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Murdered and Missing Women: Performing Indigenous Cultural Memory in British Columbia and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2014

Peter Dickinson
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Extract

In ‘“You Are Here’: H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance,” a chapter in The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor locates the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memory relating to Argentina's Dirty War geographically with a map—identifying, for example, where tens of thousands opposed to the country's military dictatorship (one-third of them women) were made to disappear—but she also locates this transfer genealogically and even genetically, in terms of the bodies of surviving relatives who remain as visible evidence (quite literally, through family photographs) of the material existence of their missing parents and children. Like Taylor, I attend to both the physical geography and the embodied genealogy of cultural memory in this article, which is concerned with making connections between the hemispheric traffic in missing and murdered Indigenous women of the Americas. I want to begin by acknowledging some of the sites of individual trauma and various sights of collective protest and witnessing related to this topic.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 202 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2014 

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References

Endnotes

1. Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 161–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Lori Culbert and Neal Hall, “Hunt to Determine If a Serial Killer Is Preying on Females along B.C. Highways,” Vancouver Sun, 12 December 2009, www.vancouversun.com/news/vanished/Hunt+determine+serial+killer+preying+females+along+highways/2332207/story.html, accessed 15 May 2012.

3. Lori Culbert, “Public Inquiry Demanded in Deaths,” Vancouver Sun, 16 December 2009, www.vancouversun.com/news/vanished/Public+inquiry+demanded+deaths+along+highways/2345230/story.html, accessed 15 May 2012.

4. Gladys Radek and Bernie Williams, “Walk4Justice Mission Statement 2011,” Walk4Justice, 30 January 2011, old.fnbc.info/walk-4-justice#Walk_4_Justice_Mission_Statement, accessed 20 June 2012 (reaccessed at new URL, 17 January 2014). The Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) has gathered information on 582 missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls. More than a quarter (28 percent) of all cases come from BC. See NWAC, “Fact Sheet: Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls,” April 2010, www.nwac.ca/sites/default/files/imce/NWAC_3D_Toolkit_e.pdf, accessed 20 June 2012.

5. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 169, 165.

6. Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 61–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Liminality is the term proposed by Victor Turner to distinguish symbolic and instrumental public rituals from the routines of everyday life; see Turner, “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6.4 (1979): 465–99Google Scholar, at 466.

7. See Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

8. See Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Hirsch, Marianne, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and “Gender and Cultural Memory,” ed. Hirsch, Marianne and Smith, Valerie, special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Society 28.1 (2002)Google Scholar. On how the gendered dimensions of cultural memory relate to questions of violence against Native women in Canada, see Cultural Memory Group, Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials across Canada (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2006).Google Scholar

9. While acknowledging that Taylor “is careful to avoid resolidifying a binary opposition between the archive and the repertoire,” Rebecca Schneider has recently suggested that Taylor does not fully explore their “inter(in)animation”; see Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 107–8.Google Scholar

10. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 29, 32, 33.

11. Ibid., 28–33.

12. Ibid., xviii.

13. Ibid., 50.

14. For an account of colonial administrators’ attempts first to regulate and then to stamp out the potlatch ceremony in British Columbia, see Bracken, Christopher, The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar. For a discussion of Delgamuukw and the legal validity of Aboriginal oral storytelling traditions in B.C. and Canada, see McCall, Sophie, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 137–80.Google Scholar

15. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC) emerged out of a multiparty alternative dispute resolution process that culminated in the 2006 signing of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA). Schedule N of IRSSA outlines the terms of the TRCC, which was mandated in 2008 to acknowledge the experiences of survivors of Indian residential schools and to “witness, support, promote and facilitate truth and reconciliation events at both the national and community levels.” See “Our Mandate,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Web site, 2008, www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=7#one, accessed 23 June 2012.

16. For an overview of the case, including the botched police investigation, see Cameron, Stevie, The Pickton File (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007)Google Scholar; and Cameron, Stevie, On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2010).Google Scholar

17. Oppal, Wally T., Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, 6 vols. (Victoria: Province of British Columbia, 2012)Google Scholar, 1:94.

18. Ibid., 95. Human Rights Watch challenges this claim, citing ongoing abuse of Aboriginal women by RCMP officers in northern BC. See Human Rights Watch, “Those Who Take Us Away,” 13 February 2013, www.hrw.org/reports/2013/02/13/those-who-take-us-away, accessed 27 March 2013.

19. Oppal, 3:198, 53.

20. Ibid., 3:128.

21. Vivian Luk, “Missing-Women Advocates Want Action on Pickton Report,” Globe and Mail, 26 November 2013, S6.

22. First introduced by Diana Russell at the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976, the term “femicide” was subsequently defined by Russell and Jill Radford as “the misogynist killing of women by men.” See Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, ed. Radford, Jill and Russell, Diana E. H. (New York: Twayne, 1992)Google Scholar, xi.

23. See, for example, Wallace, Robert, “Writing the Land Alive: The Playwrights’ Vision in English Canada,” in Contemporary Canadian Theatre: New World Visions, ed. Wagner, Anton (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1985), 69–81Google Scholar; Innes, Christopher, Politics and the Playwright: George Ryga (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1985)Google Scholar; and Wasserman, Jerry, “George Ryga,” in Canadian Writers since 1960: Second Series, ed. New, W. H. (Detroit: Gale, 1987), 320–4.Google Scholar

24. See Hoffman, James, The Ecstasy of Resistance: A Biography of George Ryga (Toronto: ECW Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 159. Black was succeeded as Playhouse artistic director by Joy Coghill, who worked closely with Ryga and director George Bloomfield in shepherding Ecstasy to the stage.

25. Quoted in ibid., 166.

26. Ryga, George, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970)Google Scholar, 10. Subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text (labeled ERJ where necessary for clarity).

27. In discussing the dialogue between her own and Taylor's work, Schneider states that whereas Taylor “works to situate the repertoire as another kind of archive,” she fails to emphasize “the twin effort of situating the archive as another kind of performance. To do this, she works to retain the distinguishing notion that posits repertoires as embodied acts of ‘presence’ on the one hand and posits archives as houses for documents and objects that, in their very presence, record a qualitative absence on the other hand.” See Schneider, 108; emphasis in original.

28. See Hoffman, 158.

29. Colin Thomas, “The Ecstasy of Rita Joe,” Georgia Straight, 28 November 2007, www.straight.com/arts/ecstasy-rita-joe, accessed 15 June 2012.

30. Yvette Nolan, e-mail correspondence, 24 June 2012.

31. Among Nolan's “many, complicated” issues with Hinton's Lear was the “seeming amnesia about Death of a Chief,” which the NAC coproduced. As Nolan put it to me, “all the marketing for Lear was about how this was the FIRST ever all-Aboriginal Shakespeare at the NAC.” E-mail correspondence, 8 November 2013. My thanks to the reviewer of this article for encouraging me to contextualize Hinton's “aboriginal mandate” at the NAC more fully.

32. Nolan, 24 June 2012.

33. Ibid.

34. “Guilty Verdict in N.S. Native Activist's Death,” CBC News Online, 10 December 2010, www.cbc.ca/news/world/guilty-verdict-in-n-s-native-activist-s-death-1.893680, accessed 6 December 2013.

35. Nolan, Yvette, Annie Mae's Movement (Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1999)Google Scholar, 4.

36. Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 2.

37. Nolan, 24 June 2012. Unless otherwise noted, references to Nolan hereafter draw on this email.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Clements, Marie, The Unnatural and Accidental Women (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005)Google Scholar, 26. Subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text (labeled UAW where necessary for clarity).

42. Gilbert, Reid, “Marie Clements's The Unnatural and Accidental Women: ‘Denaturalizing’ Genre,” Theatre Research in Canada 24.1–2 (2003): 125–46Google Scholar, at 128. The critical discourse on Clements's play is substantial, though Gilbert is especially sensitive to how its theatrical complexity relates to its memorializing impulses.

43. See Gilbert; and Bamford, Karen, “Romance, Recognition and Revenge in Marie Clements's The Unnatural and Accidental Women,” Theatre Research in Canada 31.2 (2010): 143–63.Google Scholar

44. Peter Birnie, review of The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Vancouver Sun 2 November 2000, final edition, C21.

45. Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, “Have We Ever Been Good?,” in Luna, James and Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed, exh. cat., 4 October–1 December 2002 (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2003), 9–50Google Scholar, at 18.

46. Scott Watson, “Foreword,” in Luna and Townsend-Gault, 7–8.

47. Keith Barker, “Playwright's Statement,” The Hours That Remain, www.thehoursthatremainplaystory.blogspot.ca, accessed 2 February 2014. This script has since been published: Barker, The Hours That Remain (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2013).Google ScholarPubMed

48. Mike McIntyre, Aldo Santin, and Gabrielle Giroday, “Alleged Serial Killer Charged in Deaths of Three Women,” Winnipeg Free Press, 25 June 2012, www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Man-held-in-connection-with-disapperance-killing-of-two-women-160245665.html, accessed 25 June 2012.

49. Yvette Nolan, e-mail correspondence, 25 June 2012.

50. Damien Cave, “Wave of Violence Swallows More Women in Juárez,” New York Times, 23 June 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/world/americas/wave-of-violence-swallows-more-women-in-juarez-mexico.html?pagewanted = all, accessed 23 June 2012.

51. Amnesty International, “Mexico: Justice Fails in Ciudad Juarez and the City of Chihuahua,” Amnesty International, 27 February 2005, www.amnestyusa.org/node/55339, accessed 25 June 2012.

52. See Bordertown, dir. Gregory Nava (2006; Los Angeles: Möbius Entertainment, 2008); and Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).

53. Cave.

54. Bray, R. Scott, “En piel ajena: The Work of Teresa Margolles,” Law Text Culture 11.1 (2007): 13–50, at 17–18.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., 36.

56. Here I am building on J. L. Austin's isolation of the performative utterance “as not, or not merely, saying something but doing something”; Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar, 25.

57. Santino, Jack, “Performative Commemoratives, the Personal, and the Public: Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual, and the Field of Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 117.466 (2004): 363–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 364.

58. For an extensive discussion of the Madres’ activism within the context of “the performance of politics in public spaces and . . . the role of gender in civil conflict,” see Taylor, Diana, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 184.

59. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 51.

60. See, e.g., “The Four Host First Nations,” www.canada2010.gc.ca/invsts/hnationsh/030401-eng.cfm, accessed 24 January 2014.

61. Quoted in Alex Rose, “2010 Aboriginal Pavilion Drew Huge Crowds,” FHFN Web site, 1 March 2010, http://199.243.64.45/2010-aboriginal-pavilion-drew-huge-crowds-symbol-of-pride-and-success-for-aboriginal-peoples-of-canada, accessed 30 November 2013.

62. Ibid.

63. Burnham, Clint, “Late Empire,” in Vancouver Art & Economies, ed. O'Brian, Melanie (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 29–43.Google Scholar

64. Culhane, Dara, “Their Spirits Live within Us: Aboriginal Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver Emerging into Visibility,” American Indian Quarterly 27.3–4 (2003): 593–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 593.

65. On this paradox as it relates specifically to Vancouver's DTES, see ibid., 595.

66. Program for The Road Forward, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, Vancouver, 1 February 2013, 2. (A copy of the full program is available online at http://media.wix.com/ugd/a3cd5c_46f757e8b43dedc8828e322eae0afacb.pdf.)

67. Ibid.