Moving Forward as a Nation: Chanie Wenjack and Canadian Assimilation of Indigenous Stories ANDALAH ALI Andalah Ali is a fourth year cinema studies and English student. Her primary research interests include mediated representations of death and alterity, horror, flm noir, and psychoanalytic theory. 66 The story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Ojibwe boy who froze to death in 1966 while fleeing from Cecilia Jeffery Indian Residential School,1 has taken hold within Canadian arts and culture. In 2016, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the young boy’s tragic and lonely death, a group of Canadian artists, including Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, comic book artist Jeff Lemire, and filmmaker Terril Calder, created pieces inspired by the story.2 Giller Prize-winning author Joseph Boyden, too, participated in the commemoration, publishing a novella, Wenjack,3 only a few months before the literary controversy wherein his claims to Indigenous heritage were questioned, and, by many people’s estimation, disproven.4 Earlier the same year, Historica Canada released a Heritage Minute on Wenjack, also written by Boyden.5 Ostensibly, the foregrounding of such a story within a cultural institution as mainstream as the Heritage Minutes functions as a means to critically address Canadian complicity in settler-colonialism. By constituting residential schools as a sealed-off element of history, however, the Heritage Minute instead negates ongoing Canadian culpability in the settler-colonial project. Furthermore, the video’s treatment of landscape mirrors that of the garrison mentality, which is itself a colonial construct. The video deflects from discourses on Indigenous sovereignty or land rights, instead furthering an assimilationist agenda that proposes absorption of Indigenous stories, and people, into the Canadian project of nation-building. In structure and style, this short video initially resembles other Heritage Minutes, opening with a subtitle indicating the video’s setting and time period: Cecilia Jeffery Indian Residential School, 1966. It launches into a period re-enactment of the events: a series of shots of a young Indigenous boy dressed in clothing similar to those in which Wenjack was found running through the forest.6 These images are intercut with dimly lit shots of Indigenous boys having their hair cut short and saying Christian prayers under the guidance of a priest. Wenjack does not mouth along with the prayers, at which point the priest pulls him into another room and throws him onto a mattress. The shot then cuts to a medium closeup on the priest, standing in the doorway rubbing his hands through his hair, then back to a closeup on Wenjack, who winces away from the priest, his eyes wide, seeming to imply imminent physical or sexual abuse. At this 1. Ian Adams, “The Lonely Death of Charlie Wenjack,” Maclean’s Magazine, February 1967, 30. 2. Denise Balkissoon, “Author Joseph Boyden on Writing the Story of Chanie Wenjack,” The Globe and Mail, last modified October 5, 2016, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/author-jo- seph-boyden-on-writing-the-story-of-chaniewenjack/article32443798. 3. Ibid. 4. Jorge Barrera, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape-Shifting Indigenous Identity,” APTN News, last modified December 23, 2016, aptnnews.ca/2016/12/23/author-joseph-boydens-shape-shifting-indigenous-identity. 5. “Joseph Boyden Pens Heritage Minute to Illustrate Horrors of Residential Schools,” CBC, last modified June 23, 2016, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/heritage-minute-joseph-boyden-1.3649073. 6. Adams, 30. 67 Moving Forward as a Nation point, the structure departs from that of most Heritage Minutes, cutting to a closeup of Wenjack’s actual sister, Pearl Achneepineskum, who also provides the video’s voiceover narration.7 The shot zooms out to show her holding a photograph of Wenjack. The shot’s harsh but naturalistic lighting and plain black background communicates a sense of documentary realism, in contrast to the video’s earlier coloured, low-key lighting and use of sets, that signaled its status as theatrical re-enactment. By featuring a person connected to the historical events portrayed, this Heritage Minute “breaks convention” from others, which rely solely on re-enactment, with the intention, according to Historica Canada CEO Anthony Wilson-Smith, to “make clear how current this is.”8 While the inclusion of Achneepineskum certainly does help to lend a sense of authenticity to the video, the notion that it demonstrates the currency of issues related to residential schools seems spurious. Rather, the harsh lighting accentuates the lines and hyperpigmentation on Achneepineskum’s skin, emphasizing her age in comparison to the photograph of her preteen brother. The photograph’s own weathered, black-and-white appearance is evocative of a long-gone era. The Chanie Wenjack Heritage Minute video, and other works on residential schools, such as We Were Children,9 often focus upon the schools of the midcentury or earlier, despite the fact that the last school did not close until the late 1990s.10 The focus on residential schools, then, serves to historicize the events and not, as Wilson-Smith claims, bring them into the present. Even its inclusion in a series called Heritage Minutes, along with such subjects as John Cabot’s arrival in Newfoundland in 1497, constitutes the video as a part of the past. The historicization of Wenjack’s story reveals a broader goal of reconciliation of Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people. As Naomi Angel and Pauline Wakeham posit in their essay “Witnessing In Camera: Photographic Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation,” the emphasis placed on the “pastness” of residential schools serves to negate governmental culpability in their implementation.11 Through this ostensible pastness and denial of culpability, the focus on residential schools provides an incomplete view of colonialism within Canada. In his essay “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” David Garneau argues that “colonialism 7. “Joseph Boyden.” 8. Ibid. 9. We Were Children, directed by Tim Wolochatiuk, (2012, Eagle Vision, One Television, National Film Board of Canada). 10. “An Overview of the Indian Residential School System,” Anishinabek Nation, last modified 2013, www. anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Overview-of-the-IRS-System-Booklet.pdf. 11. Naomi Angel and Pauline Wakeham, “Witnessing In Camera: Photographic Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation,” in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, eds. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Brantford: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 97-99. 68 Andalah Ali is not a singular historical event but an ongoing legacy.”12 Such works as the Heritage Minute, however, represent colonialism as just that: a historical event— one that has left lasting trauma, but a historical event nonetheless. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Boyden himself, who was an honorary witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reflects on the notion of reconciliation; he remarks how the goal of the video is not in “pointing fingers of blame,” but rather in asking oneself “how do we come to terms with this and move forwards as a nation?”13 By rejecting the idea of blame, this comment removes the issue of culpability. The reference of colonial trauma as something to “come to terms with” further represents it as a closed-off part of the past, rather than an ongoing event.14 By ending the question with the phrase “as a nation,” Boyden also highlights support for the continuation of Canada—whose very foundation is based upon the dispossession of Indigenous people—as a unified institution.15 By representing residential schools as part of a past with which one must reconcile in order to move forwards, remarks such as Boyden’s, and the video as a whole, decontextualize them from the broader, ongoing project of settler-colonialism. Considering Angel, Wakeham, and Garneau’s critiques of Canadian conceptions of reconciliation in an Indigenous context, this video takes on an assimilationist dimension. On an extratextual level, for example, it must be noted that Historica Canada is itself an organization funded in part by the government of Canada.16 The pronoun “our” in the Heritage Minutes’ slogan, “A part of our heritage,” notably, yokes Indigenous history with Canadian history.17 Through its inclusion in such an institution, the video’s general subject matter, and the presence of Achneepineskum herself, gestures towards a means by which Canada can claim the victims of its own settler-colonialism as a part of its national narrative. The story embedded within the historical event itself—a young boy freezing to death, lost in the northern wilderness—readily lends itself to be read through the notion of the garrison mentality, one of the most enduring narratives within Canadian criticism. First proposed by Northrop Frye in his collection The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, the garrison mentality describes a psychological condition apparently expressed in Canadian literature. The garrison mentality expresses itself in 12. David Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” West Coast Line 46, no. 2 (2012): 38. 13. “Joseph Boyden.” 14. Ibid. 15. Garneau, 38. 16. “Historica Canada,” accessed November 20, 2018, Charity Intelligence Canada. www.charityintelligence. ca/charity-details/796-historica-canada. 17. “Historica Canada.” 69 Moving Forward as a Nation the formation