Humanities Research Journal Series

Contents Decolonising testimony: on the possibilities and limits of witnessing 1 Testimony, witnessing and the institution Can the institution speak? The university as testimony in Canada today 11 Len M. Findlay Reconciliation as ritual: comparative perspectives on innovation and performance in processes of reconciliation 27 Roxana Waterson ‘Healing the heartbreak’?: the role of testimony in the Australian inquiry into the separation of Indigenous children from their families 49 Rebecca Devitt The testimonial arts: challenging national memory Used and abused 71 Adrian Stimson Buffalo Boy testifies: decolonising visual testimony in a colonial-settler society 81 Lynne Bell Ancestors rising: Aboriginal art as historical testimonials 97 Mary Longman In an era of stalled reconciliation: the uncanny witness of Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne 107 Rosanne Kennedy Testimony and cultural memory: from the national to the transnational Other echoes in the garden 127 Jamelie Hassan This is not a game: testimony and the making and unmaking of the child as a political subject 133 Julia Emberley Contributors Lynne Bell, Professor of Visual Culture and Co-Director of the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan, teaches and publishes on decolonising visual art and culture. Recent publications include ‘The post/colonial photographic archive and the work of memory’ (2007, Image and Inscription: An anthology of contemporary Canadian photography, YYZ Books, Toronto, Ontario), ‘Satiric spectacle, camp aesthetics and anti-colonial critique in the work of Adrian Stimson’ (Canadian Art, 2007) and ‘Thinking place: animating the indigenous humanities in education’ (with Marie Battiste, Isobel Findlay, Len Findlay and James Youngblood Henderson, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, vol. 34, 2005). Dr Rebecca Devitt is a researcher of Indigenous political history and visiting fellow at the Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University. Her postgraduate study, completed in November 2008, provided a history of Stolen Generations activism in Australia culminating in the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, held from 1995 to 1997. Her research interests include modern Australian history and, in particular, Aboriginal political movements in the twentieth century. Julia Emberley is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where she teaches in the areas of indigenous cultural practices, testimonial discourses and critical theory. Her recent book is Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural practices and decolonization in Canada (2007, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario). She is also the author of numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of Visual Culture, Signs, Topia, Cultural Critique, New Formations and Feminist Review. Len Findlay is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Widely published in nineteenth-century comparative studies, literary theory and the nature and role of universities and the humanities in Canada, his more recent work includes essays such as ‘Always indigenize! The radical humanities in the postcolonial Canadian university’ and ‘Memory’s Hegelian estate: “race”, class, treaty, and the Canadas of Alexander Morris (1826–1889)’ (Essays on Canadian Writing). His book Oral Culture for Book Historians will be published by University of Toronto Press in 2010. iii Humanities Research Vol XV. No 3. 2009 Jamelie Hassan has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. Her survey exhibition, Jamelie Hassan: At the far edge of words, organised by Museum London, Canada (2009), was awarded Exhibition of the Year 2009 by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries and will be presented at the Morris and Helen Art Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, in spring 2010. Rosanne Kennedy is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at The Australian National University, where she teaches in the fields of literature, cultural studies and gender studies. She has published widely on trauma, testimony and witnessing in journals such as Biography, Studies in the Novel, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Life Writing and Aboriginal History, and has edited (with Jill Bennett) a volume on cross-cultural approaches to traumatic memory, World Memory: Personal trajectories in global time (2003, Palgrave, London). Dr Mary Longman (Aski-Piyesiwiskwew) was born in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, in 1964, and is a member of Gordon First Nation. She is a professional visual artist, specialising in sculpture, drawing and digital media, and is a professor of Aboriginal art history at the University of Saskatchewan. She has held senior academic positions as Dean at the White Mountain Academy of Arts in Elliot Lake, Ontario, and Department Head of Fine Art at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology in Merritt, BC. Longman’s academic research includes innovative pictograph digital restoration techniques and the writing of contemporary and historical Aboriginal art-history texts. Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta. He is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator with an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Recent shows include Unmasked, at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 23 September 2009 to 29 January 2010, and Transformations, Art Gallery of Southern Manitoba, Brandon, Manitoba, 27 August to 3 October 2009. He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal and the Alberta Centennial Medal for his political, human rights and diversity work. Roxana Waterson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Her publications include The Living House: An anthropology of architecture in Southeast Asia (2009, Fourth edn, Tuttle Publishing, North Clarendon, Vermont), Southeast Asian Lives: Personal narratives and historical experience (2007, Singapore University Press/Ohio University Press, Singapore/Athens, Ohio) and Paths and Rivers: Sa’dan Toraja society in transformation (2009, KITLV, Leiden). Her current interests include social memory, life narratives, visual ethnography and childhood research. iv Decolonising testimony: on the possibilities and limits of witnessing1 ROSANNE KENNEDY, LYNNE BELL AND JULIA EMBERLEY When Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub published their foundational text, Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history, in 1992, they claimed that the twentieth century was ‘the era of the witness’.2 They focused specifically on the Holocaust and the ‘crises in witnessing’ to emerge in its aftermath. In the past 20 years, witnessing has achieved broad international relevance for truth and reconciliation commissions and national inquiries—notably in contexts in which nations are reckoning with the legacies of a divided past. The late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century have therefore been marked by an unprecedented rise in the production and circulation of and demand for testimony. In contexts such as truth commissions, testimony functions to authenticate claims of historical injustice, it enables survivors to tell their stories, and it potentially engages the public as a collective witness to histories of violence. In 1996, for instance, personal testimonies of traumatic experiences played a formative role in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in the Australian National Inquiry into the Separation of Indigenous Children from their Families and Communities and in the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. While personal testimony has brought hidden histories of violence and abuse into the public domain, in recent years, commissioners, participants, commentators, psychologists and cultural critics have become concerned with the limits as well as the possibilities of testimony. What are the effects of giving testimony on those who have suffered personally from traumatic events? Does giving testimony, as Rebecca Devitt and 1 This issue of Humanities Research has been supported by an Australian Research Council International Linkage Award. This grant enabled Rosanne Kennedy (The Australian National University), Lynne Bell (University of Saskatchewan) and Julia Emberley (University of Western Ontario) to develop this project over several years, at conferences, symposiums and forums. Several of the papers were offered and discussed at a symposium on the Uses and Abuses of Testimony, which was hosted by Professors Len Findlay and Lynne Bell of the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan in October 2008. Other contributors participated in a forum on Testimony and Witness at the Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University, in November 2007. We would like to thank the Australian Research Council, the Humanities Research Unit at the University of Saskatchewan and the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University for their support of this project. 2 Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori 1992, Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history, Routledge, London and New York. 1 Humanities Research Vol XV. No 3. 2009 Adrian Stimson discuss in this issue, re-traumatise already vulnerable individuals, without necessarily providing justice? Under what conditions can the process of bearing witness

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