Investigating Mennonite Theology, Martyrdom, and Trauma

The Spectre of Reconciliation: Investigating Mennonite Theology, Martyrdom, and Trauma

Melanie Kampen

A Doctoral Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Emmanuel College and the Graduate Centre for Theological Studies of the Toronto School of Theology. In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theological Studies awarded by Emmanuel College and the University of Toronto.

The Spectre of Reconciliation: Investigating Mennonite Theology, Martyrdom, and Trauma

Melanie Kampen

Doctor of Philosophy in Theological Studies

Emmanuel College and the University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

Mennonites have a strong and well-recognized tradition of being conscientious objectors and pacifists, yet in Canada, white settler Mennonites played an active role in the forceful process of colonization of Indigenous Peoples. During the twentieth century in Canada, Mennonite peace theology defined violence primarily in terms of military service. This allowed Mennonites to work in Indian Residential Schools as an alternative service based on conscientious objection to war.

Moreover, white settler Mennonites viewed their missionary work in Indigenous communities as faithful discipleship to Jesus, sharing the gospel with people they perceived as needing saving. The

Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada has called churches to take specific actions in order to take responsibility for the harms caused by missionary work. These include educating their own churches about their own involvement in Indian Residential Schools.

Although Mennonites in Canada have recently been working on efforts for reconciliation and solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, as a national body, Mennonites have not compiled a comprehensive report on our involvement in Indian Residential Schools in Canada. I submit that reconciliation without truth telling is not only impossible, but also deceitful and disingenuous.

Moreover, a peace theology without attention to the truth of wounds we have caused, rings hollow and exacerbates harm.

In this thesis I highlight some of the critical historical moments and theological concepts that guided and encouraged Mennonites to participate in the cultural genocide of Indigenous

Peoples through Indian Residential Schools. I also argue that unattended trauma among white settler Mennonites is a barrier to empathy with the experiences of trauma perpetrated against

Indigenous Peoples. By analyzing the trauma experienced by white settler Mennonites, especially women, I demonstrate how internalized theo-ethical and social norms such as self-sacrificial obedience and submission contributed to racist and paternalistic views of Indigenous Peoples and that these must be acknowledged and deconstructed. Finally, drawing on the field of trauma theory,

I suggest that reconciliation and healing can begin amidst the deep wound of settler colonialism through a trauma-informed theo-ethics that includes skills for analyzing social power relations, building empathic capacity, and liberating theo-ethical practices.

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Acknowledgments

I acknowledge with respect the lands on which this thesis was written. I began and finished my work at Emmanuel College in the city that Canada calls Toronto. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River.

Most of this thesis, however, was written in the settler city of Winnipeg. This land is the territory of the Cree, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene, and Métis Peoples. It is through violent settler colonialism that I have been able to inhabit this space for the purpose of writing this thesis. Since my identity is rooted in both settlers and refugees, I have tried to create a work that respects the land and the Indigenous Peoples of this land. With this thesis I have tried to hold myself and my white settler Mennonite community accountable to our participation in the harms of settler colonialism in the past, but also in the forms in which it continues to maintain systemic violence that affects Indigenous Peoples and the land today.

It is with deep gratitude that I thank Dr. Marilyn Legge for her guidance throughout my

PhD. It is rare to find such a sharp critical thinker, an encouraging mentor, and an empathic friend in one person and I count myself lucky to have had the opportunity to study with her. She has spent countless hours reading and re-reading every word written here, offering thoughtful suggestions not only on my arguments but also on the spirit of the work. I also thank the other primary members of my thesis committee, Dr. Michael Bourgeois and Dr. Pamela McCarroll for their guidance throughout my comprehensive exams, Dr. Bourgeois for helping me locate myself in twentieth century theology in Canada and the U.S. and for Dr. McCarroll for introducing me to the field of trauma studies and theology. I am immensely thankful to have a thesis committee that

communicates well and works together to support my work. Never have I felt so challenged and encouraged by a committee.

A special thanks also goes to Laureen Harder-Gissing, Mandy Macfie, and Ruth Steinman for their assistance in locating and providing access to archival materials at Mennonite Archives

Ontario, and to Krista McCracken for her help navigating the online archives at Arthur A. Wishart

Library and Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, Algoma University. Additionally, I thank Sue

Eagle, Miriam Sainnawap, and Lyndsay Mollins Koene for their correspondence, sharing their information and their insights into how to go about this thesis in a good way. To my counselors

Saretta, Laura, and Samantha for giving me perspective and skills to cope with anxiety throughout my PhD. I also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the

John W. Billes Fund through Emmanuel College for making it financially feasible for me to complete this thesis in a timely manner.

Finally, I am enormously thankful for my colleagues, friends, and family for their abiding care. Thank you to Hilary Jerome Scarscella, Stephanie Krehbiel, and Jay Yoder for always being there, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, to my colleagues at Emmanuel, especially Emma

Cushmanwood Ceruti and Hyejung Jessie Yum for countless hours of studying together, for your friendship getting through the fun and not so fun parts of a PhD together. And last but certainly not least, to my family, especially my Mom for always believing in me and for teaching me resilience. You are the strongest person I know. To my brother Kevin and sister-in-law Erika for your constant support. I couldn’t wish for better siblings. To Luna and Willow May for providing the therapeutic cuddles and joy that only dogs and babies can. And to Zooey, the person I thought

I would never meet, for your genuine interest in my work, for your patient encouragement during moments of stress and anxiety, and for making sure I take time to play. I love you.

To Zooey and my Mom

Contents

List of Abbreviations ...... ix

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Situating a Spectre: Contextualizing Interlocking Trauma...... 14

On Spectrality ...... 16

Interlocking Trauma ...... 17

Trauma Theory ...... 20

Situated Moral Agency ...... 22

Key Ethical Sources for Trauma-Informed Mennonite Theo-Ethics ...... 27

Chapter 2: The Making of Martyrs: Tracing Mennonite Theo-Ethics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries ...... 32

Mennonite Martyrs and Theo-Ethics ...... 33

Martyrdom as Theodicy ...... 39

From Nonconformity to Prophetic Witness ...... 45

Historical Context of Church-State Relations ...... 47

Investments in Martyrdom ...... 52

The Figure of the Martyr as Discipleship Ethics ...... 58

Victims, Martyrs, or Moral Agents? ...... 61

Conclusion ...... 67

Chapter 3: Can I Get a Witness? Mennonite Women’s Lived Experiences of Violence and Trauma ...... 69

Can I Get a Witness? ...... 71

Trauma Theory: Reframing Suffering and Memory ...... 79

Theology and Power: Feminist and Womanist Critiques ...... 84

Interruption: Why John Howard Yoder’s Theology and Ethics ...... 85

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Back to Theology and Power: Feminist and Womanist Critiques ...... 88

Interlocking Trauma as the Violence of Unattended Trauma ...... 97

Chapter 4: Ghost Stories: Mennonite Participation in the Trauma of Indigenous Peoples in Canada ...... 104

Seeing Ghosts in the Archive ...... 109

Northern Lights Gospel Mission in Northwestern Ontario ...... 111

Documentary Photographs: Dialectics of Truth and Reality ...... 118

Case Study: Poplar Hill Residential School Photographic “Truth”, Bio-Power, and the Production of Colonized Subjects ...... 123

Poplar Hill Yearbooks and the Maintenance of Mennonite Identity ...... 128

Haunted by Martyrdom: Melancholia and Settler Colonial Desire ...... 132

Photographic Affectivity and the Spectre of Reconciliation ...... 135

Conclusion: Mennonites and Canada’s Peacemaker Myth ...... 138

Chapter 5: Are You Willing to Live for Your Faith? Towards Trauma-Informed Theo-Ethical Practice ...... 143

Trauma Theory, Ecclesiology, and Theology ...... 145

Power and Trauma-Informed Theology ...... 151

Trauma-Informed Practice and Theo-Ethics Mapping Social Power in Psychology ...... 153

Mapping Social Power in White Settler Mennonite Communities ...... 158

Building Empathic Capacity among White Settler Mennonites ...... 160

Liberating White Settler Mennonite Theo-Ethics ...... 166

Conclusion ...... 171

Bibliography ...... 177

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List of Abbreviations

AFH Aboriginal Healing Foundation

CO Conscientious Objector

CPT Christian Peacemaker Teams

IRS Indian Residential Schools

IRSSA Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement

LGBTQ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer

MCC Mennonite Central Committee

MCCan Mennonite Church Canada

MDS Mennonite Disaster Service

NCTR National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation

RCAP Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission (of Canada)

UNDRIP United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Introduction

They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. —Jeremiah 6:14 (NRSV)

Mennonites have a strong and well-recognized tradition of being conscientious objectors

(CO) and pacifists, yet in Canada, white settler Mennonites played an active role in the forceful process of Indigenous colonization. Claims to CO status during the Second World War were justified through narratives of nonresistance and an ecclesiology of discipleship—following Jesus in his nonresistance.1 These Mennonites defined violence primarily in terms of military service and consequently, despite their status as a historic peace church, many COs and missionaries taught in and operated Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada as alternative service. The violence and ongoing trauma of the residential school system is well documented, first by the

Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in 1991, and then more comprehensively by the five year Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which published its final report and

Calls to Action in 2015.

The church denominations that operated IRS were Catholic, Anglican, Methodist,

Presbyterian, United, Baptist, and “a Mennonite ministry operated three schools in northwestern

1 Key texts for Mennonite theology at the time were a) the 1527 Schleitheim Confession (central for Swiss Anabaptists), which emphasized believer’s baptism, the ban, the commemorative function of the Last Supper, separation from the evil that is the world, the role of pastors in the church, pacifism and nonresistance because one should deny oneself and take up the cross like Christ did, and refusal to swear oaths, b) the writings of Menno Simons (1496-1561), (central for Dutch Anabaptists) which emphasized a faith manifested in works of love which included care for the sick and poor and love for enemies, c) the Dordrecht Confession of 1632 (central for Dutch Anabaptists - the stream which later moved to Ukraine and Russia and then to Canada in the 1870s and 1920s) which also includes the refusal to take up the sword, citing the prohibition by Jesus and the prophetic command to beat swords into ploughshares, especially Matthew 5:39, 44; Romans 12:14; 1 Peter 3:9; Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3; Zechariah 9:8, 9., to pray for one's enemies Romans 12:19, 20., and to do unto others as one would have others do unto themselves, Corinthians 4:2; Matthew 7:12, and d) the 1921 Mennonite Church produced Christian Fundamentals, which also prohibits participation in war. For further analysis of these see Karl Koop, Anabaptist- Mennonite Confessions of Faith: The Development of a Tradition (Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2003).

Ontario in the 1970s and 1980s.”2 Poplar Hill Residential School was in operation from 1962 until

1989.3 The TRC Final Report states that “Schools run by the Mennonite or Anabaptist community of churches were added to the Settlement Agreement after it came into force.”4 The TRC Final

Report includes a statement signed by the Evangelical Mennonite Conference, Brethren in Christ

Canada, Mennonite Church Canada, Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, and

Mennonite Central Committee Canada.5 Despite the TRC’s five year program, Mennonite organizations in Canada have not submitted a comprehensive report of their involvement in the

IRS to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). This is in part because the aforementioned conferences themselves did not operate Indian Residential Schools and in part because the three Residential Schools in Ontario were operated by Mennonite missionaries from the United States. Mennonites from Canada and the U.S. operated and funded three Indian

Residential Schools in northwestern Ontario (Poplar Hill, Stirland Lake, and Crystal Lake), two

Day Schools in Manitoba (Pauingassi and Bloodvein), and Montreal Lake Children’s Home in

Timber Bay, Saskatchewan.

There are significant historical differences between the white settler Mennonites in Canada and those who came from the U.S. for missionary purposes; however, in this thesis I address white settler Mennonites collectively for specific methodological purposes. My discussion of “white

2 Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, 56. http://www.trc.ca/ websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Honouring_the_Truth_Reconciling_for_the_Future_July_23_2015.pdf

3 Honouring the Truth, 359.

4 Ibid., 378.

5 Ibid., 393-395.

settler Mennonites” must not be understood as the reification of diverse peoples, but as a way of recognizing that all settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. are involved in social relations of power. In 2010 Mennonite Church Canada resolved to acknowledge “that destructive individual attitudes, such as paternalism, racism, and superiority are still present among us, [and that] we as

Mennonite Church Canada congregations and as individuals will seek renewed opportunities to walk with Aboriginal people of Canada, opening our hearts, minds, and ears to engage the pain resulting from the legacy of the Residential Schools.”6 All white settler Mennonites are complicit in the racism and paternalism perpetuated by settler colonialism in Canada and that when these forms of oppression are linked with certain theological commitments and socio-ethical practices, forms of violence within Mennonite communities themselves and in relation to Indigenous Peoples go largely unchallenged. This thesis is specifically a theological work that engages critical theories and theological ethics, not a historical one, and it is my methodology that accounts for my decision not to discuss historical differences between various white settler Mennonite groups.7 Indeed, as

Edith von Gunten, former co-director of Native Ministries at Mennonite Church Canada, has noted, while Mennonite Church Canada did not operate Indian Residential Schools, “[i]n the eyes of the general public, ‘a Mennonite is a Mennonite’ and there are no distinctions between geographical locations or denominational affiliation.”8

6 Resolution from Christian Witness Council quoted in Deborah Froese, “Sharing the pain of the Indian Residential School Legacy,” Mennonite Church Canada, accessed 19 March 2019. http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/news/releases/2010/07/Release14.htm

7 Methodologically I employ “white settler Mennonite” in a similar way that feminist scholarship employs the social category of “men” to talk about forms of violence related specifically to forms of power constructed through gender and men, or the way that critical race theory employs the category of “white people” to talk about forms of violence related specifically to forms of power constructed through race and whiteness.

8 Froese, “Sharing the pain of the Indian Residential School Legacy.”

Within the extant scholarly work on Mennonite settler relations with Indigenous Peoples there are a plethora of historical and literary approaches that do not fit the scope of this thesis.9 Less consideration has been given to the theological commitments and socio-ethical norms of settler

Mennonites with Indigenous Peoples, especially the common tradition of martyrdom and the virtues of submission and self-sacrifice which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3.

It is apparent that some materials have been submitted to the NCTR, since a few digitized yearbooks and administrative documents are available online, however, most of the pertinent documentation is fragmented, dispersed across archives, and ineffectively catalogued. Although a few Mennonite history books, journals, and national church publications have featured articles with information about both the Day Schools and Indian Residential Schools, in my experience this fragmentation has not effectively addressed the high level of ignorance among Mennonite constituents about their involvement in the cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

9 I do not have the capacity to provide a comprehensive report of Mennonite missionary work among Indigenous Peoples in Canada in this thesis, though this research is greatly needed, specifically in response to the TRC’s Call to Actions 59 and 60. The time and resources required to compile such a report would be enormous, and would require both the moral and financial support of Mennonite institutions (churches, social services, conferences, and schools), who hold more power and resources than any individual researcher. I have chosen to focus primarily on Poplar Hill residential school in this dissertation because it is included in the TRC Settlement Agreement. Additionally, a significant lacuna in the national truth telling process is lack of attention to missionary work in Indigenous communities that did not employ any form of formal education. I suggest that the harms of settler colonial Christianity on Indigenous communities reach well beyond the overt violence of residential and day schools and that when churches fail to attend to this aspect of cultural genocide, they fail to be accountable for it. Many churches have issued heartfelt apologies for their residential schools, but I argue that until churches recognize the harmful aspects of their theologies and missionary work, and begin to transform these in light of settler colonial violence, efforts at reconciliation will remain superficial, short-sighted, and continue to ensure settler futurity. For historical approaches to various forms of Mennonite participation in settler colonialism and Mennonite attitudes towards Indigenous Peoples in Canada see Alvina Block, “Changing Attitudes: Relations of Mennonite Missionaries with Native North Americans 1880-2004,” PhD Dissertation, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, 2006; Joseph R. Wiebe, “Mennonite Environmental History, Canadian Colonialism, and Settlement in Manitoba,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 35 (2017): 111–126; Donovan Giesbrecht, “Métis, Mennonites and the ‘Unsettled Prairie,’ 1874–1896,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 19 (2001): 103–111; Maria Campbell, “Kookoom Mariah and The Mennonite Mrs.” Journal of Mennonite Studies 19 (2001): 9–12. For literary approaches to settler Mennonite and Indigenous relations in Canada see Di Brandt, So this is the world & hear I am in it (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2007); Sandra Birdsell, The Russländer (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002) and Children of the Day (Toronto:Vintage Canada, 2006); Katherena Vermette, North End Love Songs (Winnipeg: The Muses’ Company, 2012) and River Woman (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2018); Rudy Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1962).

Given this post-TRC era and its recent 94 Calls to Action, some of which are addressed specifically to churches, it is auspicious to ask, what was Mennonite involvement in this process of assimilation? My research, therefore, is situated particularly in the context of these Calls to

Action:

59. We call upon church parties to the Settlement Agreement to develop ongoing education strategies to ensure that their respective congregations learn about their church’s role in colonization, the history and legacy of residential schools, and why apologies to former residential school students, their families, and communities were necessary.

60. We call upon leaders of the church parties to the Settlement Agreement and all other faiths, in collaboration with Indigenous spiritual leaders, Survivors, schools of theology, seminaries, and other religious training centres, to develop and teach curriculum for all student clergy, and all clergy and staff who work in Aboriginal communities, on the need to respect Indigenous spirituality in its own right, the history and legacy of residential schools and the roles of the church parties in that system, the history and legacy of religious conflict in Aboriginal families and communities, and the responsibility that churches have to mitigate such conflicts and prevent spiritual violence. 10

Given historical and current Mennonite commitments to seek peace and reconciliation, knowledge of our involvement in Indian Residential Schools is crucial for responding to these Calls to Action.

In order to be consistent with its theological claims and thus to discern how to seek right relations with Indigenous Peoples, knowledge of Mennonite history and theology during this time period is critical for changing Mennonite self-perception and consequent action.

It should be emphasized at the outset that the link I draw in this thesis between white

Mennonite settlers from Soviet Russia and settler Mennonites operating Poplar Hill Residential

School is not a historical, causal, or sequential argument but a connection of theological imagination. Employing a theological framework and not a historical one for my thesis, I draw primarily on sources of experience (especially of Mennonite women), tradition (dominant

10 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2012), 7. https://nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf

theological and social narratives and norms among settler Mennonites as defined and implemented by men), and theological imagination. The notion of theological imagination is key in understanding the linkage between Soviet Mennonite settlers in Manitoba and Swiss Mennonites in Ontario; that is, despite their otherwise divergent theological and socio-ethical practices, both groups are linked by a theo-ethical commitment to martyrdom, the violence of which remains unattended to in historical approaches to settler Mennonite relations with Indigenous Peoples. I explain how European patriarchal gender roles and gendered theo-ethics are practiced by both

Mennonite communities. Specifically, my discussion of martyrdom as the paragon of faithfulness accounts for the ways in which Mennonite theological virtues of self-sacrifice and submission along with misogyny permits violence against Mennonite women and actively silences them, while the same theological virtues along with racism permit violence against Indigenous Peoples and actively silence the survivors of Residential and Day schools. I recognize misogyny and racism as constituent elements of dominant white settler theologies, to which Mennonites are no exception.

Finally, to be clear, when I use “we,” “us,” or “our,” I am referring to white settler Mennonites.

When I began my search for archival documents on Poplar Hill, Crystal Lake, and Stirland

Lake Residential Schools, I contacted Miriam Sainnawap, the Indigenous Neighbours coordinator for Mennonite Central Committee at the time. Together we visited the Mennonite Archives of

Ontario. After this initial research, Sainnawap decided to continue her involvement at a distance, suggesting the more direct support of Sue Eagle (former Indigenous Neighbours coordinator at

MCC) and Lyndsay Mollins Koene (Indigenous Neighbours program coordinator at MCC

Ontario). Eagle and Mollins Koene provided important information about Mennonite involvement in residential and day schools in Canada, as well as guidance on how to go about my work in a good way. In this thesis I focus on white settler Mennonite theology and trauma in an attempt to

dismantle barriers to create possibilities for openness and truth-telling. Additionally, my correspondence with Eagle and Mollins Koene showed me that because of my lack of relationship with the communities in which the Residential Schools were operated I was not in a position to engage the experiences of IRS survivors and other community members in a good way. Instead, considering my knowledge both as an insider and outsider, about the complex ways in which theology and power work in Mennonite communities, my position in my social location would be better used to hold my own faith community to account by encouraging self-reflexivity about our theological commitments and theo-ethical practices, and use the trauma and violence in our own communities as an imperative starting point for acknowledging and understanding the complexity of our complicity in the violence of settler colonialism through missionary work in Indian

Residential Schools, as a response to the TRC Calls to Action.

Because I was raised in a Mennonite community in Winnipeg, in Treaty 1 Territory11, the traditional land of the Ojibway, Cree, and Métis Nations, and worked at a summer family camp in a First Nations community where Mennonites had run a Day School, I have personal interest and experience that informs my research. I have chosen to focus on Mennonite written materials in their various genres for this thesis, while other scholars such as Elaine Enns have done some exceptional qualitative, ethnographic research.12 I will focus primarily on Mennonite trauma, history, identity, and theology, in an effort to take seriously Enns’s claim that Mennonites must

11 An agreement made in 1871 between the Canadian Government and the Anishnaabe and Swampy Cree Nations. In contrast with the common phrase championed in Canada that “we are all treaty people,” not all Indigenous nations on Turtle Island signed treaties with the Crown. As such, settlers on unceded land, for example, are not treaty people.

12 Elaine Enns, “Facing History with Courage: Toward Restorative Solidarity,” (PhD diss. St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon, 2015).

attend to the trauma and privilege in their own communities before meaningful and accountable efforts at truth telling, empathic listening, solidarity, justice, and reconciliation can take place.

The lack of narrated or acknowledged connection between Mennonite settlement and settler colonialism has informed the key questions guiding my research: What particular aspects of Mennonite identity and theology made this contradiction of its historical commitment to nonviolence and yet its complicity in cultural genocide possible? And, how might Mennonite beliefs and practices be transformed by acknowledgement of this complicity? These deep tensions within and between historical-cultural understandings and theological narratives give rise to tensions in contemporary Mennonite ideas, identity, and practices. Therefore, this thesis will first, trace the origins of the tensions between pacifism and violence in dominant Mennonite thought; second, discuss key conditions, especially of historically experienced trauma, that contributed to

Mennonite participation in the colonial project of assimilation; and third, construct a more responsible moral vision and outline a set of concerted actions for future relations.

I have chosen not to use Indigenous methodologies for my thesis in order to focus on re- creating consciousness among white settler Mennonites about their own trauma and how neglecting this has contributed to a negative attitude towards the traumatic experiences of

Indigenous Peoples and providing skills for self-reflexivity, empathy building, and power analysis in order to foster openness and a spirit of truth-telling about ourselves and our complicity in the violence of settler colonialism. My experience has shown me that while groups of white settler

Mennonites are working to respond to the TRC Calls to Action as well as the responsibilities outlined in the UNDRIP, many Mennonites are still ignorant of the operation of Indian Residential and Day Schools in Canada by people who identify with their same faith community, i.e., other white settler Mennonites. This has informed the direction of my thesis immensely. Bringing Elaine

Enns’ argument to the forefront, that trauma among Mennonites is a barrier to empathy with the suffering of Indigenous Peoples, I have chosen to focus on the unattended trauma among white settler Mennonites, specifically women, and to analyze the link between the theo-ethical practices that justified and silenced Mennonite women’s experiences of sexual violence and how the same theo-ethical practices justified and silenced Indigenous People’s experiences of violence. In other words, I focus on Mennonite theology and trauma to encourage honest, vulnerable, self-reflexivity among white settler Mennonites with the hope that attending to Mennonite trauma in this way and deconstructing oppressive theological virtues and social norms, will enable white settler

Mennonites to inhabit a posture of listening and openness towards the suffering of Indigenous

Peoples and our own complicity in it towards truth-telling, accountability, and healing work. A next step would be to employ Indigenous methodologies to learn more about the experiences of

Indigenous Peoples in the residential and day schools that Mennonites operated, as well the experiences of Indigenous Peoples in the communities in which Mennonites of all stripes served as missionaries, i.e., as custodians of settler colonialism. Such ongoing work would require deep engagement with Indigenous methodologies, language learning, community consultation and partnership, and a posture characterized by treaty relationship rather than researcher.13

13 For key sources on Indigenous research methods and critical analysis of settler research on Indigenous Peoples see Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2009; Renee Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing), 2014; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples 2nd ed. (New York: Zed Books), 2012; Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing), 2008; Gregory Younging, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike Degagné. Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation), 2010; Andrea Smith, “Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity,” in Theorizing Native Studies, pp. 207-234, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham: Duke University Press), 2014.

In chapter 1 I will introduce the topic of my research, my key questions, and the impetus behind them, and convey the necessity of this work both specifically for Mennonites in Canada.

More broadly I will also situate myself at the intersection of Mennonite theology and critical social theories concerning various forms of violence, their historical causes of suffering (sources of oppression such as colonialism, sexism, and racism), the impact of moral agents (including churches), and sources of hope for change and healing. This chapter will outline my methodology, focusing on critical social theories, trauma theory, and spectrality. Using these analytical tools I will approach the interlocking nature of historical-social relations of domination and subordination that produced trauma. I will highlight core concepts, and define key terms that I will use throughout my dissertation. Finally, I will situate my project as a response to the TRC’s Calls to

Action, specifically calls 59 and 60.

In chapter 2 I will sketch a historical overview of the development of white settler

Mennonite peace theology and practices of nonviolence since their arrival in Canada. I will focus on key axioms such as Nachfolge Christi, Gelassenheit, martyrdom, victimhood, pacifism, and nonconformity, as well as communal moral norms such as obedience, submission, and humility, sources of authority, and moral vision. By contextualizing these axioms, I will relay the history in which they developed and their contentious relationship to Mennonite experiences of trauma. A significant element of this chapter will be to demonstrate the centrality of martyrdom in Mennonite theology, ethics, and identity, and how Mennonite identity, memory, history, moral norms, and its theology served as attempts to cope with the effects of deep suffering and trauma on one hand, and also worked together to silence women’s experiences and erase Indigenous Peoples. This will serve as the foundation for the feminist and decolonizing critiques in following chapters.

Chapter 3 will focus on the recorded experiences of Mennonite women who immigrated from Russia and Ukraine to Canada between 1870 and 1996. I will draw on the work of Mennonite women scholars to discuss the prevalence of violence (especially sexual violence) against women both by Russian soldiers in Russia and Ukraine as well as Mennonite men in Canada. Then I will draw on trauma theory to analyze and understand the impact of sexual violence on Mennonite women and their children. By considering the experiences of sexual violence in tandem with feminist critiques of dominant Mennonite theology, I will demonstrate that theology and ethics are not neutral to questions of social relations of power and that there are patriarchal, misogynist, sexist, and racist elements of Mennonite theology that continue to perpetuate cycles of violence against women and Indigenous Peoples.

In chapter 4 I will examine what Jamila Ghaddar has called “The Spectre in the Archive,” the presences and absences of archival materials as related to the preservation of settler futurity.

This research aims to contextualize Mennonite involvement in the three Ontario Residential

Schools, two Day Schools in Manitoba, and the Children’s Home. I will analyze yearbooks, administrative documents, and mission society reports. Then, combining analytical tools from spectrality and post-structuralism (i.e. Foucault’s bio-power14), I will demonstrate how specific aspects of dominant Mennonite theology along with social-cultural norms contributed to the cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the ongoing effects of trauma today.

In chapter 5 I will challenge the master narrative of martyrdom in dominant Mennonite theology and identity. Drawing on my correspondence with Mennonite theologian Susanne

14 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976 (2003) and Ellen Armour, Signs & Wonders: Theology After Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

Guenther Loewen, instead of asking if one is willing to die for their faith, the question is turned on its head, asking instead if one is willing to live for their faith.15 This is a direct challenge to the primacy of a Mennonite deontological ethics of discipleship. As I will demonstrate in chapters 3 and 4, the norm of faithfulness of self-sacrificing obedience and submission has been a source of trauma for Mennonite women. These theo-ethical norms were internalized by many white settler

Mennonite women and perpetuated through cycles of violence due to unattended trauma. Then, in turn, self-sacrifice and obedience were imported to Indigenous Peoples exacerbating the violence of settler colonialism perpetrated through missionary work in Indigenous communities. I argue that the two main reasons for these harmful consequences are a lack of power analysis in dominant

Mennonite theology and ecclesiology along with a lack of empathy due to unattended to trauma.

Building on Elaine Enns’ claim that trauma healing among Mennonites opens for a more empathic posture towards Indigenous trauma, I will argue for the importance of practices of trauma healing in the development of both responsible moral vision and moral agency for Mennonites today.

However, while trauma theory has proven helpful for understanding certain phenomena of repression, dissociation, and intergenerational harm, I have found the solutions for healing and hope presented by most trauma theologians wanting. Therefore, this chapter will outline some of the limitations of trauma theology’s constructive suggestions for healing and recovery. Drawing on the work of Teresa Hagan and David Smail, Shelly Rambo, Elaine Enns, and Michelle Walsh,

I will construct a framework for contextual trauma-informed theology and communal practices.

This approach will focus on developing power-mapping skills, building empathic capacity by attending to Mennonite trauma in talking circles and “embodied material play,” as well as charting

15 Miriam Toews, Irma Voth (Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 251.

some of the social, ethical, and theological sources and norms that would aid in the development of trauma-informed theo-ethics, based not on a notion not of being willing to die, but as the

Mennonite victim-survivors did, being willing to live.

Chapter 1

Situating a Spectre:

Contextualizing Interlocking Trauma

Invisible things are not necessarily not there. —Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature”

I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours? —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

There was something else in the room with us. That was the feeling I had walking through the Mohawk Institute Residential School in the Haudenosaunee territory that Canada refers to as

Brantford, Ontario. I had the same feeling again as I was looking through archives of yearbooks from the Mennonite operated Poplar Hill Development School—a feeling that there is more than meets the eye. This feeling is the feeling of being haunted.1 As a first generation white Mennonite settler, I am haunted by the involvement of my people in the destructive and violent eradication and assimilation of the Indigenous Peoples of the land we settled on. For years, as the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission unfolded in Canada, I was told by Mennonite church leaders that we did not run any Residential Schools, that while we settled on stolen land, we were ignorant of the dispossession that had made this possible, and that our involvement was not nearly as bad as that of other churches. I tried to believe them, yet something did not feel right. I was still haunted by a legacy that my community was presumably not involved in. I could not believe, given the vastness

1 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Originally Published in 1997.

of cultural genocide in Canada, that Mennonites were innocent.2 Thus the methodology for my thesis begins with my critical awareness and exploration of situated experience and social location both individually and collectively as a white settler Mennonite in the context of the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Canada.3

However, my keen interest in Mennonite involvement in the cultural genocide of

Indigenous Peoples4 on Turtle Island did not just begin with a feeling—though I value intuition and emotional intelligence as legitimate forms of knowledge. It also began with a hermeneutic of suspicion cultivated through feminist theory and theology, and critical social theory, i.e., the knowledge that things are not always what they seem, that narratives are invested in securing specific identities, relations, and futures, that there is something at stake in every discourse, and that history is written by the victors.5 As Toni Morrison wrote, “[i]nvisible things are not necessarily not there.”6 I carry this insight forward at the heart of this thesis.

2 See the notion of presumed innocence in Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack, “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women” The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice (1998): 335- 352.

3 Manitoba, where I was born and raised, is known as Manitou-Ahbee in Ojibway and Manitoh-bah in Cree. Roughly translated to English meaning “where the creator sits” or “where the spirit lives.” Conversation with Cree elder and former moderator of the United Church of Canada, The Very Reverend Stanley McKay.

4 I capitalize “Indigenous Peoples” in accountability to a conversation I had with Wendy Peterson and in accordance with the other faculty of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies (NAIITS) who are promoting this capitalization as recognition of Indigenous Peoples as nations.

5 E.g. see Handbook of U.S. Theologies of Liberation, ed. Miguel A. De La Torre (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004).

6 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 1 (1989): 1-34.

On Spectrality

In her provocative book on haunting and the social imagination, Avery Gordon writes that

“haunting describes how that which appears to not be there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities.”7 This feeling of haunting led me to look for more information to figure out what is “in the room with us” that makes me feel uneasy every time

Mennonites talk about “truth and reconciliation” and “settler-Indigenous relations.” In many ways my research has been one of following ghosts: tracking thin threads, footnotes, and secondhand conversations, and leafing through pages of archives attempting to decipher traces of truth between the dense lines of church documents and correspondence filled with respectability politics and administrative jargon. How does one situate a spectre of colonialism in the din of “settler futurity”?8 As Gordon explains:

Following ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future.9

My research questions are situated in this context of the production of memory, narrative, identity, and historically constructed social relations. The frameworks of haunting and spectrality are especially helpful in this effort because they provide a way to speak about voices and experiences that have been silenced in Mennonite discourses, but which continue to function in the dominant narrative, questioning and challenging its legitimacy, and its truth claims.

7 Gordon, 8.

8 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 1-40.

9 Gordon, 22.

Spectrality and ghosts are also more familiar to Christianity and theology than one might initially think. While often relegated to the realm of superstition or evil throughout Christian history, haunting and the appearance of ghosts occur at the center of the life of Jesus, and especially as recorded in the Gospel of John. Christianity turns upon the traumatic event which haunts the disciples—the crucifixion of Jesus. Indeed, the third person of the trinity is called a Holy Ghost in

English, the language used by Mennonite missionaries in Indigenous communities. Theologian

Mayra Rivera suggests that the Holy Ghost attunes us (Christians) to voices that have been silenced or disappeared, to those that continue to haunt communities and compels us to bear witness to these voices.

Witness is a term of great significance in Mennonite theo-ethics (which I will turn to in Ch.

2). With Rivera, I hope that “[a]s we conjure dreams of planetary love and justice, the Holy Ghost might become a theological figure of that relationship with the past that embraces in humility memory’s irreducible uncertainties.”10 It is in this sense that haunting and our deep engagement with the past, revealed by the temporal disjuncture of trauma, is a helpful framework with which to examine the complex cycles of violence that include white settler Mennonite experiences of trauma and victimization as well as our perpetration of violence and trauma against Indigenous

Peoples.

Interlocking Trauma

As I have suggested above, Mennonite experiences of trauma and Indigenous experiences of trauma, are linked by settler colonialism and its consequential use of cultural genocide in

10 Mayra Rivera Rivera, “Ghostly Encounters: Spirits, Memory, and the Holy Ghost,” in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 135; my emphasis.

Canada. Understanding this historical link of the former producing the latter is crucial to understanding Mennonite identity, practices, theological commitments, and attitudes towards

Indigenous Peoples today. By situating Mennonites at the intersection of migration, settler colonialism, and trauma, possibilities for truth telling, decolonization, transformation, accountability, and hope for reconciliation can emerge. The notion of intersectionality used by critical social theorists is instructive for this analysis. I will draw on the work of Rita Kaur

Dhamoon to elucidate this methodological approach and its import for my work.

Rita Kaur Dhamoon is a Sikh political scientist addressing the homogenous climate of

Canadian scholarship. One of Dhamoon’s aims is to promote intersectional approaches to research across disciplines in the humanities. She not only claims that the dominant paradigms and tools for critical analysis are too rigid, because of their reliance on western categories of classification, but that the use of intersectionality itself as an alternative must be seen as multifarious and multimodal. Following the work of Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, Dhamoon uses the general definition of intersectionality as “the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, [ecological,] subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts.”11 The language of intersectionality dates back to the 1980s and was coined by American critical race scholar

Kimberlé Crenshaw, who “used the metaphor of intersecting roads to describe and explain the ways in which racial and gender discrimination compounded each other.”12

11 Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality,” Journal of International Woman’s Studies 3.2 (2004): 64 quoted in Rita Kaur Dhamoon, “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality,” Political Research Quarterly 64.1 (2011): 231.

12 Dhamoon, “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality,” 231. See also Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics (University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989), 139-67 and Kimberlé Crenshaw,

In her article “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality,” Dhamoon provides an overview of different intersectional approaches. By analyzing the emphases of different scholars, she provides a helpful consideration of their respective contributions and shortcomings. In doing so, Dhamoon demonstrates the necessary multiplicity of intersectionality. In addition to intersectionality, she includes a related term and metaphor of “interlocking.” Dhamoon cites critical race scholar Sherene Razack: “Interlocking systems need one another, and in tracing the complex ways in which they secure one another, we learn how women are produced into positions that exist symbolically but hierarchically.”13 The notion of interlocking highlights the co- constitutive nature of social relations of oppressions, of privilege and penalty. Intersectionality then does not name a single, generalizable, or universally applicable methodology; rather, intersectionality entails a multiplicity of approaches in consideration of a variety of factors contingent on the eco-social particularity of the historical context under analysis.

Therefore, I chose to employ multiple terms in this thesis in order to highlight different aspects under analysis. I use the term “intersectional” or “intersectionality” to name the point at which two or more systems meet and affect each other, often compounding oppression and privilege. I use the term “interlocking” to suggest that systems are never neutral to questions of power and that power is compounded in interconnectivity between systems. I argue with Michel

Foucault that “power is immanent in the sphere in which it operates.”14 I also use the term

“interlocking oppression” or “interlocking trauma” to refer to the effects and experiences of

“Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of colour,” in The public nature of private violence, eds. M. A. Fineman and R. Mykitiul (New York: Routledge, 1994), 93-120.

13 Sherene Razack, Looking white people in the eye: Gender, race, and culture in courtrooms and classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 13 quoted in Dhamoon, 231-232.

14 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 92.

specific interactive systems. That is, interlocking trauma emerges at the impact site of interlocking oppressions. Similarly to Razack’s claim that interlocking oppressions compound one another, I argue that interlocking traumas compound one another. One effect of this is that victims of one trauma can become perpetrators of another trauma in a cycle of violence. It is at this point that trauma theories that track relational, experiential, lived-world suffering caused by social relations and critical social theories that focus on sources and causes of harm, injustice, and suffering, begin to intersect.

Trauma Theory

The well-documented and official stories of Mennonites in Canada are missing the voices of many—specifically the voices of Mennonite women and the voices of Indigenous Peoples.

Here, at this crossing of the interlocking oppressions of sexism, racism, and colonialism, is where

I locate my research. A key element that haunts both Mennonites and Indigenous Peoples, albeit differently, is intergenerational trauma. Indeed, it is in large part because of the contributions of

Indigenous trauma healing traditions to the understanding of trauma, especially in the fields of psychology and social work, that my work on intergenerational trauma among Mennonites is possible.15 Therefore, I acknowledge the experiences and deep work of Indigenous elders, therapists, social workers, psychologists, and especially IRS survivors and their families in relation to trauma and healing. However, because of my own social location as a white settler Mennonite of German-Russian ancestry in Manitoba, my focus and accountability is on Mennonite trauma and the disjuncture between our theology and our role in the trauma of Indigenous Peoples.

15 See especially the culmination of work in Renee Linklater, Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing), 2014.

Despite identifying strongly as victims, white settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S., however, do not generally think of themselves as traumatized. Growing up Mennonite, I heard many stories about the trek out of Russia and Ukraine during the 1920s through 1940s. Most of my relatives on my father’s side of the family fled in the 1940s from Ukraine to Paraguay and then eventually made their way to Canada. My father did not speak of this experience as traumatic. But the stories he told entailed poverty, illness and death, orphaned family members, disappearance of family members, experiences in prisoner of war camps, and emotional abuse within families.

Similarly, the people who attended the church in Winnipeg where I grew up often shared their experiences of suffering as refugees. As a result, I came to understand Mennonites as victims of various persecutions and suffering since their origins as Anabaptists in the sixteenth century.

I aim to understand both the ongoing effects of trauma in my own Mennonite community and how this influenced Mennonite involvement in cultural genocide historically and continues to perpetuate racism towards Indigenous Peoples. Therefore, trauma theory is a key hermeneutical tool in my dissertation. In her research on Mennonites and colonialism in Saskatchewan,

Mennonite scholar and activist Elaine Enns has astutely observed that Mennonites have not attended to their own trauma and its intergenerational effects. She suggests that until Mennonites do so they will not have the capacity to engage in meaningful, genuine, and transformative efforts of truth and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on trauma theory and qualitative ethnographic research among Mennonites in Saskatchewan, Enns argues that trauma unattended stifles the capacity for empathy and a recognition of another’s suffering, in this case, that of

Mennonites’ Indigenous neighbours.16 Trauma theory offers concepts such as repression and

16 Elaine Enns, “Facing History with Courage.”

dissociation in order to understand the long term effects of violence against Mennonite women.17

The neurobiological contributions to trauma theory also help account for the intergenerational effects of trauma in Mennonite communities in Canada, by demonstrating the somatic imprint of trauma and its genetic transference to progeny.18 Additionally, by looking at cycles of violence, trauma theory helps me to situate the experiences of Mennonite women both as victims and survivors of sexual violence, as those who were silenced, as well as being complicit in the violence perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples through the IRS and the silencing of those stories.19

Situated Moral Agency

Naming one’s social location, how we are situated and formed in particular contexts, is a key aspect of Christian ethics and moral deliberation. Traditional moral philosophy has focused on the moral agent as an abstracted and objective rational subject, unhindered by social differences

(which are themselves often viewed as causes of social conflict). The moral claims, diagnoses of immorality and sin, and recommendations for universal ethics made by ethicists from the

Enlightenment through Modernity were detached from the social locations in which they were formed. In their book, Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life, Christian ethicists Bruce Birch and

Larry Rasmussen helpfully argue that all knowledge is socially situated.20

17 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992) and Carolyn Yoder, The Little Book of Trauma Healing (Intercourse: Good Books, 2005).

18 Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014), and C. Yoder, The Little Book of Trauma Healing.

19 C. Yoder, The Little Book of Trauma Healing; Elaine Enns, “Facing History with Courage,”; Lynda Klassen Reynolds, “The aftermath of trauma and immigration detections of multigenerational effects on Mennonites who emigrated from Russia to Canada in the 1920s,” (Doctor of Psychology diss., California School of Professional Psychology, Fresno, 1997), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

20 Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen, Bible & Ethics in the Christian Life, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 71.

Moral knowledge is embedded in group identifications we all have, associated with such distinctions as socioeconomic strata, race, age, [sexuality, physical and mental ability], and gender; it is embedded in nationality, cultural heritage, religious experience, family experience, and in the institutions to which we belong. It resides in the larger patterns and systems of society that make up the material environment and cross over to the nonmaterial one: the economic order—local, regional, national international; the governance system, and wielding of political power; the cultural system of social communication, with its major sectors in education, the mass media, and the numerous informal ways by which wisdom and instruction are passed from one circle and generation to the next, not least via family and friendship. In all of these, moral knowledge mirrors specific structures of dominance and subordination as well as mutuality, and of varying levels of privilege and deprivation as well as equality and reciprocity.21

As subjects formed by historically and socially contextual identifiers we choose, in addition to identifiers perceived by others, and the communities in which we participate both by choice and not, we are moral subjects capable of moral action, of being.

Moral agency is defined as “the capacity to choose and act in accordance with judgments about what is right and wrong.”22 In contrast to the universal ethic offered by the objective rational subject, Barbara Applebaum emphasizes the importance of what she calls “situated moral agency” in philosophy.23 Challenging the Enlightenment preoccupations with objective morality of the supposedly unhindered mind, critical social theorists have argued that knowledge is situated in historical and social contexts and that a notion of moral agency that neglects to account for these elements, ignores operations of power and therefore important contextual differences. One crucial way of addressing this is by naming the sources of authority and norms appealed to in any moral discourse.24

21 Birth and Rasmussen, 72.

22 Barbara Applebaum, “Situated Moral Agency: Why It Matters?” Philosophy of Education (2002): 357.

23 Ibid.

24 Birch and Rasmussen, 35-65. I will discuss this further in the context of Mennonite theo-ethics in Ch. 2.

Applebaum draws on the work of Linda Alcoff and Iris Marion Young, employing their concepts of “positionality” and “seriality” respectively in order to elucidate “how dominant group members can unintentionally support oppressive social systems but it also suggests a notion of agency that can account for the possibility of dominant group resistance.”25 Alcoff and Young both reject the Enlightenment notion of moral agency predicated on an objective rational subject. In contrast, they call attention to the situatedness of subjects by interrogating the category of

“women.” Alcoff argues that the category called “women” is best understood as a position, or as positionality, which “has two dimensions—as the social context in which one is situated and as a political point of departure.”26 This means that those who identify with the category of “women” are constantly positioned as such in relation to others. Women as positionality refers to “a social relationship that produces external constraints that affect the lives of people who are ascribed or categorized as “women.””27 At the same time, Alcoff emphasizes the positionality of “women” as a point of departure for resistance to external structures that perpetuate specific positioning of

“women.” It is in this latter point, in “women’s” recognition of woman’s subject position, in which feminists such as Alcoff locate women’s moral agency, utilizing not some abstracted notion of

“women” to transform their positionality, but employing their situatedness itself for social transformation.28

Similarly, Young argues that the category called “women” essentially functions as a series, or seriality. She writes that a series “is a collective whose members are passively unified by objects

25 Applebaum, 358.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 359.

28 Ibid.

their actions are oriented around or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of others.”29 What this means is that “women” are not defined by biological attributes but by the external contexts in which they are situated, i.e., Alcoff’s notion of positionality. Young, however, calls attention to another dimension of “women” as seriality lacking in positionality: “If one is seen as a woman, one is impelled to behave and expected to behave in certain ways, and one is induced to have certain beliefs and certain attitudes.”30 In other words, “women” are positioned according to governing social norms in a given context that differ across contexts. Expected performances, sometimes referred to as internalization by social theorists, along with external structures of positionality, determine the category of “women” for Alcoff and Young. This does not, however, determine the agency of “women.”

Alcoff and Young’s notions of positionality and seriality enable analysis of the internal and external factors contributing to the constitution of “women” as a social category. Both theorists argue that this analysis is emphatically not deterministic; rather, positionality and seriality “are useful in that they not only explain how dominant group identity can play a major role in sustaining and naturalizing hierarchical social systems, but these models also provide for the possibility of resistance,” which I will address more thoroughly in chapter 5.31 Suffice it to say that adopting

Applebaum’s “situated moral agency” for Christian ethics enables an account of power in its various operations, here demonstrated with the specific example of “women,” but which I argue can be applied to interrogate other social categories and even social groups. In this thesis, I will

29 Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23 quoted in Applebaum, 358.

30 Applebaum, 359.

31 Ibid., 360.

draw on the notion of situated moral agency to analyze the positionality and seriality of social categories woman, settler, and white, and of the social group Mennonites.

Another element of situated moral agency that is necessary in order to understand

Mennonite theology and ethics is the notion of character formation. Many Mennonite theologians and ethicists address questions of moral deliberation in terms of character formation and argue that the latter precedes the former.32 Framing questions of moral deliberation in terms of character formation calls attention to certain forms of situatedness and affirms that ethics, moral judgements, and moral practices are formed in specific contexts, and that individual characters are formed in communities that rely on similar sources of authority and value similar moral norms. Birch and

Rasmussen write that “[w]hen attention is given to ‘character’ the reference is to moral elements we often consider ‘internal’ to the person or group—motives, dispositions, attitudes, intentions, and perceptions. These belong to moral ‘being,’ as aspects of our moral identity.”33 The word

“character” comes from the Greek word meaning “engraving tool.” Hence we think of someone’s character as the impression made on them, or the impression they in turn make on others. In addition, someone with character is considered to be a person with moral acumen who acts in accordance with their moral principles.34 Mennonite theo-ethics emphasizes that this kind of moral impression is formed in a faith community that adheres to specific sources of authority and the moral norms it derives from these sources.

32 Chris K. Huebner writes that “character precedes moral deliberation.” A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2006), 167.

33 Birch and Rasmussen, 40.

34 Ibid., 74.

Among white Canadian Mennonites, theological ethics primarily values scripture, the

Anabaptist tradition, and the experiences of immigrant/settler Mennonites. Because of this,

Mennonite theo-ethics has supported contextual theologies and often critiqued modern moral philosophy for its abstract approaches to ethics. However, at the same time, Mennonite theo-ethics has failed to recognize its own shortcomings in which it has privileged certain streams of

Anabaptism over others, and experiences of particular Mennonite men over those of women, for example, which I will discuss below in chapters 2 and 3. In addition to an emphasis on context and history that Mennonite theo-ethics already lauds, I argue that critical social-analysis is necessary in order to address the shortcomings of Mennonite theo-ethics, i.e., unequal power dynamics and the dominance of some narratives that suppressed others, whether intentional or not.

Key Ethical Sources for Trauma Informed Mennonite Theo-Ethics

Birch and Rasmussen have observed that critical social analysis is necessary for Christian ethics to be self-reflexive about its social location(s), the nature of its relations with various others, its own moral standards, sources of authority, moral norms, and its assumptions and judgements of others. Without critical social analysis, Christian ethics “fails to uncover the social-moral world,” i.e., the particularity of our moral standards in order to account for difference in the world.35 Birch and Rasmussen argue that “[c]ritical social analysis is helpful and necessary in order to effectively investigate assumed moral notions and hold them up to criticism. It belongs to the task with which Christian ethics, as a species of ethics, is charged.”36 In addition to the critical necessity for social analysis, it is also needed for constructive reasons, namely, “[a] Christian ethic

35 Birch and Rasmussen, 78.

36 Ibid., 79.

which does not have routine ways of investigating concrete social-moral reality […] will not have credibility when it makes specific moral judgements and offers recommendations.”37 In short,

Christian ethics without critical social analysis falls prey to the same level of superficiality and irrelevance as the abstract rationalism of Enlightenment moral philosophy.

As I have already noted, Christian ethics generally and Mennonite theo-ethics specifically, are not neutral to questions of power. Critical social analysis is a key methodological tool for analyzing the dynamics of power in Mennonite theo-ethics. In addition to Applebaum, Alcoff,

Young, and Birch and Rasmussen, Christian ethicist Traci West is a key source for my critique of white settler Mennonite theo-ethics. As West astutely notes, “[t]he terms that name ethical concerns as well as the assumptions at the core of the Christian message greatly influence the process of creating a coherent ethical vision.”38 In order to understand this influence, West puts ethical terms in dialogue with concrete social problems. This dialogical approach enables not only an analysis of ethical terms and concepts in theory, but also their consequences in the concrete social situations in which they arise. Whereas West’s focus is on Christian ethics and the sexual violation of black women, my focus is both on the violation of white Mennonite women and the violation of Indigenous Peoples in Canada by Mennonites. West poses a key question that I ask in my thesis as well: “What shifts in the conceptualization of Christian social ethics when its terms are applied to differing social contexts of sexual violation?”39 In addition, I also ask what happens

37 Birch and Rasmussen, 79.

38 Traci West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Pres, 2006), 36. (Hereafter referred to as DCE).

39 West, DCE, 37.

when its terms are specifically applied to contexts of cultural genocide, and the interlocking oppressions of genocide and sexual violence or violence against women.

West identifies her approach as a feminist and womanist liberative Christian ethics. Her methodology resonates deeply with my own efforts at transforming Mennonite theo-ethics towards being trauma-informed. Though I situate myself differently from West, we share a commitment to the liberative purpose of Christian ethics. It is important for West to identify her methodology this way because, as she states, method is key, because “whatever approach is chosen to interpret social problems, it determines the entire focus and definition attached to those problems.”40 Her approach is specifically womanist because it privileges the experiences of black women in the United States, and it is liberationist because it privileges the experiences of the marginalized and oppressed and emphasizes the purpose of Christian ethics as gospel, good news. In tandem with her emphasis on experiences as a source for ethics, West also pays close attention to context and social location, which in turn highlight power dynamics in any given situation.

Following West, I emphasize the importance of affective and embodied knowledge for

Christian ethics. This means that I value bodily perceptions and experiences as sources of moral knowledge and epistemologically privilege the experiences of “victim-survivors”41 of both sexual and gender violence, and in this case the colonial violence of cultural genocide. West clarifies that

“[m]oral knowledge about sexual violation includes our personal perceptions—what we feel about this subject of sexual violation [and cultural genocide]; the impact of violation on those who are victimized, including women’s [and Indigenous Peoples’] self-perceptions related to the violation;

40 West, DCE, xiv.

41 Traci C. West’s term in Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

and our collective, societal perceptions about the victimization.”42 Indeed, trauma theory supports this claim, demonstrating that trauma imprints itself not only on cognitive memories but on the body itself, resulting in physical effects of trauma that continue to negatively affect trauma victims long after the traumatic event itself—e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder and intergenerational trauma.43

As a critical Christian ethicist, West also asks about the consequences of actions. More is at stake in a critical analysis of violence against women and Indigenous Peoples than the intentions of perpetrators of violence. West points out that both actions and inactions contribute to the conditions of our relations with others. 44 Whereas Mennonite theo-ethics, in accordance with most other mainstream Christian ethics, focuses on character formation of moral “beings,” West’s approach emphasizes the always continuing process of “becoming,” inherent to our constitution as moral creatures. The notion of becoming names “an ethic that holds out hope while it instigates a critique of the context.”45 That is, “becoming” names an ethic that maintains a normative moral vision but always also remains self-reflexive about its claims and the consequences these have on relationships with others. West puts it well when she writes,

[w]hile projecting a normative vision of what personal and communal relationships consist of, the idea of becoming also depicts a process of struggle upon which this hopeful vision depends. It describes an ethic that is not concerned with achieving a finite goal or with a place that one aspires to reach in order to be finished with certain ethical problems. Instead, hope for ethical relationships is only found in one’s participation in the process of becoming a more compassionate society. […] Becoming is a perpetually unfinished task.46

42 West, DCE, 42.

43 Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking 2014). This will be addressed more fully in chapter 3.

44 West, DCE, 52.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

To put it another way, an approach to Christian ethics that is oriented by becoming is one that is committed to the hard work and accountability involved in critical social analysis and self- reflexivity with the goals of truth, justice, reconciliation, and healing ever on the horizon. The vision of hope that I aim to hold out with this thesis is guided by the words of Audre Lorde quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, challenging white Mennonite settlers such as myself to do our work, taking our part to foster right relations with one another. More specifically, this thesis is also a commitment to the following two Calls to Action that emerged from Canada’s Truth and

Reconciliation Commission directed specifically at churches:

60. We call upon leaders of the church parties to the Settlement Agreement and all other faiths, in collaboration with Indigenous spiritual leaders, Survivors, schools of theology, seminaries, and other religious training centers, to develop and teach curriculum for all student clergy, and all clergy and staff who work in Aboriginal communities, on the need to respect Indigenous spirituality in its own right, the history and legacy of residential schools and the roles of the church parties in that system, the history and legacy of religious conflict in Aboriginal families and communities, and the responsibility that churches have to mitigate such conflicts and prevent spiritual violence.47

While I cannot address all of the elements rightly called for in these two out of 94 Calls to Action,

I am committed to addressing specifically the role of white settler Mennonites in colonization from the 59th Call to Action. As a member of a school of theology, I am also committed to educate others in my faith community about the need to respect Indigenous spiritualities and to continue to be accountable for the violent impact that cultural genocide, especially that which is associated with methods of conversion to Christianity, had on Indigenous communities, in response to Call to

Action 60.

47 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action, 7.

Chapter 2

The Making of Martyrs:

Tracing Mennonite Theo-Ethics in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Sadness is what holds our bones in place. —Miriam Toews

The blood of the martyrs still stains sixteenth-century Europe and although the torture, drowning, and burning of heretics took place across other Christian denominations it seems to mark Anabaptist history in particular.1 The most well-known Anabaptist martyrology is Tieleman

Jan van Braght’s thousand-page-plus volume The Bloody Theatre or The Martyr’s Mirrror. The volume is a compilation of two halves, the first of which begins with the martyrdom of Christ and traces a genealogy of sorts of the early church from the first through the fifteenth centuries. The second half is filled with martyr accounts from 1525–1600, a period in which around 4000

Anabaptists were martyred. An Anabaptist man by the name of Dirk Willems is arguably the most well-known Mennonite martyr and van Braght’s recounting of a particular moment in his life serves as a helpful starting point for my analysis in this chapter.

Accompanied by a copper etching of the scene, the story of Dirk Willems is recounted in the Martyr’s Mirror as follows:

In the year 1569 a pious, faithful brother and follower of Jesus Christ, named Dirk Willems, was apprehended in Asperen, in Holland, and had to endure severe tyranny from the papists…Concerning his apprehension, it is stated by trustworthy persons, that when he fled he was hotly pursued by a thief-catcher, and as there had been some frost, said Dirk

1 “Catholics slaughtered Protestants; Protestants slaughtered Catholics; and both persecuted groups like the Anabaptists, who championed adult rather than infant baptism.” Emma Green, “Why Can’t Christians Get Along, 500 Years After The Reformation?” The Atlantic, 29 October 2017, accessed 16 November 2017, available online at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/luther-reformation-500-ecumenical-dialogue/543876/

Willems ran before him over the ice, getting across with considerable peril. The thief- catcher following him broke through, when Dirk Willems, perceiving that the former was in danger of his life, quickly returned and aided him in getting out and thus saved his life.2

In the end, despite pleas from the rescued guard to release Willems, he was recaptured and burned at the stake.

Mennonite Martyrs and Theo-Ethics

Knowledge of Anabaptist martyrs is ubiquitous among white settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. The Martyr’s Mirror can be found on the shelves of many Mennonite homes and a printed copy of the fifteenth century copper etching of martyr Dirk Willems hangs in the offices of many pastors and professors. The Mennonite Heritage Village Museum in Steinbach, Manitoba recently commissioned a statue of Dirk Willems for its grounds. Moreover, the number of books and writings about Mennonite peace theology that begin with an account of Dirk Willems

(including this one) and other martyrs is striking and warrants a closer look at the relationship between Mennonite-remembering of martyrs and the pivotal role it plays in Mennonite theology and ethics. Here, the ongoing prevalence of Dirk Willems in Mennonite memory is instructive in my analysis of Mennonite martyrologies and theo-ethics, because it captures core elements of

Mennonite peace theology from the fifteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. These core elements are encapsulated in the common German phrase describing discipleship to Jesus,

Nachfolge Christi (literally, following Christ), which for the European Mennonites who immigrated to Canada and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved Gelassenheit or practicing yieldedness, nonresistance, and nonconformity. This was the case until the mid-

2 Thieleman Jan van Braght, Martyr’s Mirror, trans. Joseph F Sohm (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1950), 741.

twentieth century when a number of political, social, and economic changes affected Mennonite peace theology, which I will discuss later in this chapter.

While the purpose of the Martyr’s Mirror is to remember those who died as a consequence of their obedience to Christ, for my thesis, this memorialization entails two primary objectives: to derive meaning from great suffering (i.e. theodicy), and to encourage faithfulness among other believers during times of great suffering (i.e. discipleship). For example, in his thesis on the theology of the martyrs, Mennonite historian Raymond Richard Friesen links the desire for the early Anabaptists to make sense of their persecution and execution with discipleship ethics and eschatology. As Friesen notes, “[a]ccording to their understanding of scripture and their experiences within the world, it was impossible to live as a faithful disciple and not suffer persecution.”3 They viewed their suffering in accordance with their understanding of what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus, to take up one’s cross and follow him. Indeed, Friesen observes that some of the most common phrases to appear in the Martyr’s Mirror are “follow Christ,” “take up the cross,” and “the servant is not greater than the master.”4 Suffering was viewed as an inevitable consequence of following Jesus in a sinful and evil world.

Intent aside, one can see how this belief of the value of suffering discipleship implies that those who do not suffer are not faithful, or not as faithful, creating the potential for a hierarchy of discipleship in which the martyr becomes the ultimate figure of faithful discipleship to Jesus. I argue that the emphasis on following Christ even to the cross, i.e., Nachfolge Christi, gave expression to a prominently deontological ethic, one that would shape Mennonite theology and

3 Raymond Richard Friesen, “The Theology of the Martyrs,” (master’s thesis, University of Manitoba, 1988), 95.

4 Ibid., 87.

ethics for generations and across continents, primarily valuing obedience, submission, nonresistance, and nonconformity as the true virtues and characteristics of faithfulness.

For both the martyrs awaiting their execution and those left behind to mourn them and endure further persecution, an eschatological framework for suffering was used to cope with the immensity of trauma during this time period. Indeed, Friesen reflects on the accounts in the

Martyr’s Mirror concluding that “[a]ll, surely, lived with the fear and anxiety that grew out of the experienced anger, hatred, antagonism and oppression. Yet, by and large, they remained steadfast and confident in their faith, often rejoicing in what was happening. They did so because they were able to make sense of and give purpose and meaning to their suffering.”5 The joy expressed in suffering, the singing of hymns, and the giving of testimonies, offering bystanders encouragement for endurance in faithfulness, are strange elements of the martyr stories. Some martyr stories even recount victims claiming that they did not feel any pain during their torture, graphically described by van Braght. The world of the early Anabaptists was marked with death and the threat of torture and death, at least as it is remembered in the recorded history of the Martyr’s Mirror, which, of course, fosters its own agenda. That is only to say that memory is not neutral on questions of the consequences for social power relations, even when the victors are not the ones writing the history.

To counterbalance the depth of trauma experienced by the Anabaptists, hymns, scripture, and shouts of joy were often expressed in the face of death. The joy of the martyrs is nearly always interpreted as a sign of their faithfulness and righteousness, an inspiration to those left behind, and a confirmation of their faith. Viewing their torture and death as a form of unity with the suffering

Christ, as a normative theo-ethical claim, “the martyrs often expressed joy at the prospect of their

5 Friesen, 83.

execution, thanking God that he had counted them worthy to suffer.”6 Moreover, “[t]heir own sufferings and deaths sealed and confirmed those testimonies as true and faithful and valid. Since the truth that they stood for and lived for was the truth that they were willing to die for in the same way that Christ had died for the truth of God, it was to be trusted.”7 In this sense, the martyr’s willingness to suffer and die for their faith gave it authority and credibility among other believers.

However, attributing the joy expressed during torture and death to the righteous character and faithfulness of the martyrs must be challenged. In particular, I investigate the consequences of martyrology for those who were sinned-against, especially centuries later when the counsel to be joyful amidst suffering is still prominent in Mennonite communities in Canada and the U.S. The spiritual and social effect of this has been particularly harmful for women who have experienced abuse and have been chided into silence, victim-blamed, and counseled to accept their lot, and who by adherence to this teaching continue in submissive and obedient faithfulness to their husbands and to other men in their communities as men perpetrate violence against them.

In addition to the detrimental effects of “joy in suffering,” the attribution of joy to the martyr’s character can be identified as a phenomenon referred to in social psychology as a

“fundamental attribution error.”8 Fundamental attribution error “describes perceivers’ tendency to underestimate the impact of situational factors on human behaviour and to overestimate the impact

6 Friesen, 99.

7 Ibid., 111.

8 Sometimes also referred to as or in conjunction with “correspondence bias.” I thank Zooey for introducing me to this concept.

of dispositional factors.”9 This occurs, for example, when people “believe that aggressive behavior is caused by aggressive personality characteristics (dispositional factor) even though aggressive behavior can also be provoked by situational circumstances (situational factor).”10 Another example would be the condemnation of Anabaptists who recanted as sinful and unvirtuous, since the error occurs “due to the failure of people to appreciate the power of the situation.”11 In the case of Anabaptist martyrs, their joy in suffering is attributed to their virtuous character—instead of to a psychological response in the face of trauma.

I argue that the traumatic effect is a more compelling interpretation because other oppressed, persecuted, tortured, and traumatized peoples have also performed joy amidst suffering in order to cope, hold onto a shred of dignity, and profess hope in something beyond this world.

One might think of the freedom songs sung by slaves in antebellum America,12 or even the desire expressed by death row inmates to hasten death as a result of the unique psychosomatic effects of solitary confinement.13 It is understandable why Anabaptist martyrs expressed joy on their way to

9 Bertram Gawronski, “Fundamental Attribution Error,” in Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, eds. Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs (Online: SAGE Publications, 3 October 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/ 9781412956253.n227

10 Gawronski.

11 Jessica Li Yexin, Kathryn A. Johnson, Adam B. Cohen, Melissa J. Williams, Eric D. Knowles, and Zhansheng Chen, “Fundamental(ist) Attribution Error: Protestants are Dispositionally Focused,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102.2 (2012): 281. It is interesting to note that the authors of this article have found Protestants to be more dispositionally focused than Catholics. The study conducted by six psychologists from different universities hypothesized and confirmed that “Protestants made more internal, but not external, attributions than did Catholics. This effect survived controlling for Protestant work ethic, need for structure, and intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity.” Ibid.

12 See, for example, Kerran L. Sanger, When the Spirit Says Sing! The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Routledge, 2015).

13 See, for example, Diana Peel, “Clutching at Life, Waiting to Die: The Experience of Death Row Incarceration,” Western Criminology Review 14.3 (2013): 61-72 and Craig Haney, “Mental Health Issues in Long- Term Solitary and “Supermax” Confinement,” Crime & Delinquency 49.1 (January 2003): 124-156. I thank Zooey for alerting me to this phenomenon.

the stake, as a reclamation of dignity and an appeal to a power beyond themselves in the face of worldly powerlessness, or as an ecstatic welcome end to their imprisonment and torture. But it is harmful to interpret these actions as virtuous in and of themselves, as paragons of faithfulness to be emulated by others who call themselves disciples of Jesus.

This detrimental interpretation by Mennonite historians and theologians alike draws analogies between Mennonites who suffered at the hands of state powers and their Anabaptist predecessors. Many Mennonites living in Soviet Russia during the 1930s and 40s experienced state sanctioned violence. As historian C. Henry Smith wrote: “Never since the days of the [Anabaptist] martyrs have the Mennonites suffered as much as during the twentieth century in Russia.”14

Thousands of Mennonites suffered and died at the hands of the Soviets, yet only within the past few decades have the stories from Soviet Mennonites begun to come to light—stories of extreme poverty, hard labour, imprisonment, torture, exile, disappearance (of many men) and rape (of many women). It is specifically those men who were tortured, exiled or repatriated, disappeared or murdered, who were remembered as martyrs, having experienced suffering as a consequence of their faith.

The connection between the sixteenth-century Anabaptist martyrs and the rise of the figure of the martyr among Mennonites in Soviet Russia is explicit in the 1949 German publication

Mennonitesche Martyren der jüngsten Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart, which translates to

“Mennonite martyrs of the recent past and present,” essentially a modern Mennonite martyrology.

It is also important to note that unlike the Martyr’s Mirror, the 1949 martyrology only included

14 C. Henry Smith, Smith’s Story of the Mennonites, 5th rev. by Cornelius Krahn (Newton: Faith and Life Press, 1981), 340 quoted in Harry Loewen, “A Mennonite-Christian View of Suffering: The Case of Russian Mennonites in the 1930s and 1940s” Mennonite Quarterly Review 77.1 (Jan, 2003): 48.

two women out of 61 biographies. (I will discuss the gendered nature of martyr memories and its effect on Mennonite theo-ethics in chapter 3). For my purposes in this chapter, the figure of the martyr that emerged in order to derive meaning from suffering amidst the violence in Soviet Russia and encourage faithfulness, was a gendered, male figure identified specifically with male forms of suffering as noted above.

As a result of these experiences, and akin to the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, Soviet era Russian Mennonites developed a particular theology around suffering and salvation that they brought with them to Canada and the United States. I will frame this theological trajectory under the two headings: a) martyrdom as theodicy (making sense of their suffering) and b) martyrdom as discipleship ethics (encouraging faithfulness in the face of suffering). This heuristic dualism allows for a better understanding of how the martyr functioned among white settler Mennonites in

Soviet Russia and in Canada and the U.S. during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Martyrdom as Theodicy

The 2000 spring issue of the Mennonite journal Conrad Grebel Review focused on the experiences of Mennonites in Soviet Russia during Stalin’s reign and World War II. I will now focus on the relevant contributions by Waldemar Janzen and Arnold Neufeld-Fast here concerning faithfulness and the meaning of suffering.

Mennonite biblical scholar Waldemar Janzen was born in the Ukraine in 1932 during the

Stalinist era and lived through the terror of World War II when his family fled to Germany and

subsequently to Canada as refugees.15 His essay draws on personal experience, stories from other

Russian Mennonites, and biblical interpretation to come to terms with the suffering that his family and thousands of others endured. Writing half a century after World War II, Janzen sees the occasion of the journal’s theme as an appropriate time to “look at that era with some detachment from earlier emotions. Such detachment is necessary for gaining a comprehensive, if not conclusive, picture that can aid us toward incorporating that era into our understanding of God’s leading and God’s goals.”16 Janzen expresses a need to incorporate the suffering, and what I will refer to as trauma, into his own life and hopes that other Mennonites can do the same. He writes,

“I am still struggling for a personally satisfying perspective on those years, one that can somehow incorporate them into the true flow of Mennonite history, and not simply see them as a terrible interlude best left behind and forgotten.”17 Like many Russian Mennonites who memorized parts of the Bible and relied on them for faith during times of hardship and torture, Janzen also turns to the Bible for perspectives on the meaning of suffering in the context of God’s salvation history noting that in the biblical stories “[t]here is no golden age, no perfect society, no life now already fulfilled in itself, but only that fulfillment which consists of placing the self into the God-directed movement to the ultimate God-set goal.”18 He describes the suffering during the Stalin era and

World War II as “the grip of a futureless present,” that threatened to hold Mennonites captive in

“[s]toic, fatalistic, or despairing submission.”19 To challenge the utter meaninglessness of Russian

15 Waldemar Janzen, “Time of Terror: Biblical-Theological Perspectives on Mennonite Suffering during the Stalin Era and World War II,” Conrad Grebel Review 18.2 (Spring 2000): 6.

16 Janzen, 7.

17 Ibid., 6.

18 Ibid., 8.

19 Ibid.

Mennonite suffering, Janzen suggests that “[i]f we could find a way to place the Mennonite era of

Soviet terror into a story moving toward that God-set goal or telos, we could be set free to find positive meaning in it for ourselves and our history.”20 Janzen’s approach to dealing with the trauma of Soviet Russia emphasizes the incorporation of individual and collective experiences of violence into a narrative that emphasizes God’s eschatological purposes for the world.

In addition to an eschatological or teleological framework for incorporating suffering,

Janzen suggests seven categories for evaluating biblical or theological perspectives of God’s purposes amidst suffering: remembering, memorializing and ritualizing, analogies of history, judgement and repentance, forgiving our enemies, coping with the emotional load, and our suffering-based mission.21 Three of these are germane to the development of martyrdom as theodicy. First, with regards to remembering, Janzen claims that “a certain kind of recalling and preserving the terrible past experiences for our people is necessary,” and that it must entail “[t]he emphasis on God’s salvific leading to God’s future goal, rather than on the initial rule of the dark powers.”22 Here one can again see the importance of eschatology and teleology, and in turn also how deontology is incorporated into this schema as obedience to God’s salvific leading.

Second, related to remembering, memorializing and ritualizing include a variety of mediums for expression of trauma, especially through the arts, for which worship can create an exceptional space. Janzen notes that the selection of materials chosen for worship spaces and educational settings

20 Janzen, 8.

21 Ibid., 13-17.

22 Ibid., 13.

must take its direction from the Bible. It will, for example, not glorify violence, cunning adaptation, or ingenious self-preservation. Instead, it will focus on the Christian virtues, such as sacrificial service. It will look to the example of the biblical servants of God, and above all to Jesus and his example, but also to the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3-11) and the Fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) for guidance in selecting what deserves to be held up to posterity.23

Notice that sacrificial service is named as the example of Christian virtue. Following Jesus to the cross and bearing the suffering of faithfulness was still at the forefront of much of Mennonite thought about discipleship centuries after the Anabaptist persecutions.

Thirdly, I want to highlight drawing analogies of history, in which Janzen asserts that “[w]e can gain better perspective on it [Mennonites in Soviet Russia] if we look at it in light of other such times—for example, the persecution of early Anabaptists as recorded in the Martyr’s Mirror and elsewhere. […] How have martyrs been remembered in the church?”24 Janzen, like other

Mennonite historians, compares the experiences of Mennonites in Soviet Russia to the early

Anabaptists as a contribution to a biblical-theological perspective on Mennonite suffering.

Analogy, as a method of interpretation, enables Janzen to incorporate Mennonite suffering in

Soviet Russia not only in a future-oriented teleology but also one that reaches back into a longer view of God’s salvation history. This interpretive method can be likened to the early church fathers’ use of analogy and recapitulation to interpret scripture within a broader scheme.

Each of these aforementioned sources and categories are employed for the ultimate purpose of attending to trauma by incorporating it into a broader teleological framework for salvation history. While I sympathize with Janzen’s desire to derive meaning from great suffering and laud his refusal to suppress trauma or relegate it to stoic despair, his teleological approach runs the risk

23 Janzen, 14; my emphasis.

24 Ibid., 15.

of a) neglecting the deep ongoing effects of trauma and intergenerational trauma, thereby potentially exacerbating it, and b) failing to recognize systemic violence and hold perpetrators of violence accountable, including neglecting one’s own complicity in evil and accountabilities to the suffering of others. In short, I contend that a teleological approach to Mennonite suffering in Soviet

Russia constructs martyrdom as theodicy and neglects power analyses that are necessary for trauma healing and accountable theo-ethics.

The second essay I will examine is by Mennonite theologian Arnold Neufeld-Fast, who approaches the problem of Mennonite suffering in Soviet Russia as an epistemological problem— one concerning truth. Neufeld-Fast argues that “[a]t the heart of that experience was a sustained attack on truth.”25 The constant intimidation, arrests, torture, surveillance, propaganda, and systematic deception enacted by the Communist state produced a climate of fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability in which “Christians learned that questioning or contradicting official truths meant persecution and, too often, exile and death. […] Many Mennonite men and women were denounced as ‘enemies of the republic,’ often on account of their public or private piety.”26 Some

Mennonites even falsely accused others from their own communities, turning them in to the secret police. In light of this climate of fear, Neufeld-Fast proposes that by “[t]aking truth as a central theological category, we can think anew the old Anabaptist concept of Gelassenheit.”27 Neufeld-

Fast names three sources of truth amidst suffering: “Jesus as Truth of Life,” “Gelassenheit,” and

“Worship as Event of Truth.” I will focus on the first two as they pertain to this chapter.

25 Arnold Neufeld-Fast, “Gott kann! Gott kann nicht! The Suffering of Soviet Mennonites and Their Contribution to a Contemporary Mennonite Theology,” Conrad Grebel Review 18.2 (Spring 2000), 60.

26 Ibid., 61.

27 Ibid., 56.

For Neufeld-Fast, “Jesus as Truth of Life,” points out the significance of proclaiming Jesus as the source of truth amidst an oppressive and deceptive political regime. Citing the gospel of

John, 1 John, and Ephesians, he argues that “[t]he biblical materials suggest that God’s coming to humanity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is an event of truth that reshapes the questions of God’s presence or absence that arise especially in times of suffering.”28 That is, suffering is reframed within a new salvific eschatology that enables an ethic based on Jesus’ love of enemies.

To illustrate this new ethic, Neufeld-Fast draws on the early Anabaptist notion of Gelassenheit, “a christologically established mode of being—an open, a non-manipulative or self-serving engagement with the world. It emerges from passivity and includes the readiness to yield to the call to become an instrument of the divine, even to the possibility of external suffering.”29

Gelassenheit involves the practice of letting go of worldly concerns and patiently trusting in God’s plan for salvation. This is the same notion of Gelassenheit that informed the theology of nonresistance and nonconformity among Swiss Mennonite settlers in the United States and Canada from the 1800s up until the Second World War, which I will discuss later in this chapter.

Gelassenheit, as a form of discipleship, i.e., part of theo-ethics, relies on an emphatically eschatological ecclesiology. It hinges on a church-world dualism, reminiscent of the two-kingdom theology of the early Anabaptists, in which believers, as a collective, understand themselves as separate from the world, at times even as a remnant amidst a fallen and evil world. One can see how a strict dualism between the church and the world, the persecuted and the persecutors, would be important for early Anabaptists as well as Mennonites in Soviet Russia to help them make sense

28 Neufeld-Fast, 62.

29 Ibid., 62-63.

of their suffering. By positing the world over against a minority church, the collective of believers reinforce their faith and their dignity by placing it in something other than the world that is persecuting them. The church, and the eschatological notion of the Kingdom of God (as opposed to the kingdom of the world) was a source of hope and strength for both early Anabaptists and

Russian Mennonites. Additionally, the problem of suffering is dealt with by attributing it to an evil and fallen world. And finally, Anabaptists and Mennonites are empowered in faith, and their suffering justified, by viewing themselves as instruments of God’s redemption of the world.

Neufeld-Fast presents the traditional Mennonite value of Gelassenheit as both an ethical and epistemological category, that is, as both a way of following Jesus and a way of knowing. For

Neufeld-Fast, the latter is determined by the former. In other words, yieldedness to Jesus entails trust and an eschatological hope in what Jesus proclaims through his life as truth. Here one can see the linking of the deontological and teleological approaches to suffering; obedience is linked with the promise of a greater purpose for suffering. Similarly to Janzen’s teleological approach,

Neufeld-Fast fails to attend to the effects of trauma personally, collectively, and intergenerationally. Furthermore, considering hetero-patriarchal relationship norms, the counsel for submission and patience in the face of violence and oppression has perpetuated cycles of violence among Mennonites, which contradicts the gospel’s claim of liberation and salvation

(Luke 4).

From Nonconformity to Prophetic Witness

As for most Christians in Canada and the United States, the second half of the twentieth century posed significant challenges for Mennonite understandings of faithfulness, especially with regards to peace and violence. Faced with the social and economic changes of modernization and

the national moral questions raised by the Second World War, the Civil Rights movement, the

Vietnam War, and the Nuclear Arms Race, Mennonites were forced to reconsider their relationship to the state and political issues. Having led primarily sectarian lives since their persecution during the European Reformations, under special privileges granted by states, Mennonites by and large avoided national issues and political interests. During the Second World War, faced with conscription, some Mennonites insisted on nonresistance and defenselessness, others promoted conscientious objection and alternative service, while others yet felt they could not stand by and enlisted in military service. Ostensibly, each position held was based on an understanding of faithfulness but resulted in different actions. Historically and theologically, those who entered the military were ostracized by their communities and the positions of nonresistance and conscientious objection became the dominant theological positions of the Mennonites.

In this section I paint in broad brushstrokes to identify some of the key historical and theological understandings of faithfulness with regards to peace and violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Recognizing that I am not presenting a thorough account of history, but one that seeks to make evident the dominant understandings that won out and came to define

Mennonite theology and history, further information on important alternative perspectives are recommended in the footnotes. By drawing some broad connections between political events and

Mennonite responses, I will demonstrate how Mennonites moved, by and large, from a peace theology grounded in nonconformity to one rooted in prophetic witness. I discuss how Mennonite peace theology has changed based on Mennonite conceptions of the relationship between the church and the state, because this aspect of Mennonite theo-ethics has been underestimated or ignored. I demonstrate how a dualist understanding of church and state produces a framework that

defines certain actions as violence (e.g. military service) and ignores others (e.g. sexual violence within churches) because it locates violence in the world and not in the church.

Historical Context of Church-State Relations

In the 1500s, when faced with what they understood as ecclesial corruption and rampant unfaithfulness, the Anabaptists turned to the life of Jesus found in the Bible, and to the early church for theological and moral teachings. In the middle of the twentieth century, during the moral crisis presented by the Second World War, Mennonites such as historian Harold Bender turned to the early Anabaptists for theological and moral teachings (primarily Swiss Anabaptists in the early sixteenth century). In his 1944 publication of The Anabaptist Vision, Bender called fellow

Mennonites from theological and moral complacency to a renewed and rejuvenated way of life that would reflect their faith in Jesus. Drawing on the early Schleitheim Anabaptists, Bender emphasized “first, a new conception of the essence of Christianity as discipleship; second, a new conception of the church as a brotherhood; and third, a new ethic of love and nonresistance.”30

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, theologian Guy F. Hershberger was also calling Mennonites to faithfulness, emphasizing “the way of love” and nonresistance. These theo-ethical concepts made sense under a two-kingdom theology in which the church was ruled by Christ and the world by the state. Hershberger’s theo-ethics called for moral renewal in the Mennonite church but apart from political involvement in the state.

Additionally, in 1952 a group of young Mennonite intellectuals and missionaries formed a think-tank under the name the Concern Group.31 The members took up the task of implementing

30 Harold S. Bender, The Anabaptist Vision (Waterloo: Herald Press, 1944), 20. The Anabaptist Vision was first given as an address to the American Society of Church and History in 1942; my emphasis.

The Anabaptist Vision among those they viewed as apathetic Mennonites in the U.S. (i.e. highly sectarian and quietist Mennonites). In their book on the changes in Mennonite peacemaking during the second half of the twentieth century, Mennonite historians Leo Driedger and Donald B.

Kraybill write of the Concern Group: “Responding to the havoc of war, ecumenical conversations, and the challenge of their heritage, these youthful intellectuals were dismayed by the reluctance of the established church to understand—let alone practice—the Anabaptist Vision.”32 The renewal movement of the 1950s and 60s emphasized the visibility of the church in society.

In the 1960s many more Mennonites began to rethink seriously their relationship with the state. Key political factors that influenced this especially in the U.S. were the Korean conflict, the

Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam war. There was a significant change in the theo-ethical rhetoric moving from “non-resistance and love” to

“witness.”33 This shift influenced Mennonite ecclesiology to move from a two-kingdom paradigm to a church-state relationship designated with the phrase “the lordship of Christ.” In 1965 a conference on church-state relations hosted by MCC in 1965 played a key role in establishing a new rhetoric for Mennonite theo-ethics “with references to “the lordship of Christ,” “the righteousness of God,” “prophetic witness,” “God’s sovereignty,” and “the kingdom of God.”34 It was said that Christians express their love for their country when they “challenge national leaders

31 The initial Concern Group included Irvin Horst, David Shank, Orley Schwartzentruber, John W. Miller, Paul Peachy, and John Howard Yoder. For more information, see J. Lawrence Burkholder, “Concern Pamphlets Movement,” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, 1989, accessed 10 September 2018, http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Concern_Pamphlets_Movement&oldid=134186

32 Leo Driedger and Donald B. Kraybill, Mennonite Peacemaking: From Quietism to Activism (Waterloo: Herald Press, 1994), 89.

33 Ibid., 114.

34 Ibid, 120.

to seek…justice, equality, freedom, and peace…[and] constantly witness to the righteousness which God requires of all men.”35 Additionally, John Howard Yoder’s treatise The Christian

Witness to the State (1964) reframed Mennonite cosmology such that both the church and state were under the one rule of the lordship of Christ, and that the church was called to act as a prophetic witness to the fallen principalities and powers in the world, namely the state, but without direct involvement in it.36

Considering Hershberger and Yoder too sectarian, prominent Canadian Mennonite theologian J. Lawrence Burkholder emphasized social-responsibility in his peace theology.

Burkholder’s theo-ethics were influenced by his experiences as a relief worker with MCC in India and China, where he recognized that one could never inhabit a morally neutral position, that conflicts were always complex and often required an ethic that could help people choose between the lesser of two evils instead of a morally righteous (and apolitical) position.37 Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman similarly challenged Mennonites to practice radical love. Influenced by the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and H. Richard Niebuhr on social responsibility and power relations, Kaufman also encouraged Mennonites to engage various political spheres in order to effect change.38

35 Driedger and Kraybill, 120.

36 John Howard Yoder, The Christian Witness to the State, 2nd ed. (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2002).

37 Driedger and Kraybill, 91-96.

38 Ibid., 96-99. See also Gordon D. Kaufman, Nonresistance and Responsibility, and Other Mennonite Essays (Newton: Faith & Life Press, 1979).

Given these shifts in historical context, the language of nonresistance was no longer useful.

The political climate had changed sufficiently for many (especially urban) Mennonites to adapt their theo-ethics to a world in which social responsibility could no longer be ignored. In summary,

Advocating the way of love and nonresistance, Hershberger argued for an uncompromising New Testament ethic that was faithful to the way of the cross but wary of political participation. Yoder, heralding the ethics of agape love, called for witness to the social order while maintaining a somewhat sectarian stance in the “disciple community.” But it was also love that led Burkholder to social responsibility for the larger social order with all its ambiguities, compromises, and dilemmas. Moreover, it was radical love that pulled Kaufman to the very heart of the sinful situation, even when support of the outcome differed with his personal beliefs.39

Driedger and Kraybill portray this era of conflicting negotiations in Mennonite theo-ethics as the

“ferment in the fifties” followed by “the strident sixties and seventies.”40 In some ways these are descriptive terms and Mennonite theologies and practices were challenged. For example, the conflicts between Burkholder’s moral vision of social responsibility for the Mennonite church was met with hostility, fear, and admonishment from Hershberger and Bender.41 At the same time, the dominant voices remained within a particular ecclesiological framework. While many historians and theologians portray Hershberger, Yoder, Burkholder, and Kaufman as presenting different and even contradicting theo-ethics, I argue that they all rely on a fundamental similarity: a sectarian ecclesiology of church-world separation. The consequence of this is that has kept Mennonite theologians, ethicists, and historians alike from acknowledging forms of violence such as sexism, sexual violence, racism, and settler colonialism, i.e., violence perpetrated within and by white settler Mennonite churches.

39 Driedger and Kraybill, 107; my emphasis.

40 Ibid., 83 and 109.

41 Ibid., 93-94.

Although there were significant changes in theo-ethics for Mennonites in the second half of the twentieth century, the different formulations by the dominant voices still relied on common ecclesiology in which the church and the world are identifiably different entities, with some overlap through “prophetic witness” and social responsibility. Each theologian articulated a slightly different church-world relationship in which their theo-ethic was constituted, but none saw the church as an institution in the world akin to other institutions. Additionally, John Richard

Burkholder’s and Barbara Nelson Gingerich’s 1991 edited collection Mennonite Peace Theology:

A Panorama of Types presents ten types of Mennonite peace theology. In each of these, one can see how the specific church-world relationship that is articulated informs the specific theo-ethics and understanding of peace and violence.42 Throughout the ten types, the church is continuously seen as exceptional to the world, i.e., church versus world not church in world. One significant consequence of this separation of church and world is that the Mennonite church has failed to see its own shortcomings, complicities in violence, and the particularly insidious forms of oppression that institutions often rely on for their existence. This separatist detriment is exacerbated by the reluctance of influential Mennonite historians and theologians (i.e. those with academic and/or socio-ecclesial power and authority) to acknowledge differently nuanced and conflicting narratives alongside the dominant narrative of Mennonite theo-ethical development in the past 70 years.

The lack of self-reflexivity is fraught with lived-world consequences that are at the core of this thesis. This is demonstrated, for example, by the prevalence of John Howard Yoder’s book

The Politics of Jesus taught in Mennonite colleges and universities, often insufficiently historically situated. The prominence of this book in Mennonite churches and post-secondary institutions, and

42 John Richard Burkholder and Barbara Nelson Gingerich, eds. Mennonite Peace Theology: A Panorama of Types (Akron: Mennonite Central Committee Peace Office, 1991).

its influence on Mennonites is problematic for at least three reasons. First, the lack of self- reflexivity of both Yoder and his colleagues enabled Yoder to allegedly abuse over 100 women and the church and its colleges to silence them for decades, exacerbating cycles of violence and trauma. Second, the book is often presented as a ground-breaking theo-ethic, without acknowledging the theological ferment of the sixties and seventies including the significant articulation of the politics of Jesus by C. Norman Kraus, for example, and the practices of many activists before Yoder.43 And third, by promoting Yoder’s thought for contemporary theo-ethics, church leaders and professors have failed to incorporate the changes in current socio-political climates and unique challenges that current social locations present for contemporary Mennonite theo-ethics. In addition to Yoder’s own lack of self-reflexivity, neglecting to account for power and social location in his theo-ethics, and his abhorrent abuse of power in the violence he perpetrated against women,44 his intellectual progeny have also propagated his theo-ethics irresponsibly in that they too have ignored how power and social location pose a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of their theo-ethics. I will return to this argument later.

Investments in Martyrdom

The 1990s and 2000s mark a curious investment in the Anabaptist martyrs among

Mennonites, in both churches and colleges, across disciplines in theology and literature, in various

43 “Speaking to the Intercollegiate Mennonite Peace Conference in 1968, C. Norman Kraus charged that neutral nonresistance was often an excuse for noninvolvement. Arguing that Jesus was crucified precisely because he was not neutral—because he threatened political and religious establishments—Kraus called for a theology of involvement.” Driedger and Kraybiill, 148. This was four years before John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus was published.

44 See the following sources documenting John Howard Yoder’s abuses: Rachel Waltner Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” in The Mennonite Quarterly Review, vol. 89, no. 1 (January 2015): 7-80. And Ruth E. Krall, The Elephants in God’s Living Room: The Mennonite Church and John Howard Yoder, vol. 3, self-published (2013), http://ruthkrall.com/downloadable- books/volume-three-the-mennonite-church-and-john-howard-yoder-collected-essays/ accessed 27 November 2018.

art forms such as museums, theatre, and music. I want to highlight a few key artefacts that mark this increased interest in martyrdom. In 1990 a traveling exhibit (established by Robert Kreider and John Oyer) was called The Mirror of the Martyrs: The Bloody Theatre of Nonresistant

Christians. The exhibit featured original copper plates used in the printing of the Martyrs Mirror.45

In 1992 Mennonite historian James Juhnke wrote and directed a play about Dirk Willems entitled

“Dirk’s Exodus.” In 1998, Shirley Sprunger King commissioned a musical interpretation of Jan

Luyken’s etchings for the Martyr’s Mirror. The collection, entitled Singing at the Fire: Voices of the Anabaptist Martyrs, was composed by Brent Weaver based on poems by Sarah Klassen, was performed by the Eastern Mennonite University chamber singers, was recorded, and sold on

CDs.46 In 2006 and 2007 Mennonite theologians Chris Huebner and Tripp York (both students of

Stanley Hauerwas and sympathizers of John Howard Yoder) published books with Herald Press that featured martyrdom as an essential aspect of peace theology. Huebner’s book, A Precarious

Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity features two chapters explicitly addressing martyrdom and theo-ethics. York’s book, The Purple Crown: The Politics of

Martyrdom, frames Mennonite theo-ethics in terms of the broader Christian martyr traditions.47

The most striking example I have encountered of the contemporary maintenance of

Mennonite martyr narratives occurred in the 2007 issue of the Mennonite Life journal. In 2006

45 Wesley Berg, “The Mirror of the Martyrs—The Bloody Theatre of Nonresistant Christians (Exhibit),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, December 2015, accessed 12 Sept 2018, http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Mirror_of_the_Martyrs_The_Bloody_Theatre_of_Nonresistant_Christians_(Exhib it)&oldid=134072

46 Shirley Sprunger King, Sarah Klassen, and Brent Weaver, “Singing at the Fire,” Mennonite Life 52.2 (June 1997), 22.

47 Chris K. Huebner, A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2006); Tripp York, The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Waterloo: Herald Prss, 2007).

Mennonite Life published an article on martyrdom by Mennonite scholar Stephanie Krehbiel. In the mixed style of ethnography, auto-biography, and cultural critique, Krehbiel examined her own experiences with Mennonite martyr narratives and their harmful effects on her and others in her social circles, especially in the wake of national political events such as 9/11.48 In the following issue, and without notice (as would be standard practice)49, Mennonite Life published five critical responses to her piece. This editorial decision did not include any articles supporting Krehbiel’s perspective. Some of the respondents offered more gracious responses drawing from their own contrasting experiences, acknowledging gender and generational differences, while others simply spat unwarranted scathing critique and blatant disregard for Krehbiel’s perspective. Behind her back and under the guise of mutually enriching theological dialogue, and whether intentionally or not, Mennonite Life ambushed Krehbiel, effectively dismissing and discrediting her critique of the

Mennonite martyr legacy and its harmful effects. Both the nature of the articles written by the respondents and the act of Mennonite Life publishing them without informing Krehbiel demonstrates an investment in the maintenance of dominant martyr narratives, especially by white

Mennonite men.50

48 Stephanie Krehbiel, “Staying Alive: How Martyrdom Made Me a Warrior,” Mennonite Life 61.4 (December 2006). http://ml.bethelks.edu/issue/vol-61-no-4/article/staying-alive-how-martyrdom-made-me-a- warrior/

49 Brad S. Born, editor of Mennonite Life, e-mail correspondence, 3 December 2018.

50 Mennonite Life 62.1 (Spring 2007). Stephanie Krehbiel, personal correspondence, September 2018. Additionally of note is that one of the respondents was a woman, and an undergraduate student at the time. The optics of this suggest tokenizing, which involves an abuse of power by invoking the politics of recognition on those with less power. I cannot help but think of my own experiences as an undergraduate student during which I was given “opportunities” for academic progress by male professors handing off their writing responsibilities to me under the guise of collegiality, intellectual growth, and recognition.

This increased interest in martyrdom among Mennonites and the defensive response to critiques of the dominant narratives of martyrdom raises three crucial questions. What accounts for this increased interest in martyrdom? How does the figure of the martyr frame Mennonite theo- ethics in these recent decades? And I lead into the question, what is at stake and for whom in the maintenance of these martyr narratives? (Which will be the topic of chapter 3).

To address the first question, one could theorize that the increased interest in martyrdom narratives among white Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. starting in the 1990s is enabled by the fall of the Berlin war and the end of the Cold War. Considering the connection between the development of certain Mennonite narratives and their link to stories from the Soviet Union, one could make the case that these two major international events allowed for Mennonites still in

Russia during the 90s to finally tell their stories of life behind the Iron Curtain, and that Mennonites who had escaped Russia felt safe enough to begin telling their stories without fear of repatriation.

This interpretation would fit nicely with the current martyr narratives and the ways in which

Mennonite suffering has already been interpreted with reference to the Anabaptist martyrs as demonstrated earlier in this chapter.

The aforementioned explanation was my first theoretical attempt to account for the increased interest in martyrdom among white settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. beginning in the 1990s. Although elements of this theory appear somewhat plausible, Mennonite historian

Janis Thiessen suggests an alternative theory that I find more informative and compelling. By observing that the next generation of Mennonites are the ones newly interested in the martyr stories of their ancestors, Thiessen sees an attempt to rehabilitate the legacy of their parents and grandparents in the Soviet Union. Thiessen has observed that Mennonite narratives of Soviet

Russia have only recently been submitted to class analysis and post-colonial critiques. These

perspectives complicate the Mennonite narrative of victimization and Christ-like suffering by locating them within a complex socio-political and economic milieu in which some Mennonites were wealthy estate owners, beneficiaries of the state, settlers, and exploiting their workers, in addition to the violence they experienced in the Stalin era. In order to cope with the complicity of their parents and grandparents in the exploitation of local peasants and displacement of nomadic survival routes, Thiessen suggests that the next generation of Mennonites reaches for the

Anabaptist martyrs in an attempt to rehabilitate the memory of suffering and a legacy of faithfulness.51 This is understandable given that stories of complicity in systemic violence do not usually foster inspiration for faithfulness. People do not like to speak ill of the dead, especially family members. But this is a reason for the ongoing cultivation of uncritical Mennonite narratives—not an excuse.

Thiessen argues that “revisiting martyr narratives gives us [white settler Mennonites] validation and allows us to gloss over issues of class and culpability.”52 I agree, and further argue that the inability of the next generation of Mennonites to negotiate the identity of their forbearers as both victims and perpetrators is illustrative of both undealt with trauma as well as social power

(e.g. white settler privilege).53 Thiessen bases her evaluation on similar patterns in history among other populations and how they cope with the memory of their relatives’ complicity in various forms of violence. For instance, she has observed similar patterns in the memory negotiation of white settler Mennonites and the ways in which white Germans attempt to rehabilitate the memory

51 Janis Thiessen, personal correspondence, 30 August 2018.

52 Ibid.

53 The complex relationship between Mennonites as perpetrators and victims, having trauma and privilege, will be addressed in chapters 3 and 4.

of their grandparents who were complicit in the Holocaust. The book Opa war kein Nazi (“Grandpa was not a Nazi”) presents an analysis of the current generation’s inability to accept and attend to their relatives’ complicity in the systemic violence of Nazism.54 Thiessen suggests that a similar phenomenon is occurring among contemporary white settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. as they attempt to remember and locate their history and identity in stories of martyrdom and the tendency to downplay or deny stories of culpability in violence and injustice, such as sexual violence in church communities and settler-colonialism.

Anabaptist martyr stories, even though many are gruesome, are ironically safe stories for

Mennonites to tell. This is evidenced not only by their aforementioned use in rehabilitating

Mennonite narratives of Soviet Russia, but also by their use to promote ecumenism among stratified Mennonite denominations across North America today. In a 2010 publication of literary responses to the Martyr’s Mirror, editor Kristen Eve Beachy introduces the collection with an acknowledgement of the diversity of descendants from the early Anabaptists that currently inhabit

North America. She notes that few things bring these descendants together, but they include MCC relief efforts, Mennonite Disaster Service rebuilding, and the Martyr’s Mirror. Beachy highlights an interdenominational conference that focused on the Martyr’s Mirror, describing that the “black hats, bare arms, and bobbed hair mingled freely. Together we probed the history of the book, marveled over lovingly preserved copies of early editions, and discussed the ways the stories continue to live today. We might differ in practice and theology, but we can’t forget the [martyr] stories we share.”55 It is this last conclusive sentence that I find most troubling. To interpret the

54 Harold Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tshuggnall, Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfuhrt: Fischer, 2002).

55 Kristen Eve Beachy, “Introduction,” in Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror, ed. Kristen Eve Beachy (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2010), 21.

conference as a unifying event would be an erroneous attribution of harmony to denominations whose disagreements have harmed a great deal of people, primarily Mennonites who are already marginalized in their communities and in society, women, LGBTQ people, peoples of colour, people with disabilities, refugees and other victims of state violence and torture, and others I may have failed to name here. Yes, Mennonites differ in practice and theology, and those differences directly impact people’s lives. Indeed, to reiterate, “reviving the martyr narratives gives us validation and allows us to gloss over issues of class and culpability,” and I would add race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on.56 A critical thinker must always observe not only who is present, but also who is absent: who is missing from this event? Who is unable to attend the conference because of the presence of perpetrators of violence against them? This brings us to my second question: how does the figure of the martyr frame Mennonite theo-ethics in these recent decades?

The Figure of the Martyr as Discipleship Ethics

Chris Huebner and Tripp York are two Mennonite theologians who have attempted to rehabilitate the martyrs for contemporary Christian ethics. In his book A Precarious Peace,

Huebner devotes two chapters explicitly to the consideration of martyrdom in Mennonite history, memory, and identity in relation to Christian ethics and contemporary culture, while the figure of the martyr continues to loom in the background of the remainder of his book as the foundation for his attempt to articulate a non-violent epistemology. For Huebner, the martyr raises the question of truth and knowledge (but differently so than for Neufeld-Fast).

56 Thiessen, personal correspondence, 30 August 2018.

In contrast with the standard epistemologies developed by philosophical rationalism and empiricism, which rely on proofs, rules of logic, objectivity, and propositional truth statements,

Huebner argues that martyrdom offers a radical alternative way of knowing that refuses the totalizing nature of the former. Huebner argues that “the truth of Christ involves a kind of ongoing contestation and thus cannot be but inherently conflictual when set beside the world’s desire for harmonies of closure.”57 Herein we begin to see Huebner’s ecclesiology, the church-world relationship as Yoderian which he identifies with. And he claims that epistemology turns upon this church-world distinction: “Standard epistemology, by contrast, is inherently procedural. It approaches knowledge as a matter of form that is said to be neutral with regard to content. So it tends to be blind to its own involvement in aspects of political formation.”58 Given Christianity’s long history of power abuses, and specifically American Mennonite’s history of sectarian ecclesiology, it is ironic that Huebner attributes ignorance regarding political formation (i.e., questions of power) to standard epistemology and by extension institutions outside the church. But

Huebner is not primarily interested in a critique of the world; rather, he seeks to articulate what he believes to be a particularly faithful Christian epistemology (and in turn, theo-ethics), which he argues is best witnessed in martyrdom.

Like “standard” epistemology, Huebner sees standard approaches to ethics as procedural and instrumental (i.e., utilitarian). Instrumentality, for Huebner, is considered unfaithful because it attributes too much agency to humans and marks an idolatrous seizure of control of our lives which are a gift from God. As an heir of Yoder’s notion of non-constantinianism, Huebner also

57 Huebner, 134.

58 Ibid.

decries any approach to theo-ethics and social change that considers power as organizing all eco- social relations and thus socio-political strategies. In other words, both an epistemology and a theo- ethic, which are interrelated, that seek to “move history in the right direction”59 are idolatrous in their foreclosure to the eschatological work of God in the world. As Huebner writes, “[t]he knowledge of the martyrs is not preoccupied with epistemic justification but is shaped by the epistemological virtues of patience and hope.”60 Here one can note an overlap between Heubner’s pursuit of a non-violent epistemology based on patience and hope and Neufeld-Fast’s use of

Gelassenheit as an essential element of discipleship.

I take issue with Huebner’s characterization of standard epistemology and ethics. While there certainly are schools of thought that employ this kind of thought process, non-theological disciplines such as critical theories (especially feminist, womanist, and decolonizing) are primary contributors to the identification of Christian abuses of power (material and spiritual) and possessive investments which the church has ignored. Huebner’s dichotomy implies that the so- called “world” is inherently instrumental and idolatrous, which is a false dichotomy, given the extent to which so-called “worldly” disciplines have pointed out the ways in which the church has functioned instrumentally for its own gains. In other words, the world is by no means inherently constantinian, to put it in Yoderian terms.

Ultimately, for Huebner, the relationship between epistemology and ethics coincides in the martyr as a faithful disciple of Christ. He argues that “martyrdom names a distinctly Christian way of knowing, a way of knowing that is characteristic of the body of Christ, and in particular, a way

59 Huebner, 143.

60 Ibid.

of knowing nonviolently, a nonviolent body of knowledge.”61 Viewed as a consequence of one’s faithfulness to Christ, and non-conformity to the world, Heubner sees an epistemology and ethic defined by martyrdom as “the interruption of the violent world of mastery, possession, and control by a nonviolent offering of a radically different way of being and knowing called peace. […] It is this stance of vulnerability, this refusal to seize control of one’s life, that is best captured in the

Christian practice of martyrdom.”62 Unfortunately, for Mennonite theo-ethics, such a refusal to

“seize control of one’s life” has also resulted in the refusal to realize one’s moral agency, to acknowledge one’s power, however limited, and act on one’s accountabilities. Rather than attend to the trauma Mennonites have endured and also perpetrated, an epistemology and theo-ethics of martyrdom turns our attention to the martyrs themselves, defined by their obedience and their experiences of specific forms of violence. More often than not, this occurs to the detriment of contemporary victims of violence within our own churches—especially violence against women, peoples of colour (specifically Indigenous Peoples in this thesis), and queer people, (by “faithful,”

“obedient,” and “more exemplary” Christian men). I will address this in detail in the next chapter.

Victims, Martyrs, or Moral Agents?

Another defining feature of the concept of the martyrs is the way in which both Huebner and York distinguish them from “victims.” York’s description gestures towards specific ecclesiological and eschatological commitments that ground his interpretation of the martyrs:

Descriptions create imaginative worlds, and the imaginative worlds of a victim and of a martyr are different. A victim is the subject of domination or one who suffers an injustice. This carries with it connotations of tragedy, not in the ancient sense of something fated, but in the more contemporary sense of something sorrowful that should not have occurred and thus hints at senselessness or wont of teleological purpose. Martyrdom is anything but tragic (in either sense of the word). It does not live in a world of tragedy but in a world of

61 Huebner, 137-8.

62 Ibid., 139.

apocalypticism. Martyrdom participates in the ongoing creation of not an alternative world but an authentic world: a world inaugurated by the cross and the empty tomb is the world in which the martyr resides. It is a world that is here and is not yet here. It is predicated on hope, as strictly speaking, tragedy must deny. It is a world that is invoked and displayed for all to see by the actions of those who live in it.63

Like Huebner, and Yoder before him, York adheres to a church-world relation in which Christians must be identifiable apart from the world and as a result their experiences of suffering, torture, and death are interpreted as acts of faithful obedience to Christ, as signs of Christ’s lordship over the violence in the world, and of hope in resurrection. While York notes that he does not seek to valorize one form of faithfulness over others, he effectively does, by stating that “[m]artyrdom is only a final sign of confirmation of one’s holiness. It is a testament to a life well lived—a life that is blessed to show Christ not only in life but also in death.”64 The martyr, as a paragon of faithfulness, is beyond critique. One can see how this interpretation of suffering (i.e. martyrdom) is an extension of the theologies of suffering that emerged among Mennonites in Soviet Russia.

No one wants to suffer. No one wants to be a victim. And just as Janzen and Neufeld-Fast sought to reframe suffering within God’s salvation history and reclaim a discipleship ethic based on self-sacrifice and Gelassenheit, Huebner and York present a contemporary theological stance for the next generation that seeks to rehabilitate victimization through the power of Christ that compels a disciple to vulnerable martyrdom instead of being faithful moral agents which would mean having responsibility for their life in specific embodied contexts.

The profound sense of loss and helplessness associated with victimhood can be paralyzing.

Because of this, one can see how Huebner and York’s interpretation of torture and death is

63 York, 147. In contrast with York, I would argue that many people who experience tragedy also have sources of hope, and that a dichotomy between these is false. Mennonite survival stories, especially by women, attest to this.

64 York, 154.

tempting considering the havoc that martyrdom and other forms of violence wreck on personal and communal levels. The common alternative, which relies on revenge narratives and retributive justice, only exacerbates violence and does not make sense within a historic peace church. As a result, one can see the desire to rehabilitate the victim of state violence as a martyr, a witness to the death and resurrection of Jesus, clearly in Huebner’s work. Engaging Elizabeth Castelli’s extensive work on martyrdom, Huebner recognizes that “she argues that the cultivation of the memory of the martyr functions to produce a totalizing cultural politics of exclusion that ‘generates its own self-authorizing claims to a privileged status in relation to truth and public authority.’”65

To this caveat, Huebner offers the following response:

Castelli is no doubt correct to warn against these dangers, and tragically, there is too much truth in Castelli’s reading. And yet I worry that she overstates the tendency of martyrdom to encourage concentric, static, and essentially violent images of culture and identity. In so doing she obscures the radical potential of the martyr as a figure of resistance to precisely these sorts of cultural formations.66

The fact that Huebner agrees with Castelli demonstrates that he already acknowledges the dangers she names as both true and prevalent. His desire to then continue to base an entire theo-ethic on an alternative and (by his own recognition) implausible reading of martyrdom is untenable at best.

Huebner goes on to critique the function of both heroes and victims in western culture.

Noting the rise of victim perspectives portrayed in Hollywood films and through international tribunals, Huebner argues that “[i]t has become customary to define oneself in terms of that by which we are afflicted, whether illness or anguish, overt physical abuse to subtle psychological manipulation. Identity is no longer understood as an expression of sovereignty but an experience

65 Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 198 quoted in Huebner, 193.

66 Huebner, 193.

of subjugation.”67 In other words, Huebner perceives that where the oppressor, the sovereign used to dominate cultural discourse, the victim has now become the dominant form of speech; victimization is the discourse of the day, argues Huebner. He continues to argue that “[w]hereas power used to reside in the hands of the powerful, it is now said to be wielded by the powerless.”68

Huebner sees the category of victimhood as embedded in a cultural impasse between discourses of victims and victors. Consequently, in an effort to rehabilitate the martyr from what he calls “the new logic of victimhood that functions all too often as a form of preservation and survival against the threats of the new,”69 Huebner argues that the cultural discourse of victimhood actually replicates dominant forms of control and desires for mastery represented in constantinianism.

Liberative theologies and ethics listen to victims’ speech to learn about the harm done by misuse of power. By contrast, Huebner argues that the rise of victim narratives is duplicitous and “too romantic and sentimental to be true.”70 Instead, he suggests that “[i]t might be more truthful to speak of a certain “pose of victimhood” whereby the position of the victim is exploited as a way

67 Huebner, 198.

68 Ibid., 199. I cannot help but notice the similarities between Huebner’s negative appraisal of victim voices and the arguments against “victimhood culture” made by right wing academics such as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. In a talk Shapiro gave at Marquette University, he is quoted making the following statement: “On campus, because there is such a focus on victimhood, a certain “victim privilege” has been established. Not “white privilege,” “victim privilege.” If you’re a member of a victim group, you now have a privilege. And that privilege amounts to, you get to tell other people to shut up and you also get to hurt people.” Ben Shapiro quoted in Hank Berrien, “Shapiro at Marquette: Pulverizing Victimhood Mentality,” Daily Wire, 9 February 2017, http://www.dailywire.com/news/ 13343/shapiro-marquette-pulverizing-victimhood-mentality-hank-berrien Contemporary right wing critiques of “victimhood culture” blame intersectionality in critical social theories for the creation of a victim hierarchy that places white cis-gender able-bodied men at the bottom, claiming that this silences them from moral debates. In short, both Shapiro and Huebner’s positions appear to effectively absolve them of taking social location and systemic power into account in moral deliberation. Indeed, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro end up taking the position as victim in their very critique of it, demonstrating the unintelligibility of the critique in the first place. I thank Zooey for her astute observation of this similarity.

69 Huebner, 199.

70 Ibid.

of gaining access to positions of moral authority and political power.”71 The danger of victim discourses, he claims, is that “the position of the victim circles right back to the conception of power exemplified by the hero.”72 By interpreting the rise of victim narratives in the public sphere as a manipulation of power, Huebner carefully crafts a key conceptual and rhetorical position for martyr narratives to intervene, displacing the so called impasse between victims and heroes.73

Quoting Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, Huebner bemoans the language of victimhood, suggesting that “[t]he ideology of victimization penetrates intellectual and political life even to the extent that in order for your work to have any ethical authority you must be able to present and legitimate yourself as in some sense victimized.”74 As an alternative, Huebner offers the figure of the martyr, which “by contrast, suggests the emergence of an entirely different model of culture and identity. Whereas the hero and the victim both name forms of social control, martyrdom implies a conception of life lived out of control,” in pure obedience to Jesus.75 The absence of social power analysis expressed in this analysis of culture is bewildering. Huebner quotes Anglican theologian Rowan Williams who similarly suggests that “[w]e want to be victims, to enter a world where there are clear divisions between the forces of darkness and the forces of light.”76 These are words that can only be spoken or written by someone with significant social

71 Huebner, 199.

72 Ibid.

73 Noticeably, Huebner avoids the typical language of victim and perpetrator, oppressed and oppressor, referring to the opposite of victimhood as heroism or victory. In my evaluation this signals a circumvention of analysis of power and systemic violence.

74 Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 140-141 in Huebner, 199.

75 Huebner, 200.

power. As Mennonite feminist Jennifer Yoder, who works with victim-survivors of abuse and violence, poignantly remarks, “[o]nly people with no fear of losing bodily integrity find spiritual ecstasy imagining themselves martyred.”77

It makes sense that white settler Mennonite men are invested in the maintenance of martyr narratives and find them empowering. As Krehbiel’s husband reflected on the Martyr’s Mirror he realized that he found it empowering “because against a wider cultural backdrop of narratives celebrating male aggression and dominance, it offered a kind of power based not on worldly success but on the strength of one’s heart and one’s spirit—a subversive take on masculine agency.”78 However, as Krehbiel has observed in her own research as well as her experiences, “it seems to me the greater problem is that on the occasions when we encounter difficult stories, we respond with either ‘dismissive irritation’ […] or by making whatever interpretive stretch is needed to render the difficult stories the least challenging to our worldview.”79 This aptly describes the gauntlet of defensive responses to Krehbiel’s original martyrdom reflection in Mennonite Life, as well as the interpretive gymnastics that Huebner and York engage in in their work to rehabilitate the martyr.

I argue that because Huebner and York, like most white settler Mennonite men, speak from a place of ecclesial and social privilege that does not attend to the kinds of speech and discourse

76 Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 107 quoted in Huebner 200-201. Huebner’s emphasis.

77 Jennifer Yoder, personal correspondence, 7 August 2018.

78 Stephanie Krehbiel, “Joiner, Agent, Storyteller,” Mennonite Life 62.2 (Fall 2007), 6-7. https://ml.bethelks.edu/issue/vol-62-no-2/article/joiner-agent-storyteller/ Though I would argue that the masculinity represented in the martyr stories is not so much a radical alternative to secular masculinity as yet another expression of patriarchy, because there is still no gender power analysis.

79 Ibid., 4.

that victims of systemic violence inhabit, they view this power analysis as a threat to their own social location and correspondent theo-ethics. However, instead of giving up power to survivors of systemic violence to lead efforts at social transformation, the refusal to attend to experiences of victimization as victimization (vulnerable, nonconsensual, exploitative violation) demonstrates an outright refusal to understand the actual workings of social power relations and material difference for living the faith and their theo-ethics. Indeed, in its refusal of victimhood as a descriptive category of experiences of violation, and by silencing experiences of violence, and re- appropriating suffering and abuse into the self-sacrificial figure of the martyr, Mennonite martyr theo-ethics is complicit in the violence against those deemed less significant by society—women, queer people, peoples of colour, Indigenous Peoples, those differently abled, neuro-diverse people, non-Christian, and so on. What Mennonites have missed in their attempts to rehabilitate the martyr, whether for making meaning out of suffering, for palatable familial memories, or for “radical” theo-ethics, is the way that trauma narratives along with social power obscure Mennonites’ own complicity in violence, and perpetuate forms of both trauma and violence intergenerationally.

Conclusion

Therefore, “[p]eople are not martyred, they are murdered.”80 This line in a poem entitled

“Living Sacrifice” by Mennonite poet Ann Hostetler points directly to the absence of analysis of systemic violence in Mennonite martyr narratives and related theo-ethics. In this chapter I have questioned the way in which Mennonites make their martyrs through selective memories and particular narratives. I have also discussed the ways in which dominant martyr narratives have

80 Ann Hostetler, “Living Sacrifice,” in Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror, ed. Kristen Eve Beachy (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2010), 129.

been detrimental to Mennonites who are already marginalized in the church as well as society (i.e. those with less social power). The attempts to cope with the trauma of the early Anabaptists and

Mennonites in Soviet Russia through martyr memories has produced both deontological theo- odicy and teleological theo-ethics of discipleship. I have offered a concerted approach to the question of suffering, counter theodicy, to be one of social power analysis of sources of suffering— i.e., rather than “why does God allow suffering?” I ask “who is suffering?” And “how do socio- economic and political systems contribute to suffering and violence?” In addition, in lieu of a discipleship ethic that idealizes martyrdom as the paragon of faithfulness and witness, hailing virtues of submission, obedience, and sacrifice, I aim to construct a discipleship ethic based on

Luke 4 and healing trauma, by following Jesus who tends to the wounds of the marginalized and recognizes and challenges the complex interplays of socio-economic and political powers around him. This leads me to address in the next chapter: What is at stake and for whom in the maintenance of Mennonite martyr narratives and its corresponding theo-ethics? Or, to put it differently, what are the consequences of a deontological martyrdom ethic? I turn to this in the next chapter, with a discussion of violence against women in the Mennonite church, the emergence of feminist

Mennonite theologies, its key strengths and shortfalls, and the significance of trauma theory for engaging the complex history, theology, and identity of white settler Mennonites as both victims and perpetrators.

Chapter 3

Can I Get a Witness?

Mennonite Women’s Lived Experiences of Violence and Trauma

War is hell, it’s true. Shouldn’t be exposed is another hell. Shouldn’t be exposed stifles and silences and violates. Shouldn’t be exposed refuses and ignores and shames. Shouldn’t be exposed shields bullies and tyrants. I have seen it in my own life. —Miriam Toews, “Peace Shall Destroy Many.”

Growing up as a white settler Mennonite, the daughter of immigrants, I heard many stories about the trek out of the Soviet Union during the 1920s through 1940s. Most of my relatives on my father’s side of the family fled in the 1940s from the Ukraine to Paraguay and then eventually made their way to Canada. My father did not speak of this time as traumatic, but the stories he told entailed poverty, illness and death, disappearance of family members, experiences in prisoner of war camps, and emotional abuse within families. Similarly, the people who made up the church I grew up in in Winnipeg, shared their experiences of suffering as refugees. My mother was born in

Siberia where her mother’s family (my Oma) had been sent as part of the “repatriation” of Germans living in the Soviet Union. My Oma was forced to work in labour camps as a construction worker.

She received one slice of bread a day and her bed always had icicles under it. A few months before my Oma passed away in August 2018 she told me a story about sexual violence she experienced as a construction worker. A male supervisor cornered her threatening to rape her. She told him she would jump off the building they were standing on if he did. He left her alone, knowing he would be held responsible for her death. I do not know what prompted her to tell me this story at this time, so late in her life, when she had told me countless other stories of her experiences of poverty, forced labour, and how her father was disappeared when she was 8 years old. I imagine it was the same reason many survivors of sexual violence do not report their experiences, because they are

not believed, receive no support, are blamed for the violence done to them, and are sometimes further ostracized. As a result of hearing these stories growing up, I came to understand

Mennonites, my people, as victims of various persecutions and suffering since their beginnings as

Anabaptists in the sixteenth century.

Continuing the work of the previous chapter, here I examine the experiences that have been silenced in Mennonite history and theology. Marlene Epp’s groundbreaking work on the experiences of Mennonite women in Soviet Russia and their arrival in Canada is indispensable for understanding the emergence of feminist critiques of Mennonite history and theology. Drawing also on the work of trauma theorist Judith Herman, I argue that white settler Mennonites in Canada of Russian-German descent have experienced collective and gendered trauma that has been tragically unattended to, exacerbated by the covert violence of the dominant martyr theology as outlined in the previous chapter. By considering the experiences of sexual violence in tandem with feminist critiques of dominant Mennonite theology and women’s experiences, I will demonstrate that theology and ethics are not neutral to questions of power and that there are patriarchal, misogynist, sexist, and racist elements of Mennonite theology that perpetuate cycles of violence against women. Additionally, I will discuss how patriarchal patterns are additionally internalized by Mennonite women and continued in cycles of violence towards Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on the work of Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack, I examine how the internalization of patriarchal norms function as normative in Mennonite theo-ethics and how this affects marginalized groups, producing hierarchies of oppression which perpetuate cycles of trauma and violence. Moreover, I argue that these need to be challenged with theo-ethical claims for seeking right relations.

Can I Get a Witness?

Mennonite theologians of martyrdom often begin their discussion of the tradition and their theo-ethical interpretation with the definition of ‘martyr.’ The Greek word ‘martūr’ translates as

‘witness.’ Standard Christian theologies of martyrdom rely on this definition to interpret martyrdom as the ultimate witness to the truth of God. For Mennonites, the violence of the disappeared, murdered, and repatriated men in Soviet Russia was interpreted as martyrdom, as faithful discipleship to Jesus, and as witness to a telos beyond the abominable world, in an effort to derive meaning from horrific suffering. My focus here is that while these interpretations fit the narratives of the trek out of Russia, women’s experiences of sexual violence, did not. The

Mennonite martyr is an overtly male figure who witnesses only to specific forms of violence and truth. The dominance of these narratives have erased women’s experiences of suffering and their voices have often been overtly silenced in Mennonite churches and communities.

In the last few decades, some brave Mennonite women have challenged the master narrative of martyrdom with stories of their experiences of wartime rape. Mennonite historian

Marlene Epp has done significant research in this area, especially on the rape of Mennonite women refugees in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Wartime rape is peripheral even if noted in Mennonite accounts of Soviet Russia. The theology of suffering that emerged emphasized God’s faithfulness and deliverance, the victory of death that Christ ensures for the martyrs who would be resurrected at the eschaton, and their commitment to the virtues of nonresistance and pacifism. Epp astutely observes this phenomenon of identity construction and its consequent silencing of women’s experiences:

To the extent that Mennonite narratives of these events are shaped by biblical images of the “exodus” and a firm belief in the guiding hand of God, the experience of rape is discomforting because it suggests hopelessness and abandonment, rather than faith and protection. Thus memories of rape are subsumed and depersonalized in the overall

narrative of the horror of the war because they have no place in the framework of meaning for the Mennonite community.1

The experiences of the raping of women were erased in the Mennonite narrative because raped women were seen as helpless victims at best but usually they were castigated as sinful and morally corrupt.2 Because the rape of Mennonite women by soldiers was so common in Soviet Russia, some women made contracts with one soldier under the duress of poverty and the threat of gang rape, enduring his sexual violation to acquire food, citizenship papers, and protection from the rape of other soldiers. Such negotiation by women was viewed as defilement and moral corruption by

Canadian Mennonites when the refugee women arrived in the country.

As a result, Mennonite women repressed and internalized their experiences and their

“memories were thus shaped by an inner conflict over their own conditioned response of submission and the resultant guilt that by not resisting they were complicit.”3 As a result of this kind of moral agency, Mennonite women often spoke only about the sexual violations of others they knew and omitted their own experiences, or spoke about it in coded ways. In 1997, Mennonite psychologist Lynda Klassen Reynolds submitted her dissertation on the multigenerational effects of trauma among Soviet Mennonites who immigrated to Canada in the 1920s. In her survey of the first generation of immigrants, many respondents reported witnessing and knowing murder victims, family members who were arrested, and living in a climate of fear. At the same time, fifty

1 Marlene Epp, “The Memory of Violence: Soviet and East European Mennonite Refugees and Rape in the Second World War,” Journal of Women’s History 9.1 (Spring 1997): 62.

2 Ibid., 77.

3 Ibid., 75.

percent reported that they knew someone who had been raped in Russia while none reported that they themselves had been raped.4

Mennonite settlers who were already established in Canada had particularly scathing and misogynist views of Mennonite refugee women. A well-known Mennonite historian, Cornelius J.

Dyck, “author of a standard text in Mennonite history, describes family fragmentation on Soviet

Mennonite communities during the 1930s in these words: ‘Many wives whose husbands had been deported had [sic] all they could do to provide daily bread for their children. The children grew up without proper parental attention and without Christian training.’”5 With this statement, Dyck insinuates that Mennonite women were incapable of raising their children in their faith tradition.

Similarly, one Mennonite woman who had survived rape in order to ensure survival for her children later gave birth to the child of her perpetrator. Rumors spread through her community judging her as “loose” and “easy.”6 In another instance, “a Mennonite woman who was also [sic] offered cyanide, but after being repeatedly raped, chose to live. She was admonished not to take the capsule by an adult male, who reminded her that, for Mennonites, the taking of life, including one’s own, is a sin. However, the lifetime of psychological and emotional depression that followed

4 Lynda Klassen Reynolds, “The aftermath of trauma and immigration: detections of multigenerational effects on Mennonites who emigrated from Russia to Canada in the 1920s,” 58. For this survey there were 67 respondents, ages 67-94, 32 men and 35 women. Klassen Reynolds, 56. Underreporting for rape and other forms of sexual violence is very common given the barriers that victim-survivors continue to encounter if they do report, such as denial, disbelief, victim-blaming, shaming, and even further violence through ostracization from their community. The #metoo movement on social media in 2018 gave the public a glimpse of how many more women have experienced sexual violence than their friends, families, acquaintances, coworkers, and so on, ever thought.

5 Cornelius J. Dyck, An Introduction to Mennonite History, 3rd ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1993) quoted in Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 40.

6 Case file contained in MHC, XXII-A.1, CMBC/CMRIC (191), 1353/1135 quoted in Marlene Epp, Women without Men, 145.

prompted moments of regret over her decision.”7 One woman whom Epp interviewed recalled a big lake beside her grandparents’ home in Russia where many young women and girls went to drown themselves in the aftermath of rape.8 Suicide, even in the aftermath of severe trauma, was condemned by Mennonite leaders (i.e., men) “first because it is a sin, and second because it represented a rejection of maternal responsibilities.”9

The experiences of wartime rape were also perceived as shameful for the Mennonite community and threated to derail the hegemonic narrative and theology of suffering in which a theo-ethics of discipleship was understood. Indeed, Mennonite historian George K. Epp summarized the wartime rape in two mere sentences in his history of Mennonite immigration to

Canada after World War II. He writes, “[w]omen and even children had been raped (hundreds, perhaps even thousands; we do not know; it is a subject too painful to talk about). Men and children were forced to watch as their mothers and sisters were abused…It was a miracle if a woman that

[sic] fell into the hands of Soviet soldiers was not raped.”10 Such dismissal of women’s suffering must be addressed by rectifying the record to name what occurred.

In some cases, sexual violence continued for Mennonite refugee women and girls in

Canada. Many women and teenage girls had to work as domestic workers, often living with their employing family. This made them vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse. One woman

7 Epp, Women without Men, 64.

8 Ibid., 65. In footnote 91 Epp adds: “The memoir of a Prussian Mennonite man corroborates this form of suicide; he describes how one of his aunts jumped with her baby into the lake to escape constant raping: Horst Gerlach, Nightmare in Red (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House c1970), 32.” Ibid., 219.

9 Epp, Women without Men, 65.

10 George K. Epp,”Mennonite Immigration to Canada after World War II,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 5 (1987)117-118 quoted in Marlene Epp, “The Memory of Violence,” 60; my emphasis.

recounted continuous sexual molestation by her employer, who was also a distant relative. She was forced to continue working for him to contribute to her family’s income.11 These experiences of abuse and rape and the consequent perceptions of them by Mennonite men illustrate the misogynist patriarchal patterns of treating women as inferior, morally corrupt, irresponsible, and shameful. Contrary to the perception of many Mennonite men, Epp suggests that “[f]or women coerced into sexual relationships with Soviet soldiers and officers, the temporary security and indeed small comforts this offered her and her children may have represented a more “honorable” choice than offering herself as a martyr.”12 Under such circumstances, when moral agency was so constricted, this choice makes sense.

In addition to experiences of sexual violation, the altered gender roles (i.e., different than traditional wife and mother gender roles) of Mennonite refugee women posed a threat to established Mennonite communities in Canada. During the migration from Soviet Russia, there were approximately twice as many Mennonite women as men.13 This put Mennonite refugee women, especially widows, in a difficult position. Women with disappeared husbands inhabited a unique position because they were treated as widows in Canada but at the same time remarriage was complicated because many never received word that their husbands were dead.14 As a result

11 Epp, Women without Men, 119.

12 Epp, “The Memory of Violence,” 77. This suggests that women had a better sense of accountability in their theo-ethics than men who were married first and foremost to the church, and attended to their wives and children when convenient. It is my contention that male accountability towards their family was not seen as a priority of discipleship, a pattern that continues to be seen in white settler Mennonite households across Canada. And yet, at the same time, “[g]iven the patriarchal family ideology that existed in Mennonite communities, the loss of the father was viewed not only as a physical absence but also as a loss to the moral fibre and, indeed, the integrity of the family itself.” Epp, Women without Men, 40.

13 Epp, Women without Men, 12. The gendered nature of war narratives is striking given that approximately 80 percent of the world’s refugees are women and children but refugee narratives are dominated by male experiences. Ibid., 6.

of so many “women without men,” Mennonite women refugees had to take on typically “male” roles in the household. This had both positive and negative consequences for the women since “the responsibilities they carried and opportunities they found changed them as women and at times put them in direct conflict with the norms of the communities that received them in Canada.”15

The altered gender roles presented a challenge for male leaders in Mennonite communities who sought to maintain the patriarchal norms and narratives (both social and theological) of the community. One way to maintain patriarchal patterns is through silencing and erasure, both of which occurred as women’s experiences were routinely dismissed. In a comparable situation in

Bosnia, one journalist observes the following difference between martyrdom and rape: “Killing may make martyrs, and thus inspirit and strengthen the morale and solidarity of the victims. Rape, on the other hand, not only defiles and shatters the individual woman but, especially in traditional societies, also administers a grave, long-lasting wound to morale and identity.”16 In response to violence and trauma, sexual violence against women is incommensurable with martyr narratives which aim to recuperate victimization by interpreting it within a different framework—in the case of Bosnia, for the purpose of strengthening morale and solidarity, and in the case of Mennonites in Soviet Russia, to regain a sense of stability and hope in God’s faithfulness.

In the master narrative of the collective memory of Soviet Mennonites, the experiences of women are erased by the figure of the martyr. Unlike the sixteenth-century Martyrs Mirror, which included many women, the 1949 book of Soviet Mennonite martyrs only included two women out

14 Epp, Women without Men, 11.

15 Ibid., 5.

16 Lance Morrow, “Unspeakable,” Time (22 February 1993): 26 quoted in Epp, “The Memory of Violence,” 77.

of sixty-one biographies. Thus the Mennonite martyr becomes only a male figure, a patriarchal figure, who reinforces and reproduces traditional European gender roles, the violent submission and obedience of women to men, even in his absence, even in the wake of his disappearance or death. Significantly Epp notes, “[t]he way in which women’s memories are constructed is conversely shaped by gendered notions of female humility and self-sacrifice. Within the pacifist community, acquiescence, submission, and humility are traits valued in all members, but expected especially of women.”17 Mennonite women are appreciated for their quiet suffering, their commitment to mothering, and submission to God (and men, the head of the household). And the martyr narrative organizes Mennonite identity in such a way that reinforces this type of response to violence—for Mennonite men in the face of disappearance and death, and for women specifically in the face and aftermath of rape and the disappearance of their husbands and fathers.

Mennonite “[n]arratives of wartime suffering most often portray women, particularly mothers, as suffering quietly, submitting themselves to fate, or giving themselves into God’s hands for protection. Rarely are they remembered as offering active resistance in threatening situations.”18 Women who exemplified the moral standards of submission, nonresistance, defenselessness, and yieldedness were remembered piously (if tragically) and incorporated into some collective memories. However, women who survived sexual exploitation and exhibited moral agency for their own and their children’s survival were seen as morally corrupt. As a result,

Mennonite refugee women internalized their experiences in a number of ways that correspond to

17 Epp, “The Memory of Violence,” 75.

18 Ibid.

trauma responses such as dissociation and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which I will take up as key to this thesis.

In contrast, Mennonite men who died or were disappeared in Soviet Russia fit the narrative as defined by the hermeneutic community of martyrdom as witness and faithful discipleship. This role maintained an eschatological purpose and hope (i.e., identity) for a community grieving loss and trying to make meaning out of suffering in a new country. Women, on the other hand, who survived wartime rape remained victims and as figures of tragedy, shame, and sin, were incommensurable with the discursive identity of the Mennonite settler community.

In chapter 2 I discussed how Mennonite peace theology in the twenty-first century is constituted by non-violent resistance to state powers and the notion of prophetic witness to an alternative community, namely the church. Accounting for the experiences of Mennonite refugee women highlights the narrow definitions of violence and power in Mennonite theology. Contrary to Huebner and York, I contend that a theology of martyrdom was never about giving up power but a way of reclaiming power in the face of suffering and trauma. But, by obfuscating and silencing some experiences of women and particular forms of violence, the trauma was perpetuated and the associated martyr complex essentially became instead a tool for church leaders to reestablish patriarchal order and identity, and to reinforce damaging theological, cultural, and social norms on a refugee community primarily of women and children. In short, the martyr, as the primary figure of discipleship, perhaps resists state power and military violence, but it perpetuates violence against Mennonite women, and colludes (ironically) with settler colonial violence against Indigenous Peoples, which will be discussed later in this chapter.

Trauma Theory: Reframing Suffering and Memory

Trauma is a relatively new concept in public discourse about violence and its lasting effects on victim-survivors, considering that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was only established as a psychological disorder long after WWII in the 1980s. While theology and ethics in Canada and the U.S. has become increasingly interdisciplinary during the past 40 years it has barely scratched the surface of trauma studies. I join trauma theologians Shelly Rambo, Serene Jones, and Cynthia Hess in arguing that theology needs trauma theory in order to increase its critical acumen about the consequences of theologies and ethics, and thus also to recognize the suffering in which it is complicit.

Theoretically, trauma is most generally defined as a disconnection. While often associated with large-scale physical violence or face-to-face combat, trauma can occur with virtually any experience because trauma occurs as a result of an inability to process the experience. As trauma theorist Judith Herman elucidates, “[t]raumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.”19 Trauma reactions occur when regular human response is not possible.20 In the case of this thesis, the inability to cope with the experiences of sexual violence is evident in the stories of Mennonite refugee women. Applying trauma theory can aid in understanding victim-survivors of sexual violence in order to create and sustain a more supportive community for both healing and prevention. The ways in which

Mennonite women as well as men historically and through contemporary times circumvented

19 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 33.

20 Ibid., 34.

discussions of sexual violence and spoke of rape in coded forms, illustrates a kind of processing or coping with trauma that is reflective of the concept of “dissociation” in trauma theory.21

Dissociation essentially involves a separation of elements of traumatic experiences from one’s identity and memory. It names attempts to preserve the self, to cope with the trauma, and especially in situations of continuous trauma, to serve as a survival mechanism. In extreme cases of abuse, people, especially children, can develop multiple personalities and amnesia because of their trauma and their attempt to survive. Herman primarily discusses dissociation in the context of child abuse because children are very vulnerable and highly dependent on their caregivers especially in situations of abuse. When child abuse occurs, it creates a deep level of cognitive dissonance within the victim: the person who is supposed to care for the child is also the most dangerous and harmful. In order to cope with the trauma of abuse or neglect, children dissociate in a number of ways: “the abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory, so that it did not really happen, or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse. Unable to escape or alter the unbearable reality in fact, the child alters it in her mind.”22 In a similar way, because Mennonite refugee women were vulnerable due to their subordination to their husbands and community leaders, and dependent on Canadian Mennonites in many ways for their survival after immigration in their new homes, the dissociation of rape from memory and identity both on an individual and collective level served as a psychological defense mechanism. In addition, it stands to reason that Mennonite men, realizing that many of their family members had been raped by Soviet soldiers, experienced vicarious trauma and struggled to regain

21 See Lynda Klassen Reynolds, “The aftermath of trauma and immigration,” and Epp, Women Without Men.

22 Herman, 102.

a sense of control and meaning in the wake of such trauma.23 Consequently, men contributed to dissociation by trying to bury and forget the trauma of sexual violence that women in the faith community experienced. This contributed to a culture of shame around sex and sexuality as well as emotional and spiritual abuse of women and children, not only discounting their experiences but also condemning them.

Furthermore, the gendered nature of violence and trauma experienced by Mennonites in

Soviet Russia is illuminated by Herman’s analysis of trauma experiences in the United States in the twentieth century. As she traces the history of trauma theory and psychoanalysis in the West,

Herman notes that the concept and diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder only emerged long after the traumatic experiences of combat veterans in the Second World War. While most

Mennonite men in Soviet Russia refused military service, they would have experienced physical and psychological trauma through repatriation, disappearance, and forced labour camps. Herman also notes that “[o]nly after 1980, when efforts of combat veterans had legitimated the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder, did it become clear that the psychological syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest was essentially the same as the syndrome seen in survivors of war.”24 Indeed, rape has higher numbers of survivors with PTSD compared to other crimes in the United States.25 Herman names rape and combat as the primary sources of trauma for women and men respectively in America, producing the same psychological effects of PTSD

23 For a good primer on vicarious or secondary trauma, how to identify it and how to attend to it, see Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (Oakland: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2009). I thank Stephanie Krehbiel for this book recommendation.

24 Herman, 32; my emphasis.

25 Ibid., 52.

in both.26 The three categories for PTSD symptoms are hyperarousal, which “reflects the persistent expectation of danger,” intrusion, which “reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment,” and constriction, which “reflects the numbing response of surrender.”27 These neurological and physiological effects of trauma do not only disrupt the survivors’ ability to cope with everyday life, but also affect their relationships, including systems of attachment for the individual and secondary or vicarious trauma for caregivers or close family and friends.28

In the case of Mennonite refugees from Soviet Russia, the gendered analysis represents a conflict inherent in trauma: “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is central to the dialectic of psychological trauma.”29 Moreover, “[d]enial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as individual level.”30 In an effort to produce meaning and reclaim their identity in a crisis of faith during a time of great upheaval,

Mennonite refugees spoke of some of the forms of trauma they experienced—but this was to the detriment of others, namely those experienced by women and sometimes girls.

Moreover, although Mennonite men were not named as the primary perpetrators of sexual violence in the rape accounts of Soviet Russia, they resorted to some of the very tools that Herman has found characteristic of perpetrators, namely, forgetting, secrecy, silencing, denial, discrediting, and victim blaming.31 In short, Herman aids in understanding Mennonite refugees’ experiences

26 Herman, 61.

27 Ibid., 35.

28 Ibid., 51.

29 Ibid., 1.

30 Ibid., 7.

31 Ibid., 8.

from Soviet Russia as traumatic, and especially for women, as an internalization of this trauma which trauma theory has found can be passed down “biologically and epigenetically, as well as through family systems and communal narratives.”32 Lynda Klassen Reynolds’ research corroborates this. Her study of intergenerational trauma in Mennonites who immigrated to Canada in the 1920s from Soviet Russia found that “the first generation manifested significantly greater levels of Inhibition of Aggression, Need for Affection, and Anxiety. The second generation manifested significantly greater levels of Inhibition of Aggression, Over-Controlled Hostility,

Anxiety, and Depression. The third generation showed significantly greater levels of Anxiety and

Depression,” compared to societal norms.33

In a sermon on becoming a trauma-informed community, Mennonite pastor and theologian

Sheri Hostetler also casts a self-critical eye on internalized Mennonite trauma. Referring to the ongoing significance of martyrdom even among contemporary Mennonites and Neo-Anabaptists, she asks if a sense of individual and collective identity that is greatly shaped by past victimization interferes with Mennonite commitments to peacemaking and justice. Hostetler writes, “I wonder if this martyr trauma keeps us from both effective solidarity with victims of violence today and also keeps us inflicting violence on each other and ourselves.”34 Contemporary Mennonite feminist theologians, ethicists, and Christian theologians engaging with trauma theory agree with her

32 Elaine Enns, “Trauma and Memory: Challenges to Settler Solidarity,” Journeying Together toward Truth and Reconciliation 37.1 Article 5 (2016), 3.

33 Klassen Reynolds, 67.

34 Sheri Hostetler, “Sermon: Transforming Martyr Trauma,” Mennos by the Bay, Blog post on 3 October 2017, accessed 6 October 2017, https://blog.menno.org/2017/10/03/sermon-transforming-martyr-trauma/

assessment.35 This challenge is deeply ironic given Mennonite commitments founded as an historic

Anabaptist peace church.

Theology and Power: Feminist and Womanist Critiques

As an historic peace church, Mennonites are most known for their commitment to pacifism.

Indeed, questions of peace, violence, and non-violence are very much alive in Mennonite churches and post-secondary institutions. When Mennonites think of violence and non-violence they tend to think of two things: pacifism (and conscientious objectors), as I discussed in chapter 2, and John

Howard Yoder. These two things shape Mennonite understandings of violence and non-violence specifically, and Mennonite theological ethics broadly. Mennonites have historically understood violence primarily in terms of military service and since they are rooted in a tradition of nonconformity, military service was refused on the basis of allegiance not to the state (i.e., the world) but faithfulness to God, which prohibited taking the life of another human. This dichotomy between the church and the world played an important role in defining the parameters of

Mennonite theological ethics since its beginnings among the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, and was newly articulated and promoted by John Howard Yoder in the second half of the twentieth century.

As Yoder is the most well-known and arguably most influential Mennonite theologian in the twentieth century, it is important to address the shortfalls of his theological ethics, and indeed the ways in which it makes violence against women permissible. Traci West, whose critical questions about the consequences of theo-ethics guide my research (as I discussed in chapter 1),

35 I will outline the concurring arguments of Mennonite feminist theologians and ethicists immediately below, and the arguments of Christian theologians engaging trauma theory in chapter 5.

is critical of those she calls “isolated great thinkers,” i.e., well-known intellectuals whose moral ideas are dislocated from their social context. She writes specifically with regards to Reinhold

Niebuhr and the shortfalls of his theo-ethics in the context of anti-black racism in America, but her critical questions are crucial to this thesis as well in the context of Yoder’s theo-ethics and violence against women. As a challenge to this trend of elevating certain thinkers without critical social analysis, she posits that “[c]ommunity sources can hold accountable the ideas of dominant thinkers and traditions, ensuring that those dominant ideas are useful for the common good.”36 With this challenge she highlights the importance of a key ethical question that does not worry dominant thinkers: What is at stake and for whom? I will address this questions shortly drawing on feminist

Mennonite theologians who discuss precisely this ethical concern of analysis of social relations of power. But before I do so, I must digress.

Interruption: Why John Howard Yoder’s Theology and Ethics

When I set out to write this dissertation, I was determined not write a word about John

Howard Yoder, to write my thesis with the assumption that he is irrelevant. In a sense Yoder has become irrelevant for Mennonite theologians (primarily those who are not cis-white-men) because they have employed critical perspectives from other disciplines to bring their theo-ethics into the social contexts of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the persistence of Yoder’s works in

Mennonite churches and post-secondary educational institutions, along with the virulent neglect to address the violence not only in his life but in his theology, accounts for my brief inclusion of

Yoder in this thesis. I frame this section as an interruption as a reference to the common experience

36 West, DCE, 4. West’s critique is specifically of Reinhold Niebuhr, a contemporary of Yoder.

that women have in churches, classrooms, and meetings—of being interrupted by men continuously interjecting to dominate the conversation.

Yoder defines theological ethics primarily in terms of faithfulness to the life and teachings of Jesus as recorded in the four Gospels.37 Secondly, faithfulness turns upon a church-world dichotomy which he inherits with some modification from the sixteenth-century Anabaptists. In

Yoder’s theo-ethics, the church is defined as a voluntary community of believers that bears witness to the life and teachings of Jesus in and to the world. Holding the early church up as an ideal ecclesiology, Yoder argues that the contemporary church must be a visible minority distinguishable from the world by its way of life. Additionally, against an apolitical spiritual understanding of Jesus and discipleship, Yoder argues that the Gospels have inherent ethical and political implications for Christians; that is, Jesus’ life and teachings inaugurate a new reality for believers, a new way of being that conforms to a different standard of living exemplified by Jesus.

Where the Gospel message coincides with the ways of “the world,” the church works with the world, but where and when it does not, the church gives allegiance first and foremost to Christ.

However, Yoder does not view scripture as a moral blueprint for the church. The believing community must continuously discern what faithfulness to Jesus means and the method of discernment it practices is just as important for Yoder as the conclusions it might reach. In contrast to more hierarchical models of interpretation within Christianity, Mennonites practice discernment and interpretation of scripture in a hermeneutic community, what is often referred to as “the priesthood of all believers.” The emphasis on this model reaches back to the sixteenth-century

37 See John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994).

Anabaptists who rejected clericalism and instead believed that the Holy Spirit would aid any member of the believing community in the interpretation of scripture. Additionally, for Yoder, the character of the community cannot be accounted for apart from the reasoning that the community employs, which in turn cannot be evaluated apart from the community. Yoder hereby affirms some of the historical situatedness of both interpreting scripture as well as the moral discernment of the faith community.

A further diagnosis that Yoder makes concerning the moral failure of the church hinges on the figure of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century C.E. Where the early church prior to

Constantine was a visible minority persecuted for its adherence to its faith, Constantine becomes the symbol that marks a significant ecclesial and eschatological shift with his conversion to

Christianity. Yoder’s argument runs roughly as follows: the Christian church is constituted by those who confess the Lordship of Christ. Because the amalgamation of the church and empire makes Christianity the “norm,” the community of believers is no longer distinguishable from the rest of the citizens in the empire; the church-world dichotomy is effectively erased. Here Yoder argues for what he calls “the otherness of the church,” that the church, as a body witnessing to the

Good News of the Gospel must be visibly distinct, other, from those to whom it is witnessing (i.e. the world). The difference is “between those for whom the church is a reality and those for whom it is the institutional reaction of the good and bad conscience, of the insights, the self- encouragement—in short, the religion of society.”38

38 John Howard Yoder, “The Otherness of the Church,” in The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical, ed. Michael G. Cartwright (Waterloo: Herald Press, 1998), 62. First published in 1994 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

For Yoder, the problem is that in the process of “constantinianization,” i.e., the amalgamation of Christianity and the state, the church becomes too comfortable in its new position of power. It takes a posture of empire, or imperial rule and control, which Yoder submits is an ecclesial idolatry. This is because, as Yoder argues, constantinianization eliminates eschatology: rather than entrust the future of the Christian community to God, Constantine brings the kingdom of God into the reigns of human and worldly power. Constantinianism therefore names an attempt to take control of history and move it in the right direction; this is a temptation to power and control that Yoder suggests Christ resisted three times in the wilderness. Contrary to this, Yoder argues that “[t]he relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.”39 Yoder makes a moral claim about theo-ethical norms when he states that “[t]he key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience […]. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which of course is the justification of the use of violence and other kinds of power in every human conflict. The triumph of the right, although it is measured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of any inherently greater strength of the good guys.”40 Here patience and obedience are named as the foremost, “the right” virtues for Christians.

Back to Theology and Power: Feminist and Womanist Critiques

The primary criticisms levied against Yoder by Mennonites are by feminist and womanist theologians and they turn on the question of power and narrow definitions of violence. In her book,

39 Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 232.

40 Ibid., 232.

Obedience, Suspicion, and the Gospel of Mark, Mennonite feminist theologian Lydia Neufeld

Harder spends a significant amount of time unpacking “the ethos of authority as it is expressed and practiced in a specific hermeneutic community,” namely, white settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. in the late twentieth century.41 She recognizes that the model of a priesthood of all believers for a hermeneutic community rests on the unequal power structure of clericalism.

However, without a more thorough power analysis, Yoder’s alternative model based on the work of the Spirit simply maintains other unequal power dynamics. Yoder’s hermeneutic framework is based on the authority of the Spirit working through members of the community, which in theory creates equality rather than hierarchy. In practice, however, because of social norms in the community conforming to patriarchal gender roles, women are excluded from the ecclesial discernment process. Indeed, Neufeld Harder cautions that a “hermeneutics of obedience can encourage uncritical, naïve acceptance of human authority rather than promoting an openness to

God,” because the power within the hermeneutic community remains unacknowledged.42 Yoder’s strict dichotomy between the church and the world enables him to unmask certain forms of power and violence in the world, such as Christian imperialism, war, capital punishment, etc., but forecloses the acknowledgement of any unjust power structures within the church, which is continuously held up as a beacon of light and peace in a violent world.

Yoder’s ethical norms can be summarized in the notions of servanthood, subordination, and non-violence, the demands of which are non-conformity and potentially suffering and/or death. The community of believers is characterized by patience, obedience, and faithfulness to

41 Lydia Neufeld Harder, Obedience, Suspicion, and the Gospel of Mark: A Mennonite-Feminist Exploration of Biblical Authority (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 28.

42 Ibid., 38.

Jesus.43 Neufeld Harder takes issue with several elements of Yoder’s notion of “revolutionary subordination” as articulated in his most influential book The Politics of Jesus, elements which include the Rule of Paul and the breaking of bread. Following the Rule of Paul in 1 Corinthians

14:21-29 and Acts 15, Yoder emphasizes the Spirit’s freedom in meetings of the hermeneutic community. This was meant to enable transparent, multifaceted, interpretation and accountability, but results in an active role for men and a passive role for women.44 Similarly, the breaking of bread was “an act of economic ethics” for Yoder based on communal sharing by the apostles in

Acts.45 Again, however, it is primarily Mennonite men who serve communion while women serve in the private sphere of the home and church kitchen. In short, “differences in status were not overcome in the meal of unity and fellowship” because of these unacknowledged social power differences within the church.46

The other primary criticism, as mentioned above, is the narrow scope of violence and peace that Mennonite theo-ethics has articulated. As Mennonite feminist theologian Gayle Gerber

Koontz has observed, because Mennonite peace theology rose in response to Christian defenses of war and capital punishment, it continued to focus on the violence of military service at the expense of other forms of violence such as domestic and sexual abuse in Mennonite homes and churches.47

Gerber Koontz challenges Mennonites to increase the scope of peace theology, urge the agenda,

43 Neufeld Harder, 42-43.

44 Ibid., 49. I would add that this structure also promotes misopedy, which continues to be maintained in contemporary hermeneutic circles that do have a more equitable relation between men and women but continue to neglect children.

45 Ibid., 51.

46 Ibid.

47 Gayle Gerber Koontz, “Introduction” in Peace Theology & Violence Against Women, ed. Elizabeth G. Yoder (Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1992), 1-4.

help pose issues and provide analysis, evaluate theological and ethical convictions and cultural assumptions with reference to violation of women, offer constructive proposals, and call for the integration and consistency of theology and practice (which is absent in Yoder, as demonstrated by Neufeld Harder above).48 This narrow definition of violence in terms of military service can again be seen as dependent on a church-world dichotomy: war is something the world does and because the church is an alternative to the world, true believers are called to practice nonconformity. In addition, Stephanie Krehbiel notes that “Mennonite pacifist discourse developed in large part as a conversation among Mennonite men about how to resist masculinist nationalism and militarism. If soldiering was what made boys into responsible citizen-subjects, then Mennonite men needed an alternative means to citizenship and manhood,”49 which the figure of the martyr provided. Thus one begins to see the interlocking nature of shortfalls in Mennonite theology and ethics due to narrow definitions of violence and a lack of social power analysis.

In addition to the neglect of domestic and sexual violence in Mennonite homes and church communities, feminist Mennonite theologians Mary H. Schertz, Ruth Krall, Carol Penner, and many others after them have highlighted the dangers of Mennonite understandings of obedience, servanthood, and suffering (i.e. nonconformity, nonresistance). Each of these authors contributed to a conference held in 1992 at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (formerly Associated

Mennonite Biblical Seminary) on Peace Theology and Violence Against Women. Schertz suggested that Mennonite peace theology is not good news for all Mennonites, especially women.

Where peace theology requires not resisting evil and accepting suffering, this has taught

48 Gerber Koontz, 1-4.

49 Stephanie Krehbiel, “Pacifist Battlegrounds: Violence, Community, and the Struggle for LGBTQ Justice in the Mennonite Church USA,” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, Lawrence, 2015), 34, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Mennonite women to accept their suffering of abuse and violence by their husbands and other family and community members.50 Similarly, Krall has called attention to the culture of rape that is inherent to patriarchy and active in Mennonite theology. Mennonite theological anthropology sees women as second sex, not made in the image of God but in the image of Adam. The Mennonite theology of suffering adds that women must suffer as Christ suffered in imitation of Christ, as the ultimate sign of faithfulness.51 As Krehbiel affirms, what nonconformity and nonresistance “as a tactic for violence neglects, however, is the violence that Mennonites commit against one another.

The degree to which Mennonites are able to acknowledge this as a problem is, predictably, dependent on social location.”52 Carol Penner also emphasizes that suffering is not redemptive and that Mennonite theology has failed to identify unjust causes of suffering due to its lack of power analysis.53

Nekeisha Alexis,54 a Black Mennonite woman theologian, addresses additional power inequalities functioning in the dominant Mennonite peace theology as represented by Yoder. She asks whether “a theology that glorifies and centralizes Jesus’ suffering and violent death [can] also disempower and thwart the survival of people who are oppressed.”55 Alexis notes how white

50 Mary H. Schertz, “Creating Justice in the Space Around Us: Toward a Biblical Theology of Peace Between Men and Women,” in Peace Theology & Violence Against Women, ed. Elizabeth G. Yoder (Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1992), 5.

51 Ruth E. Krall, “Christian Ideology, Rape and Women’s Postrape Journeys to Healing,” in Peace Theology & Violence Against Women, ed. Elizabeth G. Yoder (Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1992), 76-92.

52 Krehbiel, “Pacifist Battlegrounds,” 6.

53 Carol Penner, “Content to Suffer: An Exploration of Mennonite Theology from the Context of Violence Against Women,” in Peace Theology & Violence Against Women, ed. Elizabeth G. Yoder (Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1992), 103-107.

54 Formerly Nekeisha Alexis-Baker.

Christians spiritualized the Gospel, the freedom and equality available in Christ, and supported slavery with a “hermeneutics of sacrifice.”56 Some slaves received this Gospel from white

Christians as a message supporting their enslavement as divine punishment. Other black people interpreted Jesus and the cross very differently and viewed the suffering of Jesus as “a sign of solidarity with them.”57 Still others found the most empowering and liberating message in Jesus’ resurrection as a triumph over evil and his love and compassion for the sick and poor as salvific.58

Central to Yoder’s soteriology is his notion of “revolutionary subordination.”

Revolutionary subordination suggests that the cross, as triumph over evil, enables a new social order in which subordinate and dominant powers in the world are overturned. For Yoder this means that a slave is not enabled as a moral agent to servanthood and obedience to God because his hope lies ultimately in God and no longer in the world or his master. Likewise, a master is called to obedience to God and to treat the slave with kindness. However, in revolutionary subordination, each member is still expected to accept their social location, but to act freely in obedience to Christ within it.59 One can see how this might pose a challenge for those positioned subordinately in society.

The only helpful aspect that Alexis sees in “revolutionary subordination” is the emphasis on maximizing freedom. In contrast to Yoder, she sees that black people practiced revolutionary

55 Nekeisha Alexis-Baker, “Freedom of the Cross: John Howard Yoder and Womanist Theologies in Conversation,” in Power and Practices: Engaging the Work of John Howard Yoder, ed. Jeremy M. Bergen and Anthony G. Siegrist (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2009), 83.

56 Ibid., 84.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., 85.

59 See Ch. 9 “Revolutionary Subordination,” 162-192 in Yoder, The Politics of Jesus.

subordination when they resisted their oppressor or escaped plantations. She names Sojourner

Truth as a quintessential example.60 Situating herself in this history of anti-blackness in the United

States, Alexis challenges Yoder’s notion of revolutionary subordination, a supposedly liberating way of life enabled by the cross. She argues that “[i]n spite of its potential for resisting domination

[read, the world] and equalizing relationships, however, revolutionary subordination appears to be inherently oppressive when Yoder asserts that it also calls people at the bottom of society to accept their disadvantaged position.”61 Additionally, she criticizes Yoder for his failure to challenge “the systems of power that dominate.”62 She argues that Christian ethics also needs “nonviolent resistance to the domination in the way of the cross.”63 What she calls for is not only an individual or personal liberation but social transformation.64

Feminist Mennonite ethicist Kimberly Penner broadens the critical discussion of sexual violence in Mennonite churches and communities by identifying not only sexual violence against straight cis-gender women, but also by identifying discrimination against LGBTQ persons as sexual violence. Her comprehensive dissertation on sexual violence in Mennonite churches in

Canada and the U.S. aims to imagine “discipleship as erotic peacemaking.”65 With a thorough analysis of John Howard Yoder’s abuses against women as well as a detailed overview of feminist

Mennonite critiques of power with regards to theology and ethics, Penner moves towards

60 Alexis-Baker, 92.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 93.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., 94.

65 Kimberly Lynn Penner, “Discipleship as Erotic Peacemaking: Toward a Feminist Mennonite Theo-Ethics of Embodiment and Sexuality,” (PhD diss., University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 2017).

developing a feminist Mennonite theo-ethics that values embodiment and sexuality, instead of viewing them as sources of shame and sin. By examining the ways in which gender and sexuality have been treated in Mennonite churches on constituent as well as conference levels, Penner observes how specific understandings of ecclesiology and ethics contributed to gender and sexual violence in these contexts. Joining the feminist Mennonite scholars before her, like Neufeld Harder and Gerber Koontz discussed above, Penner argues that unequal power structures remain unacknowledged in processes of ethical discernment in the Mennonite church, and that this hides forms of sexual and gender violence. This is because women and other-gendered/non-binary people, as well as LGBTQ people, hold less social power than straight cis-gendered men.

Penner additionally notes how processes of reconciliation with victim survivors of sexual violence have failed to address the impact of violence on people. In the case of John Howard

Yoder, she demonstrates how the process designed to rehabilitate him and reconcile him with victim-survivors of his sexual violence, failed to understand social power dynamics and as a result exacerbated the harms experienced by the women Yoder violated. Using this as a case study,

Penner observes theo-ethical sources and norms that contribute to heterosexism and misogyny in

Mennonite churches. Locating herself in the field of liberative Christian ethics, Penner develops not a sexual ethic for Mennonites, but a theo-ethics that addresses gender and sexual violence by privileging the voices and experiences of those with the least social and ecclesial power.66

Finally, the work of feminist Mennonite theologian Elaine Enns and her husband Ched

Myers, provides a framework for a more equitable peace theology based on social power mapping.

They define violence as “a distinct subset of conflict occurring when one party acts wittingly or

66 Penner, 6-10.

unwittingly to dominate another, directly through violence or systematically through injustice.”67

Enns and Myers ground their approach in three theses: “all behavioural violence has social roots; the work of restorative justice and peacemaking is necessarily variegated, yet of a whole cloth; understanding how social power is distributed is key to responding to conflict.”68 Their conviction for the importance of mapping social power comes from “the Hebrew prophets constantly challenging the distribution of power in their social world” and Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Mark “adjudicating violation upon careful analysis of relative power in the community, giving radical moral priority to the “least.””69 Theo-ethics without power analysis is theo-ethics without accountability.

Enns and Myers note that “social power must always be analyzed in context, and this is a multidimensional task,” that involves considerations of gender, class, race, ability, health, sexuality, geography, faith, and many more elements specific to identity and social location.70

They define social power according to four basic capacities: mobility, access, self-determination, and influence, and differentiate between subjective perceptions (personal biases or stereotypes) and objective conditions (e.g. economic, political, structural).71 Applying this framework for power mapping would enable Mennonite churches to use a critical lens of self-reflection within our own communities and assess the distribution of power and how unequally it is shared, and to

67 Elaine Enns and Ched Myers, Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Volume II: Diverse Christian Practices of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009), 15.

68 Ibid., 15.

69 Ibid., 28-29.

70 Ibid., 30.

71 Ibid., 34.

recognize multiple forms of interlocking injustice and violence. By listening carefully to the voices of women and other marginalized peoples this effort could begin the long process required to address the harm done by Mennonite peace theology as I have discussed here.

Interlocking Trauma as the Violence of Unattended Trauma

Unfortunately, white settler Mennonites from Soviet Russia have by and large not attended to the trauma they have experienced or to the domestic, sexual, and emotional abuse of women and children that continues in Mennonite homes and communities.72 Trauma unattended to returns as violence. The denial of trauma has detrimental effects on the relationships of white settler

Mennonites with others, especially others who are marginalized, especially Indigenous Peoples in this case. Mennonites from Soviet Russia inhabit the dual positions in social relations of refugee and settler. Women, as refugees, had little social power in their communities, but as settlers they benefited from their whiteness and economic support from Mennonite churches and government refugee aid. Having western European ancestry made it easier for Mennonites to assimilate into white Canadian society than other refugees then and now who are peoples of colour as well as the

Indigenous Peoples of this land.

Elaine Enns helpfully widens the frame of reference for understanding white Mennonite trauma in a colonial context. She locates herself as a grandchild of Mennonite refugees who fled

Soviet Russia and settled in Saskatchewan next to Cree communities who were still experiencing the depredations of settler colonialism through residential schools and discriminatory government

72 See Isaac I. Block, Assault on God’s Image: Domestic Abuse (Winnipeg: Windflower Communications, 1991); Stephanie Krehbiel, “Into Account: Support for Survivors Seeking Justice, Accountability, and Recovery in Christian Contexts,” accessed 30 September, 2018, https://intoaccount.org; and the Mennonite Abuse Prevention (MAP) List, accessed 30 September 2018, http://www.themaplist.org

policies. She writes, “I believe it is important to explore connections and contrasts between these two communities’ experiences of trauma and resilience, for the purpose of working for justice and healing.”73 Enns identifies the failure of Mennonites to attend to our trauma as a significant barrier to empathy, truth telling, healing, and solidarity with their Indigenous neighbours. Drawing on

Marlene Epp’s historical work that I have also referred to in this thesis, as well as trauma theory

(which I will discuss more in chapter 5), Enns argues that silencing exacerbates trauma and points out three reasons that rape and sexual assault are often silenced by communities. These are, first, the lack of a safe space for talking about trauma, which leads to self-censoring; second, unequal power dynamics, which dictate whose stories get told and are valued; and third, ambiguity or manipulation of memory, in which victims who have memory gaps are deemed uncredible or sanitized by others.74 Each of these elements can be seen at play among the Mennonite women refugees who had very little social power in their own communities.

But Enns also calls attention to another form of silencing in which both Mennonite men and women are complicit—the silencing of the violence of settler colonialism. This is one of the ways in which trauma unattended returns as violence. It is a pattern of ongoing abuse of power that can be observed in abusive families (father abuses mother, mother abuses children, children abuse pets and elders) as well as across societal groups. Mennonites value their history, their memory and narratives, and many can trace their genealogy through generations and across continents. However, what is absent from Mennonite genealogies are relations with Indigenous

Peoples, which includes the Nogai and Cossack peoples who inhabited the Ukrainian Steppes

73 Enns, “Trauma and Memory,” 1.

74 Ibid., 6.

before Catherine the Great forced them out and settled Mennonites on their land, as well as the land of the Young Chippewayan nation in Saskatchewan that was given to Mennonites upon their arrival in Canada that Enns names.75 These are only two examples among many, largely unaccounted for, historical instances of Mennonites displacing other peoples.76 As Hostetler emphasizes, the ways in which Mennonites narrate and remember their trauma has effectively kept them stuck in a kind of “martyr identity, despite being in very different historical circumstances.”77

In my own experiences in Mennonite churches, communities, and schools, I have noticed that prejudiced and racist views of Indigenous Peoples are prevalent. A common attitude among white settler Mennonites in Canada towards Indigenous Peoples is: “we came here as refugees with nothing and we made it, why can’t you?” This commitment to the myth of meritocracy commits the Fundamental Attribution Error I addressed in chapter 2. In reality, attitudes that judge others by attributing behaviour to character only contribute to the discriminatory systems of power that disenfranchise Indigenous Peoples in the first place. Instead of responding to Indigenous

People’s trauma with empathy, because of Mennonite’s own history of suffering, many

Mennonites respond with defensiveness and judgement. One of the most insidious and saddening contributions to oppression of Indigenous Peoples, is the attitudes of white settler Mennonite women who have experienced trauma and suffering, but who have internalized the patriarchal and racist norms of their community, perceiving themselves only as victims. Professor of law Mary

75 Enns, “Trauma and Memory,” 6.

76 Other examples include Mennonites on the land designated to Six Nations (Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora) under the 1763 Royal Proclamation, Mennonites in southern Manitoba on traditional Cree, Ojibwa, and Métis lands, Mennonites in the traditional territory of the Tarahumara Peoples of Chihuahua, Mexico, Mennonites in the traditional lands of the Ayoreo in the Gran Chaco, Paraguay and Bolivia.

77 Hostetler, “Sermon: Transforming Martyr Trauma,” 3.

100

Louise Fellows and critical race and law theorist Sherene Razack have theorized the role of this pattern in perpetuating the cycle of violence as “the race to innocence.”78

Solidarity between people who experience different forms of oppression often fails because of what Fellows and Razack identify as “competing marginalities.” Sometimes when a group of people is advocating for social change, equity, respect, and liberation, they perceive other groups who are advocating for social change as competing voices, and even as barriers to achieving their own appeals for change. In such a situation, differences are characterized as “additive oppressions,” in which groups produce hierarchies of oppression, each vying for the position of most oppressed, most innocent, and therefore most legitimate in their appeal. Fellows and Razack note how this pattern functions among feminists:

each woman claims that her own marginality is the worst one; failing to interrogate her complicity in other women’s lives, she continues to participate in the practices that oppress other women. We have named the process through which a woman comes to believe that her own claim of subordination is the most urgent and that she is unimplicated in the subordination of other women as the “race to innocence.”79

A good example of this is the way in which the white women who led the suffragette movement in the United States depended on the ongoing oppression of black women (who cared for white children while the white women marched) for their liberation, ignorant of the ways in which sexism, racism, and classism were interconnected.

Fellows and Razack recognize that the framework of additive oppressions leads to an impasse at best and a perpetuation of oppressions at worst. Alternatively, provide a framework of interlocking oppressions that interrogates the “relationships among hierarchical oppressions,” and

78 Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack, “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women,” The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice (1:1998), 335-353.

79 Ibid., 335.

101

highlights the ways in which “systems of oppression come into existence in and through one another so that class exploitation could not be accomplished without gender and racial hierarchies; imperialism could not function without class exploitation, sexism, heterosexism, and so on.”80

Ultimately, Fellows and Razack argue that “[i]f, as women, our liberation leaves intact the subordination of other women [and non-binary gender identities], then we have not achieved liberation, but only a toehold on respectability.”81

The “race to innocence” connects with dominant Mennonite narratives as well as

Mennonite women’s narratives. In terms of dominant narratives, historical accounts as well as autobiographies of Mennonites during Soviet Russia position Mennonites as innocent victims of a mercurial communist regime. While the Stalin era is certainly to be condemned, only a handful of

Mennonites have begun to account for their own social location on the Ukrainian Steppes, as settlers, some as wealthy landowners who exploited local peasants on their estates. Secondly, by focusing on certain forms of violence (military violence and state power) and championing peacemaking alternatives (CPT, VORP), Mennonites have neglected forms of sexual violence in their own communities, i.e., the ways in which they are contributors to peace and justice as well as perpetrators of violence. Thirdly, both Mennonite men and women produced a hierarchy with regards to Mennonite refugee women, who were seen as morally corrupt and therefore inferior.

And finally, the ways in which Mennonite men and women have perpetuated racist and paternalistic attitudes towards Indigenous Peoples and participated in their cultural genocide has been largely ignored by Mennonite communities, under the guise of innocence, and under the

80 Fellows and Razack, 335.

81 Ibid., 350.

102

legitimation of missionary work, conversion, and civilizing.82 In line with Fellows and Razack’s framework of interlocking power, Enns insists that in order for Mennonites to begin a genuine process of truth, justice, and healing with Indigenous Peoples (and I add in response the TRC Calls to Action), they must attend to their own trauma first, and then recognize the ways in which it is both intertwined with and complicit in the trauma of Indigenous Peoples. As theologian Ruard

Ganzevoort writes,

If we take traumatization seriously, we have to acknowledge that there is evil in our society, our churches, and our families. If we pay attention to victims as victims, we have to admit that there are perpetrators as well. And maybe [sic] we have to admit our own complicity to the structures of violence by which people have become traumatized. It is much easier to treat victimization as pathology. In sum, in order to maintain our own fundamental assumptions, we stigmatize the traumatized persons. We take them as pathological victims that need to be adapted to the normal religious world again. Even in friendly and pastoral gestures, this stigmatization is out of our own self-interest. It protects our life world and our safe reading of the tradition from their dangerous presence and dangerous memories (Metz, 1977).83

In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman outlines three key stages of recovery: safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection. Since “[t]he core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others,” these stages of recovery make perfect sense.84 Indeed, Enns’ recommendation is that “[f]aith communities among settlers need to create safe spaces to give testimony about intergenerational trauma, but also provide opportunities for privileged people to face our culpability, and building courage and skill to engage in justice work.”85 From her own pastoral work, Enns has created spaces for stories to be told and reclaimed, as well as worked with particular Mennonite communities to “construct a

82 Chapter 4 will address this in detail.

83 Ruard R. Ganzevoort, “Scars and Stigmata: Trauma, Identity, and Theology,” Practical Theology 1.1 (2008): 29.

84 Herman, 133.

85 Enns, “Trauma and Memory,” 8.

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parallel chronology of our migration stories on one line and Indigenous history on the other.”86

These practices embody what Enns calls “historical response-ability.”87 For Mennonites today, building capacity to respond genuinely as moral agents of faith to historical harms both as victims and perpetrators must involve Herman’s three states of recovery: safe spaces for testimony; mourning the many and various losses produced by traumatic events; and reconnecting

Mennonites with each other by building trust, accountability, reparations, and compassionate relationships. Hope is found in this recovery process to foster empathy and solidarity with others and their experiences of trauma, healing, and social transformation.88

86 Enns, “Trauma and Memory,” 8.

87 Ibid., 7.

88 Chapter 5 will address what this might entail in more detail.

Chapter 4

Ghost Stories: Mennonite Participation

in the Cultural Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Often I would sit back and watch Poplar Hill buzz with activity […] Then I would contemplate. What effect will this have on student lives? on staff lives? on my life? on the Indian people as a whole? on our Canadian nation? on the world? on the universe? on eternity? The influence of this activity will never end! The past belongs to historians, the present belongs to us, and the future is in God’s hands! —Clair Schnupp, New Horizons

I see you are not there. —Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

When I talk about my dissertation with other white settler Mennonites, I receive a mixture of responses: usually surprise, incredulity, curiosity, and sometimes disdain. The most common response is, “I didn’t know Mennonites ran residential schools.” This suggests a mixture of naiveté, ignorance, negligence, and defensiveness among white settler Mennonites in addressing our own complicity in Canada’s colonial violence. Although many white settler Mennonites across Canada who attended national TRC events and churches at local and conference levels have taken steps to stand in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, by and large, we do not recognize ourselves as perpetrators of the violence associated with the settler-colonialism of Mennonite operated residential schools.1 This is not unique to white settler Mennonites in Canada and the U.S. As

1 White settler Mennonite Neil Funk-Unrau mentions Mennonite involvement in residential schools and Mennonite colonization of Manitoba in his chapter “Small Steps Toward Reconciliation: How do we get there from here?” in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry , pp. 75-84, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2013). Mennonite Church Canada printed the following three special issues of their Indigenous Relations journal Intotemak including important reflections, confessions, and calls to responsibility from white settler Mennonites, as well as from many other voices. Mennonite operated IRS and Day Schools, however, are strangely not mentioned. Wrongs to Rights: How Churches Can engage the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Special Issue of Intotemak, ed. Steve Heinrichs (Winnipeg: Mennonite Church Canada, 2016); Yours, Mine, Ours: Unravelling the Doctrine of Discovery, Special Issue of Intotemak, ed. Cheryl Woelk and Steve Heinrichs (Winnipeg: Mennonite

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critical theorist Sara Ahmed has observed “whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it, or those who get so used to its inhabitance that they learn not to see it, even when they are not it.”2

In their book on social justice education, Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo point out that “being perceived as White carries more than a mere racial classification. It is a social and institutional status and identity imbued with legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others.”3 White settler Mennonites benefit from the same social rights and privileges as other white settlers in Canada and the U.S. Sometimes described by Mennonite historians as an ethnic minority, many Mennonite refugees and immigrants, with their protestant work ethic and

European social norms assimilated to the Canadian and U.S. culture of whiteness more easily than white Irish, Italian, and Jewish peoples. I say this to highlight the ways in which white settler

Mennonite attitudes towards Indigenous Peoples and the “Other” more broadly, were deeply aligned with their non-Mennonite white settler neighbours. Within Canada and the U.S., Sensoy and DiAngelo define racism as “White/settler racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination, supported intentionally or unintentionally by institutional power and authority, and used to the advantage of Whites and the disadvantage of peoples of Colour.”4 While there are historical, theological, and social differences between Soviet Russian Mennonites in Canada and Swiss

Mennonites from the U.S. operating Indian Residential Schools in northwestern Ontario,

Church Canada, 2016); Quest for Respect: The Church and Indigenous Spirituality, Special Issue of Intotemak, ed. Jeff Friesen and Steve Heinrichs (Winnipeg: Mennonite Church Canada, 2017).

2 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8 (2007): 157.

3 Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is everyone really equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press Columbia University, 2017), 122. For additional key sources of critical race theories see Sherene Razack, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wendy Fletcher and Cathy Hogarth, Andrea Smith. For theologians and Christian ethicists whose work addresses the interlocking oppressions of Christian theology, settler-colonialism and/or racism, see Traci West, Emilie Townes, Delores Williams, Kelly Brown Douglas, Andrea Smith, Laura Donaldson, James Cone, J. K. Carter, Willie Jennings, Robert Warrior, George Tinker, Vine Deloria Jr.

4 Sensoy and DiAngelo, 119.

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understanding how elements of settler colonialism such as racism, sexism, classism, and paternalism operate across Euro-American Mennonites, allows us to see patterns of oppression that are otherwise overlooked.

A common temptation for white settler Mennonites is to reach for stories of good relationships between Mennonites and Indigenous Peoples, to save face and as counter-narratives to the violence of settler colonialism. For example, “My friend is Indigenous, so I’m not racist,” or “My church didn’t run a residential school,” or “I went to a reservation once and they said they liked the Mennonites.” But Sensoy and DiAngelo counsel against the use of anecdotal evidence noting how “[f]ocusing on exceptions or unanalyzed personal experiences prevents us from seeing the overall, societal patterns. While there are always exceptions to the rule, exceptions also illustrate the rule. […] But the historical, measurable, and predictable evidence [in this case given by the RCAP and the TRC] is that this is an atypical occurrence.”5 Instead, following Özlem and

DiAngelo, in this thesis I also encourage the practice of examining patterns as a crucial guide to engaging critical social analysis and understanding oppression that is key to the work of truth- telling, social justice, and healing.

In 2010, one issue of the Mennonite publication Canadian Mennonite covered the opening

TRC events in Winnipeg, Manitoba.6 The frequency with which I encountered ignorance of

Mennonite involvement in Indian Residential Schools is unexpected given the fact that this issue was mailed to approximately 14,336 Mennonite homes and churches.7 The four correspondents

5 Sensoy and DiAngelo, 12. They add: “Focusing on the exceptions also precludes a more nuanced analysis of the role these exceptions play in the system overall.”

6 Canadian Mennonite 14.16 (2010).

7 Circulation numbers provided by Lisa Jacky, Circulation and Finances at Canadian Mennonite, personal correspondence, 17 October, 2018.

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covered the event well and they name each of the Mennonite operated residential and day schools along with a brief overview.8 But somehow this knowledge seems to have gotten lost amidst the din of IRS church records and national conversations about the TRC. Even white settler

Mennonites who read the Canadian Mennonite diligently have forgotten this part of our history.

For some reason, our involvement in Indian residential and day schools was not committed to collective memory among white settler Mennonite engagement with the TRC. Perhaps it is easier for white settler Mennonites to point to the atrocities committed by Catholic, Anglican, United,

Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist run residential schools, since these have been the focus of the

TRC and national efforts to educate about the IRS. For example, a white settler Mennonite church conference staff member once told me that our involvement was “not as bad” as other church denominations. This sense of “we were not as bad” establishes a hierarchy of innocence, or a “race to innocence”9 among white settler Christians in Canada as discussed in chapter 3. Another consequence of making light of our involvement in IRS is that this re-establishes a hierarchy of oppressions among Indigenous Peoples—i.e., the students at Poplar Hill and other Mennonite run schools did not experience the horrific violence that students at other IRS were subjected to (such as sexual abuse, forced sterilization, and medical experiments).

Indeed, Mennonite missionaries among Indigenous Peoples in Canada are consistently portrayed by our own church leaders and constituents as more culturally sensitive than our denominational contemporaries, and even radical for their time. This is because they disobeyed

8 Evelyn Rempel Petkau, “How complicit are Mennonites in Residential School Abuse?” Canadian Mennonite 14.16 (2010): 4-7; Janet Plenert, “A first step towards healing,” Canadian Mennonite 14.16 (2010): 8-9; Deborah Froese, “MC Canada shares the pain of Indian Residential School legacy,” Canadian Mennonite 14.16 (2010): 9 & 11; Rachel Bergen, “With God, all things are possible,” Canadian Mennonite 14.16 (2010), 11-12.

9 Fellows and Razack.

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Indian Agents by learning local Indigenous languages, closing schools during trapping seasons, and recognizing Indigenous Peoples as children of God instead of satanic heathens (although some white Mennonite missionaries thought this too).10

As I introduced in chapter 1, Mennonites were involved in operating three Indian

Residential Schools in northwestern Ontario (Poplar Hill, Stirland Lake, and Crystal Lake), two day schools in Manitoba (Pauingassi and Bloodvein), and Montreal Lake/Timber Bay Children’s

Home in Saskatchewan. In this chapter I will focus on Poplar Hill Development School in northwestern Ontario for two reasons: first, because it is included in the TRC Settlement

Agreement as a site where colonial violence was enacted through Indian Residential Schools, and secondly, because it holds a contentious place within white settler Mennonite history, memory, and in turn identity. Indeed, white settler Mennonites are haunted by the spectre of colonialism and our role in it—and, as I argue in this chapter, the spectre of reconciliation.

I begin with J. J. Ghaddar’s work on spectrality and archival science and apply a critical theo-ethical stance to frame the position of Indigenous Peoples in white settler Mennonite memory, history, identity, and theo-ethics. Then, drawing from the archive of newsletters, personal correspondence, and history books of the Northern Lights Gospel Mission (NLGM) in northwestern Ontario, I situate white settler Mennonite missionary presence. Next, using critical theories of documentary photography and Foucauldian bio-power, I develop a case study of the archived yearbooks from Poplar Hill Development School. These archival materials are exceptional sources for analyzing the construction of collective memory and identity because each

10 These are, of course, preferable to the alternatives, but the missionary work of conversion and assimilation remain mostly unquestioned.

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of these types of sources are curated from the perspective of white settler Mennonite missionaries for a specific audience and present an intentionally constructed picture of the relationship between

Mennonites and Indigenous Peoples. Furthermore, these sources continue to inform how white settler Mennonites in Canada understand and narrate their own history in relation to Indigenous

Peoples today.

Therefore, I argue in this chapter that white settler Mennonites in Canada continue to be haunted by the ghosts of these colonial schools, and that while they make us uneasy, they have and continue to be necessary for the maintenance of Mennonite identity and are used to justify our existence on and ongoing colonization of Turtle Island. As such, I ultimately argue that insofar as white settler Mennonite identities are narrated theologically, specifically through the figure of the martyr, the desire for our identities as self-sacrificing, benevolent peacemakers, is a specifically theo-colonial desire.

Seeing Ghosts in the Archive

An archive is a peculiar space. Generally, archives are understood to house the documents and artefacts of collectives, preserving the histories of institutions such as schools, churches, military, and governments, as well as particular ethnic groups, and even nations. Archives are often treated as sources of truth, the unadulterated facts of history. Archives, however, are not accessible to everyone. Levels of security clearance and required channels of access to information suggest a certain spectrality, i.e., ghost stories in the archive, a present absence. Indeed, as J. J. Ghaddar notes,

Scholars who draw on postmodern, post-structural, deconstructionist, or post-colonial theories have dismantled the claim of archival neutrality and interrogated notions of universality, objectivity, and truth. Emphasizing the need for an expansive approach to crucial archival notions such as provenance and record-ness, this scholarship has

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highlighted the critical role of the archivist in shaping archives and the stories that can be gleaned from them. In such scholarship, archives emerge as a contested site of power and silence, of inheritance and disinheritance.11

As a contested site of power, the archives also emerge as site of spectral activity. Therefore, we must not only ask of archives, “what is at stake and for whom?” But also, “how is the TRC archive assimilated into the national memory of a colonial and colonizing country?”

Ghaddar argues that “historically, the incorporation of records by or about Indigenous people into the national settler archival repository has been crucial for the constitution of a settler historical archival memory (at the expense of an Indigenous one), which transforms Canadian national shame and guilt into national glory and honour.”12 Church archives of Indian Residential

Schools and broader missionary efforts are not an exception to this desire to recuperate a history of guilt and shame into those in which churches reestablish their identity as bearers of truth and reconciliation—the reinstitution of what Paulette Regan refers to as “the benevolent peacemaker myth.”13

With regards to archival science, beyond initial critiques of power, critical feminist, queer, and race theorists have called for archival transformation:

Their critique suggests a need to elaborate or move beyond notions of archival pluralism and a liberal politics of recognition that emphasizes inclusivity, multiplicity, and self- reflexivity. While these have revealed dominant Western ontologies and epistemologies foundational to archival science, and how archives perpetuate the othering of diverse publics and bodies of knowledge, they have not effectively challenged or altered this state of affairs.14

11 J. J. Ghaddar, “The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory,” Archivaria 82 (Fall 2016): 6; my emphasis.

12 Ibid., 5.

13 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010). I will discuss this in more detail at the end of this chapter.

14 Ghaddar, 7.

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Similarly, the TRC has challenged churches to recognize their complicities in the structures of settler colonialism, and their hegemonic ontologies and epistemologies. Some churches have begun to do this self-reflexive work. However, the primary focus of churches in response to the

TRC has been the collection and submission of records, and the issuing of official apologies. Few have taken up the Calls to Action directed specifically at churches, which would minimally require significant changes in Christian theologies, ethics, collective memories, education, and as I suggested in chapter 3, attention to their own histories of trauma and internal abuses of power.

Perhaps the reason we white settlers are so hesitant to attend to the spectre in the archive is because in the dominant western literary imagination, ghosts are often portrayed as malevolent victims of violence seeking revenge. Perhaps we settlers fear that we will be held accountable for our actions, and for the benefits we have from the actions of our forbearers. I now turn to the archival evidence of Mennonite missions in northwestern Ontario.

Northern Lights Gospel Mission in northwestern Ontario

In June of 1953 the first group of missionaries were flown into Pikangikum, the closest Indian Reservation north of Red Lake, about 55 miles by air. The four men and two women, preparing to live on an island there for a time, set up a tent and then the men began to make a clearing in the dense bush. All this activity didn’t go unnoticed by the Indian peoples in the nearby reservation and they silently paddled out to the island to watch. It’s hard to imagine who may have been the most curious, the missionaries wondering how the Indians would receive them, or the Indians wondering why the white man had come. Meeting the Indians was exactly what the missionary group wanted and they were prepared by having, as one of their number, an Indian Christian girl, Elizabeth Peake. Elizabeth was able to communicate with the Ojibway speaking people and she used the opportunity to tell them about the love of Jesus and His offer of abundant life.15

The Northern Lights Gospel Mission (NLGM) the organization that operated the Poplar

Hill Development School began with Irwin and Susan Schantz, missionaries from Pennsylvania in the United States. They started working as missionaries to Indigenous Peoples in Minnesota in

15 Mary Horst, A Brief History of Northern Lights Gospel Mission (Canada: N.L.G.M., 1977), 5.

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1938. Their primary mission work was to teach Bible schools which employed short term service workers from white settler Mennonite communities in the U.S. By 1951 the NLGM administration was operating 10 community outreach services and 23 Bible schools during that summer.16

“Giving the oversight of most of the Minnesota churches to other Mennonite conferences, they

[Irwin and Susan] were free to pursue other possibilities.” 17 So in 1952, NLGM established their headquarters in Red Lake, Ontario. As Mary Horst records, “[t]hat summer, Irwin, with several young people toured Lake-of-the-Woods in a cabin boat looking for neglected people. They found and became acquainted with a number of Indian people, conducted Bible Schools and preaching services whenever an opportunity presented itself, all the while roughing it.”18

During that same year, an unnamed United Church minister in Red Lake encouraged the

Schantz’s to take the Gospel to northern communities. Soon thereafter an airplane was donated to the mission by a constituent member in Pennsylvania and the Schantz’s took this as a sign of God’s will for them to go and preach to Indigenous Peoples farther north. In 1953 six missionaries landed near Pikangikum, as described above. They settled on a nearby island, ready to convert the

Indigenous Peoples to Christianity and assimilate them to the social, cultural, economic, and political norms of western civilization, similarly to colonizers in America before them.19 Over the course of a few years, NLGM had missionaries in Deer Lake, “Sandy Lake, North Spirit Lake,

MacDowell Lake, Bamaji Lake (now Slate Falls) and Cat Lake, all in northwestern Ontario and

16 Horst., 3-4.

17 Ibid., 4.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 5.

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Flag Island just below the Minnesota-Ontario border.”20 The mission also operated day schools in

Grassy Narrows and North Spirit Lake for a time, until the Canadian government opened its own schools there.21 When NLGM wanted to open a school at Poplar Hill there was opposition “from a religious group and, using political influence, they were able to force the closing of the school.”22

This did not deter the Mennonites, however, since “[t]his closed door almost immediately proved to be a blessing when, at the invitation and support of government officials, a boarding school for

Indian children was opened just across the lake from the village.”23 Thus Poplar Hill Residential

School (later named Poplar Hill Development School) was established in 1962.

In Canada, Indian Residential Schools were operated by church-government partnerships ran from the 1870s to 1990s, with the Mohawk Indian Residential School (1931-1970) named as the first school that fit the definition of IRS within the Indian Residential Schools Settlement

Agreement (IRSSA)24 Although the Canadian government began closing Indian Residential

Schools in 1969, my archival research does not show any evidence that this affected the operation of Poplar Hill Residential School (1962-1989). Mary Horst’s brief history of NGLM mentions that

“[i]n time the government opened nursing stations at most of the northern communities relieving the mission of that responsibility. At Grassy Narrows and North Spirit Lake, Day schools were operated by the mission for a time. These needs were also later supplied by the government’s

20 Horst, 6-8.

21 Ibid., 8-9.

22 Ibid., 9-10.

23 Ibid.

24 “Where are the Children?” Legacy of Hope Foundation, accessed 19 March 2019, http://wherearethechildren.ca/en/timeline/#7

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opening of new schools and the mission schools were then no longer needed.”25 Unlike many IRS that were closed or transferred to Indigenous operation after 1969, Poplar Hill Residential School closed after allegations of physical abuse were made.26 These allegations of abuse are not recorded in the TRC Final Report. As Mennonite journalist Ross Muir reported in 2010, ultimately “‘[n]o charges were laid because the students who had been strapped did not want to press charges,’ the story indicated, adding, ‘and because a section in the criminal code that protects adults in authority if they used corporal punishment.’”27 The TRC Final Report does mention, however, that

“[s]tudents were still being locked up in what was referred to as the ‘counselling’ room at the

Poplar Hill, Ontario, school in the 1980s.”28

Before discussing the Poplar Hill yearbooks, I want to provide a sense of the attitudes with which white settler Mennonite missionaries approached Indigenous Peoples. Because the following excerpts express a strong sense of paternalism and racism, they might be disturbing for some readers. The first excerpt, published in the NLGM newsletter to its constituents and supporters, contains a missionary’s assessment of the convertibility of Indigenous Peoples at Flag

Island.

We find three distinctive classes of people here among the people of the bush. […]

First Class. These are our elder people from the forties on up. In appearance there is little difference from the rest of the tribe. But their thinking is anything but rational. They have been modeled in the days of the medicine man. […]

Second Class. These are the young braves. Friendly almost to the point of equality. […] They think in terms of progress. They realize the importance of seeing their children

25 Horst, 8-9.

26 Ross W. Muir, “Poplar Hill’s closure remembered,” Canadian Mennonite 14.16 (August 2010): 10.

27 Muir, 10.

28 Honouring the Truth, 104

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educated. […] In spiritual things they realize their old tribal traditions could not meet the needs of the hungry hearts. […] Yet these minds and hearts must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. […]

Third Class. Our hope. No wonder Jesus said, “Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me.” Like clay in the hands of a potter, so are these innocent ones. Unspoiled, fallow, ready to be planted, and what a blessed privilege we have to sow the Word of God.29

In addition to the colonial superiority complex evident in this letter, religious conversion and cultural assimilation through education are conveyed as necessities for Indigenous Peoples, and as something that the more “rational” younger people recognize and welcome, rather than a result of colonial pressure to assimilate and provide for their children in future generations in a white world.

Other missionaries saw some of the negative effects that assimilation efforts were having on Indigenous communities but remained entirely un-self-reflexive about it. In a 1962 NLGM newsletter, David, Elva, and Lynn Burkholder wrote the following from Pikangikum: “The transition from the old Indian culture to that of the white man’s is being forced upon today’s

Indians, but not without problems of readjustment on their part.”30 Similarly, as Horst records in her brief history of NLGM: “Technical progress and modern civilization have made definite inroads into the northern communities and this has meant improved living conditions for the Indian people. At the same time it has had an upsetting influence on their way of life, affecting particularly the young people as they try to find their place in a white man’s world.”31

29 Paul Stoll to Alvin Frey, January 1963, Northern Lights Gospel Mission Newsletter, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, Mennonite Archives of Ontario, XV-10.2 (hereafter Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MAO).

30 David, Elva, and Lynn Burkholder, May 1962, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MAO.

31 Horst, 14-15.

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A common thread throughout the NLGM newsletters is an emphatic concern with saving souls and spiritual warfare associated with traditional Indigenous cultural and spiritual beliefs and practices. After a house burned down in Deer Lake, missionary Alma Halteman reflects: “Yes, we do everything humanly possible to rescue someone from a burning house. Let’s be in such earnest to save souls from eternal destruction.”32 After the funeral of a six-month old baby at Poplar Hill,

Lydia Hochstedler wonders: “The grief stricken parents have had this experience three times. Why don’t they turn to the Lord? We must pray more!”33 Missionaries Paul and Mary Stoll request intercessory prayers through their letter from Lake-of-the-Woods: “We have a tremendous burden for the lost here especially the Indian people. Please pray for us and with us for a harvest of souls.”34 Norman and Dorothy Schantz, missionaries at Grassy Narrows, conclude that “[t]his past year three Indian men died, because they were taken captive by Satan at his will, supposedly by a curse….intercession could change these conditions.”35 David King wrote from Grassy Narrows, asking supporters to “continue to pray for the work and ministry among the Indian people. Prayer is a very vital but little used weapon in our warfare against Satan.”36

In these letters, the white settler Mennonites express a strong connection between salvation and suffering, i.e., suffering is relieved through salvation, and suffering occurs when one turns away from God. Ralph and Tillie Halteman at North Spirit Lake express the causal relationship between sin and suffering this way: “The Bible says the heart is wicked, so if they [the Indigenous

32 Alma Halteman, January 1964, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

33 Lydia Hochstedler, January 1963, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

34 Paul and Mary Stoll, March 1963, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

35 Norman and Dorothy Schantz, March 1963, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

36 David King, April 1963, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

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Peoples] would give their lives over to the Lord Jesus who delivers them from sin, the heart trouble would flee. These people have a religion that does not deliver them from sin, therefore the heart trouble will continue.”37 Beatrice Benner reflects a similar attitude from Grassy Narrows: “Then

God looked upon all His other sheep still outside the safety of His fold. His heart ached for them as the grouped and stumbled about. He saw them yielding again and again to strong drink. He permitted the disabling of their transportation vehicles to and from town, sickness, and close calls to death, to remind them of His sovereignty.”38 One letter even suggests prayer as a solution to domestic abuse: “In need of your prayers: […for] Sister Annie, for a forgiving spirit. Her husband

Charlie, for victory in controlling his temper, and to show love instead of wrath.”39 This recalls the tragic dynamics of domestic and sexual abuse discussed in chapter 3, and the theological justifications for women’s submission and forgiveness in the name of Nachfolge Christi.

Throughout their work in Indigenous communities, white settler Mennonite missionaries were highly regarded by their constituencies. Similar to their international counterparts, missionaries to Indigenous Peoples were seen as going directly into the “heart of darkness,” sacrificing their comfortable lives in order to “rough it” in the wilderness, as faithfulness to Jesus.

Still today, in my own white settler Mennonite circles, even among those engaged in the TRC, those missionaries who were deemed more culturally sensitive than others are idealized by constituents as exemplary disciples of Jesus. The high level of regard they receive is almost that of sainthood—but since Mennonites do not have saints, one could say it is more akin to a

37 Ralph and Tillie Halteman, January 1964, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

38 Beatrice Benner, January 1964, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

39 William Moyer and family, January 1963, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MOA.

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martyrological status, since they presumably endured the cost of discipleship that others living more comfortable lives did not.

Overall, the missionary work, whether culturally sensitive or overtly paternalistic, depends on a notion of superiority—the assumption that white Christians have something that Indigenous

Peoples do not have and that it is something that they need, i.e., to be saved from eternal hell. For white Mennonite missionaries in Canada this is displayed primarily through a notion of benevolence, which I will address later in this chapter. I now turn to discuss the function of documentary photographs, and their authoritative and evidentiary status in modernity to contextualize my case study on the Poplar Hill Development School yearbooks, which rely more on photographs than written text.

Documentary Photographs: Dialectics of Truth and Reality

There are many kinds of documentary photographs, and I suggest three distinctive temporal categories by which to organize them: 1) photographs that seek to preserve what is being lost, something passing; 2) photographs that seek to capture the present moment, the dynamics of something current; and 3) photographs that seek to construct newness and change, the emergence of something. Documentary photographs are therefore used for many different purposes: to preserve history, to substantiate present realities, and to stake claims for change, for the future.

What is common to documentary photographs across these temporal categories is that they are perceived to show the truth. That is, they function with an authoritative epistemological quality about them that secures their status as (re)presentations of unadulterated reality and therefore also truth. When analyzing documentary photographs, it is important to understand for what the photos are evidence. I will review two kinds of documentary photographs (the preservative and the

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projective) in order to understand their dialectics of truth and reality, and to discuss how these overlap and differ from my own analysis of the Poplar Hill yearbook photographs.

The documentary film Coming to Light, tracks Edward Curtis’ photographs of American

Indian life. I interpret along with other cultural critics and scholars the photographs to document the “noble savage,” the vanishing Indian, nostalgia for the simple traditional life of a primitive and fading culture and people.40 The photographs present Indigenous people with dignity and authority—the stating of the portraits of leaders in their regalia, modern objects removed from the scene to present pre-modern life—but also as artifacts; that is, the photos display an impulse to cultural preservation but through a process of objectification and commodification. Curtis’ photographs were later sold to wealthy settlers who were very interested and invested in the aesthetic appeal of the “old time Indian.”41 Nostalgia is a desire for something past and as such the appeal of Curtis’ documentary photographs to white settlers helped to eradicate the Indian from the present, securely preserving them in the past. As Thomas King has observed, “Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, and suitably garbed. And dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise.”42

What the photos do not show, is what the U.S. government was doing to Indigenous

Peoples at the same time. This absence haunts the photographs. In a photograph of a ceremony the

40 My interpretation of how the film shows the photographs.

41 Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians, directed by Anne Makepeace (USA: PBS American Masters, 2001) Documentary Film, 85 min.

42 Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Anchor Canada: 2013), 66.

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spectators do not see the glaring absence of the outlaw of these ceremonies by the state, the forceful removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands, their incarceration, their disappearance, and their murder. To raise concern about the photos of vanishing Indians is to ask: “Why and how they are vanishing?” This is how ghost stories begin. Applying spectrality is to ask about what kinds of subjects the photos produce and maintain, and conversely, which they do not: who do they make disappear? In the case of Curtis, the photographs produced the Indian object of the past and the spectator, the settler subject of the present. Moreover, the relegation of Indians to the past helped constitute and legitimize the colonial nation state of America. If the Indians were gone, then the land was empty and free to be settled. The staging and touching up of Curtis’ photographs bears on their ideological epistemological value. Though they are not necessarily true depictions of

Indian life, they are definitely real depictions. Both what is presented in the photographs and what is absent from them depicts the dynamics of settler colonialism and its spectral politics. This dialectic of truth and falsity, the present and absent realities, bears on the deontological authority of these photographs in constituting settler identity as legitimate, justified, and even innocent.

Another kind of documentary photograph—the constructive, type three from above— depicts something true, often raw, that conflicts with or challenges the accepted or presumed reality

(state of affairs). If the nostalgic documentary photo conceals, this image shows everything, and constructs truth through exposure. Karyn Sandlos’ work on graphic photographs of the violated bodies of women during the pro-choice movement in the U.S. exemplifies this type. Her focal point is a photograph of Gerri Santoro, a victim of an abortion gone wrong. The photo is shocking:

Santoro’s naked, bloodied, body lies face down on the floor of a motel room. For Sandlos, this photograph became “a point of entry into a discussion which would explore our relationship to political images and to larger debates over reproductive politics, paying particular attention to the

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irresolvable tensions and dichotomies which constitute choice/anti-choice debates and the political subjects within them.”43 Images of Wounded Knee, the Sand Creek Massacre, the 38 Santee Sioux that Lincoln hanged, produce a similar sort of exposure to the violence on Indigenous bodies. Or one might think of the photograph of Michael Brown lying dead in the street for 4 hours after he was murdered by police officer Darren Wilson that circulated media as blatant evidence of violence against black people by law enforcement. Documentary images have authority. This is because they are understood to represent reality.

Analyzing documentary photographs enables us to map the visual politics of discursive landscapes.44 Sandlos’ framework asks what the photos construct, both individually and collectively, and how they construct newness or change. She seeks to understand “how images frame and organize the discourses of particular political struggles, and how these discourses constitute the possibilities for interpreting images.”45 Both of these questions are crucial for my forthcoming analysis of the Poplar Hill yearbook photos. Documentary photographs that expose raw and brutal truth that create changed views, the uncut reality of a given social group, have a different relationship to spectrality than the nostalgic/preservative photos such as those by Edward

Curtis. Initially one might think that exposure photos do not haunt because they do not conceal anything; their brute revelation leaves nothing to the imagination, nothing unseen, no spectres in the background. And yet, as Sandlos experienced with the photograph of Santoro, and as many experience with images of massacres and lynchings, these photos too haunt us. In these photos the

43 Karyn Sandlos, “Unifying Forces: rhetorical reflections on a pro-choice image,” in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, eds. Sara Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Laureen McNeil, Beverley Skeggs (New York: Routledge, 2000), 77.

44 Ibid., 77.

45 Ibid., 79.

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ghosts appear to us front and center; the spectres are the violated subjects themselves. As Gordon writes, “the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place,” that is, if you did not already know it was.46

The final kind of documentary photograph is neither nostalgic preservation nor perverse exposure/capture, but photographs documenting the practices of everyday life—photographs that aim to show what life is like (not was like, or is really like). This refers to type two above— photographs that seek to capture the present. This is the category into which the poplar Hill yearbook photos fall, and indeed the large sum of Indian Residential School photos. For my purposes here, I will call them institutional photos, because they seek to capture the life of students, teachers, and staff at an institution, specifically an educational one, but also, as we know, a socio- political and religious one. The photographs in the Poplar Hill yearbooks are not nostalgic photos attempting to preserve something vanishing. Nor are they graphic depictions of violence. In this sense, they are presented as uniquely banal, which is perhaps why white settler Mennonites perceive them as harmless, innocent, and neutral—and therefore all the more covert and convincing in the production of a Mennonite narrative of benevolence, peacefulness, and moral superiority (i.e. innocence). I will discuss these specific narratives in more detail later. For now, what remains most important is the evidentiary status of these photographs, their appearance as true depictions of the reality of Mennonite involvement in this Indian Residential School. Yet, these photographs too haunt me. Is it because white settler Mennonite church leaders neglected to teach me the truth from the beginning? Is it because I know of the horrors of violent abuse at other schools? Or is it because I have learned with Toni Morrison that “invisible things are not-

46 Gordon, 8.

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necessarily not there”?47 All of these elements contribute to my hermeneutic of suspicion and an epistemology that values intuition as well as erudite knowledge. It was, after all, haunting and a hermeneutic of suspicion that brought me here in the first place.

Avery Gordon asks whether or not “analyzing hauntings might lead to a more complex understanding of the generative structures and moving parts of historically embedded social formations in a way that avoids the twin pitfalls of subjectivism and positivism.”48 In her analysis,

“[h]aunting is constitutive of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great impact.”49 She continues to elucidate:

“As a concept, mediation [with ghosts] describes the process that links an institution and an individual, a social structure and a subject, a history and a biography. In haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic systems and confounds the social separations themselves.”50 I am interested in the place where the social phenomenon of haunting and the institutional documentary photos from Poplar Hill interlock. I turn to this now.

CASE STUDY: Poplar Hill Residential School, Ontario

Photographic “Truth”, Bio-Power, and the Production of Colonized Subjects

A yearbook is an interesting document of historically socio-cultural evidence. Often more photographs than words, it constructs the identities of its subjects through the curation of specific

47 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 1 (1989): 1-34 in Gordon, 17.

48 Gordon, 19.

49 Ibid., 7.

50 Ibid., 19.

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memories. As a genre, yearbooks are meant to produce nostalgia; they do not show difficult times unless these can be narrated as obstacles collectively surmounted. Yearbooks document “good” memories, but also do so in a way that suggests that the photos chosen truly document everyday life at the school. That is, the positive affective production and the evidential status of the snap- shot photographs are co-constitutive of the benevolent relationship of the white Mennonite staff and teachers and the Indigenous students. The yearbook, as a document and producer of collective memory, circulates this among the Mennonites, Indigenous Peoples, and their respective communities, ensuring passive and laudable responses to the school. In this way, the yearbook, as one element of an educational institution, produces a very specific subject—namely, a colonized subject.51

The Indian Residential School is a very specific education institution, whose function fits

Michel Foucault’s description of “bio-power.”52 Along with the prison, the asylum, the clinic, and the factory, the school is a site of disciplinary power. For Foucault, bio-power is an augmentation of disciplinary power. Where disciplinary power acted on individuals to discipline and punish them as form of social control, bio-power aims to mechanize this function on an entire population.

Foucault calls this “man-as-species” but the workings of bio-power can also be seen in specific populations. Consider his description of biopolitics: “Biopolitics deals with the population, with

51 I have not included yearbook photographs in this thesis due to the nature of trauma. Copyright issues aside, I also do not consider legal permission to reproduce photographs of cultural genocide as ethical permission to do so. The yearbooks are available online at the Algoma University archives as cited, but this does not mean that the people depicted in them have consented permission to reproduce them, especially considering that students attending Poplar Hill Residential School would not have had access to informed consent regarding their photographs, as is standard practice for photographing children at schools and camps today. Ultimately the yearbooks belong to the Indigenous Peoples and their families who attended the school.

52 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” Lectures at the Collége de France 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 1997), 242-247.

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the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.”53 Biopolitics names precisely the form of regulating power that aims to assimilate a population into an ideal form. In the case of this thesis, it is the assimilation of Indigenous Peoples through the cultural genocide. Indian residential schools are mechanizations of both disciplinary and biopolitical power. The constitutive elements of bio- disciplinary power work to shape and produce a specific form of bios (life)—namely the white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, Christian, male citizen of, in this case, the nation-state of Canada. The genocide and assimilation of Indigenous Peoples is usually narrated in terms of oppression and eradication, i.e., negative terms. While this is certainly the case, these negative elements are but one part of the dual operation of bio-disciplinary power. “[B]io- disciplinary power is first and foremost productive not repressive, or better, that its exercises in repression serve certain productive ends.”54 Bio-disciplinary power is both positive and negative in this sense because it operates dually to protect and (re)produce a specific form of bios (life) while eradicating all others. There is circular or perpetual motion.

Theologian Ellen Armour argues that photography is one mode or mechanism of bio- disciplinary power. Bio-disciplinary power itself does not target any social level or group in particular but “[p]hotography is critical to the establishment of the modern taxonomic social order

[…] and the creation and installation of the personages it organizes, personages assembled via the triangulation of sexuality, race, and animality.”55 Hence my interest in IRS yearbooks as sites of knowledge about historically and socially constructed power relations.

53 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 245.

54 Ellen Armour, Signs & Wonders: Theology After Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 64.

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Not only does photography produce the ideal bios through what and how it documents its subjects, it also inaugurates a new scopic episteme for “reading” these photographs.56 As described in the previous section, documentary photographs attain evidentiary status in different ways. This becomes even more complex and covert from the historical periods of the Enlightenment to

Modernity, with the rise of diversification of disciplinary institutions. The relationship between images, photographs, and epistemology changes individually and collectively. As Armour suggests, “photographic truth is a form of truth as aletheia, concealment—[…] in the more

Foucauldian sense of epistemic truth. Just as how we (think we) know affects what we know, so too how we (think we) see affects what we see—materially.”57 Photography is a technology of bio-disciplinary power, and therefore bio-disciplinary power is the primary power operative in the establishment of what Armour calls “photographic truth.”58

With the invention of the camera and the photograph came a new scopic regime. In the

“classical episteme,” “[t]he spectator exercises sovereignty over the viewed object, which places the spectator firmly outside the scope of the visual […] of representation.”59 One might think of the absence of the spectator viewing a painting. A painting is art and history, a representation that must be interpreted. In the “modern episteme,” the visual becomes internalized by the spectator and “[v]isual truth, then, is rendered profoundly subjective—finite and perspectival—rather than infinite and objective.”60 At the same time, scientific research (specifically physiology)

55 Armour, 64. More could be said on how each of these operates.

56 Ibid., 53.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 55.

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demonstrated that “there is no necessary connection between what we see and what’s real. Severed from an immediate relationship to reality, vision is rendered vulnerable not only to distortion but to self-generated illusion.”61 Bio-discipline is an answer to this precarious episteme of the modern subject.

As Armour argues, the establishment of photographic truth, specifically documentary truth had to be learned, i.e., disciplined. “It was in and through being put to use as a mechanism of the exercise of bio-disciplinary power—also an “invention,” recall, of the nineteenth century—that photography accumulated what Tagg calls (after Barthes) its ‘reality effect’—that is, its reputation for giving us simply that-there-then unadulterated and ‘pure’.”62 What one saw was what one knew. To see a photograph was to possess the knowledge of what it captured. Armour provides the following astute summary of how photographic truth is produced:

Rather than the innate capacity of the camera, realism is a self-reflexive discourse code established through the repeated practice of “controlled and limited recall of a reservoir of ‘texts’.” The production of photography’s reality effect is part and parcel of the emergence of managerial and disciplinary techniques associated with new institutions established through bio-disciplinary power (the prison, the asylum, hospitals) and the sciences that went with them (sanitation, comparative anatomy, psychology). The “evidential force” of photography lies not in its ability to reflect the ideologies expressed in these institutions, but it is consolidated by and through its use of their material operation. … … Above all, these are sites where the human being—as a particular form of bios—is managed in pursuit of racisms both for (the normal and normative) and against (the abnormal and non-normative).63

Applying Foucault and Armour’s explanation of bio-disciplinary power to documentary photographs allows us to identify the surreptitious operations of settler colonialism in the archive.

60 Armour, 57.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 61; my emphasis.

63 John Tagg, Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 4-5 quoted in Armour, 65 and 68.

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I use this approach to analyze the yearbooks of Poplar Hill Residential School in northwestern

Ontario.

Poplar Hill Yearbooks and the Maintenance of Mennonite Identity

Poplar Hill Residential School was operated by the Northern Youth Program branch of the

NLGM in Red Lake, ON. The residential school in Poplar Hill ran from 1962-1989. In 1969, the name was changed to Poplar Hill Development School when it became dually funded by the

NLGM and the federal government, with the purpose “to develop age-grade ‘retarded’ students to their maximum academic potential; to use manual training to foster practical skills applicable to making a living in the changing north; to develop social awareness; and to provide a ‘family-type’ experience rather than an ‘institutional-type’ experience.”64 The condescending paternalism and self-righteous benevolence in Principal Paul Miller’s words expresses the operation of bio- disciplinary power as discussed above. Rather than newly imposed colonial socio-economic topographies, the assumption is that Indigenous Peoples need the help of white settlers in order to survive in the changing landscape of the north. Settler colonialism has considered this the “white man’s burden” all along—to eradicate the Indian (Sepulveda) or to educate (i.e. convert and assimilate) the Indian (de Las Casas); “to kill the Indian and save the man.” The distinction Miller makes between the “family-type experience” and the “institutional-type experience” is also telling, for two reasons: a) because it assumes that Indigenous families do not measure up to the category of the “family” of white settlers, and b) because it assumes that the category of the family is somehow neutral to disciplinary and institutional technologies.

64 Paul Miller, September 1969, PHD-000213, Poplar Hill Development School IAP School Narrative, National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, University of Manitoba, updated 14 June 2012, http://nctr.ca/School%20narratives/EAST/ON/POPLAR%20HILL.pdf.

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By contrast, I would argue that the family is the institution par excellence for Canadian and

American citizenship and its nationalistic socio-economic topographies. The nuclear family, defined by strict lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and progeny is the foundational bio-disciplinary body of the settler colonial nation state. These elements of bio- discipline are visible in the yearbook photographs; one can see the installation of the Indigenous children into the dominant form of each of these demographic categories, which together, produce the specific bios of assimilated Indigenous Peoples, colonial subjects, wards of the government.

As the school’s administrator, James Byler, wrote in 1989, the school was “[n]ot only teaching them [the children] to read, write, and count, but to live a life that is worth living as an individual, and as a contributing asset to society as well.”65

Recall Edward Curtis’ nostalgic photographs of vanishing traditional life and the noble

Indian. Many of the photos, especially portraits, were retouched to remove modern objects and were photographed in the posture and style of the colonial era. While perhaps not staged in the same way, the Poplar Hill yearbook photographs present a similarly curated bios. Each yearbook includes a portrait of each student organized by grade level (i.e. European standards of intellectual capacity). The students are dressed in western clothing and European haircuts. Some are smiling, others are not. The rest of the yearbook is filled with collages of everyday life: classroom learning, chores and manual training, home economics, and special events and outings. Again the clothing is gender specific with girls wearing skirts and dresses and boys in pants and shirts. The home economics classes also follow traditional European gender roles. In the 1971 yearbook, Principal

65 James Byler, New Horizons, 1989, Nishnawbe Aski Nation Collection, Poplar Hill Series, Algoma University Archives, last updated 2018, http://archives.algomau.ca/main/sites/default/files/2011-63_002_012.pdf.

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Paul Miller’s opening message includes a comment on the Ojibwa and Cree hunting traditions followed by the exclamation: “But that was long ago—you live now!”66

Photographs can establish and embody settler colonial order. Clothing, backdrops, posture, position, body language, facial expression, all work to (re)produce a norm, a bios.67 The photographs show the everyday bio-disciplinary power at work in producing assimilated citizens of the nation state and moral children of God. Mennonite theologian Sarah Kathleen Johnson demonstrates this further in her important article on the bio-disciplinary power of rituals in Indian

Residential Schools. She writes, “[r]itual processes form the whole human person physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially, culturally, and spiritually—this was the case with religious ritual in residential schools.”68 Furthermore, “[i]n seeing Christian ritual in residential schools as an embodied technology, we come to see its power not primarily as the symbolic expression or instrument of institutional power, but as “imprecise, relational, and organization” power over children’s bodies.”69 Johnson also points out the significant linkages between the practice of kneeling to pray, kneeling for extended periods of time as punishment, as well as kneeling during acts of sexual abuse.70 What Johnson’s research highlights is the bio-disciplinary power of everyday rituals, whether they are religious rituals as she discusses, or cultural and socio-economic rituals depicted in the Poplar Hill yearbooks.

66 Paul Miller, New Horizons, 1971, Nishnawbe Aski Nation Collection, Poplar Hill Series, Algoma University Archives, last updated 2018, http://archives.algomau.ca/main/sites/default/files/2011-63_001_014.pdf.

67 Armour, 71.

68 See Sarah Kathleen Johnson, “On our Knees: Christian Ritual in Residential Schools and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada,” Studies in Religion 47.1 (2018): 6.

69 Ibid., 16.

70 Johnson, 10.

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The inclusion of photographs depicting bannock baking and cradle-board making, for example, might assuage guilt white Mennonite settlers might feel about the cultural genocide that took place in the school.71 These photographs make the everyday practices at the school appear benign and even culturally sensitive. However, far from a place of benign ignorance about the impact of everyday rituals to produce settler colonial religious and socio-cultural norms, the following quote from the first available yearbook (1966) by Principal Clair Schnupp captures the zealous and eschatological confidence the Mennonites had in their educational establishment:

This belief and the institutional assimilation of Indigenous children provided fertile ground for the myth of settler benevolence (as Paulette Regan has called it)73 to become internalized by settler Mennonites. One need only to look at Frank H. Epp’s compendium on the history of

Mennonites in Canada,74 Royden Loewen and Steven Nolt’s book on Mennonites in North

America,75 and Sam Steiner’s 2015 volume on Mennonites in Ontario to see the dominant trope for settler Mennonites was an exilic deliverance into the promised land. Indeed, Steiner’s 600- page book records the history of the NLGM and Poplar Hill on a mere few pages.76 As a seasoned

71 Clair Schnupp, New Horizons, 1970, Nishnawbe Aski Nation Collection, Poplar Hill Series, Algoma University Archives, last updated 2018, http://archives.algomau.ca/main/sites/default/files/2011-63_001_013.pdf.

72 New Horizons, 1966, Nishnawbe Aski Nation Collection, Poplar Hill Series, Algoma University Archives, last updated 2018, http://archives.algomau.ca/main/sites/default/files/2011-63_002_001.pdf.

73 Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within, 83-110.

74 Frank H. Epp, Mennonites in Canada: 1786-1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996) and Mennonites in Canada: 1920-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996).

75 Royden Loewen and Steven M. Nolt, Seeking Places of Peace: Global Mennonite History Series: North America (Kitchener: Pandora Press, 2012).

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historian and someone with significant ecclesial authority, this minimization—whether intentional or not—of the assimilation and cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples by Mennonites is reinforced as a normative narrative.

The reputation and internal belief of Mennonites as a peace church, committed to nonviolence and pacifism has covered a multitude of sins. Their heretical and persecuted beginnings in the fifteenth century followed by precarious and sometimes harrowing migrations through Germany, Poland, and Prussia produced a very specific collective memory and identity for European Mennonites. I propose that this can be best understood through the figure of the martyr, which still haunts Mennonites today.

Haunted by Martyrdom: Melancholia and Settler Colonial Desires

The grief and trauma that followed the Second World War was enormous and multifaceted.

Anne Anlin Cheng’s work on melancholia can help us understand the complexities of the specific grief that Soviet Mennonites experienced and that continues to affect their children and grandchildren in Canada and the U.S., despite now living in safety and abundance. Cheng draws on Freud’s two kinds of grief for her analysis: mourning and melancholia. She explains the difference:

Melancholia…is pathological; it is interminable in nature and refuses substitution (that is, the melancholic cannot “get over” loss.) The melancholic is, one might say, psychically stuck. As Freud put it, “[i]n grief [mourning] the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” Melancholia thus denotes a condition of endless self- impoverishment. Curiously, however, this impoverishment is also nurturing. In fact, Freud describes melancholia as a kind of consumption.77

76 Samuel J. Steiner, In Search of Promised Lands: A Religious History of Mennonites in Ontario (Kitchener: Herald Press, 2015).

77 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8; my emphasis.

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I suggest that the affective production of Soviet Mennonite refugees in Canada is more accurately understood as melancholia rather than the grief of mourning.

The figure of the martyr is so powerful in Mennonite identity that Mennonites continue to reproduce the narratives of suffering and victimization (but not of rape). Their simultaneous desire- for and fear-of martyrdom is striking. As I argue, martyrdom is a primary concept in organizing

Mennonite identity (politics) and theology in Canada. The narratives that followed the horrors of the war were characterized by deliverance, the biblical story of the Israelite exodus out of Egypt, freedom, and perseverance. Famous Mennonite history book titles reflect this, titles like Through

Fire and Water, Up From the Rubble, The Road to Freedom, and Seeking Places of Peace, and In

Search of Promised Lands. The Mennonites understood their migration to the Americas as a providential act of God. However, given my thesis, this worldview is gravely problematic because the Mennonites settled on stolen land. Moreover, our involvement in running three Indian

Residential Schools in northern Ontario and various day schools in Ontario and Manitoba, highlights that their desire for freedom was a settler colonial desire.

It is my contention that martyrdom is the primary concept organizing Mennonite identity in Canada and the primary colonial fantasy characterizing their encounter with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The martyr is a figure of suffering at the hands of the state, but is also at once a figure of freedom in Christ from suffering. If, as Cheng describes, melancholia is consumptive, then the grief of the martyr, and those who grieve the martyr, is a melancholic one in Mennonite settlement. I contend that Mennonite colonialization consumes and denies

Indigenous freedom in the name of freedom in Christ. As one Mennonite missionary said: “As

Christian Missionaries, the first and highest end we have in view is to impart the truth of the

Christian religion to these benighted people... it is the most important factor in the daily school-

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room ... to change the heathen Indians [sic] and evolve them into civilized and [C]hristian men and women.”78 Just as Christ saves the martyr from his suffering, so the Mennonites sought to imitate

Christ and save Indigenous children from theirs.

Mennonites narrate their freedom by way of the martyr, the paragon of which was Christ.

The martyr’s freedom is constituted by Christ. This theology is first of all gendered by Mennonite men in the master narrative, as I showed with the erasure of the rape stories, then was internalized by Mennonite women, and finally was racialized by both. Thus Indigenous freedom becomes constituted by assimilation at best—and by genocide at worst.

What melancholia helps us to see is the ways in which patriarchy, racism, trauma, colonialism, and Christianity function in an interlocking manner among white settler Mennonites.

Cheng’s elucidation of melancholia “offers a powerful critical tool precisely because it theoretically accounts for the guilt and denial of guilt, the blending of shame and omnipotence in the racist imaginary.”79 This is precisely what I see going on in the Mennonite negotiation of their identity as refugees and as settlers. Melancholia is a mechanism for coping with spectral affects, with the feeling of being haunted, and the guilt and shame of settler-colonialism that runs up against the grief and trauma of sexual violence and disappearance.

Analyzing martyrdom as a colonial fantasy along with the affective and socio-political dimensions of melancholia allows us to see that settler-colonialism is the condition of Mennonite freedom (rather than the exception to it). This presents a problem for martyrdom because it

78 S. S. Haury, 1886 Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs quoted in Steve Heinrichs, “Confessing The Past: Mennonite and the Indian School System,” (Winnipeg: Mennonite Church Canada, 2013), 2.

79 Cheng, 12.

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reorients and relocates freedom. The acceptance of this claim would constitute the loss of the martyr, hence the melancholic response to this dual grief of Mennonite suffering and their complicity in the suffering of Indigenous Peoples. As Cheng observes, “the dominant culture’s relation to the raced other displays an entangled network of repulsion and sympathy, fear and desire, repudiation and identification.”80 For European Mennonites in the Americas, this is embodied in the settler colonial fantasy of martyrdom, unattended to trauma, and its melancholic reproduction in the encounter with the other.

Photographic Affectivity and the Spectre of Reconciliation

Through all of the processes I have described above, the myth of Mennonite benevolence continues to be internalized by yet another generation that is told there are no such things as ghosts.

Avery Gordon describes the ghost or the apparition as “one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course.”81 Her methodology for engaging spectres is that of conjuring— again, not as individual psychosis or superstition, but as “a kind of visible invisibility: I see you are not there.”82 Gordon elucidates her method of conjuring this way:

I do not devise procedures for the application of theories because one major goal […] is to get us to consider a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique, one that is more attuned to the task of “conjur[ing] up the appearances of something that [is] absent” (Berger 1972: 10). A way of seeing is not a rule book for operationalizing discrete explanatory theories. It is a way of negotiating the always unsettled relationship between what we see and what we know (ibid: 7). I suppose you could say that the method here involves producing case studies of haunting and adjudicating their consequences. What kind of case is a case of a ghost? It is a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost—that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past

80 Cheng, 12.

81 Gordon, 8.

82 Ibid., 16.

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and the present—into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world.83

Is intergenerational trauma a politically correct, secular term, for ghosts? For the apparitions of settler colonial violence on Indigenous children, something invisible yet very real, that continues to haunt so many? Again, Gordon provides this education:

Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present. But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed, it seemed to me that haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. This is the sociopolitical-psychological state to which haunting referred.84

When I look at the yearbook photographs from Poplar Hill I see what is not there. I see the absence of Indigenous parents, aunties, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, elders. The yearbook, aptly named New Horizons curates the existence of whitewashed Indigenous bodies. The students have no voice; collages are superimposed with quotations clearly written by the Mennonite editors, putting words into the children’s mouths, describing factually and affectively documenting their experiences.

Ellen Armour locates these kinds of photos within the category of snapshots. Drawing on the work of Susan Sontag, she suggests that snapshots, these photos of everyday life and joyful events, are “mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.”85 “[J]ust as family photographs signal our grasp on the past to assure us of our status in the present, so tourist photographs. They signal that we know a photogenic site when we see it, which (re)assures us that

83 Gordon., 24; my emphasis.

84 Ibid., xvi; my emphasis.

85 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001), 8 quoted in Armour, 85.

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we matter.”86 The photos from the Poplar Hill yearbooks fit this description. They produce a collective memory and identity of Mennonite settlers as benevolent, practical, hardworking, self- sacrificing, faithful, and morally superior to their Protestant, Catholic, and Anglican contemporaries. The yearbooks secure and justify their existence as legitimate and soteriological—

Mennonite settlers matter and witness the gospel in a watching world, or so the narrative goes.

The significance of the yearbooks’ capacity to assuage Mennonite settler guilt and anxiety should not be underestimated. “Photography (en)trains us in the modes of seeing, knowing, doing, and being that are integral to the modern episteme and ethos.”87 Moreover, it entrains certain forms of life—bios—over others. Thus to recognize these apparitions in the yearbook photographs is to recognize that we are haunted by them. This is the photographic affectivity associated with spectrality.

Once we see the ghosts we must ask what they want. W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that “[t]o ask what do pictures want? is not just to attribute to them life and power and desire, but also to raise the question of what they lack, what they do not possess, what cannot be attributed to them.”88

Thus, “…to ask what these pictures want—is to inquire after their role in bio-disciplinary power” as I have done in this thesis.89 It is to ask time and again, when we encounter (the unfamiliar in) the familiar, “What do these signs and wonders have to tell us about what circulates between and among those of us who are subjected by the current disciplinary regimes? What do they tell us

86 Armour, 85.

87 Ibid., 93.

88 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10 quoted in Armour, 94.

89 Armour, 95.

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about our own past, present, and future?”90 Navigating the interlocking dynamics of history, theology, and ethics, i.e, consequences, in the construction of our collective memory and identity is undeniably the task of settler Mennonites today who choose to face the spectre of truth and reconciliation.

Conclusion: Mennonites and Canada’s Peacemaker Myth

Settler colonialism in the United States is characterized as wild, lawless, filled with mass removal of Indigenous Peoples from their lands (e.g., the Trail of Tears) and outright massacres of entire villages (e.g., Wounded Knee, Sand Creek). By contrast, settler colonialism in Canada has narrated itself as peaceful, benevolent, generous, and orderly. As historian William H. Katerberg points out, the Canadian mounted police, a prominent symbol of national identity, are “‘keepers of the Queen’s peace.’ As such, they personify ‘Canadian law and order – defined in the British

North America Act by the motto ‘peace, order, and good government’ – [which] effectively forestalled the culture of gunplay and violence typical of the American West and its ideal, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”91 In reality, while Canada’s colonization is differentiated from the United States’ in some ways, it was not less violent. Katerburg cites the Seven Oaks

Massacre, and the North-West Rebellions and the execution of Louis Riel.92 In more recent history,

I would add the land reclamation confrontations at Oka, Ipperwash, and Caledonia, the highway of tears in B.C., and of course Indian Residential and Day Schools, and Christian missionaries in

90 Armour., 5.

91 William Katerburg, “A Northern Vision: Frontier and the West in the Canadian and American Imagination,” in One West, Two Myths II: Essays on Comparison, eds. C. L. Higham and Robert Thacker (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 66 quoted in Regan, 103-104; I have amended quotations marks for style.

92 Katerburg, 66 quoted in Regan, 104.

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Indigenous communities across Canada. Indeed, the Treaties are the paragon of benevolent conquest—portrayed as peaceful and civilized discussions followed by unanimous agreement of terms.

As historian Richard Slotkin explains, the peacemaker myth is effective because “‘[t]he moral and political imperatives implicit in the myths are given as if they were the only possible choices for moral and intelligent human beings … [Myths transform] secular history into a body of sacred and sanctifying legends.’”93 White settler Mennonites are uniquely suited to this peacemaker myth, easily assimilating into a national myth of benevolence towards its own citizens exemplified in systems such as national health care, religious and educational freedoms, an emphasis on international peacekeeping efforts, and a de-emphasis on military power (at least in comparison with the United States). National heroes and sacred secular histories are easily replaced with the Mennonite’s own sacred texts, narratives, and the martyrs that they have carried with them from place to place. With the exception of evangelical and charismatic influences among some white settler Mennonites in Canada and the United States, white Mennonites are generally perceived as people who profess their faith more through actions than through words.

Organizations such as MCC, MDS, and CPT, to name a few, are faith-based humanitarian organizations. Similarly, MCCan and MCC missionaries are primarily sent to aid in community services and development, with evangelism included where and when appropriate. White

Mennonite missionaries in Indigenous communities are no exception to this “peaceful” approach, characterized first and foremost by “witness”—a theo-ethic of discipleship based on the life, death,

93 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800- 1900 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 19 quoted in Regan, 105; my emphasis.

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and teachings of Jesus, as discussed above in chapter 2. Mennonite missionaries in Indigenous communities in Canada viewed themselves as benevolent peacemakers, making them ideal partners in the operation of Indian Residential and Day Schools, and aiding the assimilation of

Indigenous Peoples through their own church funded efforts of conversion.

White settler Mennonites continue to do mission work in Indigenous communities in

Canada. Today this is usually done through summer Bible camps and guest preachers. In the 1990s and 2000s the paradigm of MCCanada’s Indigenous Relations office changed from a “for them” to “with them” format. This reconceived model, called Partnership Circles, emphasizes that white settler Mennonite presence only occur upon invitation from Indigenous communities. This is an important recognition on the part of white settler Mennonites. However, an invitation is not a guarantee of equal or equitable power relations. As the letters from the NLGM suggested,

Indigenous communities across Canada who invited Christian missionaries to educate their children did so under duress of colonization—their way of life was being eradicated under settler colonialism and they sought to give their children a chance at surviving and thriving in the new world being imposed on them. It was after an amendment to the Indian Act in 1920, that school attendance was made compulsory for Indigenous children. In contrast to claims by NLGM missionaries at MacDowell Lake:

Going to school is not compulsory for the Indian children, but more of them have the privilege of going to school than in times past. Some of the children can attend in the village where they live. Others leave home to go to boarding school. […] Sending their children to boarding school at Poplar Hill is not an easy thing for these Christian parents at MacDowell Lake. However, they realize that it is the Lord’s will and for the children’s good, so they are resigned to it.94

94 Omar, Emma Mae, and Wanda Helmuth 1962, Northern Lights Gospel Mission fonds, MAO. In 1920 the Indian Act was amended to state: “The department [of Indian Affairs] is thus enabled to establish a system of compulsory education at both day and residential schools.” Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report for 1920, Canada Sessional Papers, 1921, pg. 13 in First Nations Education Steering Committee and First Nations School Association, Indian Residential Schools & Reconciliation: Teacher Resource Guide 11/12, Book 2: The Documentary

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Central to the question of invitation, is the question of moral agency. And the question of agency can only be addressed by acknowledging social location. This, in turn, requires the kind of power analysis I described at the end of chapter 2. Without this, the Partnership Circles model runs the risk of perpetuating covert forms of settler colonialism in Indigenous communities, under the guise of benevolent peacemaking. What is additionally troubling is the possibility for Canadian churches, white settler Mennonite churches and church organizations included, to recuperate the

TRC into the national peacemaking myth. Collecting and submitting IRS records and offering official apologies for the harms of residential schools is an important step for churches as a response to the TRC, but it is only a step. As Regan explains, “[t]he peacemaker myth is resilient and flexible. It is manifested today in a new discourse of reconciliation. Despite talk of reconciliation, the underlying structures and behavioural patterns of colonial violence that have shaped our relationship lie just beneath the surface.”95 Regan is addressing public institutions and government agencies—and churches are no exception here.

Without substantive social power mapping, theological and structural changes, churches run the risk of recuperating their history of shame and guilt through their contributions to TRC into a narrative of triumph and moral superiority, thus replicating the myth of settler benevolence and Canada’s peacemaking myth. This is the spectre of reconciliation. In order to address the above–named issues demonstrating a lack of power analysis and empathic capacity, I turn to a discussion of a trauma-informed theo-ethics based on a liberative and life-giving understanding of

Evidence (Vancouver: fnesc and FNSA, 2015), 27. Accessed 10 October 2018. www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp- content/uploads/2015/07/PUB-LFP-IRS11-12-DE-Pt2-2015-07-WEB.pdf

95 Regan, 109.

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discipleship to Jesus contrasting the melancholic figure of the martyr that dominates white settler

Mennonites.

Chapter 5

Are You Willing to Live for Your Faith?

Towards Trauma-Informed Theo-Ethical Practice

YOU MUST BE PREPARED TO DIE! […] I pondered his dark advice. I scratched out the word DIE and wrote LIVE. —Miriam Toews, Irma Voth

Death persists. …Love remains. —Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma

This thesis demonstrates how trauma and theology are deeply intertwined: a theological spectre haunts the heart of Christianity. The traumatic event of Jesus’ crucifixion sits at the center of the Christian story. Even after the resurrection, Christ returns to the disciples as a spectre, bearing the marks of the cross, bearing witness to his triumph over death, bearing the stigma of trauma on his body. Then he ascends to the heavens, imparting yet another spectre to those who believe he is the messiah—the Holy Spirit.

Historically, Christianity has itself also been a source of trauma, with its complicity in crusades, the Inquisitions, witch hunts, anti-Semitism, genocide, slavery, colonization, and the ostracization of those who do not fit the dominant cultural and societal norms of the day. As a result, many trauma theorists and practitioners of trauma healing (as well as lay people) are very suspicious of the church and the role of Christianity in trauma recovery and healing. At the same time, however, people of Christian faith continue to turn to churches in times of deep suffering for community, for support, for meaning, identity, comfort, and healing. As such, the starting point for many theologians and Christian ethicists engaging trauma theory comes from their encounters with their own suffering or the suffering of others.

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As I have argued in previous chapters, white settler Mennonites in Canada have experienced significant trauma, in particular those who were refugees from the Soviet Union. The trauma of white settler Mennonite women was compounded through silencing. Finally, the unattended trauma of white settler Mennonites emerged in both their paternalism and disdain towards the suffering of Indigenous Peoples. As I have demonstrated, white settler Mennonite theo-ethics that emphasizes self-sacrificing obedience and submission have been a source of trauma for Mennonite women as well as for Indigenous Peoples.

This chapter poses a direct challenge to the figure of the martyr as the paragon of faithfulness in white settler Mennonite theo-ethics. For centuries the ultimate question of faithfulness to Christians across denominations has been “are you willing to die for your faith?”

With Miriam Toews’ poignant literary phrasing, I pose the question “are you willing to live for your faith?” Instead of a peace theology that attempts to retrieve martyrdom from its traumatic interpretation, I propose a framework for a trauma-informed theo-ethics that attends to the effects of martyrological theo-ethics. First, I will outline the need for trauma theory in theological reflection. Theologians engaging trauma theory take suffering as a starting point, asking: who is suffering and why? This question crucially requires power analysis of social relations. Thus I argue that a trauma-informed theo-ethics must employ the skills of social power analysis in order to map systemic sources of violence and harm in order to imagine possibilities for transformation. Next, using social power analysis, I will discuss some of the limitations in current practices of healing and recovery suggested by theologians engaging trauma theory. In turn, I will make some suggestions for white settler Mennonites to build empathic capacity by attending to their own trauma through various practices. Finally, I will chart some of the social, ethic, and theological

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sources and norms to aid in the development of trauma-informed contextual theologies and ethics, based not on a willingness to die, but, as the Mennonite victim-survivors did, a willingness to live.

Trauma Theory, Ecclesiology, and Theology

Some of the key theologians engaging trauma theory today are Shelly Rambo, Serene

Jones, and Cynthia Hess. Shelly Rambo is a Reformed theologian whose work is at the intersection of suffering, trauma, and constructive theology. Her interest in doing theology in a way that attends to trauma is informed by her witness to many people’s accounts of suffering and their experiences of deep trauma. I have chosen to focus on her book Spirit and Trauma rather than Resurrecting

Wounds, although the latter is more recent. I find her use of Mayra Rivera’s work on the body and flesh, and the integration of hauntology into trauma theory provocative and compelling in the latter book, but because Spirit and Trauma specifically aims to provide a framework for this endeavour, it is better suited to demonstrating the importance of trauma theory for theology. In her search for theologies that engaged the experiences of trauma survivors, Rambo found a significant gap in the field. She noticed a gap between the standard theologies of redemption (including theodicy) and the experiences of people who tried to keep on living in the aftermath of deep trauma. In Spirit and Trauma, Rambo seeks to bridge this gap, or more specifically, to fill and to inhabit the gap in order to think about what it might mean to speak theologically amidst traumatic space.

Rambo’s reading of the passion narrative and her focus on Holy Saturday is particularly important. She argues that standard scripts of salvation are read along a linear temporality of creation—fall—salvation, emphasizing Christ’s resurrection and victory over death. But, as she demonstrates in her book, such a theology of redemption tends to elide the depth of the wounds of trauma in people’s lives. Drawing on Passion imagery, this can be likened to theology’s desire to

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hasten from Christ’s death to his resurrection without inhabiting the absolute darkness and despair of Holy Saturday as Mary and the disciples did.1 In Rambo’s reading of Holy Saturday, life and death are inextricably linked. Jesus has been crucified and descends to the depths of hell, the place of absolute alienation from love and the possibility of life. Inhabiting this time of Holy Saturday is a way of inhabiting the aftermath of trauma, the depth of hell people have experienced. As a corrective to dominant salvation scripts, Rambo develops a theology “of the middle,” a space amidst trauma, that attends to suffering. Her method is to develop a framework for reading biblical texts and theological narratives such as the Passion from the lens of trauma theory.2

Alongside her deconstruction of Christianity’s dominant soteriological scrips, Rambo develops the theological notions of witness and testimony, as are essential to trauma theory.

Drawing on Holocaust survivors Dori Laub and Elie Wiesel, Rambo emphasizes witness and testimony as crucial in attending to trauma and preventing further violence.3 In her theology,

“[w]itness is an accompanying term to “remaining:” it describes a way of being oriented to what remains, to the suffering that does not go away.”4 She adds that “[i]n order to witness, one must enter into the elisions at the heart of suffering.”5 This is the core of the impetus for integrating trauma theory and theology. This challenge to theology, to resist racing to the resurrection while eliding deep suffering, constitutes witness, and as Rambo submits, the work of the Spirit.6

1 Rambo, 76.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 24.

4 Ibid., 26.

5 Ibid., 40.

6 Ibid., 13.

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Like Rambo, Reformed theologian Serene Jones begins with the reality of suffering.

Specifically, she asks, “[h]ow do people, whose hearts and minds have been wounded by violence, come to feel and know the redeeming power of God’s grace?”7 At the core of this question is the dialectic between living in a world marred by violence and God’s deep love for creation.8 Jones takes a specific approach in her book Trauma and Grace in order to accommodate the fragmented reality of trauma. She refers to this as an interstitial theology.9 Reflecting in part on the collective trauma experienced by Americans in the wake of 9/11, Jones poses her key question: “What is the church called to do and be in times of collective trauma?”10 She sees the church playing an important role in the aftermath of trauma. Its purpose is to create space for people affected by trauma to tell their stories and to become witnesses who can receive the stories and testify to them as truth. To integrate stories of trauma into the stories of the faith community as a whole, Jones turns to John Calvin and the Psalms as sources for healing.11

Calvin viewed scripture as a lens through which to view the world, and a drama in which people of faith are invited to participate.12 In his commentary on the Psalms, Calvin identifies with

David, as simultaneously faithful and sinful.13 Through praying the Psalms, Jones suggests that survivors are able to give voice to their own suffering: “Speaking the unspeakable. Giving

7 Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville: WJK Press, 2009), viii.

8 Ibid., ix.

9 Ibid., 22.

10 Ibid., 26.

11 Ibid., 32-33.

12 Ibid., 46.

13 Ibid., 48.

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language to a heart whose pain has made it speechless. This is what Calvin describes as the rare power of the psalmist.”14 Jones describes how this practice of giving voice to suffering was used in the case of a teenage girl who had witnessed a drive-by shooting. A group of women deacons surrounded her to support her and help her process her trauma and testify in court. This process of support included reading and praying the Psalms together. Jones testifies to the power of the

Psalms in trauma healing.15

More broadly, in her work, Jones challenges Christians to consider how to construct liturgies and doctrinal spaces that are cognizant of trauma in the faith community. She notes that the Reformed doctrine of “total depravity” has “too often been used to impede agency rather than to foster it.”16 Challenging this reading, she proposes that “the story of Mary illustrates what happens when we understand this doctrine not as disparaging human beings but as recognizing the condition they find themselves in.”17 Thus, in Jones’s reading, Mary recognizes her sinful condition and this prepares her to receive the grace that is the Christ-child. Finally, Jones suggests that the doctrine of the Trinity might be the most suitable image for redemption and reception of grace for trauma healing. The Trinity’s work in the cross is “the reality that not even death on a cross can cause God to withdraw God’s love from those whom God has elected.”18 Jones

14 Jones, 51; my emphasis.

15 Ibid., 44.

16 Ibid., 117.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 147.

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understands this as an act of God’s solidarity with those who suffer, not as redemptive suffering, but as grace and God-with-us.19

In a similar vein as Jones, theologian Cynthia Hess emphasizes the role of worship practices for trauma healing in her book Sites of Violence, Sites of Grace. Writing in the context of the Church of the Brethren, an historic peace church committed to nonviolence, Hess aims to address what she identifies as “internal violence.” Internal violence refers to suppressed internalized forms of violence within the community to name and address trauma experienced in faith communities. Drawing on trauma practitioners, Hess notes that people who have experienced trauma often remark on themes of “God’s absence, silence, and distance more than non- traumatized people. In addition, they often express feelings of unworthiness before God, as well as a loss of trust in and anger at God.”20 Therapist Sheila Redmond confirms that survivors tend to “suppress the spiritual effects of their traumas.”21 This is not surprising given that churches participate in many abuses both interpersonal and collective and are often unequipped to offer resources for healing to trauma survivors.22 Hess acknowledges the church’s shortcomings by naming it as a site of violence.

At the same time, however, Hess wants to call the reader’s attention to the life-giving practices of the church, which she suggests can transform it into a site of grace. While recognizing that trauma is experienced differently for different people, Hess does discuss common patterns

19 Jones, 149.

20 Cynthia Hess, Sites of Violence, Sites of Grace: Christian Nonviolence and the Traumatized Self (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009), 53.

21 Ibid., 53.

22 Ibid., 54.

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which suggests two things that are minimally required to support recovery and/or healing: the reconstitution of the self, and the integration of the traumatized self. Drawing on Judith Herman’s required categories of safety, narration, and connection, Hess suggests that faith traditions can learn to restore a sense of meaning to people’s lives and provide a framework in which to reintegrate their identity and provide hope for the future.23

Historically, the peace churches’ emphasis on nonviolence has expressed itself primarily in the refusal of military service. However, as Hess points out, “[u]nderstanding nonviolence as the refusal to act as an agent of violence is a start, but it must entail more than this. Christian nonviolence must entail contributing to the healing of selves that are sites of violence by creating a space in which traumatized persons can survive and flourish.”24 In response to this, Hess proposes the use of rituals, practices that are already part of the faith community. Rituals are important because they facilitate meaning and they do so in an embodied way, which trauma theorists such as Bessel van der Kolk have noted as a key factor for trauma healing, especially in survivors with PTSD.25 Hess writes that “[i]n addition to offering this structure and predictability, rituals create a way for survivors to place their losses within a larger framework. Through ritual, trauma survivors establish connections not only with the divine and their present community but also with the past and the suffering of others.”26 Moreover, and perhaps the most convincing argument for the importance of trauma theory in the church and theology is Hess’ critical

23 Hess, 80.

24 Ibid., 56-57.

25 See Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking 2014).

26 Hess, 80.

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observation that “trauma is part of the identity and life of the church, which is constituted [at least in part] by traumatized people. […] Since the church is a social organism in which what affects one member also affects others (albeit in different ways), trauma is a reality with which the entire church body must contend.”27 Ultimately, Hess’s vision is that the church might become a space in which trauma survivors can share their stories and integrate them into a larger framework, a wider narrative of Christ’s grace, and a voluntary and egalitarian community that embodies the grace and hope for a future that is different from their traumatic past.28

I appreciate Rambo, Jones, and Hess’ engagement with trauma theory in their respective theological works. They take seriously the voices of survivors and the depth of pain that they continue to suffer in the aftermath of trauma. Additionally, while acknowledging the church’s complicity in harms and failures to offer sufficient support, these theologians challenge the churches to step up and practice their claims of Christ’s grace and the redemptive healing power of the gospel by educating themselves on the effects of trauma and possible sources for healing.

However, I also find some limitations in their work, specifically in terms of power analysis, which

I think is crucial for naming sources and causes of trauma as well as possibilities for trauma healing.

Power and Trauma-Informed Theology

Rambo, Jones, and Hess each approach trauma more as individual or personal experiences than a collective one, although they emphasize the fact that the effects of trauma reach beyond survivors to their relationships with others including the churches in which they participate. What

27 Hess, 56.

28 Ibid., 133.

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is missing, however, is an analysis of power, specifically of systemic and social power in context.

Rambo’s theology of remaining provides a good framework for integrating trauma theory into theology but fails to meet its full potential. Though her concepts of witness and testimony are powerful theological sources for trauma healing, the absence of power analysis regarding survivors and witnesses and those who give testimony leaves a large gap for potential abuses of power such as sanitization, misrepresentation, appropriation, and recuperation which could lead to an exacerbation of harms. Similarly, in Jones’s and Hess’s work, their emphasis on rituals and trauma- informed worship spaces attend to the embodiment that trauma theory recommends for healing.

However, they fail to acknowledge their own positions of power as ministers. Hess’s description of the church as a voluntary and egalitarian community is a vision at best, not a reality. There is no analysis in either Jones’s or Hess’ work of how to address the problem of abuse in faith communities themselves, especially the well documented abuse by priests and ministers—the very people administering and facilitating rituals, who are supposed to provide a safe space and foster healing. Finally, Jones’s use of the Psalms as a source for trauma healing requires some historical contextualization. Many of the Psalms she refers to are attributed to David, who raped Bathsheba.

Without a critical power analysis in context, neglecting this aspect of the Psalms could very well retraumatize victim-survivors of sexual violence if they are asked to pray the words of a sex offender as a source for their own journey of healing.

It is necessary to address this significant lacuna throughout recent trauma-informed theology. For this I recommend Mennonite scholar Carolyn Yoder’s work as the director of

Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) programs in the United States. I promote her six steps for faith communities wanting to support trauma survivors: 1) “recognize ourselves as leaders,” which involves educating our white settler Mennonite communities about trauma and

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cycles of violence and victimhood; 2) “challenge our own faith communities to live up to the highest ideals,” which involves building relations across religious lines, and recognizing and challenging harmful habits of thought and practices in our faith traditions; 3) “prevent trauma by learning to wage peace,” which involves offering viable options in public forums for non-violent responses to crises and conflicts as well as training and preparation; 4) “work at both the personal and communal/structural levels,” which involves recognizing that the social/structural and personal are connected and how both can promote healing for the other; 5) “be informed,” which involves vetting news, media, and information in our social contexts; and 6) “remembering that we are not alone,” which involves connecting with like-minded communities in learning and sharing resources.29 I believe that these six steps provide a good starting point for developing trauma-informed theologies and churches. In the past two decades, the role of ritual in healing practices has been viewed as a kind of panacea in western political theology, but without critical power analysis, rituals can come across as platitudes to survivors. The embodiment of rituals has the capacity for trauma healing, but only within a framework that recognizes power differences and has the capacity to address them to ensure that survivors are not traumatized by the very communities that seek to offer sanctuary, refuge, solidarity, and healing.

Trauma-Informed Practice and Theo-Ethics

Mapping Social Power in Psychology

In 1997, psychologists Teresa Hagan and David Smail published an article analyzing a significant gap in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. They argue that psychology has paid

29 Carolyn Yoder, The Little Book of Trauma Healing (Intercourse: Good Books, 2005), 73-77.

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little to no attention to the ways in which the material workings of power affect psychological distress and mental health. Hagan and Smail observe that community psychology has taken some elements of social power into its analysis and therapeutic approaches, but clinically the effects of social power on a person are neglected. The neglect of social power analysis in mental health concerns not only stifles the recovery process for individuals but is potentially detrimental as well.

In general, psychology operates in a paradigm that emphasizes individual responsibility and empowerment in order to foster recovery and healing. “Whether through insight gained in dynamic psychotherapy or attitude changes brought about by cognitive analysis, it is assumed that people will be able, through therapy, to release powers from within themselves to make a difference to their circumstances.”30 Hagan and Smail suggest that one reason therapists have avoided attending to social power with their clients is because this opens the possibility to uncomfortable political implications. Therapist often benefit from keeping the ideology of their employers unchallenged.31

However, this reason is not an excuse. Indeed, attention to social power with regards to mental health and trauma poses a direct challenge to the modern valorization of the individual will and to a Protestant work ethic that pervades western society and counsels that individuals to rise above any material interferences in their happiness and wellbeing.

Psychologists have observed “[m]orbidity patterns reveal that mental health services deal with a majority of lower social class members and a disproportionate number of people from ethnic minority groups, yet little if any explicit attention is given to the exact nature of their socio- economic difficulties.”32 There are two competing hypotheses to explain this: a) “social drift,”

30 Teresa Hagan and David Smail, “Power-Mapping—I. Background and Basic Methodology,” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 7 (1997): 258.

31 Ibid.

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(people with lower competence end up in lower social classes), and b) “trauma-based explanations

(those subject to chronic life stress due to low class membership develop mental health problems in response).”33 The social drift hypothesis is a fundamental attribution error of the same kind I identified with regards to martyrdom in chapter 2. It is the attribution of behaviour to character instead of to social situation. The second hypothesis begins to turn towards the effects of social power on people’s mental health by recognizing the traumatic consequences of power abuses and oppressions in people’s lives.

In response to this lacuna in psychology and clinical practice, Hagan and Smail pose the following thesis: “It is our belief that an appreciation of the centrality of the operation of social power to individual experience does more than offer an alternative perspective on clients’ difficulties: it actually helps to make sense of a wide range of clinically relevant phenomena and unify them within a single coherent paradigm.”34 As such, Hagan and Smail outline a way of mapping social power for individuals.

It should be noted at the outset that the form of social power mapping developed by Hagan and Smail is “an heuristic tool by means of which people may clarify and up to a point objectify for themselves the nature of their predicament and the extent of their possibilities of influencing it.”35 Additionally, it is important to take into account “not only of the amount of power available to individuals, but also of their having to deal with damaging powers bearing down upon them

32 Hagan and Smail, 259.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 261.

35 Ibid., 264.

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from within their proximal worlds.”36 Hagan and Smail set up their framework with three categories of “the impress of power.” These are “the person,” which includes an individual’s experiences and bodily sensations; “proximal influences,” which refers to domestic and work situations, education, personal relationships, and family; and “distal influences,” which refers to politics, economics, culture, information media, etc.37 Within each of these spheres of life, they locate material resources (education, employment, money, physical environment) as well as personal resources (confidence, understandings of past, development of desire, embodiment, intelligence). Additionally, an individual may have variable access to potential sources of power and support in their concrete context than as objectively mapped on the framework. In order to account for this, Hagan and Smail include a spectrum to identify variable control over resources.

For example, “even potentially wealthy individuals […] may be subjected to oppressive parental restrictions on whether and how they can spend their money.”38 I discuss this framework in my thesis because analysis of social power relations is an important aspect of trauma-informed theo- ethics that seeks to cultivate practices of other-regarding moral agents in relation.

Social power mapping is not a panacea or a replacement for psychotherapy and cognitive analysis, but a significant challenge to common western approaches to mental health problems, emotional distress, and the effects of trauma in the field. As Hagan and Smail write, “[t]he essential point to emphasize about power-mapping is that it is not a psychometrics of the individual but a flexible method for representing important aspects of [their] social environment, in terms both of the power and resources available to [them] (assets) and the extent to which [they] are subjected

36 Hagan and Smail, 264.

37 Ibid., 261.

38 Ibid., 265.

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adversely to the proximal powers of others (liabilities).”39 A therapeutic approach that involves power mapping changes the paradigm for viewing mental health and in turn notions of recovery and healing: “the central preoccupation is not with the individual’s will, responsibility, linguistic competence, motivation or readiness/ability to change attitudes, but on those features of the individual’s social environment which are relevant to [their] predicament.”40 Hagan and Smail acknowledge that power mapping itself cannot change the negative influences of oppressive social structures on an individual’s mental health and well-being. However, they suggest that “[e]ven if the process of power-mapping reveals no room for maneuver as far as clients’ ability to alter their lot is concerned, in switching attention from supposed (and feared) personal deficiencies to injuries inflicted by a damaging environment, it may nevertheless constitute a form of ‘demystification’, bringing with it a significant relief of distress.”41 It is this element of demystification, the role of power in social relations, regarding violence and harm and in turn healing and social transformation that can be applied from the field of psychology to that of Christian ethics.

Similarly to how Hagan and Smail challenge psychology to attend to social power in order to contextualize mental health problems, emotional distress, and trauma, I apply this challenge to

Christian ethics. There is one key difference, however: whereas Hagan and Smail practice power mapping at an individual level, I suggest its necessity also for interpersonal and social relations, and build on their work now. Hagan and Smail’s power mapping begins with a number of fundamental assumptions about social relations, identity, and agency. First they assume an individual’s identity and agency are directly intertwined with their material social context. This

39 Hagan and Smail, 265.

40 Ibid., 266; my emphasis.

41 Ibid.

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does not suggest an objective, unchanging reality, but does affirm that objective conditions of social structures set material boundaries on people’s lives in terms of access, mobility, influence, and self-determination.42 Secondly, this presupposition goes in tandem with their renunciation of individualist notions of healing through responsibility, hard work, and transcendence. With these assumptions as starting points, one can begin to think about violence, harm, mental health problems, and the differing yet lasting effects of trauma in white settler Mennonite communities as well as Indigenous communities. By mapping relations of power for white settler Mennonite women who are victim-survivors of sexual and/or domestic violence, one can see how the social and theological structures contribute to the possibility and the perpetuation of violence against women. In turn then, the response for healing does not become the burden of the victim-survivors but of the community, to address the social and theological structures that enable violence on individual and communal levels in the first place.

Mapping Social Power in White Settler Mennonite Communities

The purpose of power mapping is to contextualize the embodied effects of violence and trauma. Contextualization fosters understanding of systems of power, which in turn promotes strategies for prevention, healing, and ultimately social change. Power mapping itself does not offer solutions, but charts the operations of power, both positive and negative, both supportive and abusive, on a spectrum and in spatial form. As Hagan and Smail remind their readers, “it is not psychologists’ business necessarily to constrain the implications of their findings to the possibilities for action of those who are injured by power […] but to expose the sources of damage

42 Enns and Myers, 30.

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whatever the implications and irrespective of whether immediate solutions are available.”43 I suggest the same purpose for power mapping among white settler Mennonites and of white settler

Mennonite relations with Indigenous Peoples. The lack of an immediate solution or application does not discredit the challenge that power analysis presents to social and theo-ethical systems and commitments.

Power mapping in Mennonite communities at the individual, proximal, and distal spheres of life is of utmost importance. First, to avoid the pitfalls of victim blaming, silencing of victims, and the protection of perpetrators. Secondly, the same method of power mapping can be applied to white settler Mennonite relations with Indigenous Peoples. By beginning with the same fundamental assumptions about identity and agency, white settler Mennonites can begin to see themselves as agents of colonialism within a much larger structure of colonization and cultural genocide. Additionally, power mapping of Mennonites working as missionaries in Indigenous communities, whether through residential and day schools or not, illustrates that settler Mennonites hold more social power than the Indigenous Peoples in the specific community no matter how generous, culturally sensitive, or cutting edge Mennonite theology is.44 Power mapping removes responsibility from Indigenous Peoples for their trauma and suffering. Power mapping disables victim-blaming and a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” attitude towards healing and social change. Power mapping is necessary because it places white settler Mennonites face to face with

43 Hagan and Smail, 266.

44 Unfortunately, Hagan and Smail do not provide a visual representation of their power mapping tool. However, the foundations of a flexible and workable power mapping inventory developed by Elaine Enns and Ched Myers achieves many of the same analyses as described above. See Elaine Enns and Ched Myers, Ambassadors of Reconciliation, Volume II: Diverse Christian Practices of Restorative Justice and Peacemaking (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009), 36. I could not reproduce this table here due to copyright restrictions.

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their complicity in violent social and theological structures. Particular resources are required for this work, foremost among them is empathy.

Building Empathic Capacity among White Settler Mennonites

The word “empathy” is much more descriptive in the German language (my mother tongue) than in English. Translated as either mitgefühl or mitleid, mit means ‘with’, Gefühl means

‘feeling’ or ‘emotion,’ and Leid means ‘burden’. Hence the words for empathy in German translates as ‘feeling-with’ or ‘bearing-with’. Translated this way, empathy suggests acknowledgement or “seeing” the suffering of another. Without judgement, empathy assumes a posture of “with-ness.” To have empathy is to “feel-with” or “bear-with” another. Concurrently, this is how theologian Catherine Keller describes the central Christian virtue of love: “to love is to bear with the chaos. Not to like it or to foster it but to recognize there the unformed future.”45

Suffering, trauma, and violence render life chaotic. Recall that trauma is defined as a continuous intrusion of the past into the present, a cruel interruption of people’s attempts to cope, heal, and live well, however they define these terms. As such, trauma informed theology must begin with a posture of empathy. Trauma informed theology begin with experiences of suffering. Moreover, I suggest that trauma informed theology must begin with experiences of suffering in context. This requires the aforementioned power mapping skills, something which victim-survivors often know intuitively.

In the context of white settler Mennonite women and Indigenous Peoples in Canada, I have argued, following Elaine Enns, that lack of empathy is a significant barrier for truth-telling about sexual violence and cultural genocide and the ways in which these forms of violence are

45 Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 29.

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interlocking and co-constitutive. In her Doctor of Ministry studies, Enns completed a research project which aimed “to explore ways to effect change in Settler Mennonite and Indigenous relations.”46 She describes the project as follows:

We focused specifically on how victim mentality, intergenerational trauma and lack of critical historical awareness may impede Settler Mennonites in building authentic relationships and restorative solidarity with Indigenous communities. We hoped to inspire conversation about how Mennonites could build empathy with Native realities and wrestle with victim mentality within our own community, attending particularly to the voices and perspectives of women.47

In addition to this, I think that it is equally important to ask what kinds of practices and behaviours were and are lauded in our churches and theologies and which in turn were and are condemned (as discussed above chapters 2 and 3) and then to inquire further as to who was lauded and who was condemned (as discussed in chapters 3 and 4 above). This critical analysis is based on a key question in liberative Christian ethics: what is at stake and for whom? Mapping the effects of theologies and ethics with social categories can help to identify unacknowledged patterns and systems of power that are operating in a community. This skill is primarily for people with more social power, since those with less social power are usually keenly aware of the patterns and structures that pose barriers and harm them. As critical theorist Sara Ahmed discerns, “whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it.”48 Similarly, male-ness and settler-ness are invisible to those who inhabit these bodies of social power.

In order to build empathy, Enns used a “talking circle” process, common in the field of restorative justice and a process that traces its roots to many traditional Indigenous practices for

46 Elaine Enns, “Facing History with Courage,” 29.

47 Enns adds, “We designed a process to conduct five to seven individual interviews, three focus groups and one workshop, while remaining flexible as the research unfolded in case it required different responses.” Ibid., 29.

48 Ahmed, 157.

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addressing violence, trauma, and conflict in their communities.49 The focus groups that Enns facilitated each followed the talking circle process, with different focal points. One engaged women who are connected to the Mennonite settlement of Tiefengrund/Stoney Knoll in

Saskatchewan on traditional Cree lands. Another focused on the experiences of children and grandchildren of Russländer immigrants and the effects of violence and intergenerational trauma.

The third group heard from “[w]omen who attended at least one Canadian Truth and

Reconciliation Commission hearing.”50 In this group, “[p]articipants reflected on how Canadian

Prairie Settler Mennonites have developed a separate history from our Indigenous neighbours; how the TRC helped to connect those stories; how stories of Indigenous trauma impacted them; significant learnings from the TRC; and what barriers and prospect [sic] for reconciliation look like.”51 Like Lynda Klassen Reynolds’ research in 1997, Enns’ found that in 2015, Mennonite immigrants from Soviet Russia and their progeny continued to exhibit symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety. It seems that little has changed over the past two decades in terms of

49 I do not have the space in this thesis to address the Indigenous roots of circles for healing and how these have influenced practices of restorative justice worldwide, but suggest the following for essential reading on Indigenous roots and practices of talking circles in Indigenous communities see Jane Dickson-Gilmore and Carol La Prairie, ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?’ Aboriginal Communities, Restorative Justice, and the Challenges of Conflict and Change (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Rupert Ross, Returning to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice (Toronto: Penguin Group, 2006); Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge, eds., Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community (St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2003), Wanda D. McCaslin, ed., Justice as Healing: Indigenous Ways (St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2005); Carolyn Boyes-Watson, Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth: Bringing Justice Home (St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2008); Allan MacRae and Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Family Group Conferences, New-Zealand Style (Intercourse: Good Books, 2004). For talking circle practices in various contexts and communities see Kay Pranis, The Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking (Intercourse: Good Books, 2005); Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, The Little Book of Victim Offender Conferencing (Intercourse: Good Books, 2009); Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Waterloo: Herald Press, 2005) first published 1990; Wilma L. Derksen, Confronting the Horror: The Aftermath of Violence (Winnipeg: Amity Publishers, 2002); Gerry Johnstone and Daniel W. Van Ness, eds., Handbook of Restorative Justice (Portland: Willan Publishing, 2007).

50 Enns, “Facing History with Courage,” 30.

51 Ibid.

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Mennonite mental health awareness and resources for coping and healing. Enns makes some astute observations from her research, that settler Mennonites would do well to take to heart:

Myths about Mennonite toughness, resilience and superiority seek to assure us that we were not damaged by the trauma our ancestors experienced, that we are not weak. But there are two problems. First, both as individuals and as a community we are exhibiting symptoms suppression of our own pain and unresolved trauma inhibits our capacity to empathize with other traumatized people. Indeed, a belief that hard work and faithfulness simply erased our trauma plays into pejorative judgements of those who appear weak or wounded from past (or present) violence. This likely undergirds Mennonite attitudes of either paternalistic charity or antipathy towards Indigenous peoples. Rather than understanding poverty, addictions and violence in Indigenous communities as connected to the continuing legacy of colonial violence, we blame the victim.52

Comments made in talking circles often lead to an identification (either intentional or accidental) of key systems and structures of social and theological power in a community’s history, identity, and memory. Where empathy is stifled because of trauma, power mapping can challenge barriers maintained by patriarchal social and theological norms of white settler Mennonites such as hard work, self-sacrifice, stoicism, and a cause and effect view of sin and suffering.

In addition to talking circles as facilitated by Elaine Enns, I also encourage embodied approaches to trauma that do not depend on speech. Western societies tend to privilege talking based approaches to dealing with conflict, violence, and trauma. Talk therapy, the practice of developing narratives, continues to dominate psychotherapy even as researchers design and promote more embodied practices for approaching trauma. Indeed, the impetus for innovation in this regard is the growing research on PTSD and other forms of trauma confirming that trauma is imprinted on the body, and that there are limitations to logotherapy when it comes to healing

52 Enns, “Facing History with Courage,” 51.

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practices.53 One alternative form of therapy to narrative construction is described by trauma theologian Michelle Walsh as “embodied material play.”54

Walsh’s work at the Peace Institute in Boston, MA involves alternatives to talk therapy through various forms of material play. One of these forms is sandplay. “In sandplay, or sand tray/world play, a survivor places miniature objects into a tray of sand (other elements such as fire and water also may be present) to create a story about the world, often a world that has symbolic and metaphoric meaning for their lived experiences.”55 Sandplay enables an embodied way for victim-survivors of trauma to express their experiences. Because the effects of trauma are so embodied, in emotions and bodily sensations, forms of embodied material play such as sandplay, allow victim-survivors to enact their trauma, their emotions, their bodily sensations through figures, objects, landscapes, colours, and textures to begin to make meaning out of their experiences.

Beyond the catharsis that many people encounter through embodied art and play, embodied material play has physiological and psychological effects. As Walsh explains, embodied material play “provides direct access to the limbic system where trauma might be frozen in affect without narrative. Such physical play activates movement in the brain between the sensory base of memory in the limbic system and the frontal lobes of language and reason. This allows affect to be slowly

53 See Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking 2014).

54 Michelle A. Walsh, “Taking Matter Seriously: Material Theopoetics in the Aftermath of Communal Violence,” in Post-Traumatic Public Theology, eds. Stephanie N. Arel and Shelly Rambo, 241-266 (New York: Palgrave), 2016.

55 Walsh, 246.

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reconnected to language through play with material symbols in the sand.”56 In patriarchal and paternalistic western societies such as Canada, play is often relegated to the realm of children, and deemed immature. When the categories between children and adults are rigidly and hierarchically maintained, adult identity is constituted through their distinction from children and childhood.

Loss of imaginative capacity is but one dire consequence of paternalism and adult supremacy.

Walsh acknowledges that “[“p]lay” as a response to trauma may appear to be an odd category for a theologian to employ,” and because of the associations of play with frivolity, many adults may underestimate the power of embodied material play in attending to trauma. Such a paternalistic attitude towards play ignores “the vital and serious role of play for creativity, learning, transformation, and the experiences of freedom, choice, resilience, and the opening of imaginative possibilities.”57 Embodied material play is powerful because of the “restoration of possibilities in imagination through the facilitation of choice, control, and opportunities for meaning-making, are recognized as core “healing” components by many who specialize in the social science and therapy of trauma.”58 The sand tray provides a world in which the player is not constrained by abusive powers, whether interpersonal or systemic. In this way the sand tray creates a space for the player to express the relations between trauma and embodied agency in potentially profound ways. Like trauma informed theology, embodied material play begins with the experience of trauma, of suffering, approaches victim-survivors with a posture of empathy, and creates space for the embodied experiences of trauma and resilience, suffering and hope, to be expressed.

56 Walsh, 246.

57 Ibid., 250.

58 Ibid.

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As I have suggested, building empathic capacity requires a “seeing” of suffering, an acknowledgement of trauma. It also requires that suffering be situated in contexts of power, including personal, communal, and societal. In her work, Enns similarly concludes that “[e]mpathy requires analogizing one’s own pain to that of another. At the same time, moving from a superiority complex to historical response-ability involves acknowledging honestly the ways in which race, privilege and social location have advantaged one group’s recovery over another’s, both historically and in the present.”59 Building empathic capacity therefore requires acknowledging our own trauma, critical historical awareness about our relations with Indigenous Peoples and colonization, creating spaces for embodied material play, and mapping power in our communities and theologies.

Liberating White Settler Mennonite Theo-Ethics

Throughout this thesis I have demonstrated how white settler Mennonite martyr narratives, in the social context of Canada, and their corresponding theodicy and theo-ethics, have been detrimental for Mennonites, especially for women, and for Indigenous Peoples. The emphasis on obedience and self-sacrifice as the highest Christian virtues have perpetuated violence against women and people of non-binary genders, and Indigenous Peoples. Presented as the epitome of faithful discipleship to Jesus, these virtues have not been “good news” for anyone except for those with the most social power. Evangelical Christian leaders (including evangelical white settler

Mennonites) often ask their constituents whether they are willing to die for their faith. Here dying is seen as the greatest sacrifice a human could give someone or something, and within Christianity it is viewed as a most assured sign of someone’s faithfulness. But is not the story of Jesus a story

59 Enns, “Facing History with Courage,” 52.

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of liberation? Of good news for the oppressed (Luke 4)? Did Jesus not endure suffering and death on the cross, descent to hell, resurrection, and ascension so that we might live (John 4)? Is Jesus not a victim-survivor of trauma? After experiencing torture, death, and hell, Jesus returns and appears as a spectre to the disciples, bearing the marks of violence, the stigma of trauma, on his body. In the aftermath of trauma, Jesus ascends and the Spirit remains. Or as Shelly Rambo writes, in the aftermath of trauma, “[d]eath persists. … Love remains.”60

Jesus’ disciples, contemporary Christians included, are haunted by the trauma of the crucifixion and the spectre of truth that Jesus imparts to us. Theologian Mayra Rivera has picked up on exactly these “theological reverberations” with the discourse of hauntology.61 Haunting and trauma are closely related, sharing a symptom of “temporal disjuncture” that is relevant to the forms of violence experienced by Mennonite women and also but differently so by Indigenous

Peoples62; ghosts appear as apparitions of those already departed, and the effects of traumatic events disrupt the present lives of people and communities time and again. For example, reflecting on the Gospel of John, Rivera notes that Mary does not recognize Jesus until he calls her by name, and the disciples only recognize Jesus’ spectral appearance once they see and touch his wounds, the traces of trauma on his body. Furthermore, the Holy Spirit that will remain with the disciples after Jesus’ ascension is a key figure in recognizing trauma. As Rivera writes, “[i]n Jesus’ absence, the Holy Ghost—tellingly also named ‘the spirit of truth’—will be present among a collectivity- to-come, and will help its members recall what they have heard and seen (John 14:26).”63 As the

60 Rambo, 172.

61 Rivera, 118-135.

62 Ibid., 126.

63 Ibid., 125.

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disciples are commissioned to go into the world and share what they have seen and heard (i.e. remembering the life and teachings of Jesus), they will be accompanied by the Holy Ghost, a spirit of truth, to aid them in bringing the good news of liberation to others (Luke 4:18). In these ways the gospel illustrates that recognizing trauma requires engagement with ghosts. Because of this,

Rivera recommends acknowledgement of haunting in our lives and in the lives of others, and with the ghosts of violence and loss that people experience. A trauma-informed theo-ethics requires a spirit of truth about the lived-experiences of trauma; only with a spirit of truth does the message of liberation, salvation, healing, and reconciliation become possible.

Truth here is not to be understood as something arrived at, something to be achieved once all the records have been collected and compiled for the TRC. Truth here is to be understood as

“remaining.” Following Rambo’s theology of remaining, truth is the spirit that remains in the aftermath of trauma. It is a spirit that inhabits the middle ground between life and death, the temporal disjuncture that trauma produces, in which victim-survivors find themselves. Rambo calls for theology to witness to this tenuous and fragile middle ground. However, the conflation of witness with martyr is problematic here. As Elizabeth Castelli argues, “the understanding of a martyr as one who testifies to human suffering is subsumed under the model of the martyr as one who gives up her life for the sake of her religious beliefs. This self-sacrificial model, according to

Castelli, “won the day” in the history of Christianity,” especially in white settler Mennonite theology and ethics.64 By and large, Christianity’s understanding of martyrdom has silenced and eclipsed forms of human suffering based on less social power. This exacerbates the effects of

64 Rambo, 40 summarizes her reading of Castelli and adds a quote from Castelli, “What I want to suggest is that the overprivileging of the self-sacrificial dimensions of the ‘martyr’ results in a flattening out, the dangerous eclipsing of the possibility of recognizing the suffering of others.” Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 203.

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trauma among victim-survivors. Rambo criticizes Christian theology, particularly in America, for its preoccupation with the resurrection and redemption. In models of redemption, experiences of suffering and trauma get recuperated into a narrative of triumph that tends to minimize the effects of trauma if not all together erase them.65

In contrast, Rambo calls for “witnessing from the middle,” which refers to the depth of trauma and suffering as illustrated by Holy Saturday, the dark middle between the cross and the resurrection.66 This practice requires two elements: “First, a person is positioned in respect to suffering in such a way that she can see truths that often escape articulation, that emerge through cracks in the dominant logic. Second, this tenuous placement also means that the witness is subject to the continual elisions that make it impossible to see, hear, or touch clearly. In order to witness, one must enter into the elision at the heart of suffering.”67 The notion of truth, a Spirit of truth, is reconceived as that which remains. Trauma theorists and even more so victim-survivors have long observed that trauma is fragmented and does not yield well to narrative construction. Rambo suggests that the truth is not in the narrative; “[w]itnessing is not about attaining the correct and true story but, in fact, about a capacity to meet these stories, to hear them for all the ways in which they do not cohere. […] Looking from the middle turns us to see the movements of Spirit that exceed the triumphant logic of cross and resurrection.”68 What if, instead of viewing the relationship between the cross and resurrection as a triumph over death that elides the suffering that remains in the aftermath of trauma, what if we viewed the relationship between the cross and

65 Rambo, 145-148.

66 Ibid., 40.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., 151; my emphasis. One can observe the stark contrast here between Rambo and John Howard Yoder.

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resurrection as a story of survival, as Rambo suggests.69 What if Jesus’ spectral return through resurrection, and the imparting of the Holy Spirit of truth, is understood as the persistence of God’s love? Love abides. Along with the intrusions of violence and suffering, God’s love in the Spirit of truth remain in the aftermath of trauma. Jesus was prepared to die. Are we prepared to live?

69 Rambo, 171.

Conclusion

Come from the four winds, O spirit, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. —Ezekiel 37:9 NRSV

In this thesis I have traced some of the key ways in which trauma has affected white settler

Mennonite communities, especially women, and in turn, by neglecting to attend to trauma, in addition to patriarchal and colonial social norms and theologies, white settler Mennonites contributed to the trauma experienced by Indigenous Peoples. First I explained how a history of martyrdom evolved into a specific theology of suffering for Mennonites in Soviet Russia. In an attempt to cope with the trauma of disappearance, raids, betrayal, state surveillance, and sexual violence, those Mennonites with the authority and social power to produce the community narratives focused on their own male forms of suffering to the detriment of women’s suffering, which included sexual violence. The collective narratives that Soviet Mennonites produced in the aftermath of Stalin emphasized a view of faithful discipleship through Nachfolge Christi, which emphasized nonresistance in the face of violence, and Gelassenheit to suffering, i.e., a narrative that viewed the martyr as the paragon of faithfulness.

This narrative reinforced both social and theological norms in an attempt to reclaim a sense of normalcy, norms that were defined by those with the most ecclesial and social power in the community: white, settler, male church leaders. Social norms in white settler Mennonite communities in Canada were informed by theological norms and were very much in line with the dominant white settler colonial norms of hetero-patriarchy already present in the country through

European invasion. These included the dominance of white, male, cis-gender, heterosexual, able- bodied, neurotypical, middle to upper class, Christians. White settler Mennonite social norms and distribution of household roles conformed to European norms as well as theological norms of

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submission to God and submission to the man, the head of the household. The privileging of these social and theological norms were central to attempts at reestablishing order and control in the aftermath of suffering. Unfortunately, they were also extremely detrimental to those who did not conform to these norms, whether by choice or by the objective conditions of their social location.

Moreover, those who did not conform had to be brought into the fold; this was the charitable paternalistic impetus for missionary work.

The spectre of reconciliation reminds us that we have trauma as well as truth-telling to attend to. I have framed this thesis in part as a response to the TRC Calls to Action directed at the churches. I reiterate them here:

60. We call upon leaders of the church parties to the Settlement Agreement and all other faiths, in collaboration with Indigenous spiritual leaders, Survivors, schools of theology, seminaries, and other religious training centers, to develop and teach curriculum for all student clergy, and all clergy and staff who work in Aboriginal communities, on the need to respect Indigenous spirituality in its own right, the history and legacy of residential schools and the roles of the church parties in that system, the history and legacy of religious conflict in Aboriginal families and communities, and the responsibility that churches have to mitigate such conflicts and prevent spiritual violence.1

White settler Mennonites in Canada have primarily focused on other aspects of these Calls to

Action than I have highlighted. They have emphasized official apologies for Indian Residential

Schools in Call to Action 59, and some theological schools have also begun to develop and teach curricula in consideration of Call to Action 60. The curricula tend to focus on cultural sensitivity and the inclusion of Indigenous Christian theologies. These are important steps, but I contend that without an examination of our own white settler Mennonite complicity in cultural genocide called

1 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action.

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for in Action 59, our apologies and attempts at reconciliation will appear disingenuous and do little to affect the social and theological transformation called for in 60—respect for Indigenous spirituality in its own right.

The spectre of reconciliation demands more than these Calls to Action. As I have already argued, reconciliation, like truth, is not something arrived at; it is a process, a posture, a way of being in the world that impacts all areas of social and theological life. It involves critical historical awareness, power mapping of our institutions, social, and theological norms, building empathic capacity, and attending to trauma in its various forms. It also requires decolonization. White

Mennonite scholars and church leaders have primarily described decolonization as a critical analysis of the European roots of our own theological norms and the acceptance of Indigenous

Christian theologies as legitimate. While this is important, especially since our theology shapes so much of our social and political life, we must remember that “decolonization is not a metaphor.”2

In their profound article on decolonization, Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck and critical social theorist K. Wayne Yang, argue that “[t]he metaphorization of decolonization make possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence,” that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.”3 One move to settler innocence that is particularly germane to white settler Mennonites, myself included, is conscientization. Influenced by modern liberalism, left-leaning white settler Mennonites value institutional education and often view it as the remedy for societal ills. It is commonly believed, in my own circles as well, that good education and critical thinking (conscientization) will bring about the capacity for social change, including

2 Tuck and Yang, 1-40.

3 Ibid., 1.

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peace and justice. Following critical race scholar Franz Fanon, Tuck and Yang name critical consciousness as an important step in decolonization but not the end goal and certainly not a panacea. The caution that “the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism.”4 Indigenous scholar

Jeanette Armstrong reinforces the importance of land return for decolonization and reconciliation.

She writes,

Without being whole in our community, on our land, with the protection it has as a reservation, I could not survive. In knowing that, I know the depth of the despair and hopelessness of those who are not whole in a community or still on their own land. I know the depth of the void. I fear for us all, as the indigenous peoples remaining connected to the land begin to succumb or surrender. I fear this as the greatest fear for all humanity. I fear this because I know that without my land and my people I am not alive. I am simply flesh waiting to die.5

The violence, trauma, and death that settler colonialism produces, explicit and covert, is immanent, its bio-productive powers embedded in systems and structures that undergird not only institutional life but also social, political, and economic norms, and distributed geographically, rearranging space, people, life, according to its priorities.6 Drawing on critical race scholar Aimé Césaire, Tuck and Yang explain that “[c]olonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities.”7 In

4 Tuck and Yang, 19.

5 Jeanette Armstrong, “Sharing One Skin,” in The Case Against the Global Economy: And For a Turn Toward the Local, eds. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), 467-468; my emphasis.

6 See Ed. Sherene Razack, Race, space, and the law (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002).

7 Tuck and Yang, 21.

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contrast with liberal social justice approaches, “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.” Tuck and Yang call settlers to “consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence—diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.”8 I implore my own people, white settler Mennonites, to examine our land, our power, our privilege, identify our feelings of guilt and responsibility, as first steps to understanding our identities as complex as both refugees and settlers, as peaceable and violent. Our historical and theological narratives have emphasized the former and neglected the latter, adding salt to wounds. My thesis is an urgent call for us to attend to the latter.

This conclusion is not conclusive in any straightforward sense. Already before I started writing there was more to be said than I could in this space and time frame. This thesis is a reflection on experiences of suffering, an analysis of some of the forms of violence that produce trauma in white settler Mennonite communities such as my own and how we continue to participate in settler colonial systems that harm Indigenous communities. I offer some critical tools that I have found effective and meaningful in reducing the harm of settler colonialism, both within our own communities and on others. What I have offered in terms of a trauma informed theology is, I hope, only the beginning of a response to the demands made by the spectres of sexual violence and cultural genocide in settler colonialism. A beginning that leads to accountability and the rearrangement of power among white settler Mennonites. And a beginning that leads to

8 Tuck and Yang, 21.

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repatriation of land, acknowledgement and respect of Indigenous sovereignties and self- determination.

What remains in the aftermath of trauma? Witnesses remain. Truth-telling remains. Love remains. The spectre of reconciliation remains. My hope and my prayer is for the words of healing spoken by the prophet Ezekiel: “Come from the four winds, O spirit, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”9

9 Ezekiel 37:9 (NRSV).

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New Horizons, 1966. Nishnawbe Aski Nation Collection, Poplar Hill Series. Algoma University Archives. Updated 2019. http://archives.algomau.ca/main/sites/default/files/2011- 63_002_001.pdf.

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