this article reveal the decades-long racial, gendered, and sexualized violence experienced by Indigenous women in Val-d’Or, a community approximately 500 kilometres northwest of Montréal. Since the original broadcast of the Enquête documentary, “SQ Abuse: Women Break the Silence” (CBC Radio-Canada 2015), Indigenous women in Maniwaki, Sept-Îles, and Schefferville have come forward to reveal similar experiences, some of which are detailed in a second documentary also produced by Radio-Canada’s Enquête: The Silence Is Broken (CBC Radio-Canada 2016). These documentaries won the Michener Award, a prestigious award for public service journalism in Canada, for the role they played in uncovering the extensive stories of sexual, physical, and psychological violence by the SQ officers against Indigenous women (Bradshaw 2016).4 In addition to providing the women in the film with a platform to speak about their experiences with the police, the findings of the documentary films resulted in the initiation of a government tip line inviting other Indigenous people in Québec to share their experiences and encounters with the SQ. Seventy-five calls were made to the tip line revealing additional stories of violence against Indigenous women by the SQ (CBC News 2016b). On 21 December 2016, Québec Premier Phillipe Couillard announced a two-year public inquiry (the Viens Commission) into the treatment of Indigenous people by various systems, including policing and corrections, health services and youth services (Fundira and Montpetit 2016; Gouvernement du Québec, n.d.). The final report of the Viens Commission details the extensive racism against Indigenous people in all of Québec’s major public institutions, including the police. Following the report, the new provincial Premier, François Legault, has repeatedly denied the realities of anti-Indigenous racism in provincial government services (Curtis 2020; Viens 2019).
This chapter examines how the two documentaries, SQ Abuse: Women Break the Silence (2015) and The Silence Is Broken (2016), compel a consideration of how testimony about anti-Indigenous police violence reveals the limits of a culture of redress. I show how the testimonies and lived experiences of Indigenous women can challenge and expose the limitations of redress and reconciliation. By “a culture of redress,” I am referring broadly to a mode of political activity on the part of a range of actors, agents, and community groups who contest relations of domination in an effort to expose links between historical and ongoing injustices. Over the past forty years, cultures of redress have formed part of the political, legal, social, and cultural life of liberal democracies.5
In Canada, redress, reparative justice, and reconciliation have formed a significant part of public policy in the last twenty years.6 Far from being solely confined to formal legal negotiations for land title, or to monetary compensation as a result of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a culture of redress permeates many legal, political, educational, cultural, and artistic practices and sites in Canada.7 The women’s testimonies in the documentary films contest relations of domination and subjection such that their experiences open up questions central to a culture of redress, including reparative justice, state responsibility, and accountability as well as Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Despite the unique role these films have played in providing a platform for Indigenous women to detail their experiences of police violence, the role and responsibility of the Canadian media in addressing violence against women has repeatedly been called into question (CBC Radio-Canada 2017).
In this chapter, I explore the following questions: What do the films demonstrate about the constitutive role of gendered racialized violence and white settler colonialism in Québec and Canada? What do the visual dimensions of the testimonies presented reveal about the interdependence of gendered racialized violence and the politics of redress? The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I briefly explore how testimony is a key ingredient in a culture of redress and an important site for “promoting both individual claims for redress and larger political demands for justice” (Rodriguez 2014). In the second section, I offer some context into the events in Val-d’Or and the surrounding regions. I also provide an analysis of the testimonies by Indigenous women in the documentary films. In particular, I focus on how the representation of individual and focus group narratives ultimately function as collective testimony about Indigenous women’s experiences with police violence.8 I analyze the testimonies of Indigenous women presented in the films to examine how racialization structures gendered experiences of police violence.9 My approach is informed by a critical visual methodological perspective which considers visual culture “a specific technique of colonial and imperial practice,” and focuses on the processes of racialization in visual materials. In the third section, following Allen Feldman’s (2004) insights concerning the relationship between representing biographical narratives of trauma and harm and the “visual culture of witnessing,” I explore the meaning of testimony as evidenced in the films. I suggest the testimonies are ultimately presented as collective renderings of the legal terrors of state-sanctioned racial gendered and colonial violence. The collective testimonies function as expressions of the gendered experience of racial difference and demonstrate how racial violence contributes to a liberal culture of redress in settler colonialism.
Testimony and the Politics of Redress
Violence against Indigenous women is a sanctioned, active, and constitutive practice in and of white settler Canada. Through the power of Indigenous social movements, direct-action advocacy and testimony as truth-telling, the historical, episodic, and extensive experiences of racial, gendered, and sexualized violence experienced by Indigenous women has become intertwined with the culture of redress in Canada. On 8 December 2015, as a result of decades of organizing by Indigenous families, women, and communities, the federal government announced a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. Leading up to this announcement were a number of significant organizing and advocacy efforts by Indigenous women’s organizations, Indigenous communities, individual activists, and non-governmental organizations that galvanized national and international attention to the issue.10 This advocacy, and the many other small and large legal, political, and creative efforts that support such advocacy, provides a critical scaffold with which to consider racial, gendered, and sexualized violence experienced by Indigenous women in Canada within discourses and practices concerning the politics of redress. The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019) concluded that violence against Indigenous women is a “Canadian genocide.” Key to this advocacy, and to this chapter, is the role of testimony by Indigenous women in offering an account of the violence of policing by state officials in white settler Canada. The events in Val-d’Or and nearby communities came to light, in part, following the powerful testimonies of Indigenous women documented by media. These documentaries are structured through the testimony of Indigenous women who share their experiences of racial, gendered, and sexual violence by police in Québec. The testimony of Indigenous women shows how their experiences of racialized gendered police violence opens questions concerning how the representations of memory and violence intervenes in broader discussions concerning ongoing racial and gendered violence in an era of redress and reconciliation.
Testimony is a medium for the politics of redress, and it is a method of examining the racial violence that has sparked compelling practices of political contestation, transforming the world of public dialogue on racial justice and altering socio-legal policy and reform. This chapter represents an engagement with the practice and representation of testimony regarding gendered racialized colonial violence. I explore how the documentary films function as evidence of, to borrow Shoshana Felman’s phrase, the “practice of testimony” of racial, gendered colonial violence (Felman and Laub 1992, 1). Analyzing the practice of testimony requires attention to “how issues of biography and history are neither simply represented nor simply reflected, but are reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over” through representation (xiv–xv). Through testimony, memory is conjoined with performative representation and opens up a field of knowledge-making about state-sanctioned racialized gendered violence and survival. Above all, the practice of testimony unfolds within particular modalities of power in white settler colonialism, including intergenerational and ongoing structural violence, police violence, and state-sanctioned dispossession. Through “practising testimony,” Indigenous women reveal how the content of racial difference is experienced through racial, gendered, and sexual violence perpetrated by police. When Indigenous women testify to violence experienced, they are ultimately challenging “the tendency to render disappeared women as anonymous figures whose lives and livelihoods are made to signal an apparent willing vulnerability to violence” (Hargreaves 2015, 84).
Representing the Legal Terror of Racialized Gendered Violence
Prior to the Enquête documentaries, the disappearance of Sindy Ruperthouse and the sustained efforts of her family and community to pressure police to investigate her case galvanized attention to the experiences of Indigenous–police relations in Val-d’Or (CBC News 2015). The first Enquête documentary, SQ Abuse: Women Break the Silence (2015), sparked a series of events that increased the profile of Indigenous women’s experiences with the police in Québec. On 3 November 2015, there was a rally on Parliament Hill in support of the women in Val-d’Or (Rice 2015). Vigils in solidarity with Indigenous women in Val-d’Or were also held in Montréal (Pall 2016). It was following the first documentary that the Québec Minister of Public Security Martin Coiteux set up the hotline inviting women and community members to report police violence and misconduct (Balkisson 2016). Eleven of the seventy-five complainants were pursued as formal complaints (CBC News 2016b; see also MacKinnon 2016). The first Enquête documentary was indeed a watershed moment.
SQ Abuse: Women Break the Silence begins with a swift moving aerial shot of the Val-d’Or region, the green density of the La Vérendrye Wildlife Reserve is contrasted with harsh open pit mines. The pits mines reveal the extractive violence of settler colonialism. These images are anchored by the annual Sisters in Spirit Vigil on 4 October, an event that demands political action and honours the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women (Native Women’s Association 2014). We learn that, in addition to the many missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, the case of Sindy Ruperthouse, a 44-year-old Algonquin woman from Pikogan, is on the mind and in the hearts of the women at the vigil in Val-d’Or. Ruperthouse was last seen on 23 April 2014, when she checked herself in at the emergency room at the Val-d’Or hospital with three broken ribs (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 7:37). The SQ did not open an investigation into Ruperthouse’s disappearance, but the case was reopened following the production of CBC Radio-Canada’s investigative report SQ Abuse: Women Break the Silence. We learn that the last time Sindy’s parents talked to her, she called asking for a large sum of money. She was living with a violent boyfriend at the time. After this phone call, they did not hear from her for months. Faced with months of silence and inattention from police, Sindy’s parents decided to commence a search themselves, printing and distributing hundreds of photos and posters in Québec and Ontario.
The documentary explains that months after her parents started the search, Ruperthouse was in fact seen by Caroline Chachai in a local department store. Chachai reported the sighting to the police and to the local Native Friendship Centre. The police did not adequately follow up on this lead. Members of the Native Friendship Centre approached the department store owner and requested that he show the Ruperthouse family excerpts of video surveillance footage. The owner did not, however, provide an exhaustive survey of footage (nor did the police request that the owner do so), and none of the footage provided matched the description of Ruperthouse in a black jacket, which is what Chachai had reported. The department store owner explained that all Aboriginal women look the same (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 12:14) In frustration, Ruperthouse’s father explains: “When it’s a white person, they’ll search everywhere. For us, nothing. It’s like it’s not important” (12:26). The documentary provides an intimate portrait of the haunting and unbearable pain of Ruperthouse’s parents: the violence of racism, the indifference of the police, the inattention to their daughter’s disappearance (“not one policeman has come,” her father explains [1:21]) and their continuing search for their daughter. “It’s terrible to live this, these moments. To be looking and looking. Sometimes I suffocate,” her mother explains (4:13).
A focus on the racism and indifference of police and the intimate portrait of the aftermath of Sindy Ruperthouse’s disappearance is juxtaposed with a group of Indigenous women sitting together around a table at the Native Friendship Centre in Val-d’Or. They unanimously confirm reports of the violence Sindy endured at the hands of her partner and the film weaves their own stories of the racial, sexualized, and gendered violence they have experienced in their dealings with the police with the details of Ruperthouse’s disappearance. “These women,” Josée Dupuis, the narrator-journalist explains, “publicly denounce the contempt they suffer from those who are supposed to protect them” (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 1:51). In the course of group conversations about Ruperthouse, the women begin to describe their own harrowing experiences of racialized police violence. Individually and collectively, they describe experiences with police where isolated spaces in the region become sites for inflicting bodily and sexual violence. They describe experiences of being taken to the outskirts of the city (on the road toward the airport, for example) or events that occur in empty parking lots in the middle of the night. These places are spaces of racial terror where experiences of gendered racialized violence are rampant and ongoing.
The film shifts from the humane space of the Native Friendship Centre in Val-d’Or to barren and desolate roads and parking lots. Their experience of racialized gendered violence at the hands of police is revealed to be distinctly spatialized—the spaces of terror in Val-d’Or reveal a visualized documentary account of the annihilative consequences of settler colonialism for Indigenous women. Systemic police violence directed at Indigenous women and girls, and the impunity with which such violence is perpetrated, is a form of racial legal terror.11 Violence is written into their experiences of the space of the land in Val-d’Or. As Romeo Saganash explains, the violence of white settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land is written into the geography of the Val-d’Or region. “It’s a place that derives its wealth off minerals that come from stolen land,” explains Saganash. “It’s a lot easier to take things from people if you don’t consider them your equals. But things can change and there are allies on the ground, people trying to find solutions, people recognizing that things have been unfair for a long time” (Curtis 2020). The spatial and legal terrors of Val-d’Or thus demarcate how gendered racialized violence defines the contours of humanity for Indigenous women. It has been well established that the violence Indigenous women experience should be properly understood as both racial and spatial (Razack 2002). That is to say, with each violation directed and experienced by Indigenous women, we must consider the racial and spatial dimensions of the dehumanizing effects of this violence. For example, how is the history and genealogies of white settler colonialism and the attendant carceral policies inaugurated by the Indian Act alive in the interaction between Indigenous women in Val-d’Or and the police? How is the Val-d’Or region, and the SQ, a symbol of eviction and dispossession for Indigenous people in Val-d’Or? Answers to these questions are revealed as the women recount their experiences of police violence.
Priscilla Papatie recalls that her sister was taken to the outskirts of town: “I think she really got a racist officer,” she explains. Papatie recalls that many Indigenous women are forced by police officers into a remote wooded area and left there to walk the several kilometres back into town. This is an example of a Starlight Tour, a form of racial and spatial violence that results in the eviction of Indigenous people to the outskirts of the city. In the video, viewers accompany Priscilla Papatie to Baie de la Carrière, an isolated area on the outskirts of town. She explains:
This is where people would take us when they wanted favours. The little road in the corner over there. . . . That’s where often girls were dumped. Sometimes girls would say to me that they had to have oral sex or they would have to go all the way with people and the police, clients too. Then they would walk all the way back to get downtown. (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 13:34)
In the car on a deserted road on the outskirts of Val-d’Or, viewers are presented with a powerful testimony of the corporeal and spatial dimensions of gendered racial and sexualized violence experienced by many Indigenous women. The experiential knowledge Priscilla Papatie offers encompasses her own experience and that of a number of other women. She moves between “us” and “they” and “girls” in her narrative reconstruction of these experiences in ways that conceal identity, articulate subjectivity, and expose the racial and spatial realities of violence and domination in Val-d’Or. It is a powerful scene in which the visual testimony that accompanies her words expresses a density of experience that strains the capacity of a single testimonial subject.
The documentary effectively shifts between the general and the particular, between the individual testimonial subject and the collective rendering of racialized gendered and sexualized colonial police violence. A subsequent scene, also situated in a remote area outside the town, prioritizes the individual testimonial subject. Bianca Moushoun’s experiences reveal the complexities of survival and agency in the face of sexual assault. In conversation with journalist Josée Dupuis, Moushoun describes the coercive tactics deployed police officers to force women to take part in their own rape:
Moushoun: Often it was here that the police would drop off the girls. . . . And then the girls would walk back to town. . . . Often they would pick me up and then they would talk to me. And instead of taking me to the police station they took me to another place . . . like here. Then they would ask: Do you want a beer? They would have some in their trunk, the police. They would give me a beer and I would drink it. Then they would give me another and another. Then we would go into one of the little roads in the woods. And then they would ask me to perform oral sex on them.
Dupuis: How many police officers are we talking about?
Moushoun: Seven.
Dupuis: And you were not the only one?
Moushoun: No, I wasn’t the only one . . . I would say almost all the girls who were prostitutes in town.
Dupuis: Did they pay you?
Moushoun: Yes, they paid me. They paid for each service. Let’s say there were two, they would each pay $200, $100 for the service, $100 so I wouldn’t talk. Sometimes they would pay me with coke, sometimes cash, sometimes both. (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 16:30)
Moushoun’s account of her particular experience, and of the general experience of Indigenous sex workers in town, functions to reveal the omnipotent threat of racial colonial violence expressed through systems of racial governance such as police. Later in the documentary, Moushoun indicates that she has filed two complaints about police abuse, one complaint concerning an interaction where officers broke her arm when she was a minor (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 25:26). For white audiences tuning into watch a CBC Radio-Canada documentary, Moushoun embodies the racist stereotypes concerning Indigenous women, and it is precisely through confirming such stereotypes—confirming the racial violence of white settler colonialism—that she reveals the daily realities of racial gendered colonial police violence.
The legacies of colonialism and racism have produced enduring stereotypes of Indigenous women. Recognizing the nature and extent of these stereotypes is key to understanding how police violence operates through race and gender. Historical and ongoing white settler colonialism is replete with gendered racialized stereotypes about Indigenous women. When assessing early patterns of settler colonialism, for example, it is evident that representations of Indigenous women were used strategically to deny Indigenous claims to land and to dispossess Indigenous communities through law and other policies (Jiwani 2009). Such gendered racialized stereotypes contribute to racialized and gendered knowledge about Indigenous women. These stereotypes are integral to understanding the ongoing victimization of Indigenous women and their resilience.
The testimony offered by Moushoun and others can be considered, in part, as “scenes of subjection,” to evoke Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) powerful illumination of the forms of everyday terror and resistance that have historically shaped Black identity. “Scenes of subjection” illustrate the interdependence of agency and violence in the experience of anti-Black, racial gendered and colonial violence. As Hartman explains, “these performances of blackness are in no way the ‘possession’ of the enslaved. They are enactments of social struggle and contending articulations of racial meaning” (Hartman 1997, 57). Indeed, Moushoun’s testimony concerning the experiences of Indigenous sex workers in Val-d’Or reveals the interdependence of sexualized violence and possible conditions of agency for Indigenous sex workers. Victimization, therefore, does not dispossess Indigenous women of agency and choice. Instead, victimization must be understood in the context of “women’s resilience and capacity for positive action as well as negative reaction against social injustices” (Kaiser-Derrick 2019, 109).
The documentary depicts additional accounts of women who offered CBC Radio-Canada testimony through written documentation of their experiences. The final scenes in the film depict the “crisis of trust” that is illustrated by apprehension and feeling “scared to death” when considering submitting a police complaint. Many of the women in the film identify the aim of warning other women as their reason for speaking to CBC Radio-Canada. As Angela King says, “Why come out with this? . . . If it has to do with the police, if it’s to help other young women who may end up living the same thing” (CBC Radio-Canada 2015, at 20:55).
The Silence Is Broken (2016) was released a year later and represents the responses of Indigenous women to the stories revealed in the first documentary film, SQ Abuse: Women Break the Silence. This second documentary provides a platform for women in the surrounding regions of Maniwaki, Sept-Îles, and Schefferville who were triggered by the first report and now wished to come forward and add their voices and experiences of police violence to the record. Lise Jordan recalls a night in Schefferville in 1989 when she was taken into custody for no particular reason. “Most of the time they would load people in the car. And most of the time it was girls,” she explains. “I don’t really think they needed a reason to take them.” She was raped in a cell by a police officer while other officers stood by. “I was raped by police officers in Schefferville. One officer, but I say more because there were others who were there and knew what was going on” (CBC Radio-Canada 2016, at 5:03).
The film cuts back and forth between these scenes of testimony and the barren winter roads of the Val-d’Or Region, thus symbolizing the spatial connections between land, dispossession, and violence in Indigenous women’s lives. As they follow the road to Sept-Îles, viewers begin to hear the words of Deborah Aianish as she recounts her experiences of police violence. As she was leaving a bar, a police officer in Schefferville grabbed her and put her in the back of a police cruiser.
When we got to the police station it was dark everywhere. I screamed, I didn’t want to be locked up. I was asking myself what I could have done. I was screaming. Then the white policeman gave me a glass of water and a pill. When I woke up . . . [she collapses into tears] . . . when I woke up my panties were pulled down. I knew he had raped me. I was pregnant when this happened. He very much destroyed me. (CBC Radio-Canada 2016, at 7:07)
Aianish’s account, and that of other women in the surrounding regions of Val-d’Or, further reveals the historical, systemic, and systematized racial police violence directed at Indigenous women. This particular experience shows the sexualized, gendered violence of policing as well as the futility of pursuing justice within a system that has been dangerous for Indigenous women. That such violence is ongoing, sustained, and enduring is indicative of an organized system of complicity and silence that permeates the SQ. As Isabelle Parent explains, the SQ has “developed many techniques [of complicity and silence] so that it doesn’t have to come out publicly” to denounce the actions of police officers (CBC Radio-Canada 2016, at 11:04). Aianish’s testimony adds to the range of experiences of racialized gendered police violence identified in the film. In particular, her testimony illuminates how police violence is not an isolated event in past; her experience reverberates into the present, showing how the experience of settler state violence (police violence) shapes, to follow Hartman, subjection and agency.
Testimony and Racial Gendered Violence in Settler Colonialism
The documentary films function as an indictment of the state. The films can be said to function as an alternative inquiry, creating a national archive that catalogues Indigenous women’s experiences of police violence. Through the use of individual, collective, and focus group testimony, the structure and visual representations in the film mimic that of a redressive human rights inquiry that gives priority to victims in testimonial process. In this way, the films establish a political and legal record, thus opening up questions concerning past injustices, racialization, gendered victimization, collective responsibility, and individual culpability. Key to the impact of the film is the representational effect of testimony in providing the basis of, and advocacy for, a politics of redress.
Gendered racialized violence against Indigenous women is essential to the white settler colonial state. Visualizing testimony through these films assists in showing the temporal and spatial dynamics of racial gendered violence. Practices of violent colonial dispossession central to the settler colonial project are reproduced through racial sexual violence perpetrated by state officials. Sherene Razack (2002) argues that violence against Indigenous women should be conceptualized as racial gendered spatial violence. The temporal “spatiality of the violence” begins with Indigenous people being dispossessed of their land and continues through ongoing, systemized structures of dispossession which today resembles exclusion, dehumanization, the disregard of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, alienation from land, and disregard and the violence that Indigenous men and women experience (Razack 2002, 127). When police violate Indigenous women, they do so within and through the history of ongoing settler colonialism that renders such violence normalized. Razack describes these violent practices as “journeys of transgression” that “are deeply historical” since they form a central role in “settler strategies of domination” (130). Audra Simpson argues that Indigenous women,
“Disappear” because they have been deemed killable, able to be raped without repercussion, expendable. Their bodies have historically been rendered less valuable because of what they are taken to represent: land reproduction, Indigenous kinship and governance, an alternative to heteronormative and Victorian rules of descent. Theirs are bodies that carry a symbolic load because they have been conflated with land and are thus contaminating to white, settler social order. (Simpson 2014, 157)
Visualizing testimony through these films assists in showing the temporal dynamics of racial gendered violence. Significantly, the methodological approach of the films highlights individual and focus group discussions that ultimately function as collective testimony about Indigenous women’s individual and particular experiences of the gendered racialized violence of policing. In this way, the expressive and communicative function of the testimony mobilizes a politics of contestation that calls the state to account and exposes the relationship between gendered racialized violence and racial/human difference in constituting the politics of redress in Canada.
The film functions through what Allen Feldman (2004) describes as “memory theatres,” which can be described as scenes of testimony production where “the production of biographical narrative, life history, oral history, and testimony in the aftermath of ethnocidal, genocidal, colonial, and postcolonial violence occurs within specific structural conditions, cognitive constraints, and institutional norms.”12 I suggest that the films act as a memory theatre for the historical and ongoing violence of settler colonialism. As a representational “memory theatre,” the individual testimonies, visually collated as collective testimony, ultimately offer a “scene of testimony production” that functions “not only as a single testimony, but also an entire archive” (163). These scenes of testimony production exist within a culture of redress and reconciliation that has formed a significant part of Canadian national consciousness in the last twenty years. Arguably, the films function as a visualized human rights inquiry whereby the testimony of the racial legal terror of police violence effectively produces a redress aesthetic that makes a case for calling the state to account.
Together, Indigenous women’s testimony as evidence and truth performed as testimony form a significant feature of the visual aesthetics of the films. Shoshana Felman suggests that through the practice of testimony, testimonial subjects transcend mere narrative or straightforward storytelling. As she explains:
To testify—to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement. As a performative speech act, testimony in effect addresses what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized significance, and what in happenings is impact that dynamically explodes any conceptual reifications and any constantive delimitations. (Felman and Laub 1992, 5)
Testimony thus transcends teleological narrative and, in this particular context, evokes the constitutive dimensions of the racial violence of ongoing settler colonialism and the subject-making practices that make it possible. The women testify to the repeated and sanctioned racial dehumanization experienced through encounters with state officials. In this sense, the films provide a record of their particular experience and of the violent role of authority and power performed through police violence.
The collective testimony presented in these documentaries function as collated experiences of gendered racialized police violence that is transformed into a performed narrative of human rights violations, surveillance, anger, disappearances, and death. I have suggested that these collective testimonies amount to documenting and affirming the legal terror of state-sanctioned police racial violence. In so doing, visualizing testimony in this manner categorically challenges the structure of “truth-telling” that is evident in human rights inquiries or other reparative processes that seek transcendence for the victim of a human rights violation. Visualizing testimony in this way echoes Hargreave’s analysis of the documentary film Finding Dawn which similarly depicts Indigenous women’s first-person storytelling to address the experiences of missing and murdered Indigenous women, their families, and their communities. The power of visualizing testimony “is to position the seemingly disparate stories of missing and murdered women in relation to one another and to the families, communities and territories from which they are missing, foregrounding not only Indigenous women’s shared vulnerability to violence across different material circumstances, but also the politically resistive ways women are actively remembered within and across different familial and community-based networks” (Hargreaves 2015, 84).
The visual representation of collective testimony displaces the individual subject or the victim/survivor that would otherwise be central to the structure of human rights inquiries. Feldman suggests that human rights inquiries often follow a “curative and redress” teleology in which individual experience and biographical narratives are “processed through prescriptive expectations—that is, expected to produce healing, trauma alleviation, justice and collective catharsis” (Feldman 2004, 170). For example, he describes this process as “emplotment” whereby redressive projects are narratively structured through a temporal morality that follows a narrative structure that contains three parts: (1) Identifying racialized gendered violence; (2) Outlining the chronic, sustained, episodic or the aftermath of the violence; (3) Developing a set of recommendations to address the violence. This linearity is meant to culminate in the cathartic break with the past—“establishing the pastness of prior violence, and managing and controlling the conditions and term of its periodic reentry into the present, usually through appropriate commemoration,” Feldman explains (170). The collective testimonies highlighted in the films do not fit easily into a narrative of moral or psycho-social overcoming. The visual testimony produces narratives that are anchored in the individual testimonial subject and significantly, also extend beyond the individual subject in producing an account of the racial gendered violence of settler colonialism. In this regard, the individual subject recounting a human rights violation, suffering or outrage is narratively reconstructed through the visual process of documentary film and invites a consideration of the relational experiences of Indigenous women. In so doing, the individual victim/survivor as archetype in the reparative process, is displaced or split open, giving way to a collective public record of gendered, racial violence in which legal terror is predicated on historical and ongoing racial colonial violence.
Conclusion
There is “unfinished business” between Indigenous women in Val-d’Or and the police (Curtis 2020). The Viens Commission concluded that “systemic racism acts as a barrier between Indigenous people and essential government services,” including police services (Curtis 2020). As noted, Premier François Legault has repeatedly denied that systemic racism exists in government services in Québec (Curtis 2020). My focus in this chapter emphasizes how individual and collective testimonies concerning police violence necessitate a historical consideration of the logic of human and racial difference. Speaking back to state practices and calling the state to account through collective testimony shows how those who contest the racial logics of settler colonialism effectively mobilize to expose racist state violence, and ongoing experiences of gendered racialized violence. Through offering collated narratives that represent an archive of experiences, grievances, and ambivalences, collective testimony is a site of contestation concerning the psychic, social, and affective dimensions of police racial violence. These “residual” narratives cannot be smoothly integrated into “such master narratives as the idea of progress, collective reconciliation, or evolution to human rights equity.”13 In these residual collective testimonies, there is an asymmetry to the racial relations of domination and subjection, historical and ongoing, in which collective testimony into the terror of police racial gendered violence is iterative of human and racial difference. The violence of state officials is the violence of sovereignty in Canada (CBC News 2016c). The culture of redress thus requires racial violence as evidence of the need for the national project of reconciliation.
In response to the two documentary films, 41 police officers in Val-d’Or sued for defamation of character, claiming that the reportage was biased and untruthful and that their reputations were tainted and the community’s trust in the police undermined (Croteau 2016; Lytvynenko 2016). That police in Québec would react in such an adversarial manner should perhaps come as no surprise. Regarding the disappearance of Indigenous women in British Columbia, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2017, 22) concluded that the “police offered a dismissive response to reports of missing Aboriginal women, and failed to prevent, promptly investigate and sanction violence against indigenous women and girls.” The suit brought by the Val-d’Or police officers further indicates that, quite apart from failing to conduct investigations themselves, the police also seek to discredit investigations conducted by others. The dehumanization of Indigenous women as an extension of police practices shapes the material and symbolic conditions of the grammar of racial difference in white settler Canada. The collective testimonies demand a consideration of the historical dimensions of the role of racial gendered violence in settler colonialism.
Notes
1 Racial dehumanization refers to how relations of power and privilege eject certain groups of people from category of human and evokes Frantz Fanon’s writings on racialization. Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, humanist, and revolutionary anti-colonial writer. He used the term “to racialize” when contrasting it with the phrase to humanize, thereby signalling the ways in which processes of racialization eject certain people from the very category of human. Racialized dehumanization is the experience (and experiential knowledge) of this ejection. In this chapter, I use the word racializing to show how it assists processes of domination, oppression, subjugation, violence, and marginalization (Murdocca 2014).
2 Two of Henry’s complaints were made using an online system. One complaint was made in person at the police station in Maniwaki, Québec. The responding officer did not consider her complaint relevant because Henry and her friend voluntarily got into the police cruiser. Despite this response, the complaint was sent to SQ’s internal affairs department in Montréal. The CBC reports that an investigator indicated to Henry that he did not receive her two prior complaints and requested that she submit an additional formal complaint in writing. At the time of the interview, it had taken five years for the SQ to respond to her complaint (CBC Radio-Canada 2016, at 27:35).
3 “Starlight Tours” is an expression used in Canada to describe the police practice of picking up or apprehending Indigenous people and driving them to the outskirts of a town in a remote area where they are invariably beaten up, abandoned, left to die, or are expected to walk back to town.
4 See CBC News 2016a.
5 Henderson and Wakeham use the phrase “‘cultures of redress’ to signal the site for the polyphonic enunciation of diverse perspectives on grief and grievance, wrong and repair, and equity and justice. The term ‘redress’ is frequently invoked by marginalized constituencies in search for justice for grievances, connoting something more than the nebulous conception of a national ‘coming together’ or ‘eliminating of differences,’ often associated with reconciliation, and suggesting, rather, a demand for accountability, compensatory action, and concrete reparations” (Henderson and Wakeham 2013, 9; Torpey 2006).
6 I use the phrase “reparative justice” to describe the broad range of practices of governance, affective associations, and aesthetic expressions distributed across social, political, and legal life in Canada that invoke an attempt to address historical and structural injustices experienced by Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (Murdocca 2013).
7 For example, the “Common Experience Payment” is one element of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (Common Experience Payments). See Government of Canada, “Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement,” https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015576/1571581687074#sect3, accessed 17 November 2022.
8 Critical visual methodology examines how images and the aesthetics of social media reflect social difference, social relations and social and political power (Mirzoeff 2013).
9 This approach examines how images and the aesthetics of social media reflect social difference, social relations and social and political power (Mirzoeff 2011).
10 For example, in 2002 the Native Women’s Association of Canada, Amnesty International Canada, the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada and the United Anglican Church formed the National Coalition for our Stolen Sisters. In 2004, Amnesty International released the significant report “Stolen Sisters” which documents a number of cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. In 2005, funded by the Status of Women Canada, Sisters in Spirit was created to provide research and policy led and developed by Indigenous women to respond to the issues concerning the disappearances and murders of Indigenous women (Stolen Sisters 2004).
11 I borrow the phrase “legal terror” from Colin Dayan who reveals the ritualized making and remaking of legal conditions of civil death (“naturally alive but legally dead”) through legal processes that define and redefine personhood (Dayan 2005, 42–80).
12 In this article, Feldman (2004) suggests that human rights inquiries can be understood as memory theatres since participants testify to the state violence and atrocities the have experienced. The field of memory studies is vast and beyond the scope of this chapter. The interdisciplinary field of memory studies resides with areas of critical concern for social and political life across a number of fields including literary and cultural studies, historical studies, neuroscience, human rights law and legal studies, trauma studies, media studies, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, big data and artificial intelligence.
13 Feldman uses the word “residual” keeping in mind Raymond Williams’s distinction between the residual and the archaic, and their differential relation to what he called the emergent (Feldman 2004).
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