Boundaries of Possibility: Race, Nostalgia and the Saskatchewan Centennial

BOUNDARIES OF POSSIBILITY: RACE, NOSTALGIA AND THE SASKATCHEWAN CENTENNIAL

Lynn Audrey Caldwell

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

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Abstract

In Boundaries of Possibility: Race, Nostalgia and the Saskatchewan Centennial,

I draw from critical race theory and cultural studies to investigate moments from

Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations. Through event observation, interviews with event organizers, and analysis of visual and textual materials, I examine how Saskatchewan is commemorated as a place, as people, and as a past. My analysis interrogates nostalgic identifications with a European invader-settler story toward developing increasingly equitable, heterogeneous and multi-cultured understandings of Canada and Canadian citizenship.

This research takes up questions of nostalgia, attachments, irretrievable losses and desired returns, and I structure my line of questioning as a route through which to unsettle invader-settler Saskatchewan fictions and their hold on possibility - and on territory and history. The theoretical framework includes a recognition that the tension between coherence and fracture in commemorative practices means that this Centennial is not one monolithic event consistent in its productions. A critical race perspective further underlines that to the extent that the Centennial does appear consensual and unified, it does so through denials of or diversions from the ongoing and racialized iniquities of colonial nation-building.

ii This analysis of race and nostalgia reveals ways that the intentionality and violence of colonization is neutralized or modified in what is imagined as a

"reconciliatory" terrain of Saskatchewan, depicted as not so far removed from the processes of colonizing modernity, with a landscape that is not seen to be

dramatically/excessively industrialized or urbanized. I argue that Saskatchewan is

available and accessed in very particular ways in the sticking of colonial racism to nation

in Canada - and that certain attachments to Saskatchewan as a knowable place, population and past contribute uniquely and persistently to ongoing racist national formations. The 2005 Centennial has presented a vital opportunity to decipher such

attachments and their particularities; and, the analysis and conclusions of this thesis propose directions for intervention and for reconfigured possibilities.

in Acknowledgments

My supervisor, Sherene Razack, has been inspiring teacher and guide through this project as well as through many conversations that led to its beginnings, and I am so deeply grateful for her direction and generous encouragements throughout. The members of my thesis committee, Roger Simon and Kari Dehli, and at the defense also Martin Cannon, each provided such thoughtful and engaged readings that continue to shift my perspectives and deepen my commitments in ways that will extend beyond these pages. For close reading and feedback that has broadened the scope of how I situate and imagine the work, I am very grateful to external examiner Diana Brydon.

It is hardly possible to adequately acknowledge how much I have learned from OISE/UT student colleagues and friends in ways that have informed this project and shape my imaginings and hopes for much more. Carrianne Leung and Melanie Knight especially, and in so many ways, each provided much encouragement and insight at critical moments and shared many pivotal conversations through every stage of the design and writing. I am also deeply appreciative of learning in the good company of friends and colleagues extraordinaire: Allison Burgess, Andrea Fatona, Anne Wagner, Bonnie Slade (great to have your company for the final stretch!), Carmela Murdocca, Catherine Burwell, Darryl Leroux, Eve Haque, Gada Mahrouse, Gulzar Charania, Holly Baines, Nathaniel Paul, Nupur Gogia (thanks for great company during days in the library!), Paula Butler, Simone Browne, Susan Ferguson, Suzanne Lenon, and Vannina Sztainbok, and collectively various configurations of the SESE student caucus, and students in Sherene's thesis group. I am so grateful for so much I have learned about scholarship, politics, equity, ethics, humour and who knows what else from you all in various encounters along the way, and particularly through some very, very good food fests with many of you.

Big thanks also for acts of support and encouragement in Toronto to Brad Berg, Catherine Rose, Christopher Lind, Ena Dua, Gail Allan, Hal Thomas-Rose, Heather Williams, Jennifer Janzen-Ball, Jim Kirkwood, Julie Graham, Karen Williams, Kerry Fast, Lynette Plett (special thanks for extraordinary acts of patience, insight and friendship as I navigated the final months!), Marilyn Legge, Marion Kirkwood, Michael Bourgeois, Noelle Bowles, Savitri Dua, Ralph Wushke, and friends at Bathurst. An extra dose of gratitude for those with whom I shared households at various stages as I was completing this text, including Digger and Bella. Yes, Digger, we had our moments but I loved and appreciated you dearly as a companion in the house! And to all housemates, thank you for conversation and assistance in so many forms. I am also so grateful to Jim and Marion, and to Leif Vaage in Toronto; and to my parents, to my brother and family, and to Brenda MacLauchlan and Ruth Blaser in Saskatchewan for opportunities to be tenant, house-sitter, or frequent extended visitor in your households during my years and travels as a graduate student. Many repeated and generous acts of hospitality have been an immense support to me in the completion of this thesis.

For ongoing encouragements in Saskatchewan directly related to this project both academically and personally, I am grateful to Carol Schick, Catherine Barnsley, Mary Jeanne Barrett, Nettie Wiebe, and to Alison Calder and Warren Cariou (even though you

IV two aren't exactly in Saskatchewan - adding a Winnipeg paragraph is more complexity than these acknowledgments need!). Thank you to women at a feminist network event in Saskatchewan who invited me to discuss this research with them very early on and in ways that helped me to see the importance of this work; and to Ruth and Brenda who provide so much more than a household to land in for stays in Regina.

There are many more friends in the complex geographies of thought and travel to whom I owe and will express words of thanks directly.

The questions and analysis of this project have been shaped very much through engagements in graduate course work and I gratefully acknowledge the teaching of course instructors, including the members of my thesis committee, and also especially Sheryl Nestel (teacher of my first and my final course taken at OISE/UT, and generous advisor always). I am grateful also for experiences as teaching assistant in Canadian Studies courses, and have learned much that relates to these pages in conversation with undergraduate students in tutorials and on the pages of assignments, my teaching assistant colleagues Carrianne Leung and Allison Burgess, and professors Emily Gilbert, Joanne Saul, and Todd Gordon.

Much appreciation to Danny Wilson at the Centennial Office for an early and helpful conversation about the planning of Centennial events, which helped me in the selection of events, texts, and interview participants. And I am very grateful to Andrea Menard, Leslee Newman, Lisa Donahue, Lynda Haverstock, and Ruth Bitner for their generosity of time and reflection during our interview conversations.

I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding a phase of this project.

And a final word to family. Firstly to Mom, Dad, Neal and Diane: you probably only know a fraction of how much I attribute gratefully to you now and over time for all that I do and desire to do. Your relentless support and your care for me matters so much. Also the presence and words of Jonathan, Kris, and Karen at various stages have been welcome encouragement. And of course, dear Aidan: some day I look forward to telling you more about what I was reading and writing in your basement or your upstairs office when I should have been paying (and I am of course glad for the very many hours of play, too)! And, to my grandparents all: I continue to know and appreciate your care in more ways than you could possibly have anticipated.

In offering these acknowledgments of so many forms of assistance and support toward what these pages represent, I also acknowledge that while I do submit this as a completed text, its words are partial ...not only as fulfillment of degree requirements, but also as response to the questions and contexts that are its impetus.

v Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgments iv

Preface: The Centennial as an Opportunity for Research 1 The Centennial: Saskatchewan's Makings and Re-Makings 1 An Opportunity: Questioning Saskatchewan 7 The Chapters 10

Chapter One: Designing and Theorizing the Project 11 Introduction 11 Impetus for the Project 12 Racism and National Imaginaries 12 Design of the Project: Questioning the Centennial 17 Research Question 17 Data 18 Interpretive Approach 21 Theoretical Ideas that Inform my Interpretation 26 Subjectivity - and particularly, racial subjectivity and white racism 26 Space - and particularly, racialized space and white settler contexts 37 Memory - and particularly, commemoration and nostalgia 45

Chapter Two: Situating the Project 57 The Project as Critical Work 57 Critical Studies of Saskatchewan as Place 60 Critical Studies of White Normativity, Space, and National Imaginaries in Canada....70 Critical Studies of Nostalgia and Commemorative Practice in Canada 75

Chapter Three: Saskatchewan as a Place 84 Quilt and Buffalo 84 Geography is a Question 86 Centennial Moments that Place Saskatchewan 89 Middle Landscape 89 Terrain of Disharmony and Displacement 102 On the Maps of a Nation 112 Place with a Future 120 Race, Nostalgia and the Questionability of Place 123

Chapter Four: Saskatchewan as a People 129 Once Upon a Time 129 People, Populism, and Subjects of Centennial Commemoration 133 Centennial Moments of Subjectivity and Subjection 140 Aboriginal Acknowledgments 142

vi Art and Artists 153 Diversity 158 "We are..." 163 Race, Nostalgia and Possible Subjects 166

Chapter Five: Saskatchewan as a Past 169 Pavements and Paradise 169 Elusiveness and Indeterminacy of the Past 172 Centennial Moments that Remember Saskatchewan 175 The Ethereal Past 176 The Past as Inheritance 194 Race, Nostalgia and Returns to Saskatchewan's Past 199

Chapter Six: Conclusion 203 The Invisibility of the Sea 203 Saskatchewan's Fictions 206 The World Could Use a Little More Saskatchewan 206 Implications: Courage to Invent New Fictions 211

Bibliography of Works Cited 216

vu Preface: The Centennial as an Opportunity for Research

Think of the stories your grandparents told of this young province - stories of survival and success that have shaped our present day. Those precious stories, if not recorded, will disappear with our early generations.

Winning the Prairie Gamble website

Wide open is my mind to the past that we share Wide open up the future and breathe in the air Wide open up my arms to the true-blue love Wide open, are my eyes to the stars up above.

Lyrics by Jason Plumb1

The Centennial: Saskatchewan's Makings and Re-Makings

On 4 September 1905, the city of Regina, Saskatchewan, newly named as provincial capital, hosted a celebration to mark the inauguration of Saskatchewan as a province in Canada. The official date of Saskatchewan's entry into the federation of

Canada is recorded as three days earlier, simultaneous with that of Alberta's on the first of September; however, celebrations in Saskatchewan were held later to allow for persons designated as dignitaries in relation to these events - including then Canadian

Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and Canadian Governor General Earl Grey - to attend inauguration events in both of these "new" Canadian provinces.

One hundred years after these September events that officially legislated and publicly marked the inauguration of Saskatchewan as a province in Canada, the

Saskatchewan government claimed 2005 as a Centennial year for the present day province. This designation of the Saskatchewan Centennial year occasioned festivities organized by the provincial government, by local municipalities, museums, community organizations and individuals. Many communities organized homecomings, the

1 Lyrics from song promoting the provincial government's 2003 "Saskatchewan: The Future is Wide Open" campaign.

1 2

Lieutenant Governor hosted a televised gala of performing arts and several other arts- based initiatives, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip visited the province from England, newspapers published special editions featuring images and stories about and from

Saskatchewan's past; there were contests and concerts and parades throughout the year and particularly during the summer months, commemorative calendars, t-shirts, coffee table books, theatre productions, and commemorative songs. The provincial Western

Development Museum (WDM), which has branches in four Saskatchewan cities, launched a commemorative exhibition called Winning the Prairie Gamble. To accompany this exhibition, the museum also set up a website to collect "family stories" of "survival and success," which they invited as personal illustrations of this provincial tale of a gamble won.

The "100 years" focus of this Centennial project marks a method to portray

"Saskatchewan" as a discrete, and presumably shared, experience bounded by time as well as geography. The "Centennial" of 2005 becomes a moment to name and re-name that boundedness, and to register boundaries of space and time in a publicized celebratory form. In the project I present in these pages, I identify and investigate these boundaries as questionable, problematic, and tenuous. I will have more to say about commemorations in the chapter to follow; certainly, I present no surprise in this thesis by identifying a state-initiated Centennial event to be productive of homogenizing, celebratory tales and declarations of shared identifications with a place and its history.

However, I argue that there is more than that to be learned from these binding practices of the 2005 Centennial.

2 Information on these exhibits and the "family stories" project is available on the website of the Western Development Museum at www.wdmprairiegamble.com (Last viewed 8 February 2008). 3

The Saskatchewan commemorated in a tale of taking a chance on the prairies is of

course also the name for a place and history marked by the violence, legislation, labour,

and constructions of colonial settlement in the Canadian West - within broader Canadian

and global activities of imperialism and colonialism. It is also the name for a place

peopled by and remembered as, lived in and related to through global migrations and

through indigenous life, including indigenous mobilities, which disrupt and defy any

colonial claims to territory and history. The museum exhibitions and stories, and the

festivities encouraged by the government's publicity through the provincial 2005

Centennial office would, therefore, face this tale of European invasions, and Aboriginal

resistance and resilience, the tale of flooded lands and treaties, and other acts of

colonialism that capitalized on the fertilities of soil, on the labours of homesteaders, and

on legislated acts of aggression toward Aboriginal peoples including through the Indian

Act4 and the establishment of the reserve system. Commemorative tales of Saskatchewan

would carry the responsibility of accounting for the present varied and uneven conditions

of life embodied by people, lands, and communities in Saskatchewan and for the varied

mobilities and histories that shape the place. However, that the task of commemorative

3 The 2005 Centennial was chaired by an elected Member of the Legislative Assembly (ML A), Glenn Hagel, who was given the title of Legislative Secretary to the Premier, and responsibility for coordinating celebrations with staff members at a 2005 Centennial office that related to several departments and ministries of the provincial government. The organizational structure and activities for the official celebrations were established as an outcome of a four year study and public consultation process conducted by a 19 member Citizens' Advisory Council to the Anniversaries Secretariat. The Advisory Council's report was titled Celebrating Saskatchewan: Celebrating a Century of Progress 1905-2005, Saskatchewan Government Publications, March 2001. 4 The Indian Act legislation of 1876 merged federal laws relating to and treaties with Aboriginal peoples into one statute constructed with intent to define and regulate all aspects of "status Indian" life, and which still functions with this intent and its effects today. For this description of the Indian Act, I rely on Bonita Lawrence, 'Real' Indians and Others: Mixed-Race Urban Native People, the Indian Act, and the Rebuilding of Indigenous Nations, PhD., OISE/UT, 1999, p. 55. Also, Renisa Mawani, "In between and out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor and the Law in British Columbia, 1850-1913," in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, Toronto: Between the Lines, p. 47. 4 telling is complicated and involves stories of aggression and iniquity, and involves defiances of colonialism, is not apparent in ready evocations of a gamble "won" and 100 years of shared success and survival. It may be no surprise that a Centennial event of this sort emphasizes cohesion over complication, and survival and success over loss and aggression; and, such commemorations in the context of colonization and resistance to it are certainly neither unusual nor unquestioned in contemporary activist culture and scholarship. However, while I do examine and call to account Centennial practices that reinscribe colonial identifications, the focus of my contributions has more to do with how

Saskatchewan is available and accessed in very particular ways in the sticking of colonial racism to nation in Canada; and, how certain attachments to Saskatchewan as a knowable place, population and past contribute uniquely and persistently to ongoing racist national formations. The 2005 Centennial presents a vital opportunity to decipher such attachments and their particularities.

My project is certainly aligned with concerns for the uneven conditions of life embodied in Saskatchewan. Who shares in the success and survival, and who is excluded? These are obvious and enduring questions. Saskatchewan, though indeed comprised of varied forms of surviving and successes, is also a place where some children - and predominantly among them, Aboriginal children - stand on darkened streets at night, exploited in prostitution;5 where some children spend long hours on school buses traveling from farms to distant schools; a place where broken pavement

The Special Committee to Prevent the Abuse and Exploitation of Children through the Sex Trade documented this violence in Saskatchewan and identified that "The majority of these predators on the stroll are non-aboriginal men, many of whom are affluent. In contrast, the Committee concluded that over 80% of the children suffering abuse from these men are of Aboriginal descent." (Saskatchewan, Final Report of the Special Committee To Prevent the Abuse and Exploitation of Children Through the Sex Trade, Delivered to the 2nd Session of the 24th Legislature, Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, June 2001). 5 marks the effects of hauling grain by truck to distant terminals owned by large and not local grain companies, and a place where city police officers have repeatedly and recently driven and abandoned Aboriginal men to isolated fields in freezing weather.6

Saskatchewan is a place undeniably entangled in colonial and postcolonial relations, economics, violence, and forms of governance and resistance.

"100 years of Saskatchewan" as parameters for a commemoration, clearly include elements that counter a tale of fortune in the "prairie gamble," including the violations and iniquitous conditions of life perpetuated through Canadian colonial projects, and the myriad of losses in agricultural and rural community life over recent decades. In contrast, and in keeping with global tendencies in official commemorations, public energy and funds invest in promoting a celebratory and homogenizing tale of survival and success. The celebrations focus not only on commemorating what are contested and conflicted legacies, but also draw into their purview - also contested - future possibilities and imaginings. The Saskatchewan provincial government, for example, framed the Centennial as a moment that coincided with new promise and opportunity for the province. In the years immediately preceding the Centennial year, this was communicated through a government-sponsored "Saskatchewan: The Future is

Wide Open" project organized by Saskatchewan Industry and Resources. The project was Saskatchewan's "attitude campaign," with its purpose to increase optimism among

Saskatchewan people in the future and economy of the province, and "to raise awareness both inside and outside the province of our progress in creating a more competitive

6 The findings of a recent inquiry into the death of 19 year old Neil Stonechild as a result of one of these incidents are available at: www.stonechildinquiry.ca/finalreport/ (Wright, David H., Mr. Justice. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild. Regina: Government of Saskatchewan, 2004.) And see Joyce Green, "From Stonechild to Social Cohesion: Anti-Racist Challenges for Saskatchewan," Canadian Journal of Political Science Vol. 39, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 507-527. 6 investment climate."7 This campaign and the lead up to the Centennial were also accompanied by several high profile developments in Saskatchewan, including the

o opening of the new Synchrotron facility in Saskatoon, and the potential opening of a diamond mine near Prince Albert, both of which were featured in an October 2004 national CBC special on Saskatchewan "remaking itself."9 Saskatchewan also featured prominently as a "success" in national popular culture - with 2004 Canadian Idol finalist from Saskatoon Theresa Sokyrka,10 and the celebrated television comedy Corner Gas, that features a small rural Saskatchewan town, and which has since received repeated and wide media coverage and is now in international syndication.11

The Saskatchewan marked by this moment is a geography in "anxious negotiation." I draw that phrase from the work of Jane M. Jacobs on urban spaces in

England and Australia, as a conceptualization of encounters between "centre and margin,

Self and Other, here and there"13 in various manifestations. I view the Centennial as an opening to interpret, and to intervene in, the makings and re-makings of Saskatchewan and particularly its "fraught relations of race and place"14 which include but are not limited to the celebratory and homogenizing practices of a Centennial that obscure or

7 Text from the Saskatchewan Government sponsored website: www.wideopenfuture.ca (Last viewed 11 May 2004). 8 This is a research centre located at the University of Saskatchewan that attracts scientific researchers and research projects from around the world and is "one of the largest science projects in Canadian history." See www.lightsource.ca. (Last viewed 31 January 2008.) 9 This was on The National on 22 October 2004, coinciding with the official opening of the Synchrotron. 10 Sokyrka was subsequently named the "Saskatchewan Centennial Youth Ambassador." 11 This syndication was announced in November 2006. Two short Globe and Mail articles at the time situate the distribution of this Saskatchewan comedy in remarks about its significance: "Corner Gas heads to America," Globe and Mail 24 November 2006; and, John Doyle, "Will Iraqis find Corner Gas funny?" Globe and Mail 27 November 2007. 12 Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 11. 13 Jacobs, Edge of Empire, p. 11. 14 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001. 7 deny counter-articulations and stories revealing of racist colonialism's lingering effects and ongoing resistant oppositions. The continually shifting compositions of

Saskatchewan also involve stories and community formations, and ways of thriving, surviving and celebrating that do not reside in or rely on homogenous settler stories of survival and success. And, the negotiations of geography, the fraught relations of race and place, and the openings for intervention provided in the occasion of 2005 extend beyond conflictual histories and into ongoing considerations of progress, modernity, loss, success, decline, and future possibility in the province. This Centennial moment is an opportunity to study and explain processes of binding time and space, history and geography; it is an opportunity to recognize and respond to the racist power relations embedded in the making and remaking of "Saskatchewan" as discrete time and space, to look at forms of resistance to and ongoing reproductions of colonial relations. It is an opportunity to denaturalize the moment and to investigate less colonially-bound social and cultural possibility in Saskatchewan. It is also an opportunity to learn about what persists as inflexible in negotiating ways ahead as Saskatchewan makes and remakes itself.

An Opportunity: Questioning Saskatchewan

My thesis is about the Saskatchewan Centennial. It is about Saskatchewan.

However, I want to place that focus, at the outset, in a broader project that takes as a central concern a troubling, persistent, and explicitly racist national imaginary invoked

(and legitimated and legislated) in Canada. In the introductory chapters of this thesis I elaborate on this impetus for my investigation and on that national imaginary. Here in these prefatory pages, I name as a starting point that racism in Canada is an evident, well 8 documented and critical problem to confront in any investigation about how Canada and any of its particular spaces come to be and to be known and claimed. My thesis is about investigating how stories and images of Saskatchewan play a part in perpetuating Canada as racial state and culture. I take the interpretation of racial state and culture from the work of David Theo Goldberg, and particularly the "insistence of 'racelessness'" that

Goldberg names as part of what constitutes culture and state formations that are actually foundationally shaped by race.15 My thesis is about making this perpetuation visible, for the purposes of opening to reconfigurations of Canadian national, and Saskatchewan particular possibility.

In the inquiries of this project, I call attention to commonly reiterated and circulated stories and attributes of Saskatchewan as people, as place and as past that circulate in the Centennial commemorations. To do so participates in an attempt to expose and address forms of "everyday" racism.16 This is racism that is readily visible, and simultaneously concealed, in its integration with the ordinary - that is, with the commonly reiterated and circulated; what is concealed is how explicit everyday violence of racism in Canada derives from identifications with fixed notions of who and what

Canada actually is. In Chapters One and Two, I will discuss in more detail some of the prolific critical work that addresses forms of racism integrated in Canada's national imaginaries - work that exposes how constructions of legitimate citizenship, or of a core

15 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, Maiden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, p. 201. 16 Philomena Essed describes how "as a process [racism] is routinely created and reinforced through everyday practices." In Philomena Essed, "Everyday Racism: A New Approach to the Study of Racism," Race Critical Theories, Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, editors, Maiden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, p. 177. 9

Ca«adz'a«-Canadianness17rely on and conceal colonial and racial power relations, histories and mobilities. In my thesis, a central problem I take on is to make sense of the makings and remakings of Saskatchewan as a form of Canadianness attached to these racialized practices of concealment.

The occasion of this Centennial and the events, images, and texts it produces reveal laden relations and histories; they reveal foundational and ongoing colonial relations in Canadian "nation-building." In the midst of these fraught relations, the

Centennial as a commemorative event invites affective identifications with the tales that it bears, and with the notions of belonging and shared place and history it animates through its repertoire of Saskatchewan images, narratives, memories. For an example, and one that plays centrally in this repertoire, lyrics from the official Centennial song, titled "Saskatchewan - We Love This Place" begin:

I have shared your laughter -1 have shared your tears I have watched you grow for a hundred years I have walked your cities -1 have breathed your country air I love this place, I love it here18

Immediately, the opening word and lines of this song frequently repeated in 2005, invoke/invite a personal knowledge of and affection for what the lyrics call forth as

Saskatchewan, and as beloved place. Part of investigating racism is to learn more about the power of its perpetuation through celebrative identifications with settler colonialism's effects and the merging of those effects with powerful affect - such as this lyrical love. I come to the project with a belief that problematic affective identifications ought not be merely dismissed, but rather bear close scrutiny; I hope to contribute some understanding

17 "Ca«ac//'a«-Canadianness" is a descriptor fromEv a Mackey's work (Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) to which I will return in Chapter Two. 18 Stan Garchinski, "Saskatchewan, We Love this Place," official song of Saskatchewan Centennial 2005. 10 of this through considerations of nostalgia, and to reveal nostalgia, affect, and the calling forth of a bound or settled Saskatchewan as visibly more mobile, loose, and unpredictable than may yet be imagined.

The Chapters

In the first two chapters, I elaborate on the scope and structure of this project.

Both chapters focus on situating this project in relation to other critical work, method and methodology, and on detailing the impetus for and contributions provided in this research and writing.

In Chapter One, I describe the impetus in terms of a concern with fixed, and racialized, notions of space, subjectivity, possibility, and Saskatchewan. I identify the theoretical framework for this exploration, locate it in broader persistent and multi-sited critical projects and commitments, and I present the research design.

In Chapter Two, I focus on relating this work to scholarship that disrupts fixed notions of Saskatchewan and that confronts racial formations, white settler racism, and colonial narratives, in Canada.

In Chapters Three, Four, and Five, I describe and analyze data from the 2005

Centennial celebrations. The chapters focus, respectively, on place, people, and past, as the organizing themes. I will detail those themes more precisely as I introduce those chapters. Each of these chapters includes lengthy sections of description from my encounters with and conversations about Saskatchewan Centennial text, images and events.

In Chapter Six, I discuss implications from this analysis, and close with some thoughts regarding the pedagogical significance of this inquiry. Chapter One: Designing and Theorizing the Project

They seemed as inevitable and right as the wide fields of grain around them.

Sharon Butala, "Absences"

History wreaks its revenge on representational security as essentialism and constructionism oscillate wildly in a death-struggle over the claims of mimesis to be the nature that culture uses to create a now-beleaguered second nature.

Michael Taussig, Mimesis andAlterity

In order to explain this, we must think carefully about the nature of ghosts, words, and nations.

Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny

Introduction

To think carefully about Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations in the interest of socially useful and ethically responsive interpretations is a core intent of this project.

In this chapter, I describe the organization of material and conceptual resources for and outline my argument about what is achieved by this particular study of the

Centennial commemorations. This chapter is focused on design and theory, elements of the construction of this project to which I will return throughout this text. Here, I introduce the shape of my project by describing the core questions that bring me to this study, the materials and encounters I am working with as data, and some of the guiding theoretical ideas on which I will draw as I interpret Saskatchewan in these Centennial materials and encounters.

I begin by naming why I contend it is worthwhile to question and write about the

Saskatchewan Centennial in this way. Following this description of the impetus and merit of the investigation, which builds on what I began to name in the preface, I outline

11 12 the design of the study. There, I describe the data and my methods of interpretation. I conclude this chapter with a section outlining the conceptual resources from critical theorizing about subjectivity, space, and memory on which I will draw for my analysis throughout. In reference to the epigraphs to this chapter, ghosts, words, and nations do figure in this investigation; but here, inevitabilities are as questionable as wide fields of grain.

Impetus for the Project

Racism and National Imaginaries

This is a good and critical time to study the circulation of stories and anxious makings and re-makings of Saskatchewan. In the preface, I began to link my interest in such study to a concern with a Canadian national imaginary. Saskatchewan's 2005 celebrations coincide with prevalent invocations and interpretations of Canada as 21st century nation struggling to maintain and articulate a claim as convener of tolerant society and as leader in peacekeeping and democracy globally.1 Invocations of Canada as a tolerant, multicultural, peacekeeping nation internally and externally are not new, nor are the struggles to maintain or articulate these claims. However, such nation-making always involves processes that suppress, act against, and exclude counter-articulations.

In Canada, imaginings of tolerance, multiculturalism and peacekeeping are asserted and

1 The 2005 commemorations coincided, for example, with government announcements regarding an expanded role for the Canadian military in Afghanistan. In May of that year, Canadian Defense Minster Bill Graham spoke on this expansion, "This commitment is consistent with our new international and defence policies, which demonstrate Canada's emphasis on bringing stability and humanitarian relief to fragile states....With this commitment, Canada is assuming a leadership role in paving the way for a secure, democratic and self-sustaining Afghanistan." Government of Canada news release, 16 May 2005 (NR- 05.035). 2005 was also the year that saw the development of a comprehensive National Security Policy titled Securing an Open Society, which in the Governor General's Speech from the Throne in October of that year was cited in relation to "Canada's proud tradition as a leader in peace-keeping" being "tested today by increasing demands in extremely dangerous and politically complicated situations" (Canada. Speech from the Throne to Open the Thirty-Eighth Session of the Parliament of Canada, October 2005). 13 maintained in the midst of racialized and racializing security and policing practices.2

Efforts to resist and reform these practices, to name race and racism as implicated in the securing of Canada as a nation, repeatedly encounter a resistance in return - that something "Canadian" is threatened when race is named, and when racism is resisted. I intend to elaborate on this throughout this text: Saskatchewan remembered and imagined as integral to nation-making in Canada plays a revealing role in securing racialized imaginings of Canada.

My project is to investigate dominant stories and images in the Saskatchewan

Centennial celebrations and to identify ways that race and nostalgia - theoretical approaches to each of which I will discuss later in this chapter - may contribute to the shapes of and constraints on possibility reiterated in these commemorations. This is a project that links race and dominance and is a project that connects imagery and the imaginary with the real and material. The impetus for the project is my own lived experience of Saskatchewan; and, the impetus for my own project is also in much broader and persistent work of scholars, activists, cultural workers, teachers, community

2 See for example: Simone Browne, "Getting Carded: Border Control and the Politics of Canada's Permanent Resident Card." Citizenship Studies Vol. 9, No. 4, 2005, pp. 423-38. Also, Scot Wortley and Julian Tanner, "Inflammatory Rhetoric? Baseless Accusation? A Response to Gabor's Critique of Racial Profiling Research in Canada," Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice/Revue canadienne de criminologie et de justicepenale, Vol. 47, No. 3, July 2005, pp. 581-609. 3 For example, in Sherene Razack's account of how international peacekeeping is implicated in racialized violence, she describes how "Canadianness as a structure of feeling stands in the way of our pursuit of accountability," in Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 144. See also, Sheila Gill, "The Unspeakability of Racism: Mapping Law's Complicity in Manitoba's Racialized Spaces" in Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law, pp. 157-184. Gill reveals how "credible testimonies of difference threaten to rupture Canada's lofty self-image as a highly egalitarian society" (p. 166) in her critical analysis of how the Speaker of the Manitoba Legislature ruled the word "racist" out of order and "foreclosed on any future use of this 'unparliamentary language' in critiques of the policies of a government or a political party" (p. 164). Gill further concludes that "with racism declared an impossibility in official public narratives about the Canadian homeland, race and the effects of its construction within imperial-colonial power relations are also willfully elided" (p. 167). 14 organizers, and the public in its many manifestations, for liberation from multiple racialized oppressions that constitute this nation in its present and historical forms.

Etienne Balibar contends that "the discourses of race and nation are never very far apart." His is neither a contention of a predictable relation between race and nation, nor between racism and nationalism. In his account of the proximities and entanglements of these formations, Balibar accounts for multiple cycles of relation in how they are constituted and constitute each other.5 In what Benedict Anderson calls the "imagined community" of a nation, many imagine - through this materiality - nationhood as a kinship and a connection across time and space with people who may never have met, and may not ever meet.6 When I write of a racist national imaginary in Canada, what constitutes this imagination is togetherness, identification, and shared identity in a place that is Canadian and Canada. These imaginations are real, and functional; and, these are invocations that rely on suppressing much of how this Canada is constituted. Canada as a nation is a symbolic and material entity, and race is embedded in its imagining as in its histories.7

4 Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism," in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London and New York: Verso, 1991, p. 37 5 Balibar does not argue that racism is an inevitable consequence of nationalism (p. 38), but he does identify it as a necessary tendency (p. 48) "In the last analysis, the overlapping of the two goes back to the circumstances in which the nation states, established upon historically contested territories, have striven to control population movements, and to the very production of the 'people' as a political community taking precedence over class divisions" (p. 48) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. 7 It is useful to note differences between "nation" and "nationalism". For example, see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Cheah asserts that "nationalism's philosophical structure is not to be found in the thought or work of any particular philosopher, but in a constellation of concepts that are the necessary (but not sufficient) condition of nationality." Also, "We are told often enough that the nation holds itself together by means of atavistic hallucinations and the violent and oppressive subordination of its members to the larger whole" (p. 12). 15

The embedding of race in Canada as a nation does take many forms; and there is not a singular national imaginary. Among the sources of this variance, Canadian configurations of nation rely on innumerable sites of imagining that are not readily delineated. Included in these are political delineations of provincial and territorial space in the nation, and it is the marking of one of those, Saskatchewan as province, that I query as a site in this investigation. However, regional sites of Canadian national imagining and, relatedly, regional elements of national imaginaries - be they provinces or broad geographical terrains such as "maritimes" or "the north" or "the prairies" - are not stable reference points. While I am, in a sense, taking a region as a reference point for this inquiry, I do so acknowledging, as John Allen, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane argue, that regions are "a series of open, discontinuous spaces constituted by social relationships which stretch across them in a variety of ways."8 That Saskatchewan is an unstable point of reference and site of imagining, though nonetheless constituted in observable ways, is integral to the interpretive stance of this project. This instability of

Saskatchewan by virtue of being, as any region in Canada or elsewhere, a construction in both its political and imagined contours is precisely part of what the racist national imaginary of interest here conceals. Race is embedded in imagining Canada as constituted by places of regionally diverse Canadianness, such as its provinces.

The focus of this project's inquiry is particularly on Canadian attachments to white settler colonial configurations of citizen subjectivity, of national space and of a nationally known past - as one persistent form of national imagining. My attention to

8 John Allen, Doreen Massey and Allan Cochrane, Rethinking the Region, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 5. In advancing this argument, they accept "the validity of place-based studies: as exemplars of wider phenomena, symptomatic of broader changes; as laboratories for the exploration of particular issues, both theoretical and empirical; and for themselves, to aid attempts by people living and working in an area to understand what is going on around them and maybe to change it for the better" (p. 1). 16

Saskatchewan Centennial commemorations is linked to these imaginings of Canada - imaginings that have material and social effect and imaginings that I contend find some of their persistence in reiterations of Saskatchewan as a delineated, knowable, bounded place in the nation. This has much to do with the place of nostalgia in the questions that shape this project, in that investigations of nostalgia address ways that present identifications with places and their meanings are attached to particular pasts. What makes Saskatchewan knowable at all, and particularly in ways accessed for public commemoration? What is the power of attachment to Saskatchewan as a particular form ofCanadianness?

I align this project with many diverse investigations of powerful fictions. In my use of that language, I draw from Avery Gordon's description of sociological research in which she describes the fictive, its power, and forms of its investigation.9 As well as considering fictions, I am attentive to methods for investigating them. Drawing as I do on critical race theory, poststructuralism, postcolonial thought and studies of white settler societies, decolonization methodologies, and critiques of national mythologies, I am located in practices that investigate workings of power and resistance. My study is concerned with the constructed, the produced, the narrated, the assembled, legislated, mapped, performed, imagined. I do not gloss the differences in these investigations, these processes, or their theoretical namings, but at the outset I want to name this alliance. I intend to do in my analysis as Michael Taussig suggests and live "reality as

9 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997, p. 38. She discusses how the real can be a powerful fiction that we experience as true. 17 really made up,"10 and to insist on attention to what Sara Ahmed names as recognizing

"the world as something that does not have to be, and as something that came to be, over time, and with work."11 Toward this critical inquiry, I move now to introduce more fully the guise of the fictive I encounter in the Centennial commemorations.

I am investigating Saskatchewan as a powerful fiction. And as a particular fiction. This project is about the material of imaginings; I investigate the place of people and land, of particular encounters in accounts of Saskatchewan given in Centennial texts and events, and I report on materials used in these accounts. This project also is about the imaginings of materiality; it is about the real as fictive and the fictive as real. I attend to the workings of power in such merging of fiction and flesh and I come to this knowing that such inquiry constitutes a well traveled and theorized terrain. The power I address is implicated in racist national imaginaries, and in how race and nation work together in

Canada, and I am interested in Saskatchewan as integral to that working. Specifically, I am interested in Saskatchewan fictions of past, place, and people. The impetus for this project is at heart a quest for flexibility, possibility and for release from fixed imaginings.

Design of the Project: Questioning the Centennial

Research Question

Many questions shape this inquiry. I initially proposed the project as an investigation of how white racial subjectivity is constructed in Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations and have conceived it - as I reiterate elsewhere on these pages - as a contribution to disrupting the normativity of whiteness in the nation. A later version of

10 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alter ity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York/London: Routledge, 1993, p. 255. 11 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. 18 the question was: how do the commemorative activities of the Saskatchewan Centennial invoke nostalgia, and how do they construct racial subjectivity? Subjectivity, and the normativity of whiteness are certainly critical concerns that have shaped the research and writing of this project, as they are core elements to investigate in the countering of racist national imaginaries. However, in the course of this research and project design the entanglements of subjectivity, geography and memory/history - always integral to the concerns of this project - have continually produced shifts and ruptures in the singular naming of subjectivity in my queries. The sections on methodological approach that conclude this chapter, and my analysis throughout, elaborate on the entanglements of these concerns and concepts.

I articulate this question in multiple ways and it continues to rupture and shift, but its operative form in the production of these pages and the investigations that inform them is:

What do commemorative moments of this Canadian provincial Centennial, celebrating one hundred years of Saskatchewan, reveal - or conceal - about race, nostalgia and a Canadian national imaginary?

Data

My research design includes three primary sources of data: text, observation, and interviews.

Textual materials circulate as a means for engaging the Saskatchewan population in the event of the Centennial and as a means for communicating the event in Canada.

The words used to describe the Centennial in these materials, as well as the forms of address (i.e., who is the assumed audience of the texts?) are meaningful for investigating the process of subject formation and the ways that Saskatchewan as a place with a past is 19 configured. I have focused particularly on textual materials that have a broad circulation.

This has included commemorative books, various special issues of magazines, a set of newspaper articles from September 2004 to February 2006 (obtained through a Canadian

Newstand online search, and also some articles in hard copy), the official Centennial website, song lyrics, government news releases, and speeches of the Premier, the

Lieutenant Governor, and a federal cabinet minister from Saskatchewan who attended many official events in 2005.

Attendance as a participant-observer at public events designated as commemorative of the Centennial provided opportunity for me to study forms of address and celebration that invite the participation of "Saskatchewan people," that represent that subject position through a variety of activities and displays, and that characterize the commemorated place and its past through performance and exhibition. The attention in my observations is to forms of narrative, visual materials, and the forms of display produced and enacted to present the Centennial to audiences. I traveled to and in

Saskatchewan in the summer of 2005; most events I attended were from late July to the first weekend of September, marked as the actual anniversary weekend. Events attended included two performances of the official Centennial play performed by the Dancing Sky

Theatre Company, four Western Development Museum exhibits (Yorkton, Moose Jaw,

North Battleford and Saskatoon), a portion of one community's street festival, three art exhibits, the opening ceremonies of the Canada Summer Games, and the September long weekend anniversary celebrations in Wascana Park, Regina (to commemorate the actual date of provincial "autonomy"). I also viewed two televised events - the Queen's visit to the provincial legislature and the Lieutenant Governor's Centennial Gala Celebration of 20 the Arts, both broadcast live on CBC television in May 2005. I also subsequently viewed a recorded version of the Gala celebration several times on a DVD.

I conducted four interviews with five individuals; my contact with them was facilitated by a staff person in the Saskatchewan Centennial office who generously assisted me in identifying and contacting people involved in producing and designing

Centennial events. All interview participants agreed to being identified by name in this text. My purpose is not to generalize about a group of people interviewed, nor to draw any conclusions about them individually; I do not conceptualize the participants as a representative sample of a particular wider population. Rather, I understand these as interviews through which I generate data on the construction of commemorative events and texts. Thus the number of interviews is small. Interviews with people active in constructing narratives, images, museum exhibits, staged events, enables me to question and identify what kinds of materials (textual, historical, geographical) are drawn upon to construct commemorative events, to identify the subjects of that commemoration. My interviews were with Lisa Donahue, producer of the Centennial Gala, Leslee Newman and Ruth Bitner, co-chairs of the Winning the Prairie Gamble exhibit of the Western

Development Museum, Andrea Menard a Metis songwriter and performer who sang at many of the official Centennial events and was one of the judges of the official song contest, and Lieutenant Governor Lynda Haverstock. I am grateful for their participation.

The materials generated from these activities of textual perusal, event observation, and interviews consist of field notes; interview transcriptions; photographs; audio CDs; a

DVD of the Gala Celebration; electronic versions of speeches, news articles and the official website text and images; and, t-shirts, postcards and other Centennial commemorative items. This represents a multi-dimensional set of data through which I have conducted my analysis of Saskatchewan in these Centennial commemorations.

Interpretive Approach

My approach to the data generated through this research is interpretive. This follows from my research question, the context, and from the theoretical ideas about subjectivity, space, and public memory that frame my methodology. I read the data - textual documents such as pages from pamphlets, websites, newspaper articles; my field notes, images and memories from events and interviews; transcripts, notes, and audio from interviews - to interpret the Centennial commemorations and to see the shape and relations of subjectivity, space, and memory particularly in the constructions of racial subjectivity and spatial invocations of nostalgia. One basic implication of this interpretive approach for my reading of data is that I account for and document my own position and relation to the data as a researcher. I read this data reflexively. Part of my identification of "who" the subjects are in a Centennial brochure, in an interviewee's words, or as addressed by a speaker or image at a Centennial event, is shaped by me as the one who sees/interprets. As a researcher, I am implicated in the relational processes of construction that I propose to investigate.

This data is in the form of relational processes - of racial subjectivity, space, and memory/commemoration. I read these processes as discursive', my analysis of the textual, observed, photographed, conversational data from Centennial activities recognizes a constructed character to the subjects, places, stories, and meanings ascribed to them in these materials. Further, bodies of knowledge - or, as I will later discuss, 22 domains of possibility - both "constrain and enable"12 the construction of possible subjects, spaces, stories, and their meanings. In this, I draw on notions of discourse indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, and on Foucauldian concepts of knowledge and power in understanding discourse and discursive fields. However, while my analysis is a discourse/discursive analysis, it is not primarily nor solely a textual discourse analysis.

My use of discourse analysis is a decision of method. As a method, this has to do with textual data coding, with attending to themes in text and in images, and contending with relations of power and productions of knowledge. These practices guide investigations of the constructedness of social events and their interpretations. I distinguish discursive analysis as a choice of method from that of claiming it as a "self- sufficient paradigm;" this distinction is informed by Martyn Hammersley's assessment of discourse analysis and conversation analysis.13 Hammersley argues that discourse analysis can and should be detached from a social constructivist approach, primarily because this relies on what he considers a very partial model of the human actor.14

My application of discourse analysis as method, and of Foucauldian notions of discursive formation, is formed/informed also by attention to tracing material conditions of possibility and involving analyses of materiality and extratextual forms in my accounts of Centennial moments and texts. A question guiding my discursive analysis is: what occurs in Centennial moments? This is informed by Derek Hook's approach to such analyses, and particularly his suggestion to "approach discourse less as a language, or as a textuality, than as an active 'occurring' - something that implements power and action

12 Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject, New York: New York University Press, 1993, p. 37. 13 Martyn Hammersley. "Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: Methods or Paradigms?" Discourse and Society Vol. 14, No. 6,2003, pp. 751-781. 14 Hammersley, "Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis," p. 772. 23 and that also is power and action."15 Hook criticizes Wetherell and Potter,16 who developed an approach to discourse analysis that does also inform my work, for not accounting enough for "the material conditions of possibility, to the multiple institutional supports and various social structures and practices underlying the production of truth."17

My practice of discourse analysis does involve Wetherell and Potter's practices of discerning "interpretive repertoires."18 It is my intent however, in keeping with Hook's and Hammersley's approaches, that my analyses investigate the workings of these repertoires not solely in textual form. I use discourse analysis in a way that discerns such repertoires in my data, without being completely bound up in the materials as discursive constructions and formations.

I also recognize the processes I examine as performative - we perform culture and social activity, not just write it.19 That is not to say that the textual data does not include performances - for example of whiteness, of Saskatchewan, of the past - in Judith

Butler's sense of "a stylized repetition of acts." However, in my attention to performance I also distinguish it from the textually discursive, following Diana Taylor's contention that "it is vital to signal the performatic, digital, and visual fields as separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so privileged by Western

15 Derek Hook, "Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History: Foucault and Discourse Analysis," Theory and Psychology Vol. 11, No. 4, 2001, p. 532. 16 Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 17 Hook, "Discourse, Knowledge, Materiality, History," p. 526. 18 Wetherell and Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism, pp. 88-93. Norman K. Denzin, Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, London/Thousand Oaks/New Dehli: SAGE, 2003, p. 78. 20 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism, and the Subversion of Identity, Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 179. 24 logocentrism." My observations and field notes document movement, and visual and physical material, as well as words spoken, and in my analysis I account for my own presence and interactions at these events as part of the data.

I recount various Centennial moments as occurrences of power and action, within broader fields of activity and meaning. These are moments within a broader field of the

2005 Centennial celebrations, and I use the term moment throughout not merely to signify particular or discrete time but to identify that a fragment of a politician's speech, a gesture or dance on a Centennial stage, words from an interview with a Centennial organizer, my observations of an exhibit or display - are all fragments that collude together in a larger composition of events and occurrences.22 I also use the term to recognize that the Centennial as a phenomenon is only accessible in its fragments; this is an observation that relates to what I discuss later in this chapter about official commemorations as attempts toward unity and cohesion but that are really configured as fractured and uneven. My framing of the data material as moments in this way also derives from Diana Taylor's identification of "scenario," which she describes as "a paradigmatic setup that relies on supposedly live participants, structured around a schematic plot, with an intended (though adaptable) end."23 Scenarios "exist as culturally specific imaginaries - sets of possibilities, ways of conceiving of conflict, crisis, or

21 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 6. Taylor distinguishes the expression "performatic" from Butler's "performative." 22 As I have worked out this use of "moment" to identify objects/foci of my analysis, I find this transdisciplinary definition of interest, that a moment is: "a brief or exact point in time, but is also a term used to signify something of import - and in physics, a product of force and distance" {Oxford English Dictionary). 23 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 13. Taylor distinguishes scenario fromth e concept of "trope" which "relies on language to transmit a set pattern of behaviour/action" (p. 13). 25 resolution - activated with more or less theatricality"24 and rely on more than language for their repetitions; a prominent example she notes for scenarios is that of repeated stagings of colonial encounter. There are repeated stagings of paradigmatic setups in the commemorations and celebration of Saskatchewan's genesis as a province; I encountered these through my attendance at various events, readings of text, viewing of visual material, and in conversation about Centennial productions through the interviews.

To summarize this approach to interpreting materials gathered as data: the theoretical ideas about subjectivity, space, and memory that inform my analysis designate my data from text, observation, and interviews as interpreted, discursive, and performative/performatic. My interaction with the generated data is as a reflexive reader of texts, transcripts, images (e.g., on websites), and my field notes. In my reading of this data, my interaction with it is in the form of identifying themes and interpretive repertoires, processes of racialization, subject formation, and constructions of relations to the past. Pragmatically, I was aided in a reflexive reading and identification of themes/processes/formation/constructions by the use of qualitative research software for textual coding. I used the coded textual material (the newspaper articles, politicians' speeches, interview transcripts, my field notes, news releases, text from the official website, song lyrics) in conjunction with visuals (including an audio-visual recording of the Gala, images in the newspapers, my own photos from attendance at events, my observations at events) and audio (recordings of the official Centennial songs). In the process of analysis and writing, much of that "conjunction" took place in the office where

Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 13. The research software used for textual coding was NVivo 7. 26 all the materials are stored - through actual reading and viewing of materials alongside each other, and through re-reading and re-viewing.

Theoretical Ideas that Inform my Interpretation

Since concepts are not determinate packets of ideas... proper deployment in every instance entails a further determination of them, an increase and a shifting of their content.

Joan Copjec, Supposing the Subject

The theoretical ideas critical to my research methodology centre on subjectivity, on space, and on public memory particularly as they relate to race and colonialism. I present each of these in turn to further the rationale for my question and design, and to indicate what I explore at greater length throughout the thesis itself. I describe this methodological approach as a starting point and as part of naming elements of my research design. In the pages that follow, I describe my working practices and understandings in undertaking this project as an investigation of and informed by these theoretical ideas.

Subjectivity - and particularly, racial subjectivity and white racism

The ways that race and racism are part of Saskatchewan and the Centennial are such that they can seem both too obvious to necessitate explication, and at the same time too obfuscated or eluded to make known through explanation. The theoretical ideas I discuss in this section focus on racial subjectivity and on white racism in particular because of the ways that they are operative in such obfuscations of the obvious. This is critical to the ways that my project is about race. In this section as I describe a methodological approach to race and subjectivity, I am cognizant that this approach is particular to that obfuscating operation of race and racism. Much in my approach derives 27 from critical race theory broadly, but with a particular focus on workings of race that can render its operations and effects invisible from particular subject positions, namely and persistently, that of a white subject position. To describe that approach, I begin here with an account of subjectivity and then elaborate particularly on racial subjectivity, whiteness and white racial subjectivities.

Theorizing about subjectivity is not equivalent to descriptive accounts of individual psychologies, attitudes, or bodies. Subjectivity does indeed converge in many ways with considerations of personhood, agency and identity, and certainly discussion of subjectivity turns attention to individuals and selfhood. However, the operative concept itself, in the ways that I am using it here, is primarily employed to investigate and explain how narratives and performances that commemorate Saskatchewan produce what I understand as positions, or possibilities in which selves, persons, bodies come to know themselves and to be known or seen. This has implications for actual people living in

Saskatchewan or affected in other ways by what Saskatchewan may produce in the world.

There are certainly convergences with identity and with individual expressions and experiences of selfhood and agency; my primary concern is with processes that create and constrain those expressions and experiences. I will elaborate, with specific reference to a Foucauldian understanding of subjectivity.

My approach to the construction of subjectivity derives from Michel Foucault's notion of subjectivity as "the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyze himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge.. .the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth 28 where he relates to himself."26 What I read in Foucault's image of a game is his, and others' who draw on his work, focus on power as constitutively relational, and on the relationship of power to the production of truth.27 Truth here plays out in relations of power. "Truth," Foucault states in one discussion of the relationship, "is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it." These games of truth that produce subjectivity - subjects' interpretation of themselves as a domain of knowledge - are continuous. The power relations through which the "games" continue do not act upon discrete subjects from somewhere external, to impose truths and produce domains of knowledge. Rather, in a Foucauldian notion of power, "there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations." Further, "the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations."30

What investigating this notion of subjectivity does in my particular research project is something that I will reveal in detail in my interpretation of data from

Centennial events, particularly in Chapter Four where my focus is on narrations and

26 "Maurice Florence" (Michel Foucault), "Foucault," in James D. Faubion ed., Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984, New York: The New Press, 1998, p. 461. 27For example, Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace locate their account of Foucault's thesis on power "by highlighting the essential link between power relations and their capacity to 'produce' the truths we live by." Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject, New York: New York University Press, 1993, p. 58. 28 Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 74. 29 Foucault, "The Body of the Condemned," in The Foucault Reader, p. 175. 30 Foucault, "The Body of the Condemned," in The Foucault Reader, p. 175. 29 performances of Saskatchewan as people, and in the ways that "Saskatchewan people" are addressed in Centennial texts and other commemorations. I draw from theories of subjectivity as a way to see commemorations of Saskatchewan as productive - and alterable - domains of knowledge. In an introduction to subjectivity as an area of investigation and theory, Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan write,

the theory of the subject proposes a notion of identity as precariously constituted in the discourses of the social, whereby it is both determined and regulated by the forces of power inherent in a given social formation, but capable also of undermining them.31

In this explanation, Easthope and McGowan emphasize how the notion of a subject draws attention to a process of construction, in the making of subjects, and how this attention to construction points to the potential for transformation. It is my hope that attention to subjectivity in this project accomplishes such a point.

Many discussions of subjectivity centre on notions of stability and instability, of fragmentary and fluid subjectivities, and the implications of such ideas in thinking about the social world, its inhabitants, and its transformations. Debates that circulate in regard to the stability or instability of subjects in social theory traverse such fields and approaches as psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, political anthropology, and many variations of these in philosophies and theories of the social. Debates about the stability or instability of subjects are elements of a broader conversation about subjects and subjectivity, and frequently, about the efficacy of social constructivist approaches in research and theory.

I draw from Foucault and work primarily with a Foucauldian notion of subjectivity. However, while I take Foucault's notion of domains of knowledge and

31 Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, eds. A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Second Edition. Toronto/Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 73. circulations of power as a primary referent for this interpretation of subjectivity, I also carry into my study questions about the place of interiority. The psyche is a different domain than that of this investigation, but it is certainly also a continuous interest and implication throughout my analysis. I may not have access to the internal thoughts or feelings of people I observe, interview, or imagine in my interpretations of how the

Centennial creates and constrains subject positions and possibilities, and so I cannot make claims about those experiences. However, what I reveal and conclude about the production of subjects through these commemorations does bear a significant relation to individual thought and feeling in ways that matter. In reference to Foucault's work,

Judith Butler contributes considerations of psychic processes involved in subjectivity - as a supplement and some ways a corrective to Foucault. This relates to my topic quite critically, but not as something I set out to resolve.32

Butler names a "tropological quandary"33 in her introduction to a discussion of subjects and subject formation, which in her text is posed particularly in terms of notions of "subjection."34 Here, she refers to tropology as a practice of speaking in tropes - in figurative discourse, which elicits a "paradox of referentiality:"

The moment we seek to determine how power produces its subject, how the subject takes in the power by which it is inaugurated, we seem to enter this tropological quandary. We cannot presume a subject who performs an internalization if the formation of the subject is in need of explanation.36

Subjects and subjectivity are both referent, and object of inquiry in my study. This is one of the productive quandaries that shape this work. I do not dwell on it as a philosophical

32 For example, see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 33 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 4. 34 And thus a particular interest in processes of subordination. 35 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. 36 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. 31 problem; rather, I focus on particular questions regarding racial subjectivity and return to this as the impetus for this research.

Theorizing subjectivity as a matter of race involves finding ways to, as Sherene

Razack names the process, "cut through the structures of dominance in which we are embedded."37 My study is less an inquiry into individual motives or personalities than into conditions for subject formation, both material and ideological. I ask how subjectivities are embedded, and what those structures of dominance are - in the

Centennial texts, images, and exhibits. In asking this kind of question regarding the formation of subjects, I join in questioning how it is that people come to know who they are through the particular domains of truth played out through the materiality and ideologies of colonialism, and through the formation and management of hierarchies and stratifications that divide humanity through the violent construction of "race" as difference.

I draw on a contextualist approach to race and racial subjectivity, looking at its composition through site-specific analyses. Particularly, I follow Linda Martin Alcoff s attention to the "micro-interactions through which racialization operates, is reproduced and sometimes resignified."38 She distinguishes this explicitly from social constructionism, to avoid any tendency to interpret the influences of context such that

"we can construct identities out of whole cloth;"39 The contextualism that Alcoff asserts

Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, p. 18. In an introduction to an account of the workings of white dominance, Razack describes the challenging task for critical educators and legal practitioners to address racial subjectivities and structured dominance. Linda Martin Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," in R. Bernasconi, ed., Race, Maiden: Blackwell Publishing, 2001, p. 271. 39 Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," p. 282, note 10. 32 recognizes "that what race is is dependent on context."40 She describes this position within an account that emphasizes the reality of race. That is, to say that race is contextual is not to say that it is somehow not real. In my approach to reading race in the

Centennial commemorations, I look at the site itself as productive of the meaning of race and racism. My assumption and experience is that there is race; there is a "lived experience of racialization"41 in Saskatchewan, and among the writers and performers, curators, and audiences of the Centennial, and for myself as a participant observer and writer about these events. However, that assumption does not define the effects or the particular "bodily experience, subjectivity, judgment, and epistemic relationships"42 that comprise participation in the Centennial and its viewing. To say that there is race in the relations of this commemoration is not to predict its racist effects.

It is to say that such effects can be documented. The micro-interactions, the intimate negotiations of meaning and the moment-by-moment ways that people get to know themselves and others and to express this knowledge, are crucial sites for anti-racist critical attention. I do not look to the Centennial as a commemorative event and presume to say it is or is not, in some totalized way, a racist production. Such a claim is not productive of the anti-racist effect that is possible and imperative in tracking embedded structures of dominance through my data from these commemorations. Even as I claim at the outset that the Centennial figures in a racist national imaginary, and that this research is about racism, such racism is not a monolith to be uncovered through moments

Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," p. 282, note 10. Emphasis in the original. 41 Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," p. 271. 42 Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," p. 271. 33 or pieces of evidence. The micro-interactions of a site or context are the very thing itself.43

They are, however, interactions embedded and interconnected with other moments. It is possible to simultaneously attend to both site and interconnections, and this is a crucial aspect of the methodology I employ. A site-specific approach to race does not limit analysis to one site and does not contend that race has no durable content.

I view these site-specific constructions of race within broad circulations of knowledge and power. Specifically, I refer to what Ann Laura Stoler cites as "circuits of people, produce and narration... through [a] broader global frame."44 This implies that I attend to material and historical links between the data that I generate, my observations, and broader networks within and beyond Saskatchewan. Site-specific productions of race and racialized subjects occur within broader (temporally, and spatially) circulations of power and knowledge. Saskatchewan is in an extended map of relations comprised of global and historical events, imperial incursions on land, indigenous acts of resistance and survival, and formations of borders, state formations and political economies.

Sara Ahmed names a fault associated with anti-racist work that names whiteness, and in my shift here toward describing my approach to whiteness in investigations of

As well as drawing on Alcoff s assertions about contextualism, I am informed by historical inquiries into colonialism that focus on the intimate domains of imperial rule. Included in such approaches is Ann Laura Stoler's reminder that "colonial regimes were not hegemonic institutions but uneven, imperfect, and even indifferent knowledge-acquiring machines" (Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and [Post] Colonial Studies," The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 3, December 2001, p. 863). Stoler, and others such as Adele Perry (in notes above), in turns to historical archive to document the moves of colonialism, look to the micro-interactions of decades and centuries before. (See also Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, University of North Carolina Press, 1994; Vron Ware, "Moments of Danger: Race, Gender and Memories of Empire," in Ann-Louise Shapiro, ed., Feminists Revision History, Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 217-245.) 44 Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties," p. 841. 34 racial subjectivity, I want to foreground her argument, and other concerns about turning attention to whiteness at all:

whiteness is only invisible for those who inhabit it. For those who don't, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere. Seeing whiteness is about living its effects, as effects that allow white bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape, spaces in which black bodies stand out, stand apart, unless they pass, which means passing through space by passing as white.45

My concern with a racist national imaginary in Canada and with Saskatchewan

Centennial commemorations as implicated in it is very much about a production of white subjects as "the citizens," and I am involved with making that production visible and naming it as race and racism. In so doing, I declare an anti-racist intent. Declaring an anti-racist intent, however, does not in itself secure its effect.

My intent is to turn attention to what is celebrated as norm and as definitive of a shared history and identity as indeed not a norm, not ordinary, not innocent, and to show that there is race in such stories and what they assume, celebrate, and promote. I seek to expose ways that racism is situated with those who experience its effects as privilege and it is integral to my project to name the production and effects of whiteness as racial.

However, I resist any assertion that this naming is an end in itself, or any claim that turning such attention to productions of whiteness as racial is a novel contribution and, in that novelty, therefore a radical subversion of racist power relations. To temper the claim of novelty, I emphasize that identifying whiteness as a racial subjectivity is not new.

Naming whiteness as racial is a deliberate move, but is a move against its normativity and against processes that produce its status as an unmarked subjectivity in contrast to racialized others; this is not a move that names whiteness as racial against a historical

45 Sara Ahmed. "Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism," Borderlands Vol. 3, No. 2,2004. Electronic Journal, paragraph 1. 35 background of invisibility and non-racialized subject formation. Addressing whiteness as racial has a long, long history, rooted in what Ahmed names as "the Black critique of how whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the effects of that privilege on the bodies of those who are recognised as black."46

Moves against its normativity and against ways that whiteness is produced as unmarked are an insistence that white is a racial subjectivity. The invisibility is, for example, as named by Toni Morrison in her attention to "whiteness and the literary imagination,"47 found in silence and evasion of the language of race when white subjects are on the pages of literary texts penned by white American writers. An insistence on recognizing white as a racial subjectivity is an even stronger insistence on the necessity, as Ruth Frankenberg states as her message from investigating white female subjects, to

"assign everyone a place in the relations of racism."48

Whiteness is neither homogenous nor monolithic. To name whiteness as racial is not merely to point to white bodies on streets, in wheat fields, on television commercials or on a Saskatchewan Centennial stage and say there is the white race, that those bodies are racial bodies. Rather, "whiteness must be comprehended and analyzed as a purely relational construct."49 This does involve attention to embodied people in actual contexts, and it does involve "pointing" to race. However, analyzing whiteness as a

Ahmed, "Declarations of Whiteness," paragraph 2. 47 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York: Vintage Books, 1992. 48 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 6. Emphasis in the original. This assignment refers to a practice that links pretensions to invisibility or normativity to the racial character of whiteness itself, and names the racist effects of that normativity. Whiteness has never actually been invisible in its effects; as Frankenberg notes, "whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly to those it definitively excludes and those to whom it does violence" (p. 229). Assigning everyone a place in the relations of racism, against this invisibility, is a move against the ways that whiteness reproduces itself as an invisible norm through racist relations of power and knowledge. 49 Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 5. relational construct relies on an understanding of race that does not fix it as a static quality of individuals. Alcoff s contextualist approach to race, and a Foucauldian approach to subjectivity and to domains of knowledge and power support such analysis.

To say race is contextual is not to say that it is somehow not real or that it does not affect and attach to bodies in enduring and insidious ways. To take a contextual approach is to resist the tendency for felt experience to operate as explanations, as if experiences are fully self-presenting.50 Whiteness has to be explained in specific contexts, not assumed as explanatory. And a contextual explanation will turn to the processes of racialization, not to a white body as fully explanatory. To point to whiteness in ways that reveal it as racialized - and in ways that point out its racist effects and sources - is not a simple gesture.

This also means that white racial subjectivity cannot be addressed without addressing its relation to other racialized subjectivities, and accounting for the interlocking processes that comprise whiteness itself and all forms of subjecthood as domains for knowing and in which to be known. Relations between whiteness and other subjectivities such as blackness or Aboriginality are inherent in their formation. And racialized subjectivities are derived in relation to each other not in static or predictable ways, nor as distinct exclusionary categories. Deborah Britzman's point that "bodies are more complicated than the first glance can bear to acknowledge"51 underlines how this relationality makes pointing to race, or identifying particular racial subjectivities with

Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," p. 272. 51 Deborah Britzman, "Difference in a Minor Key: Some Modulations of History, Memory, and Community," in Michelle Fine, et. al., Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, p. 31. 37 specific bodies, difficult. It is not just complicated to point to bodies as racial; it is complicated to point and name them as white.

When I investigate "who is the white subject" and "who" is possible in Centennial productions of subjectivity, the question I am asking is not just about white bodies or individuals. It is about a relational process of construction. The relational and contextual nature of racial formation implies that such pointing should also turn in the direction of the territories and events that specify particular subject effects. This is clearly not a turn away from bodies and the effects of race on persons; it is a way of understanding those effects and the possibilities for intervening in them by investigating the specific relations of power - in terms of events, encounters, policies and projects - in which they are embedded.

Space - and particularly, racialized space and white settler contexts

My understanding of these embedded relations of power productive of subjectivity relies on a spatial analysis of race, and interpretations of a white settler society as a particular domain of knowledge - as a culture and society shaped through the invasion of European white settlers, their laws, and their state formations into Aboriginal land. Patrick Wolfe, for example, describes global colonizing initiatives that envisioned and established permanent settlement on Aboriginal land and premised on "the elimination of native societies" as structured invasions; he identifies this as a process in which "the colonizers came to stay - invasion is a structure, not an event." My attention to space is particularly to ways whiteness is theorized as contextual, to ways that a specific settler context such as Canada is understood as productive of whiteness,

52 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London and New York: Cassell, 1999, p. 2. 38 and to how an analysis of the contextuality of white racial subjectivity in a Canadian context can be read as part of the broader geographies and struggles that constitute colonial and post- or counter-colonial relations globally.

The specificity of Canada as a settler context is a notion that both contends contextual uniqueness, but also identifies that Canada bears similarity to other particular global contexts of colonialism, and reinforces that Canada as nation is a product of what I referred to earlier as an extended map of relations and product of, in Stoler's terms, circuits of people, products and narratives through the world's racializing colonialisms.

Comparisons that mark similarity can be and are made between Canada and contexts such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel. Of Israel, Joseph

Massad's analysis of "settler colonialism, being a variant of colonialism"53 identifies a context where "settler-colonists declared themselves independent while maintaining colonial privileges for themselves over the conquered populations."54 The specific global alignments that Massad makes between that context and others are the United States,

Zimbabwe, and South Africa which

instituted themselves as postcolonial states, territories, and spaces and instituted their political status as independent in order to render their present a postcolonial era. Yet the conquered peoples of these territories continue (including the people of Zimbabwe following independence and South Africa following the end of apartheid) to inhabit these spaces as colonial spaces and to live in eras that are thoroughly colonial.55

Massad does not name Canada, but the point he is making about the particularities of continued "post-independence" settler privilege is relevant to Canada and its variously

Joseph Massad, "The 'Post-Colonial' Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel" in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks eds., The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, Duke University Press, 2000, p. 311. 54 Massad, "The 'Post-Colonial' Colony," p. 311. 55 He names the declarations of independence - the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the American Revolution in 1776 and the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. configured relationships with Britain, and with France. Interpretations of specifically settler-colonial national spaces are operative in my reading of Saskatchewan and its

Centennial events, texts, and images as Canadian space.

Terms such as invasion and conquer, as in the analyses given by Wolfe and by

Massad, stress that this interpretation of nation and space - which is also to interpret history and productions of subjectivity - recognizes the context as one founded in and functioning through violence. In a footnote to her account of reading postcoloniality in

Canada, Diana Brydon makes this clear by explaining the fact of invasion and its precedence:

For many years, Canada was described as a settler colony. In the late 1980s, postcolonial critics modified the description to "settler-invader" in order to remind readers that, from the point of view of indigenous peoples whose lands were taken, "settlement" was in fact an invasion. I have reversed the terms here, to "invader-settler," to shift the emphasis from two opposing historical narratives and to stress that the narrative of settlement in itself occludes and denies the prior fact of invasion. Instead of adding the modifier "invader" to the prior narrative of the victor, which celebrated settlement, priority should in fact be given to the initial fact of invasion.56

Invasion as an interpretation of space in Canada also recognizes that histories of invader- settler spaces which prioritize narratives of the victor, and certainly there are histories that do, repeat in their narration the violences of colonial claims to territorial possession.

Bonita Lawrence underlines the importance of explicit accounting for this violence in order to grasp the conditions that shape who lives where and how in a national context.

She writes, "As history is currently written, from outside Indigenous perspectives, we cannot see colonization as colonization. We cannot grasp the overall picture of a

Diana Brydon, "Reading Postcoloniality, Reading Canada," in Cynthia Sugars, ed., Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004, p. 177, n.2. focused, concerted process of invasion and land theft." That overall picture, Lawrence elaborates, includes how "these histories come together in the experiences of different

Indigenous nations 'on the ground.'"58

History and its constructions of truth are not only written in text but also materialized in space. Sherene Razack details this in an introduction to a collection of

articles on race and space in Canada. She articulates an understanding of space as a

social product,59 which counters a sense of it as a passive backdrop to social and cultural relations. Recognizing space as a social product rejects the view "that spaces simply evolve, are filled up with things, and exist prior to or separate from the subjects who

imagine and use them."60 It "entails an interrogation of how subjects come to know themselves in and through space and within multiple systems of domination."61 My inquiries into Saskatchewan and its Centennial productions, are very much rooted in

spatial concerns. Centrally, I do think through Saskatchewan itself as a space in the various ways this is constructed materially and symbolically. Space, in invader-settler

society, to use Brydon's term, is shaped through the historical processes of exploration,

settlement, dispossession, mapping, and legislation of colonial and settler projects, and through persistent resistance to colonial invasions through forms of community and movements that refuse the dominance and divisions of invader-settler practices. These historical processes and their effects are ongoing in terms of how they have marked

landscapes, and how they continue to affect subjects and possibilities. Constructions of

57 Bonita Lawrence, "Rewriting Histories of the Land: Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Eastern Canada," in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law, p. 26. 58 Lawrence, "Rewriting Histories of the Land," p. 26. 59 Which draws on details fromFoucault , and Henry Lefebvre. 60 Razack, "When Place Becomes Race," p. 8. 61 Razack, "When Place Becomes Race," p. 17. 41 racial subjectivity such as whiteness are sites and events, in institutional forms and material form, as well as domains of knowledge ascribed relationally to particular bodies.

I actually find it quite difficult to write Canada and not assume that the spatial marks of colonialism are writ large even as the word comes to the page. This is not to say that I apply a schema that explains everything about Canada through a frame of

"white settler society," or "invader-settler space," such that the designation is immediately explanatory in a totalizing way. It is to interpret Canada as comprised of maps, legislation, global migrations, appropriation of lands, and constructions of buildings, communities, institutions, and transportation infrastructures. It is to say that such maps, constructions, and infrastructure are related historically and globally to long and wide entanglements of imperialism and colonialism.62 In this project, I view Canada

(in transitory moments and events -1 do not presume to view it holistically or from a position of omniscience) not as a natural, or "given," phenomenon, but as a social product, as "comprised." Specifically, with the writers of Race, Space, and the Law, a collection of writings that analyze the workings of race in specific Canadian sites and which includes Bonita Lawrence's work cited above, I see Canada as "a racial and spatial story, that is, as a series of efforts to segregate, contain, and thereby limit, the rights and opportunities of Aboriginal people and people of colour." This is an analytic approach that "is one way, among others, to uncover processes of racialization."64 It is a way that

In Ania Loomba, Colonalism/Postcolonialism, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, Loomba discusses various distinctions between imperialism and colonialism suggesting that "one useful way to distinguish between them might be to not separate them in temporal but in spatial terms and to think of imperialism or neo-imperialism as the phenomenon that originates in the metropolis, the process which leads to domination and control. Its result, or what happens in the colonies as a consequence of imperial domination is colonialism or neo-colonialism" (pp. 6-7). Loomba stresses that the definitions are not fixed. 63 Razack, "When Place Becomes Race," p. 17. 64 Razack, "When Place Becomes Race," p. 17. insists on denaturalizing the configurations and narratives that stand as a phenomenon such as Canada, a way that attends to historical and geographical "boundedness."

Attending to how lands and bodies are organized, represented, and regulated in

Canadian contexts draws into focus both the formidability (in its racist, violent, and lingering effects), and the fragility, of colonialism and its spatial domains of possibility, including possibilities for subject formation.65 Historian Adele Perry, from whom I have drawn the concept of formidability and fragility in relation to colonial formations, observes that "however successful the colonial state was in conclusively asserting its authority, it fundamentally failed to recast the society it governed in its own image."66

The failure feeds both the formidability and the fragility, in that there is continual effort to recast the society, against the resistance and contradictions in the colonial project.

This has implications for the formation of whiteness as a dominant racial subjectivity in an invader-settler context. Perry's history of gender and race in the creation of Canadian settler society tells a spatial story of how the acquisitive and dominating fantasies of colonialism reckon with landscapes and bodies that resist its grasps for a totalizing invasion. The spatial story is that colonialism is not a monolith, but consists of moments and events of contestation, resistance, and enforcement that mark and construct a society, in unstable and contested but also violently and structurally invasive forms.

Colonial practices and their lingering effects produce and rely upon categories of subjects and subjectivity that generate and endorse distinctions such as normative/different; citizens/not citizens. Elaborating his interpretation of invasion as

Perry, On the Edge of Empire, p. 195. Perry, On the Edge of Empire, p. 196. 43 structure, Patrick Wolfe distinguishes between settler and "franchise" colonization such that:

settler colonies' relative immunity to the withdrawal of native labour is highly significant. As noted, this immunity contrasts sharply with the master-slave structuring of Fanon's schema, in which the colonist "owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say his property, to the colonial system...." In the settler-colonial economy, it is not the colonist but the native who is superfluous.67

This notion of superfluity in settler society is in tandem with the categorizations I named above. This is tandem in the sense of operating, or cycling, together. And it is a notion that relies on and bolsters the pretense of invisibility attached to whiteness in the power and knowledge practices of settler society. The invasion of colonial settler structures into

Aboriginal land carries the notion of superfluous others who do not fit the envisioned membership of the settler, and presumed core, population. The pretense of invisibility is that this core population is not racialized; it is the norm from which racial differences deviate. And the categorical distinctions I named above - normativity, and citizenship - are examples of how the presumptions of a core population circulate in the spatial domains of settler society through claims to land and to belonging in other forms.

Sherene Razack's study of Canadian legislation on identity documents and refugees, for example, demonstrates how settler colonial relations are enacted through law in ways that authorize ideas about the "original citizens" as nation-builders and

Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, p. 2-3. Wolfe's reference to Fanon is fromFrant z Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 28. 68 For another take on the notion of superfluity in invader-settler contexts, see Achille Mbembe, "Aesthetics of Superfluity" Public Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 373-406. Mbembe writes about Johannesburg as "postapartheid metropolis" (p. 373) and identifies how architectural form, urban design, and the "unconscious of a city" (p. 404) relate to and convey productions of superfluity in layered histories of South African racial space. His account includes attention to superfluity as "the dialectics of indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things" (p. 374) and to how forgetting and remembering merge in postapartheid Johannesburg. caretakers of national space including determining who belongs. The ideas about these original citizens entitled to live in a space of their own ordering70 function as subject formation in perpetual process. That is, a continual reassertion of original claims to space. Razack identifies the process as an "internal coherence,"71 in which "entitled" citizens recognize and assume this entitlement to be definitive of them. "White citizens come to believe in their entitlement and at the same time that entitlement becomes real.'"z This is a game of truth in which citizenship is the domain of possible knowledge and an effect is that refugees without identity documents are outside that domain. The borders around citizenship to be negotiated by anyone seeking access coincide with a story of white settlement, and a related white entitlement.

The borders and contours also circulate around and as a story of respectability, reasonableness, and tolerance. In the identity documents example Razack reports on publicized responses to the identity documents rule in which the subject position of entitled citizenship is invoked in the guise of "reasonable," and generous, "Canadians" who must guard against ruptures in the security and order of their home - in the persons of un-Canadian, racialized, others who are unreliably positioned outside a settler story of origins in Canada. Similarly, in Ghassan Hage's account of white normativity in

Australia, he points to recurring debates about immigration practices in that settler context and shows how in such debate,

the 'migrants' and the 'ethnics' are welcomed, abused, defended, made accountable, analysed and measured. Ultimately, the debates work to silence them and construct them into passive objects to be governed by

69 Sherene Razack, "Simple Logic: The Identity Documents Rule and the Fantasy of a Nation Besieged and Betrayed," Journal of Law and Social Policy Vol. 15,2000, pp. 181-210. 70 Razack, "Simple Logic," p. 185. 71 Razack, "Simple Logic," p. 186. 72 Razack, "Simple Logic," p. 187. 45

those who have given themselves the national governmental right to 'worry' about the nation.73

The settler story is not merely circulated narratively or ideologically as a tale or fiction; the bodies and voices spoken of or as the subjects in the story (for example the "citizens" of the identity documents example and in debates on immigration) are found in or find this domain of knowledge through actual events in their lived experiences and histories.

The settler story is told in actual bodies, economies, and institutions located and operating where and as they do as an outcome of invasion.

These conceptualizations of space and its mutually constitutive relation with racialized subjectivity and citizenship, reveal the ongoing reproductions of racism and colonialism. And in my research this means that when I ask "who is possible" and "who is the subject" as I have considered the textual and visual data from Centennial events, I am also asking a spatial question. When I am asking "who" I am also asking "where." I elaborate further on this question in my introduction to Chapter Three. In the next section here, I turn to thinking about how notions of memory as a public or collective practice contribute to my interpretation of and intervention in the possibilities of who, and where, Saskatchewan is.

Memory - and particularly, commemoration and nostalgia

Public memory is a dynamic and relational activity. I understand public memory

- specifically in relation to nostalgia and commemoration - as a domain of knowledge, productive of subjectivity and of spatial practices. Thinking of memory as a publicly or collectively configured activity that relates past and present is an analytic approach that

73 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, p. 17. 46 draws attention to a process of construction; this, as I discussed earlier regarding subjectivity, is also to draw attention to potentials for the undermining and transformation of knowledge.74 And, to undermine or transform knowledges, such as imagined configurations of "the way things were" (which is to put simply how a notion of the past is constituted), is to engage with power relations and with productions of truth that circulate through those relations. Certainly in regard to race and power relations in

Canada, the normativity of white subjectivity and the racialization of prairie space could be explored in other domains than that of public memory; we could investigate the

"anxious negotiations" and contestations over future possibility in Saskatchewan without turning to this Centennial commemoration. However, the past's involvement in the present and the future are particularly potent in contexts of commemoration such as the events of 2005 Saskatchewan in ways that reveal the wdeterminacy of the past and of present/future possibility. This particular marking of a Centennial is a visible reiteration of power and knowledge that make and constrain such possibilities; as such, it is a moment to consider carefully and in which to seize potentials for undermining and transformation. Looking at relations with the past, as I do particularly in Chapter Five, reveals how subjects, spaces, and past and future possibility are bound in cherished, but constructed and unstable, notions of identity and place. The instability of these notions, and the efforts to reiterate and secure them, are of much concern in varied efforts to address how race and nation configure each other - in ways that linger - in Canadian contexts.

Many scholars have examined this integral instability and lack of givenness to what constitutes memory. For example, Raphael Samuel identifies memory as always

74 See page 27. 47

"an active, shaping force,"75 and contends that what is forgotten is as much a component of memory as is what is remembered.76 Remembering "the way things were" is a process, both relational, and contextual. Samuel's identification of this process concurs with other conceptualizations of this domain of activity - with ways of thinking about memory that question any naturalizing tendencies to associate memory with some form of static truth or representation of the past, or with some notion that the past itself is statically and singularly knowable. Rather, as David Lowenthal emphasizes, "memories are reconstructions."77 John Gillis, in a study of commemorative practices similarly contends that memory and identity support one another to "sustain certain subjective positions, social boundaries and power."78 Too often, he observes, memory is given the

70 status of a material object rather than a flexible, active process. Attention to practices of public memory as active and unstable enables particular attention to constructions of subjects and spaces as questionable, as interruptible, and as less bounded or natural possibilities. In the context of my project's inquiries, the constructedness of memory aligns it with what I have been referring to as the fictive and specifically to the view of

Saskatchewan as a powerful fiction. Memory is itself fictive.

This does not preclude a measure of materiality to what constitutes both memory and also the past, which functions as its object. While Gillis contrasts its status as active and flexible process to that of a material object, the process and effects of memory are also of course bound in material practices - of, for example, monuments, artifacts and

75 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory Volume I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London and New York: Verso, 1994, p. x. 76 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, p. x. 77 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 210. 78 John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 4. 79 Gillis, Commemorations, p. 3. ruins, as well as everyday practices of cultural and political life and knowledge production. Practices of memory in shared social contexts, have substance that can be identified in many ways. In Roger Simon's introduction to a collection of work on practices of remembrance, he observes,

Much, then, depends upon the substance of our practices of remembrance, practices that constitute which traces of the past are possible for us to encounter, how these traces are inscribed and reproduced for presentation, and with what interest, epistemological frame, and structure of reflexivity we might engage these inscriptions - remnants in the guise of stories, songs, images, and objects.81

Thus, he continues, effects of remembrance practices are not limited to matters of representation. Rather, "practices of remembrance are questions of and for history as a force of inhabitation, as the way we live with images and stories that intertwine with our sense of limits and possibilities, hopes and fears, identities and distinctions."82 I relate this "force of inhabitation" to Avery Gordon's approach to sociological inquiry in which

"to understand how the real itself and its ethnographic or sociological representations are also fictions, albeit powerful ones that we do not experience as fictional, but as true" requires a methodological challenge to "monopolistic assumptions" about a secure reality that could be accessed through studies of the social. We do inhabit these powerful fictions; and certainly some of the force of that inhabitance comes through practices of remembrance that draw upon and effect material conditions for our imaginations - imaginings of identity, citizenship/belonging, nation, and of collective possibility - that are experienced, and sometimes declared, as true.

See for example, Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. 81 Roger Simon, "Remembering Otherwise: Civic Life and the Pedagogical Promise of Historical Memory," The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning and Ethics, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, p. 3. 82 Simon, "Remembering Otherwise," p. 3. 83 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 11. Commemoration, as a form of public memory, has a role in attaching truth to memory's fictions. As an organized practice intended to draw collective focus to a past occurrence of some kind, commemoration functions as a form of remembrance. Inherent in this function of shared remembering, are attempts to forge social cohesion and shared meaning, attempts that Simon identifies in distinct forms of "historical memories enacted in a society." The Saskatchewan Centennial as an event, is a commemoration in its very naming of intent to link 2005 with events and activities of 1905; by defining the present moment in this particular relation with the remembered past of Saskatchewan's inauguration as a province, "the Centennial" commemorates and ascribes meaning to

1905. As John Gillis notes, "there is nothing automatic about commemoration."85 The

Centennial of Saskatchewan is a creation of the present and, as such, a product of decisions and investments particular to state and cultural formations of 2005

Saskatchewan, and of contemporary Canada. As commemoration, the activities of the

Centennial are collective constructions and reconstructions of the past and bear the fraught relations of that process. In commemorations, writes Gillis, "results may appear consensual, when they are in fact the product of processes of intense contest, struggle, and in some cases, annihilation." Lyn Spilman's account of nations and commemorations emphasizes, too, that commemorations can be "large, diffuse, and

Simon, "Remembering Otherwise," p. 3. Simon distinguishes between two basic forms of remembrance: those practices which "link meaning and identity within collective rituals that attempt to build a social consensus by invoking iconic memories that mobilize affective structures of identification"; and, those that "are more overtly hermeneutic...[and] organize and legitimate discursive structures - the 'lessons of history' - within which basic corporate commitments might be rationally articulated" (p. 3). These are forms of remembrance in response to which Simon articulates possibilities for "remembering otherwise" - possibilities for remembrance that are pedagogically transformative. 5 Gillis, Commemorations, p. 3. 86 Gillis, Commemorations, p. 3. transient events." The "Centennial," for example, appears as singular, but in its effects and practices it is multiple - in terms of sites and relations and the timing of its occurrence. There is a central organizing office operating with a budget, promoting a theme, an official song, slogans, banners, logos and public leadership, functioning to draw the association of 2005 and 1905 into a coherent and shared meaning. However, these elements, and the project of recognizing a Centennial, are responded to, interpreted, and contested through many local sites.

This multiplicity and variance has implications for the making and management of subjectivities and spaces, with local deviations from state sanctioned ideals and themes, and varied effects from cohesive ideals clashing with experiences contrary to cohesion. Robert Cupido's account of Canada's 1927 "Diamond Jubilee of

Confederation" contributes to an understanding of how "competing sources of group loyalty and identity" counter and resist official attempts toward a cohesive national consciousness.88 Similarly, Katarzyna Rukszto's work on the "Heritage Moments" project in Canada describes how commemoration relies on the "logic of a unifying address," but it is a fractured and contested process. I view such tension between the unifying sanctioned themes of commemoration and its varied multiple sites of enactment and encounter as indication that the Centennial is both managed and unruly in its productions. Further, Gillis's reference to annihilation, contest, and struggle as among the processes that produce seemingly consensual commemorations accentuates that

87 Lyn Spilman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 88 Robert Cupido, "Appropriating the Past: Pageants, Politics, and the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association Vol. 9, 1998, p. 157. 89 Katarzyna Rukszto, Minute by Minute; Canadian History Reimagined for Television Audiences, PhD, York University, 2003, p. 78. 51 cohesive celebrations of nations "built" through colonization on Aboriginal land, such as these celebrations in the context of Saskatchewan, are products of violence. The tension between coherence and fracture in commemorative practices such as those I investigate as the Saskatchewan Centennial reinforces the perspective that this Centennial is not one monolithic event consistent in its productions. It also means that the ways the Centennial does appear consensual and unified appear so only by denials of or diversions from the ongoing and racialized iniquities of colonial nation-building. Colonization is a violent enterprise and when commemoration of its effects is celebrated as social cohesion - or perhaps as "survival and success" - the violence is not only denied but turned into a basis for promoting positive collective feeling. In the data chapters of this thesis I offer accounts of specific ways that this occurs in Centennial moments to structure

Saskatchewan as people, place, and past in ways that reiterate colonial binds on possibility - a reiteration of colonial violence.

And investigating this basis for a positive collective feeling is indeed a central contribution of my inquiry and very much tied to the impetus for this project which I outlined at the outset of this chapter. I align my concern regarding colonial commemorations and positive feeling with a question that Sara Ahmed names in her work on "the cultural politics of emotion" in which she asks "why are relations of power so intractable and enduring, even in the face of collective forms of resistance?"90 In her analysis, Ahmed conceptualizes this intractability and endurance as "what sticks"91 and by this she explains forms of investment in social norms and structures - such as, for example, the nation as object of love - as a process involving both movement and

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 12. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 11. 52 attachments. Regarding emotion and its effects, she explores how such objects (of emotion - which may be nations, images, bodies) "become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension." In the relationship between movement and attachment, Ahmed describes, it is objects o/emotion that circulate rather than emotion itself as something that could perhaps fill the air as a felt "thickness" or "shared feeling" that passes between people.93 She counters such a notion of shared feeling with her account of the sociality of emotion in which "emotions are not 'in' either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and social to be delineated as if they are objects;"94 this underlines her call for attention to movement and attachments when investigating "what sticks."

I find Ahmed's approach useful for conceptualizing questions I have wanted to ask about Saskatchewan's place in perpetuating attachments to Canadian colonialism, and for thinking through how such perpetual attachments are and could be disrupted. I place that account of her work in this section on memory because it directly informs how

I carry these questions about Saskatchewan, and about disrupting colonial attachments, through my interpretations of nostalgia. My considerations of nostalgia are of an effect

of commemoration in the terms I have identified such a remembrance practice above; and, they are also considerations of a form of affect. I conceptualize this dual enactment

of nostalgia, as both effect and affect, through my understanding of what Ahmed proposes about movement and attachment in the circulation of objects of emotion.

Nostalgia, as I identify it in the management and unruliness of Centennial

commemoration, and in the ways I regard its status as a productive and examined

92 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 11. 93 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 10. 94 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 10. 53 theoretical construct for certain attachments to "the way things were'Vthe past, has - again as both effect and affect - a quality we might think of or theorize as "moving."

With Ahmed's framework in mind, I do intend a double meaning. On emotion, she says,

"what moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place."95 Of nostalgia, and Saskatchewan's place in perpetuating colonial attachments, I am presenting in this thesis an inquiry in which I explore and pose conclusions about what "moves" and "holds in place" identifications with Saskatchewan

- identifications that obscure not only its place in the workings of race and nation but also the always present efforts to disrupt and resist them.

Nostalgia, which I thus interpret as a quality of moving and attaching identifications, involves a relationship between presence and absence. This is a relationship that is variously interpreted; Dylan Trigg, as one example of such interpretation, considers this relationship in an account of how "ruins" - in the form of physical structures in a state of crumble, collapse and decay - shape notions of progress and temporality. Nostalgia's place in the distinction between presence and absence is that nostalgia inherently moves toward an "unavailable object."96 Trigg observes,

Were there not a distinction between what was present and what was absent, the magnetism of nostalgia would inevitably dissolve. Continuity would be a given and the place of pastness would no longer be required. Yet the "lost world" of nostalgia must necessarily fall away from time in order to be preserved as the static past.97

In this conceptualization of nostalgia, the past and present are "disunited" and nostalgia's role is to fashion a connection. Trigg specifies that nostalgia "discloses the void between

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 11. Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay, p. xvi. Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay, p. 56. past and present in spatial terms." This observation coincides with a frequently repeated account of the origins for the word's usage which are the Greek concepts of

"nostos" (return home) and "algos" (pain) brought together as "nostalgia" by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in the 17th century as an explanation for the distress of soldiers away from and longing for home."

Linda Hutcheon describes how that medical pathological definition of Hofer's context "allowed for a remedy - the return home, or at least the promise of it."100

Hutcheon then points toward a shift from the spatial to the temporal in which "the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, accounts for nostalgia's power."101 In this account, the temporal past becomes the absent spatial object as nostalgia makes the idealized past into the site of immediacy, presence, and authenticity.102 Peter Fritzsche

•I AT concurs that nostalgia takes the past as its mournful subject: in the context of the

French Revolution, to which Fritzsche turns in his interpretation of nostalgia as

"predicated on thoroughly modern structures of temporality,"104 he focuses on how material unsettlement led to new historical sensibility, and an uneasiness with living in modern times.105 Such unease with modernity, Fritzsche explains, relates to nineteenth-

98 Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay, p. 56. 99 Peter Fritzsche, "Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity," American Historical Review 2001, p. 1591. 100 Linda Hutcheon, "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern," University of Toronto English Language (UTEL) Main Collection, Electronic Resource: http://www.libraiy.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html. paragraph 7. 101 Hutcheon, "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern," paragraph 9. 102 Hutcheon, "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern," paragraph 12. 103 Fritzsche, "Specters of History," p. 1594. 104 Fritzsche, "Specters of History," p. 1592. 105 Fritzsche, "Specters of History," p. 1602. 55 century European reconfigurations of temporality including "the notion of historical process as the continual production of the new."106 In his view:

Both in Europe and in the United States, the memory crisis of the nineteenth century was not the function so much of actual losses but of reconfigured structures of temporality that lifted losses out of obscurity and rendered them meaningful by giving them a historically specific locale.107

I recount Fritszche's location of nostalgia in a nineteenth-century crisis of memory not so much to give or affirm an originary moment or context for nostalgia's existence; but, rather, as with my reference to Hutcheon's citation of a shift from nostalgia as a contemporary spatial return into a temporal one, to emphasize that considering the past as a place to return is a central concern of nostalgia. Nostalgia functions as an attachment of time to space. Which, to repeat from above, is an affective attachment, meaning that it functions through "moving" objects (of feeling) - and investing / sticking them in relation.

I am interested in questions of nostalgia, affect, attachments, irretrievable losses and desired returns as a route through which to release invader-settler Saskatchewan fictions from their hold on possibility. Commemoration and nostalgia rely on, and naturalize, instabilities and fragilities and constructions of space and subjectivity (and of possibility and the past). As I interpret "who" is possible and "where" is possible in

Centennial commemorations, I consider how such possibility is bounded by sticking together notions of the past and of place through commemoration and its nostalgic effects and affects. My explanation takes form in the pages to follow, and takes the form of

Fritzsche, "Specters of History," p. 1589. Fritzsche, "Specters of History," p. 1589. 56 knowledge about nostalgia and commemoration, about constructions of racial subjectivity and about Saskatchewan in Canada.

This methodology, in the form of approaches to subjectivity, space, and memory, informs how I view what kind of data it is that my research has generated and what forms of conclusions I may make from my interpretations. In the next chapter, I offer an account of how I situate the inquiries and analysis of this thesis in broader terrains of investigation. Chapter Two: Situating the Project I suppose the issue reduces itself to what our humdrum and pedestrian daily work, what we do as readers and writers, is all about, when on the one hand professionalism and patriotism will not serve and on the other waiting for apocalyptic change will not either.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

The Project as Critical Work The type of inquiry I am making is not new. My intent in this chapter is to articulate what type of inquiry I conceive this project to be in terms of a contribution to social research in Canada, but also in terms of what kind of intervention a piece of intellectual work and writing such as this is or could be as one way of engaging the critical cultural and political task to confront racism in twenty-first century Canada.

In situating this project as a contribution to critical cultural and political tasks its political import as a text, and as the practices through which I produced it, remain unpredictable. I cannot say with certainty what political import this research and writing has or could have, nor what if any cultural effects it may produce. That stance is central to my perspective on the contribution I am attempting in this work. To refuse to claim knowledge about the effects of this work and insist that such refusal is decidedly not apolitical or neutral is a key point I make in situating my work. What hope or change is instituted or supported by my analysis of this Saskatchewan commemoration? Having aligned my theoretical approaches with those that consider workings of power, and of construction, production, narrative, the assembled, legislated, mapped, performed, and imagined (see Chapter One), what change is effected by such investigations turned to

Saskatchewan Centennial moments? I agree with Michael Taussig that construction

"cannot be called out of (or into) existence, ridiculed and shamed into yielding up its

57 58 powers."1 He introduces that reminder with the claim that construction "deserves more respect" and concludes:

If its very nature seems to prevent us - for are we not also socially constructed? - from peering deeply therein, that very same nature also cries out for something other than analysis as this is usually practiced in reports to our Academy.2

The work I conceive this project to be is political and partial and unpredictable. It does cry out for something more. Taussig continues his assessment of constructivist analyses with the comment that, in the task of making anew, of new inventions in place of prevailing social constructions, "the critic fumbles the pass."3

I agree that my critique of specific Centennial productions, of moments on summer stages commemorating Saskatchewan's genesis as a Canadian province, of speeches about Saskatchewan's future, and various other deployments of Saskatchewan as a powerful fiction/social construction/hegemonic colonial formation will not on these pages shame or ridicule or coax it loose from its workings of power. With Taussig, I do want to ally my writing and queries with inventiveness, with the garnering of "courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions - what a sociology that would be!"4 I believe

I am also with Taussig's urge for something more than constructivist analysis by seeking to situate this project as accountable to activism, scholarship, and people who have long and persistently garnered such courage in the face of racist colonial hegemonies. I write this in the spirit of inventiveness and possibility for land and people held in colonial

1 Michael Taussig. Mimesis and Alter ity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York/London: Routledge, 1993, p. xvi. 2 Taussig, Mimesis andAlterity, p. xvi. 3 Taussig, Mimesis andAlterity, p. xvi. And see also Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 21: "Our methods have thus far been less than satisfactory for addressing the very nature of the things and the problems it is our responsibility to address, leaving us not yet making something new enough out of what are arguably many new ideas and novel conditions. A different way of knowing and writing about the social world, an entirely different mode of production, still awaits our invention." And Gordon, p. 192. 4 Taussig, Mimesis andAlterity, p. xvii. 59 fictions of Saskatchewan; however, this inquiry and any cultural or political possibility I name do not stand alone - nor do they stand as inventions I can claim to hold. If these pages cry out for something more, it is my conviction and a basic assumption of this work that the "more" has long been articulated and practiced and continues in the work and lives of activists, scholars, cultural workers, and many many who daily invent and live possibilities counter to dominant Canadian national and Saskatchewan particular imaginaries.

This project is shaped in an interdisciplinary practice of research and is significantly informed by methodologies and inquiries of cultural studies and critical race studies, primarily in Canadian contexts. Its interdisciplinarity is shaped by the particular institutional and collegial site in which I have developed the project: that of sociology and equity studies in education at OISE/UT in Toronto. This is a site that engages and encourages broad sets of practices for transformative research and scholarship in Canada and there are many ways that I have learned, in this context, intentional practices of interdisciplinary scholarship - particularly in equity studies.

There are many ways to articulate the value of resisting disciplinary boundaries in situating critical work. Pheng Cheah puts it that unless such boundaries are crossed, "it is impossible to follow the multiple threads of the global fabrication of the contemporary human being."5 Critical race studies, and cultural studies in the ways I have learned their engagements, are shaped by such commitments to interdisciplinarity. Of cultural studies,

Katarzyna Rukszto explains:

The varied strands of cultural studies come out of a number, often interrelated intellectual shifts and political movements: literary criticism, the critique of orthodox Marxism, the post-structuralist critique of "the

5 Cheah, Spectral Nationality, p. 12. 60

grand narrative" and Reason, the rise of social history, feminist theory and the women's movement, critical race theory and anti-racist organizing, and other social movements.6

In the context of critical race work, Sherene Razack writes, "The study of the creation of racial hierarchies demands nothing less than the tools of history, sociology, geography, education, and law, among other domains of knowledge."7

Within this interdisciplinary commitment to investigating material and symbolic practices that constitute racial projects in Canada, my research focus on the Centennial in

Saskatchewan is an investigation into understandings/interpretations of a particular site - representations of Saskatchewan in Canada, and of Saskatchewan within the delineated place itself. It is a focus on racial subjectivity, and the racialization of Saskatchewan space - connected to national imaginaries/stories of white settler normativity in Canada.

It is a focus on nostalgic investments in notions of place and identity - particularly through commemorative practices of public memory. In the three sections that follow, I relate my work to critical studies of Saskatchewan as a place in Canada, of whiteness, space, and national imaginaries in Canada, and of nostalgia and commemorative practices in Canada.

Critical Studies of Saskatchewan as Place

There are persistent and long-standing scholarly impulses to write about the prairies more broadly, as a "place" with particular meaning in Canada. There is also much scholarship that reads this attention to the prairies as "place" and critiques how that notion is produced, and what it produces. This critical work, for example in literary studies, social histories, and political economy studies in and of Saskatchewan, bears a

6 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, pp. 12-13. 7 Razack, "When Place Becomes Race," p. 7. 61 similar concern to my own, that of denaturalizing identifications and boundaries of place and subjectivity. Investigating the construction of a place such as the Canadian prairies, or Western Canada, or Saskatchewan - through critically reading histories and practices of history-telling, through literatures and their critiques, through scrutinizing economic and political arrangements that structure exchanges/distribution of material resources in ways that shape or define a space - can all reveal processes of invention, and bring into focus that the notion of "prairies" as any kind of place at all is due to many contingencies that could well have been, or be, otherwise.

The interpretation of Saskatchewan as prairie, or as one Canadian province that along with Alberta and Manitoba may be conceived of as such, is among several possible and interconnected interpretations of its context. It is also one that immediately reveals its contingencies in that much of the geographical terrain of Saskatchewan is not prairie at all; identifying Saskatchewan as prairie relies on diminishing the place of not only other topographies such as boreal forest but also the activities, community formations and mythologies of that more northerly, more treed, terrain as one of many variances from prairie in the place mapped as Saskatchewan. And to what extent is Saskatchewan, as a constructed place of identification, limited to the Canadian prairies, or west, as its broader region? Saskatchewan as a site to be queried as construction or invention might also be investigated as part of a wider grasslands region inclusive of territories to the south of the Canadian-American border. Further, within the nation-building practices of

Canada, which is of central concern to this project, might Saskatchewan and its regional and national imaginings not also be linked to other predominantly rural or resource-based 62

(in terms of economic activity, cultural imaginings and identifications) locales, not restricted to "prairie" or "western" Canadian sites?

Such questions situate Saskatchewan, and relatedly this inquiry, in multiple discourses of place, which could be named variously, including but not limited to: the

Canadian prairies, Western Canada, rural Canada, the North, the grasslands of North

America. These overlapping discursive terrains or to repeat a phrase from the previous chapter, "domains of possibility," have implications for discerning the shape and, to repeat another conceptualization from earlier, "stickiness" of Saskatchewan in Canada's national imaginings.8 One form of implication has to do with the terms and basis of my own questioning; another with situating the questioning in this thesis in relation to other studies of Canadian/North American/praire/rural/western/North/midwestern?/plains fictions. With regard to the former, I have placed Saskatchewan in the context of racist national imagining, and particularly settler colonial national imaginings of citizenship, of national space and of national past. I do so recognizing that Saskatchewan in the nation is also Saskatchewan in these varied and overlapping discursive fields. Just as (noted in

Chapter One) there is no singular Canadian national imaginary, Saskatchewan itself does not have a singular place in the imaginings of settler colonial citizenship, space, and past.

With regard to situating this inquiry in relation to investigations of other place-based fictions inclusive of Saskatchewan, in what follows I identify some forms of such investigation in order to bring into focus the particularity of my own study.

Tellings of Saskatchewan, and of these regional identifications of Canadian prairie or western Canada, as constructed in and constrained by colonial discourses and geographies, are of course long extant and varied in Aboriginal texts and scholarship. In

8 This is a reference to Sara Ahmed's "what sticks?" question I introduced in the previous chapter. 63 the preface to an anthology of poetry by Aboriginal women of western Canada, Emma

Laroque describes how "much of Native writing, whether blunt or subtle, is protest literature in that it speaks to the processes of our colonization, dispossession, objectification, and that constant struggle for cultural survival expressed in the movement for structural and psychological self-determination."9 Laroque's own poetry speaks to such processes in ways that write "the prairie" and "Western Canadian" fraught relations to make visible both Aboriginal resilience and colonial incursions.10 Janice Acoose, writing about stereotypical images of Aboriginal women in Canadian literatures, de- authorizes "white eurocanadian" tellings of geography and people in Saskatchewan and the prairies, resisting the capitalization and authorship of "weccp" (white-eurocanadian- christian-patriarchy) and its constructs of Aboriginality and of the terrain in which such stereotypes are produced.11 Refusals of that authorship signal that settler colonial

Saskatchewan does not have and has not had a decisive hold on knowledge production.

These critiques of and counter articulations to place-based fictions that authorize colonial discourse, and implicitly whiteness, in Saskatchewan and its proximate terrains are and have been ongoing. Karina Vernon, in "Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness:

Addena Sumter Freitag's Stay Black and Die and Cheryl Foggo's Pourin' Down Rain," intervenes in critiques and anthologies of prairie cultural production that "place the history of black cultural production under erasure." Vernon's discussion counters the over-determination of "the prairies as a racially homogenous (white) microcosm, and the

9 Emma Laroque, "Preface, or Hear Are Our Voices - Who Will Hear?" in Jeanne Perrault and Sylvia Vance, eds., Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, NuWest Publishers, 1990, p. xviii. 10 See for example Laroque's poem, "My Northern Town, South Africa" about Lac La Biche, Alberta. 11 Janice Acoose, Iskwewak-Kah 'Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princesses nore Easy Squaws, Toronto: Women's Press, 1995. 12 Karina Vernon, "Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness: Addena Sumter Frietag's Stay Black and Die and Cheryl Foggo's Pourin' Down Rain," Canadian Literature Vancouver: Autumn 2004, Issue 182, p 67. regional anthologies that continue to ignore the work of black writers" and her discussion of Foggo's and Frietag's writing works toward "re-placing blackness into the regional imaginary." Regional imaginaries are never stable or homogenous. A recent thesis and accompanying performance art by Adrian Stimson, Aboriginal artist living in

Saskatoon, brings to image and text critical perspectives on colonial imaginings of

Saskatchewan through his work, Buffalo Boy's Heart On: Buffalo Boy's 100 years of wearing his heart on his sleeve.15 Stimson's work includes a direct and counter address to the Western Development Museum's Centennial project which I introduced in the previous chapter: Winning the Prairie Gamble, as well as to one of the Centennial themes

I will later discuss, that of "100 Years of Heart." Stimson's thesis includes description of and images from his installation titled Gambling the Prairie Winnings; in his writing about this project he describes how he has "re-ordered history through a narrative of prose and double entendre."16 Stimson describes the project as the creation of a storyboard; the images in which include "collected artifacts that are both historical and

1 7 kitsch, material culture that verifies the presence of the absent." Through the storyboard images Stimson addresses the "prairie" as colonial narrative, "mimics" that narrative and "fragments its purpose."18 My own disruption of Saskatchewan as a bound or binding knowledge of place does recognize it as always and already named and known as fragmentary. I contest settler colonial stories and celebrations of Saskatchewan as

13 Vernon, "Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness," p. 67. 14 Vernon, "Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness," p. 83. 15 Adrian A. Stimson, Buffalo Boy's Heart On: Buffalo Boy's 100 years of wearing his heart on his sleeve, University of Saskatchewan MA Thesis, 2005. 16 Stimson, Buffalo Boy's Heart On, p. 23. Stimson's "Gambling the Prairie Winnings" was also discussed in a paper presented by Lynne Bell as part of a panel hosted by the Canadian Association for Cultural Studies (CACS) in May 2007. 17 Stimson, Buffalo Boy's Heart On, p. 23. 18 Stimson, Buffalo Boy's Heart On, p. 23. 65

Canada recognizing that their reiteration, as in the Centennial, is always contested and countered - and recognizing, too, that the reiterating continues.

Saskatchewan as part of broader inquiries into the structuring, imagining, and reiterating, of "the prairies" is evident in literary studies, and interdisciplinary scholarship that draws into conversation, for example through conferences and texts, scholars from across Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan around questions of prairie place and identity in the nation. For example, St. John's College at the University of Manitoba has hosted four recent interdisciplinary conferences focusing on such themes.19 The

Canadian Plains Research Center (CPRC) in Regina is another site where such questions converge, stating a mandate to "initiate, undertake, encourage and support research and scholarly work on all aspects of prairie life, including its history, resources, land and people."20 Of course, the work published through such a mandate does not all take as its subject the questioning of "prairie life" as knowable, but the CPRC is one locus of such investigations. In the field of history, and with a view to "the Canadian west" as terrain for questioning, in the 1970s and 80s the University of Calgary hosted biennial Western

Canadian Studies conferences, specifically intended to gather scholars of "Western

Canadian History;" and there are currently plans to "inaugurate a new version" of these

19 These were held in 1998,2001, 2004, and 2007 and titled, respectively, "Defining the Prairies," "The Prairies: Visited and Revisited," "The Prairies Lost and Found," and "Prairies in 3D: Disorientation, Diversities, Dispersals." Two published collections emerged from these conferences: Robert Wardaugh, ed., Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 2001. And, Len Kuffert, ed., The Prairies Lost and Found, Winnipeg: St. John's College Press, 2007. 20 The CPRC publishes the periodical Prairie Forum and identifies itself as "Saskatchewan's largest, non- fiction, and only university press." From the CPRC website: www.cprc.uregina.ca. (Last viewed 19 February 2008.) conferences starting in June 2008. I attended the two most recent "prairies" conferences in Manitoba, one with a paper that precedes my study of the Centennial but is one source of its beginnings, and more recently with a paper based on preliminary work for this thesis.22 My participation in these proceedings, and my citation here of these Canadian prairie and Canadian west studies, links my questions about

Saskatchewan in a national imaginary to active fields of inquiry that unsettle naturalized notions of prairies or Canadian west as place.

I situate my work in these fields of inquiry, but I further specify it as having to do with denaturalizing a racialized nation and with questioning how Saskatchewan, though as blurred at the edges of its discursive terrain as any place, functions within that racialization as a repeated and knowable geography, personality and memory in Canada.

Saskatchewan is interrogated as a place; to question and draw into attention its basis in invader-settler displacement and exclusions is not a unique intervention, nor is it one that has in critical Canadian scholarship claimed to be finished.

Included among discursive interventions into "Saskatchewan" - and

Saskatchewan as part of the "prairies"- are critiques of mythologies of Saskatchewan as homogenously agrarian and European that circulate in literature and in historical research; and among them are critiques that question nostalgia or fixed notions of the past and their hold on identity and place in the prairies. One frequently cited early text is a collection of essays edited by Richard Allen in 1973 called A Region of the Mind:

21 The website for the 2008 conference includes bibliographic information on the conference proceedings publications from the earlier series of conferences held between 1969 and 1987. www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/historyandclassics/WCSC.cftri (Last viewed 19 February 2008.) 22 The paper that preceded the Centennial research was titled, "Telling Tales: Viewing an Exhibition of the Qu'Appelle Valley," presented at "The Prairies Lost and Found" in 2004. The paper that related to my thesis research was, "Diversities in Commemorated Cohesion: The Saskatchewan Centennial," presented at "Prairies in 3D" in 2007. Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains. Among the interpretations in that collection, writers describe "imaginative processes of endowing the prairie experience with meaning," identify the "environment as a mental construct," and refer to the prairie also as "a mental construct, a myth."25 The notion of invented place in relation to

Saskatchewan receives particular detail in a contribution by Aritha van Herk to a 1980s collection of essays on Saskatchewan writing, in which van Herk describes "false documents and invented history" as integral to the very notion of "Saskatchewan" as a site of meaning.26 In the essay, van Herk genders and personifies Saskatchewan as a created presence; at one point, she presents this Saskatchewan persona in a moment of reflection; this persona muses about writing that reveals a prior Saskatchewan identity.

In van Herk's imaginings:

What intrigued her was that he did not talk about her - the she she was - at all, but Saskatchewan's place before naming, before straight lines and surveyor's chains and railway tracks, the thin stretch of limitation settled on infinity and altered into the death of temptation, the end of the buffalo and the bellowing scream of the future.27

These imagined reflections situate the inventedness of Saskatchewan in colonial incursions of settler agricultural infrastructure and with "the end of the buffalo" as marker of Saskatchewan's beginnings (the "she she was" after naming). I discuss this invoked relationship of a surveyed and mapped Saskatchewan to what is configured as a

Richard Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains, Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1973, p. vii. 24 E. A. McCourt, "Prairie Literature and Its Critics," in Richard Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains, Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1973, p. 161. 25 Eli Mandel, "Images of Prairie Man," in Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains, p. 203. 26 Aritha van Herk, "Invented History: False Document, or Waiting for Saskatchewan," in Kenneth G. Probert ed., Writing Saskatchewan: Twenty Critical Essays, Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989, pp. 81-82. 27 van Herk, "Invented History," p. 83. The "he" to whom van Herk depicts Saskatchewan referring is the writer Rudy Wiebe. 68 displaced, unmapped, past in the analyses chapters to follow; it is an invoked relationship

I encountered in some Centennial moments and one that raises questions beyond the

"fact" of invention. Scholarship from the context of the recent "prairies" conferences to which I referred above, reveals similar denaturalizing projects, identifying prairie as a

"multiple, mobile, and uncertain definition," acknowledging "complicity in constructing nostalgic and exclusive representations of the prairies"29 and repeating that

"prairie is as much performance as it is place or answer."30 As I have stressed in my previous chapter, my project similarly takes up this concern to identify inventedness, and beyond the fact of invention/fiction I am concerned with how Saskatchewan after the

"naming" and "straight lines" with which van Herk reckons persists as though perpetual.

It is possible, and practiced, to take up such a question through considering who participates in critical academic inquiry where interventions into Saskatchewan as knowable place are claimed. Embodying and tuning in to the practices critiqued by

Vernon above, editors of the collection on Saskatchewan writing to which van Herk's essay was a contribution, are alert to an "absence of some voices"31 in the symposium at which the work was collected, noting among the absences "that there seemed to be no place on the programme where non-white writers might be discussed." An introduction to writings on history in the region places the writing in the context of needing "more inclusive narratives"33 to counter ways that "European perspectives" define and dominate

28 Robert Wardaugh, Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, p. 7. 29 Alison Calder, "Who's fromth e Prairie? Some Prairie Self-Representations in Popular Culture," in Wardaugh, ed., Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, p. 98. 30 Robert Kroetsch, "Don't Give Me No More of Your Lip; or, the Prairie Horizon as Allowed Mouth," in Wardaugh ed., Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, p. 210. 31 Kenneth Probert, "Introduction," in Probert ed., Writing Saskatchewan, p. xiv. 32 Probert, "Introduction," p. xiv. 33 Catherine Cavanaugh and Jeremy Mouat, eds., Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement, Toronto: Garamound Press, 1996, p. xiii. 69 in historiography. Russell McDougall, an Australian writer examining Saskatchewan writing links his context with the latter by naming that both share "the historical legacy of colonialism [and] the burden of this common inheritance."34 A critique of practices in popular culture as a domain for this construction is offered by Alison Calder who specifies how "the prairies are represented as only White space." In a text that takes a political economy approach to constructions of Saskatchewan and the prairies, James M.

Pitsula acknowledges that "the 'vanishing Indian' and 'performing Indian'" are invented constructs frequently invoked, although in this text the processes of that construction are not interrogated. These are some examples of how knowledge production that authorizes its critique of Saskatchewan or/as "the prairies" turns attention to the practices of its own collaborations and productions, as a factor in perpetuating settler colonial exclusions.

The framework for this questioning of Saskatchewan in the Centennial of 2005, in which I set out to learn more about the perpetuation of racism and specifically more about persistent affective attachments to invader-settler discourse, directs questions toward how Saskatchewan serves in many ways - and in ways activated through

Centennial commemoration - as a static domain of knowledge in Canada. Further, spatial productions of white subjects as normative citizens are central to the specific investigation of this thesis. This focus on questioning static possibilities and white racial subjectivity as normative relies on displacing settler colonial authorship as originary or definitive in discourses of Saskatchewan in Canada, which Aboriginal scholarship has

34 Russell McDougall, "Reading Saskatchewan Poetry: An Australian Short Story," in Probert, ed., Writing Saskatchewan, p. 2. 35 Calder, "Who's fromth e Prairie," p. 98. 36 James M. Pitsula, "First Nations and Saskatchewan Politics," in Howard A. Leeson ed., Saskatchewan Politics: Into the Twenty-First Century, p. 350. long done, and also on strategies employed by critical scholars in various fields to unsettle white European constructions of Saskatchewan and its regional associations in the nation. The project joins these commitments and ventures a critical study of

Saskatchewan as place; the specificity of my inquiry, as well as that of attention to the

Centennial as specific event, is attention to Saskatchewan as racialized Canadian space.

Critical Studies of White Normativity, Space, and National Imaginaries in Canada

The attention I bring to Saskatchewan in the Centennial also situates my work in relation to critical studies of whiteness, race, and the racialization of space within analyses of how Canada is constructed and naturalized as a nation. I do not attempt a review of the extensive literature engaging these analyses and the many related projects of intervention and inquiry into race and racialization in Canada. Rather, to situate the questions and arguments I pose in this investigation, I discuss here forms of inquiry to which I relate my own and which directly inform my analysis of Saskatchewan in

Canada.

Eva Mackey, in a study of a context and practices that connect and overlap significantly with that of the Saskatchewan Centennial - that of Canada marking 125 years as a nation in 1992 - considers versions of "national identity" that "mobilize internal differences and similarities through erasure, inclusion, or appropriation."37

Mackey, as with writers in the collection Race, Space, and the Law, introduced in

Chapter One, stresses that Canada is both embodied in its material practices and in its circulation symbolically. My own application of the theoretical work on racialized space

Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 49. 71 and national imaginings in Canada takes much direction from both Mackey's work and that of the writers on race, space and the law in Canada.

Two of the chapters in Race, Space, and the Law focus particularly on

Saskatchewan sites to analyze constructions of race, subjectivity and the normativity of whiteness in Canada. Carol Schick writes on the University of Saskatchewan and whiteness, and Sherene Razack on the murder of an Aboriginal woman, Pamela George, by two young white men in Regina.38 These studies historicize whiteness and race, and the constructions and boundaries that legitimate and legislate who belongs and what defines citizenship or respectability in Saskatchewan. Mackey's text and Razack's edited collection, as well as Elizabeth Furniss's attention to historical consciousness and myth- making in a British Columbia community39 account for ways that "master narratives of

Canadian nationalism"40 rely on stories of benign development, "benevolent gentleness"41 and "tolerance."42 This naming of benign stories emphasizes the costs of maintaining these stories against the lives that bear the effects of racist colonialism in

Canada's development. Critical scholarship that registers the uneven conditions of life and the racialized effects of these dominant stories of national tolerance as a prevalent form of racism in Canada take many forms.

Included in this scholarship are investigations into the particular constructions of white racial subjectivity in Canada that are produced, sustained, and resisted in national formations. Himani Bannerji attests to a prevailing practice of exclusion in the ongoing

38 Sherene Razack, "Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George," in Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law, pp. 121-156. Carol Schick, "Keeping the Ivory Tower White: Discourses of Racial Domination," in Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law, pp. 99-120. 39 Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999. 40 Furniss, The Burden of History, p. 53. 41 Mackey, The House of Difference, pp. 1, 16,28. 42 Schick, "Keeping the Ivory Tower White," p. 105. 72 construction of Canada as she describes experiences of being an "insider/outsider" in its national space. She articulates the paradox of "belonging and not belonging" that a nation with a racialized story of origin creates for citizens who are not included in the

story. Bannerji links the process that enables this paradox of belonging and not belonging, of being an outsider inside the nation, with the definition of a "'Canadian' core community."43 Relatedly, Eva Mackey's text on cultural politics and national identity in Canada includes an account of how "the subjectivities of people who conceive of themselves as 'mainstream' or simply 'Canadian Canadians'"44 are formed through practices integral to Canadian national understandings, and policies, that claim a multicultural identity rooted in origins as a settler nation. Mackey cites examples of how cultural policies and celebrations of nationhood mark a Canadian "core" culture and population as ordinary and mainstream in contrast to the bearers of "difference" who provide the multiculturalism, and to representatives of a pre-Canadian, Aboriginal,

"past." She identifies ways that the contours of the Canadian Canadian subject position

- that define who can know themselves and be known within it - conform with tracing or assuming one's ties with the European, and particularly English-speaking, settler culture.

This is the normative position that functions as the core from which multiculturalism diverges. Mackey identifies this subject position as a particular form of whiteness.45

Mackey describes moves to "construct a settler national identity perceived as innocent of

43 Himani Bannerji, "Geography Lessons: On Being an Insider/Outsider to the Canadian Nation," in Leslie Roman and Linda Eyre eds., Dangerous Territories: Struggles for Difference and Equality, New York and London: Routledge, 1997. 44 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 3. Mackey identifies this mainstream, "ordinary," subject population as those who rather than knowing or being known as "hyphenated peoples" such as "German- Canadian, Ukrainian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, Greek-Canadian, Afro-Canadian, French-Canadian, Native-Canadian, Italian-Canadian, and so on have the privilege of being just "Canadian." Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 20. 45 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 21. 73 racism;"46 which is an innocence ascribed to so-called Canadian-Canadians and relies on an interpretation that the very presence of white bodies in this landscape is somehow not attached to violence.

Concerns with the racialization of space through violence and its concealment are implicit in studies of nation and of white normativity. And it is the "somehow" of detachment from violence that is traced by attention to white subject formation in the collection of texts by Razack and colleagues, in Race, Space, and the Law47 where these forms of white settler respectability in their manifestations of innocence, generosity and reasonableness are somehow fashioned in contexts where the privileging of white subjects in Canadian spaces has effects of harm, dispossession, and injustice. These writers investigate sites and events that include regulations of movement through the

Indian Act, violence toward Japanese Canadians in the second world war through

"internment," Aboriginal resistance to colonial occupation and to colonial history- writing, the murder of an Aboriginal woman in Saskatchewan and the subsequent trial of two young white men, municipal policies that interfere with proposals by Muslim communities to build Mosques in areas of Toronto, regulation of language and participation in a Manitoba legislature, the eviction of an entire community in Nova

Scotia (Africville), the regulation of knowledge and participation in a Saskatchewan

University, and border crossings for the purposes of midwifery education. Crucial to this fashioning of an innocent Canadianness amid plenty of evidence to the contrary, in each of these contexts, is disavowal of white settler implication in and benefits from the

Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 25. 47 Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law. iniquitous structuring of settler society. The disavowals uphold innocent, generous, and reasonable respectability to counter position the evidence of iniquity in these sites.

Razack traces explicitly how structures of invasion rely on, produce, and distinguish categories of subject respectability and degeneracy. Attention to space shows how the normativity of subject formations such as ordinary Canadian-Canadians, and distinctions between respectable, innocent, generous "citizens" and others outside the settler story is a consequence of, and maintained through, the concealing and naturalizing of the structured, spatial, invasiveness of colonialism in Canada. In a Saskatchewan example in that collection, Razack's study of "gendered racial violence and spatialized justice" and the murder of Pamela George, an Aboriginal woman, demonstrates that it is an effort, an intervention, "to uncover the hierarchies that are protected and the violence that is hidden when we believe such spatial relations and subjects to be naturally occurring."48

My investigation of the Saskatchewan Centennial is a way to further knowledge about Canada as a constructed and imagined nation, and particularly to unsettle concealments not only of violence but also concealments of possibility that thrive against the norms of colonial, settler and white normative investments in Canada. My particular attention to Saskatchewan in Centennial moments is an opportunity to contribute to interpreting and disrupting such concealment and the foreclosure of possibilities for belonging and thriving against the fictions and territorial claims of white racism.

Razack, "Gendered Racial Violence," p. 128. 75

Critical Studies of Nostalgia and Commemorative Practice in Canada

The intent of commemorations to be instructive, and particularly to teach about the nation and national belonging is documented in the contexts of Canadian national commemorations; for example Eva Mackey identifies the "pedagogies of patriotism"49 carried out through authoritative narrations of Canada. In the context of the national commemoration of Canada's 125th anniversary as a nation, Mackey reports, a "linear narrative of Canada's past, present and future"50 and the construction of national identity received official government sanction. Mackey's analysis does not of course stop with any conclusion that the pedagogy of commemoration in Canada through those specific events was straightforward, or predictive of all forms of commemoration in Canada. I foreground Mackey's project as I relate my own queries of the Saskatchewan Centennial to a broader range of investigations regarding commemoration and nostalgia in Canada because there are very direct moments on the pages of this text, as there have been throughout the development of this project, when I have related my arguments about racialized space and subjectivity in particular to Mackey's investigation. Mackey's account of the processes through which the Canada 125 celebrations and the related developments in national multicultural policies contributed to the securing of "dominant culture"51 and normative subject-citizen formations such as "Canadian-Canadians" very much informs my own analysis. Mackey's attention to this formation proceeding through

"the subtle and mobile powers of liberal inclusionary forms of national imagining and national culture"52 has contributed much to my own alertness to effects of the positive

49 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 71. 50 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 71. 51 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. xvi. 52 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 5. 76 collective feelings mobilized through inclusionary imaginings of Saskatchewan, for example in the often repeated refrain of the Centennial that "We are many and we are one, and we love this place, Saskatchewan."53

I am aware, and hope that my writing reflects that "one must be careful, of course, when speaking about dominant or official national cultures and identities."54 Gary

Miedma words that caution in an introduction to his queries about Canada's 100th anniversary celebrations and events at the Universal and World Exhibition, Expo 67, also held in Canada that year. Such caution reinforces the point I made early in Chapter One about there being no singular Canadian national imaginary and relatedly in this chapter that Saskatchewan is not a singular imaginary in Canada. To posit a dominant culture or nationally normative practices and imaginings as operative in and bolstered by commemorations of, in my case, Saskatchewan as a form of national space is not to make a totalizing claim about Canada or its cultures. As does Miedma, I recognize that with such caution there are still reasons to proceed. I do align my inquiry with those into

Canadian national events at least in part because much is made of the Centennial as anniversary to Saskatchewan's entry "into Canada" and because Saskatchewan's boundaries in Canadian national space are integral to the project's impetus. National belonging is very much an organizing practice of the Saskatchewan Centennial.

In regard to Canadian pedagogies of national belonging enacted through historical commemoration, there are many investigations that confirm practices of pedagogical design - not restricted to national or provincial anniversaries. Examples I identify here are among those that explicitly address the intents to instruct through commemorating

53 Garchinski, "Saskatchewan, We Love this Place." Lyrics of the official Centennial song. 54 Gary R. Miedma, For Canada's Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005, p. 8. varied "past" national occurrences. Robert Cupido's study of the 1927 celebrations of

Canada's 60 anniversary of Confederation stresses the "didactic" intent of historical re-

enactments and pageants in the national commemoration of Confederation.55 Elizabeth

Furniss locates such pedagogies in three domains of public history celebrating "pioneer"

and "frontier" life in Williams Lake, British Columbia - school curriculum, popular historical literature, and public museums.56 In Katarzyna Rukszto's analyses of the

learning prompted through the Heritage Minutes broadcasts, from which I have already

drawn in identifying a conceptual framework for memory and commemorations in the previous chapter, Rukszto describes how the broadcast narratives close off "the possibility of belonging in non-nationalist terms,"57 and how a nationalist agenda in the

production of the Minutes "disallows critical, or even complex, representations of

Canadian identity, the Canadian past, or the Canadian state."58 Effects of such terms of

the nation in the Minutes, Rukszto demonstrates, include a construction of national unity through depicting an "Anglo-French symbolic alliance as the founding presence in

Canada" in which "racialized groups are depicted for symbolic value."59 The forms of

national pedagogy frequent in commemorative activity such as this produce normative

and narrow domains of national belonging.

In Frits Pannekoek's critique of the management of national historic sites, he

argues that the management of learning and national identity through these sites is held in

a "vice-like grip"60 of bureaucracies "materially invested in the status quo"61 and in

55 Cupido, "Appropriating the Past," p. 161. 56 Furniss, The Burden of History, p. 54. 57 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 110. 58 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 111. 59 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 140. 60 Frits Pannekoek, "Who Matters? Public History and the Invention of the Canadian Past," Acadiensis Vol. 29, No. 2,2000, p. 208. 78

"manufacturing a 'useful' past."62 Pannekoek examines how defenses of such management of learning and identity in officially sanctioned commemorative practice claim to resist the specter of "political correctness,"63 a claim that Mackey also explores at some length in her account of ways that Canada 125 celebrations "strategically design[ed] symbols to distance commemoration from politics."64 This notion of

"politics" in the management of Canada 125 included an "implicit construction of multiculturalism as political, and therefore not of the real Canadian people;"65 stated attempts to avoid controversy infused intents of the national commemoration to be

"apolitical."

My investigation of 2005 established as an occasion to commemorate

Saskatchewan shares attention to sanctioned practices of Centennial activity, and to managed productions that form and reiterate a de-politicized and normative Canadian national belonging. The insights I seek and draw from this investigation, however, are also quite particular to how Saskatchewan "belongs in" Canada. As I discussed in the preface and introductory chapter, the work of this thesis is of course specific to opportunities in 2005 constructed as a moment in Saskatchewan's makings and remakings as province in Canada. The opportunity to glean insights about nation, commemoration, and the particular pedagogies of belonging activated through both the

Saskatchewan and the Alberta Centennials of 2005 certainly prompts inquiries and attention beyond the shape of the project I engage here.

Pannekoek, "Who Matters?" p. 213. Pannekoek, "Who Matters?" p. 207. Pannekoek, "Who Matters?" p. 208. Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 122. Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 122. Emphases in the original. 79

Researchers at the University of Alberta are undertaking an analysis and account of practices in the Alberta Centennial celebrations that enact disavowals of colonial violences past and present. Amber Dean, Kara Granzow, and Sharon Rosenberg juxtapose the celebratory Alberta Centennial discourse with present Aboriginal activism to halt incursions on Aboriginal land, and with reports of violent deaths and disappearances of Aboriginal women.66 Their inquiries ask how "an admonishment to remember the past and a refusal of its legacies" are connected, and how they might actually work in support of each other.67 They argue for an "opening" of discursive practices, toward incorporating not only acknowledgements of colonialism's historical legacy, which they do find in commemorative planning, but also "the contemporary inheritance of colonialism" manifested through the ongoing violences that they juxtapose with the celebratory discourse.68 This study proposes that the Alberta centennial might productively have been construed differently, "as a moment provoking uncertainty" rather than one celebrating unity and pride.69

At the 2007 Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities, hosted at the University of Saskatchewan, the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS) organized a panel discussion in response to the simultaneity of the Alberta, and the Saskatchewan,

Centennials. This was also framed in relation to the host University itself marking its own declared Centennial in 2007. One of the presenters, Lynne Bell, introduced her input with reference to the "serial Centennial fever" generated by not only the provincial

66 Amber Dean, Kara Granzow, and Sharon Rosenberg, "Encounters with Alberta's Centennial Celebrations: Juxtapositions for the Present." Unpublished. Paper supported by SSHRC Standard Research Grant, "Opening the Present to the Violently Dead," 2007. 67 Dean, Granzow, and Rosenberg, "Encounters with Alberta's Centennial Celebrations," p. 2. 68 Dean, Granzow, and Rosenberg, "Encounters with Alberta's Centennial Celebrations," p. 2. 69 Dean, Granzow, and Rosenberg, "Encounters with Alberta's Centennial Celebrations," p. 9. 80 anniversaries but also associated anniversaries marked for public institutions, cities and towns in Saskatchewan and Alberta in years proximate to 2005, such as that of the

University of Saskatchewan that year. The panel took up the fervour of these many

Centennial commemorations as opportunity to unsettle and interrupt colonial reiterations of place and identity - Lynne Bell through "mapping visual projects that situate themselves as counter memory," and the two other presenters Gloria Filax and Lorelei

Hanson through a critique of discursive productions of Albertan identity.70 In relation to these responses to what the session identified as a current "culture of commemorations" in the provinces, my inquiries about how Saskatchewan "belongs" in Canada are similarly directed toward unsettling and disrupting this commemorative culture; and, at the same time seizing it as opportunity for insight into the shapes of national belonging and nation-building inscribed in Saskatchewan as continuous space in the nation.

In this project, such insights are directly related to interpretations of nostalgia as an effect of and affect in Saskatchewan commemorations, and as a construct itself.

Informed in particular by Sara Ahmed's approach to circulations of affect, I interpret attachments of time to space, attachments to Saskatchewan, and of Saskatchewan to naturalized configurations of space, subjectivity, and the past. Throughout my account of

Centennial moments, I situate nostalgia as an explanatory construct and as a query I make regarding what holds Saskatchewan as a perpetual place in national imaginings and remembrances and in many ways as a mediating and reconciliatory Canadian space.

"Cultures of Commemoration" panel. 1 June 2007 University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Presenters: Lynne Bell, Gloria Filax, and Lorelei Hanson. 81

I relate my own questions to other queries and conclusions about nostalgia as an explanation for the intractability and endurance71 of spatialized knowledges and notions of Canadian belonging. For example, Furniss describes ways that Canadian rural communities are "portrayed as if frozen in history,"72 and Rukszto identifies the appeal of

"the security of a nostalgic past"73 in the management of national identity through

Heritage Minutes narrations. In a Saskatchewan context, Alison Calder critiques a reliance on an "ideal rural past"74 and notions that "the prairie person exists in nature, without thought"75 in some constructions of prairie identity. Calder particularly traces nostalgia and "ossified" definitions of prairie76 in the popularized writings of Sharon

Butala, a prolific fiction, and non-fiction, writer in Saskatchewan. In one of her articles,

Butala invokes her personal ability "to write it down exactly as it was; this place I write

77 about does not feel invented to we." Butala explicitly authorizes herself to write with authenticity because she walks through wheat fields, and is specifically making this claim against attempts to investigate processes of constructing place and identity in

Saskatchewan, for example in Aritha van Herk's call to question invented history, as in the work cited in the section previous.

An extended review of nostalgia and of idealizing past and naturalized essences of place and person in a Canadian space that informs my query is in Ian McKay's study, The

Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth Century Nova

I use the words deliberately to refer again to Ahmed's question regarding "why are relations of power so intractable and enduring?" Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 12, as cited in Chapter One. 72 Furniss, The Burden of History, p. 83. 73 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 66. 74 Calder, "Who's from the Prairie," p. 92. 75 Calder, "Who's from the Prairie," p. 97. 76 Calder, "Who's from the Prairie," p. 97. 77 Sharon Butala, "The Reality of the Flesh," in Writing Saskatchewan, p.98. Emphasis in original. 82

Scotia. McKay attends to folklore and handicraft "revivals" in early twentieth century

Nova Scotia to describe productions of "the Folk" as a category of Nova Scotians represented as bearing the ancient and authentic, pastoral, nature of the region. He contests the relations of power that the quest for an authentic original essence attempts to secure,79 revealing this construction of "the Folk" as a "powerful obstacle to the formation of a counter-hegemonic cultural politics."80 The elusive presence of the Folk as the bearers of the essence of Nova Scotia, and in some sense as the origins of the place, sustained the conditions for imagining the province as that kind of place where human industry and society can be a de-politicized part of the landscape - a landscape somewhere in between "uninhabited" wilderness, and modern urban industrialism and decay. McKay argues that a geography of Innocence and constructions of the Folk as an essence of that geography imagines a space set apart from social systems and practices productive of consumer culture, technology, and urban life. This representation of the

Folk dismisses the "complicated people with politics, histories, sexualities, hopes, despairs, and futures"81 and obscures the actual impacts of a capitalist economy and industrialism and the forms of participation and resistance of the actual complicated people.

McKay's investigation also directly confronts resistance to how such a critique disturbs what is reiterated as a seemingly innocuous nostalgic hold on this framework of

Nova Scotian identity when he writes:

Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. 79 McKay, The Quest of the Folk, p. 249. 80 McKay, The Quest of the Folk, p. 306. 81 McKay, The Quest of the Folk, p. 109. 83

There is nothing wrong with the widespread use of the Folk motif in regional advertising, in the thinking of the Department of Fisheries, or in regional culture generally, if one accepts the premise that there is nothing wrong about the structure of power. At least for those not excluded from the Folk at the outset, the subject-position does "work" to construct a sense of identity. There is no reason to go beyond it if one believes that Nova Scotian history has concluded with the Nova Scotia Folk enjoying a relaxed and friendly way of life. One would attempt to dislodge the concept only if one were also anxious to contest the relations of power it helps to secure.82

Dislodging relations of power attached to naturalized and purportedly innocuous subject- positions is a challenge I confront in my disruptions of nostalgic attachments to

Saskatchewan. With McKay, I situate my attempts to do so as "in the end political and ethical."83

My concern in this research is, at heart, also pedagogical. I conceive of my work as a contribution to anti-colonial pedagogy and resistance in Canada and in particular to studying ways that nationhood and white normativity are connected and reinforced through cherished notions of identity and place. I point, through my attention to the

Saskatchewan Centennial, not only to what holds such notions in place but also, I hope, toward movement and possibility. In the following three chapters, I interpret moments in the Centennial and argue for dislodging some powerful fictions that would perpetuate a static shape to how Saskatchewan "belongs" in Canada, and who "belongs" in

Saskatchewan.

McKay, The Quest of the Folk, p. 295. Both emphases added. McKay, The Quest of the Folk, p. 295. Chapter Three: Saskatchewan as a Place

That is, the sites/citations of straggle indicate that traditional geographies and their attendant hierarchical categories of humanness cannot do the emancipatory work some subjects demand.

Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

Quilt and Buffalo Quilt and Buffalo is the name given to a performance in the Lieutenant

Governor's Celebration of the Arts Centennial Gala.1 Visually, images projected and moving on the back screen of the Gala stage are aerial views of fields and trees, a herd of buffalo running on an open field, large handwritten signatures of visual artists superimposed on images from their work, clouds and sky, wheat. Simultaneously, musicians perform an orchestral piece composed for the Gala and bearing the name Quilt and Buffalo. The visual video finale involves a close up image of a buffalo standing in grass; as the music crescendos, the animal turns in the direction of the camera/viewers and the camera zooms in to the eye of the buffalo bearing a small image that enlarges to the size of the screen: through the eye of the buffalo, an image of young children outdoors, painting, laughing and talking.

This visual and musical performance in the Gala program follows immediately after the arrival of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Phillip and the Lieutenant Governor, accompanied by fanfare, God Save the Queen, and a rendition of O Canada which concludes in a rousing and emotive repetitious singing of the word "Saskatchewan!" and

"my loveL.mon amour!"

Centennial moments that I consider in this study evoke Saskatchewan as a knowable and known place. In this chapter, I address how such evocations of place

1 Held in Saskatoon, May 2005. Hereafter, references to "the Gala" indicate this event.

84 85 function in these moments to reveal and conceal binding notions of geographic possibility. I draw particularly from the theorizing about space that I introduced in

Chapter One to describe my reading/viewing of Centennial moments that characterize

Saskatchewan as place. In my description above of the projected buffalo, the landscape images, the stylized entrance of people positioned as royalty, the musical and lyrical accompaniments and anthems, and the images of laughing talking and painting children, I intend to convey how encountering place, space, and geography in Centennial tellings of

Saskatchewan is a simultaneous encounter with many dimensions of lived and imagined humanness. Place, space, and geography are not one-dimensional phenomena; they are comprised of bodies and voices (animal and human), ideas of nation and love/amour, histories and iconographies, artwork, perspective, words and images as much as of soil and architecture. As I write in this chapter an interpretation of Saskatchewan as place in the Centennial, I draw from descriptive references to land in textual commemorations, from visual images of landscape and terrain such as those projected on the staged screen of the Gala, fromm y direct queries of interview participants about decisions they made to represent Saskatchewan as place; and I draw from my observations of the entrance of a

Queen, of the projected gaze of a buffalo and from many elements of Centennial moments that may not in an immediate way seem geographic or spatial. That they are indeed immediately and always so is evident through the ongoing work in many forums of activism, scholarship, art and labour that repeatedly trace and tell how much of our social relations and selves are constituted as a geographic story.

What distinguishes the data and analysis of this chapter from the two that follow

is a focus on the where of the Saskatchewan encountered in Centennial moments. This focus is located in the queries I make of the images, encounters and text. Where is

Saskatchewan imagined to be in these moments? What do Centennial depictions and productions of Saskatchewan as a site/locale reveal about emancipatory or oppressive

social relations and possibilities? How is Saskatchewan located or not located in a broader terrain? In what ways is the global or transnational visualized, or concealed, through Saskatchewan's place in Centennial moments?

The next section of this chapter elaborates the stance of geography as a question, with specific reference to the research questions and intent of this project and as an introduction to the particular data used in this chapter. The remainder of the chapter describes and interprets textual, enacted and imaged geographies of Saskatchewan such

as staged performances, murals, museum exhibits, commemorative speeches, website

images, and textual news reports related to Centennial commemoration.

Geography is a Question

I write and theorize space and place through the materials and encounters

generated in my study of the Centennial as an interdisciplinary practice. This reading of the "where" in Centennial imaginings of Saskatchewan is one part of tracing contours of

questionability in these commemorations, for the purpose of disrupting racialized and

colonial practices. I particularly align my analysis here with work that contends

geography is a question. For example, Katherine McKittrick, cited in the epigraph to this

chapter, writes of ways that human geographies are made alterable, and how the

stability of "hierarchical categories of humanness"3 is unbound through this alterability

2 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. xxxi. 3 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, p. xxxi. 87 and through varied geographic tellings. In McKittrick's text, black women's geographies reveal how traditional or "transparent and knowable"4 geographies are undone. I write about a Centennial commemorative geographic telling, and write to resist representing stabilities in how Saskatchewan is characterized as place or terrain or lived locale. There are at least two primary considerations in my approach to writing a questionable geography for the purposes of this study.

Firstly, I do not assume that Saskatchewan is a shared geographic story or experience. I assume that it is not. This includes an assumption that I do not share the same story with readers of this text or with viewers, participants in or organizers of the

Centennial moments I consider here. The assumption is fundamental to interpreting the spatial production of racial subjectivities, as well as to the stance that there is no singular

Saskatchewan imaginary either at play in these materials or against which any of the commemorations assert a Saskatchewan geography. Early on in my writing for this project, I determined explicitly that I did not want my text to be like or, in a visceral way, to evoke "an orange sunset or blue sky or yellow field or old barn when it is taken off the shelf."5 In taking a critical stance to dominant practices of place-marking and geography, notably that of colonial renderings of this province in Canada, I did not want my text to take any fixed notions or evocations of Saskatchewan as a starting place. In this text, I write Saskatchewan as heterogeneous and questionable. Secondly, how to convey this in

4 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, p. xiii. She elaborates, "Consequently, if there is a push to forge a conceptual connection between material or concrete spaces, language, and subjectivity, openings are made possible for envisioning an interpretive alterable world, rather than a transparent and knowable world." From my thesis writing notes in 2004. 88 tangible terms is a question that threads through the writing of this chapter itself. I present this heterogeneity and questionability as both commitment and question.6

I write these interpretations of place7 and its binding and unbinding through particular Centennial moments and in so doing I produce a kind of gaze myself. What is the form and effect of that gaze? It is not the same as that of, or imagined as, the buffalo whose projected gaze shaped the Gala performance described above, and I do not claim to know the gaze of buffalo as I write. I do know that there are such views of this landscape and its presents and pasts - views experienced by real and animate buffalo, as well as a constructed/imagined gaze of these animals caught in a history and geography of displacement. Buffalo are often invoked, as in that staged moment, as witnesses to changes in the place bound as Saskatchewan, and their gaze constructed as testament to loss and sometimes to reclamation. In the analysis I construct through a presentation of

Centennial moments here, I offer a look/gaze/interpretation of how Saskatchewan's commemoration as a place is bound in powerful and racialized fictions. I present this as a discursive analysis that is both textual and visual, engages with other gazes animate and

6 In the course of developing this thesis, I was intrigued to learn the coincidence of Saskatchewan's Centennial year with that of a sometimes-called 2005 World Year of Physics. This was set to mark the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's publication of several of his most influential discoveries, particularly regarding his theory of special relativity. This contemporary coincidence suggests that in the summer and fall of 1905, at the same time as papers were being signed and borders fixedan d drawn around what was to be named Saskatchewan, Albert Einstein in Europe was undoing centuries of certainty (certainty in some circles) about time and space as fixedan d stable. His publications and their reception led to 1905's commemoration as the "miracle year of science." See www.phvsics2005.org, (Last viewed 1 March 2008.) 7 Place and space are related concepts/inquiries in the queries I make and in my analysis of this chapter. Many distinctions are made between the two; one that I have found helpful in thinking through this analysis is that provided by W.J.T. Mitchell in the preface to: Landscape and Power, Second Edition, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Mitchell describes space, place, and landscape as "a dialectical structure" (p. x). Mitchell wants to avoid either a chronological ordering or rigid identifying of the terms, offering the distinction of "place [as] a specific location, a space [as] a 'practiced place,' a site activated by movements, actions, narratives, and signs, and a landscape [as] that site encountered as image or 'sight.'"(p. x) but setting out consider a topic for discussion "(understood literally as place)" through "a process of thinking space/place/landscape as a unified problem and a dialectical process." (p. xi). 89 imagined, and in this chapter engages directly with considerations of geography and the boundaries of place.

In the next section, I describe how attempts to secure an unbound place occur in specific Centennial moments.

Centennial Moments that Place Saskatchewan

The Quilt and Buffalo production in the Gala is one example of a Centennial moment I consider in queries about Saskatchewan as place. Much occurs in all of these moments, beyond and exceeding what I account for here. In this telling, I describe

Saskatchewan as a place fixed as middle landscape, as a terrain of disharmony and displacement, on the map of a nation, and as place with a future. While not the limit of the interpretive repertoire in discourse of Saskatchewan as place, these themes emerged repeatedly and are revealing of how racialized space within Saskatchewan and of

Saskatchewan in Canada is effectively and affectively reiterated through the Centennial.

These descriptions draw from words in text such as commemorative newspapers, song lyrics or website captions, from staged movements of people and image across stages or fixed poses of people and image in exhibition space, fromnote s composed in my own moments of participation and observation at particular events and exhibitions.

Middle Landscape

Centennial commemorations of Saskatchewan etch its place in national imaginings and local memory. Repeatedly, including in press about the two Canadian

Centennials in 2005, this Saskatchewan is personified as a place and landscape in the 90

o nation and in "its own" memory. With "oh-so-friendly communities," a propensity toward self-deprecation that signals "a major league inferiority complex" and "fragile ego,"9 a backwards glancing stupor that envisions getting back to the past as "our idea of nirvana,"10 and endearing qualities as "heart" or "heartland" of the nation, Saskatchewan is a place with a personality. The attributes of this personality appear to be read right off the landscape, derived from other text, or conjured from previous incantations (e.g.,

Saskatchewan as heartland of the nation, or as a prairie heart stretching all the way to the next horizon11 is so in part by continual return to and repetition of the metaphor). The place is a personality, and vice versa.

In my reading of Centennial moments that place Saskatchewan as middle landscape, these personality attributes feature as elements of how many Centennial productions make use of, and recreate, a geographic story of Saskatchewan as rural - and of rural as a distinction within early 21st century global modernities. The celebrations of prairie heart and the sometimes impatient, sometimes laudatory, tellings of Saskatchewan as self-deprecating or backward-looking mobilize notions of the rural/agrarian/agricultural as contrary or oppositional to forms of community imagined

(and sometimes also personified) as elsewhere. One specific elsewhere that features prominently in Centennial tellings is the neighboring province of Alberta; and I will return to that specific comparison later in this section, and again in later chapters. The telling of Saskatchewan's rural character as counter to a specified or unspecified

8 Don Martin, "No Alberta Envy in Saskatchewan Series: Canada's Superprovince," Calgary Herald, 9 September 2005, p. A3. 9 Martin, "No Alberta Envy in Saskatchewan," p. A3. 10 University of Regina President David Barnard quoted in Don Martin, "Sleeping Next to the Elephant: How the Nation Views Alberta," National Post, 9 September 2005, p. A6. 11 Ralph Goodale, Speech: Wascana Park, Regina, Saskatchewan, 2 September 2005. 91 elsewhere reveals ways that Centennial moments serve to fix Saskatchewan as a mediating space in relation to these elsewheres. I read this as a move toward neutralizing the geographic story, in ways that I will elaborate in what follows. My reading of this neutrality is particularly informed by the notion of "middle landscape" articulated by Leo

Marx, and that middle landscape notion in relation to racialized spatial practices of invader-settler society.12 The rural or agrarian as contrary and oppositional is a move analyzed extensively by Marx in his early 1960s critique of "pastoral ideals" in 19th century America. He describes how this idealization draws a mediating landscape into the American national story. I provide a brief summary of Marx's account, toward elucidating commemorations of Saskatchewan as middle space in a Canadian geographic and national story.

In The Machine in the Garden, Marx describes a "landscape of reconciliation, a mild, agricultural, semi-primitive terrain"13 as an interpretive stance featured in the production of texts "trying to persuade European friends and relatives to come over"14 in the early days of American colonial settlement. Marx describes how this attribution of a mediating character to American rural life relied upon conceptions of cities and of wilderness within the trope of an expanding Euro American civilization into and through what was imagined as "uncultivated primitivism."15 This middle landscape is formed within but tempers what are imagined as the extremities of European civilization and industrialism and is invigorated by but tames what figures in these accounts as

"wilderness," providing a "moral position perfectly represented by the image of a rural

12 Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964 / 2000. 13 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 87. 14 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 87. 15 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, check ref. 92 order, neither wild nor urban, as the setting of man's best hope."16 Marx cites one early

American writer, Robert Beverly, "one of the first colonial writers whose work reveals the affinity between the conditions of life in America and the pastoral ideal" as one example of how the middle landscape was mobilized within the colonial imagination.

This reconciliatory image situates American agrarianism as an embodiment of this

"middle state" of "the desirable, or at any rate the best attainable, human condition"18 in ways that Marx illustrates have been productive of political, artistic and economic manipulations of desire to retreat or to be sheltered from the countered extremities of city or wilderness.

The natural and naturalizing landscape Marx introduces in his account resembles

Saskatchewan in displays and narrations of its geography in the 2005 commemorations.

Saskatchewan as a natural and neutral place that counters presumed extremities of elsewhere is possible in narrative and commemorative form as a result of geographic practices and histories of colonial invasion, settlement and resistance to it. The natural attributes, seemingly read right off the landscape, are embedded in colonial geography and in the history and workings of the white settler projects of Canada. In the examples with which I began this section, textual personifications of a province with an inferiority complex and an ever expansive heart portray Saskatchewan as a natural mediating character. This character is contrived from histories and geographies that place

Saskatchewan on a particular map. The personifications of a mediating character are not only attributed to landscape, they are also attributed to the "people" of Saskatchewan, and

16 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 101. 17 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 75. Marx refers to Beverly's History and Present State of Virginia written in 1705. 18 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 88. 93

I will explore this in the next chapter. Here I write about the place of Saskatchewan personified as a particular character, and draw on Marx's notion of middle landscape to discuss ways that these characterizations and other attributions of mediating rurality figure in fixed and colonial renderings of a Saskatchewan geographic story.

Centennial moments to which I point feature occurrences of Saskatchewan geography, sometimes in a rather fleeting or oblique manner, such as a reference to the province's ego. In an article in the Moose Jaw Times Herald, for example, the writer celebrates Centennial commemorations and simultaneously critiques the emphasis in some Centennial advertising on the fact that some people choose to stay in the province instead of moving out. The writer of the newspaper account muses on this ego fragility, asking, "why else would a province celebrate the fact that people chose not to leave it if did not have a major league inferiority complex?"19 In this instance, the account chastises "the government's centennial advertising"20 for this emphasis, in a call for a more prideful celebration than the advertising in question invokes. The geography in this chastisement is visible in relation to repeated occurrences of celebrated mediocrity, and critiques of such. This writer makes a distinction between pride and the form of the celebrations to which he responds. In other moments, the choice of Saskatchewan over the many advantages/temptations/differences of elsewhere takes the form o/pride. This prideful or chastised attribute of mediocrity in comparison to "elsewhere" is geographic in the ways that these attributions collude with varying Centennial moments that invoke

Saskatchewan as place, and with linked practices inscribing Saskatchewan within and as

Canada's imagined rural heritage.

19 Jason Small, "Saskatchewan Should Lose its Inferiority Complex," Moose Jaw Times Herald 22 September 2005, p. 4. 20 Small, "Saskatchewan Should Lose its Inferiority Complex," p. 4. 94

Saskatchewan Premier Lome Calvert, speaker at many Centennial events and therefore prominent in the making of Centennial moments, participated repetitively in marking Saskatchewan's rural character. On many occasions, the premier mapped

Saskatchewan as "home to 100,000 lakes, a forest larger than the nation of Germany and almost half the farm and pastureland in Canada."21 Calvert's map in these speeches also includes Saskatchewan as industry, innovation, and city; emphases vary, depending on the occasion, but his map is not exclusively rural. Not exclusively, but characteristically so, in ways that his repetitions draw on Saskatchewan as unique and as remarkable for its prairie sunsets, resources of land (and minerals beneath the prairies and forests) and naturally productive of cooperative inclinations and institutions, for example:

To meet the challenges, we have become a co-operative people ... as a practical approach to life in this land, we built marketing and production co-operatives, publicly owned utilities, and public services in health and education.22

And elsewhere:

The co-operative principle of respecting individual initiative while recognizing that we can do more together than we can alone is central to the fabric of this province...23

Saskatchewan in these moments is not rural such that all of its 2005 activities and industries are dedicated to agricultural endeavour, nor that all its populace resides in non- urban settings. Calvert does not make this claim, and he frequently and specifically states otherwise:

We are from the forest, from the parklands, and from the prairie. We are rural and we are urban. We are First Nations and Metis and the descendants of immigrant pioneers.24

21 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Bell Ringing, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 January 2005. 22 Lome Calvert, Speech: Diplomatic Forum, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 October 2004. 23 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 24 January 2005. 24 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 24 January 2005. 95

Rather, Calvert places Saskatchewan as rural by way of linking his characterizations of the province to a continuous landscape upon which historical changes occur. It is continuous in that the premier's repetitions of a naturally cooperative fabric, crafted from the challenges of life on the land, require/call forth no explanation in the moments of these invocations; the landscape is assumed as enduring.25 And it is a landscape in the ways that sunsets and prairies, lakes, forest and farmland feature as naturally linked to the

Saskatchewan he characterizes. He speaks it as easy associations, as a known and knowable place that he invokes. Another of his favored repetitions is "Saskatchewan: hard to spell, and easy to draw,"26 sometimes acknowledging that the "hard to spell" name comes from Cree language and a word describing the flow of water. The appropriation of Aboriginal language and the history that provincial naming represents is glossed over in the humorous intent of Calvert's repeated phrase.27

In the premier's speeches, he cites/sites the continuous landscape of

Saskatchewan to tell a set of stories about the province in 2005, at this marking of a "new century." These are stories about institutions and people who have made "contributions" to the province, country and world. They are stories about how just being a province

This resembles the "transparent space" that McKittrick writes about. For example, p. xv "that the external world is readily knowable and not in need of evaluation, that what we see is true." Or, page 6: "While transparent space is a view, or perspective (what we see is knowable, readily decipherable), governing social desires continually bolster its seemingly self-evident characteristics." She cites Lefebvre, and also Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose on "transparent space." 26 For example, Lome Calvert, Speech: Diplomatic Forum, 1 October 2004. 27 This is a phrase that does not originate with him. It is featured on various styles of t-shirts, some that circulated prior to the Centennial. 28 The linking of those words comes from McKittrick. 29 For example, in his speech during the Centennial Launch held in Yorkton in September 2004, his remarks note, "We are known for our Rider pride. We are known for giving this nation the gift of Medicare. We are known for Corner Gas. We are known for the nation's largest scientific project, now under construction, nearing completion, the Synchrotron in Saskatoon. We are known across the country because of Yorkton as the Last Cattle Frontier." In a later speech to a Centennial Summit in January of 2005, he repeats a similar refrain, adding other examples, and concluding with, "I could go on and on, for 96 for 100 years marks some kind of collective accomplishment. They are the speeches of a premier speaking in moments to make the provincial Centennial a marking of

"Saskatchewan." The newspaper accounts that herald particular characteristics of

Saskatchewan Centennial celebrations - in comparison to Alberta's celebrations - or just as abundant notes of evidence for Saskatchewan's particular and peculiar character of small-town friendliness and Rider-pride-infused commitment to home and community do a similar citing/siting of landscape. These are recurrent moves that place

Saskatchewan somewhere in between pre-history/wilderness/primitive land and forms of human social and economic life characterized as more decidedly modern/urban/ industrial.

Such a move appears also as an aspect of Saskatchewan comparisons with

Alberta, comparisons that appear in the news media, conversation, colloquial humor of the provinces and nation not just in relation to the 2005 commemorations, but which received more prominence given the coincidence of the two provincial Centennials.

Some examples from a Calgary Herald article:

They're both 100-year-old Prairie provinces. Here endeth the similarities. The border between Alberta and Saskatchewan may only be visible on maps, but the societal, cultural and political divides are canyons.31

And

Over time, the oil bonanza attracted the go-west go-getters to Alberta, the kids determined to put their muscles to work, the hot graduates seeking fast promotions in lucrative careers, the socialites in search of a party town, the risk takers with dollar signs in their eyes. Saskatchewan, by contrast, kept the homebodies.

goodness sakes, we invented the automated teller, we invented the Girl Guide cookie and we invented Dog River!" (Dog River is the name of the fictional Saskatchewan town in the sitcom Corner Gas.) 30 The Saskatchewan Roughriders are a community-owned franchise of the Canadian Football League. 31 Martin, "No Alberta Envy in Saskatchewan," p. A3. 97

If so, that would explain why everybody everywhere articulates the Saskatchewan advantage as its oh-so-friendly communities while the Alberta advantage is marketed as low taxes and a skilled workforce.32 There are many elements to the refrain that Saskatchewan is not Alberta. The differences feature in comparisons between the events of the two Centennial celebrations, and also in some discussion about what might have happened if the two provinces had been one instead of two since 1905.33 The contrasts between social and political economies and between the character of Centennial celebrations, and the musing about the arbitrariness of the border, function together to place Saskatchewan as the middle landscape; relatedly, these contrasts place Alberta as signifier of a differently, and perhaps more, advanced modernity.

The premier's "map," the personifications of Saskatchewan as self-deprecating or modest, and the distinctions from Alberta make of Saskatchewan a place recognizably demarcated as somewhere between "uncultivated" terrain, and uber-industrialized society. This is a landscape that has mediated the "incursion of history"34 through forms of development and cultivation that deter the excesses of modernity and capitalist progress. This is a province that is "small" in the sense of it being "unseemly to effect a swagger" in its Centennial celebrations, out of character for it to turn to "bragging" rather than "simple celebration."35 It is, in such claims, a modest place.

Which is to neutralize its geographic story. The repetitions of modesty and continual placement of Saskatchewan in complex pastoral ideations36 are in the service of

32 Martin, "No Alberta Envy," p. A3. 331 will discuss this further in Chapter Five, particularly with reference to a 2005 conversation between former premiers of the two provinces. 34 Marx, The Machine in the Garden p. 21. 35 Cam Fuller, "Comedian Butt Strikes Perfect Note as a Host," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 20 May 2005, p. B2. Fuller includes these comments in an article reviewing the Centennial Gala. 36 This refers to Leo Marx's distinction between complex and sentimental pastoralism. 98 the history and geography of settler formations. Marx emphasizes, in his account of the functioning of a middle landscape in American imaginings, that this form of idealized terrain does collude with notions of "civilization" as a state laudably removed/improved from "indigeneity" or "wilderness." He is describing a terrain imbued with the traits of a

"middle state" as the best possible of human conditions. This "grand, compelling metaphor," that Marx describes, is that moral position "perfectly represented by the image of a rural order."37 Saskatchewan, in these demarcations, neither wild nor urban, is

100 years old. The site being cited in the examples above, and in multiple other

Centennial moments, has its genesis in the political makings of the so-called Autonomy

Act of 1905; and it is a settler story. The premier glosses over appropriation of

Aboriginal language in the very naming of the province; the Saskatchewan he proclaims as easy to draw is, in that humour, de-linked from the colonial appropriations of its origin. This Saskatchewan is linked to rurality and friendly communities, cooperative endeavor and a place chosen as home against the advantages and allure of elsewhere. It is a developed Saskatchewan, cultivated terrain, bracketed in a hundred year span of time; the presumed first curve of the bracket being origin as a province in 1905, and the second a demarcation between Saskatchewan now and whatever else lies beyond or elsewhere in 2005.

That bracketing marks a settler story of place. The forms of human industry and community to which the modest persona of Saskatchewan is attributed are those associated with developing Saskatchewan politically and economically as a Canadian province. The geographic story of this settler society is not a claim to what Leo Marx reads in some centuries-past EuroAmerican and European literature as a simple or

37 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 101. Cited also earlier, in footnote 15, this chapter. sentimental pastoralism. The simple and sentimental he identifies would be the idea of a rural idyll that is completely and decidedly removed from anything urban or industrial.

Saskatchewan's rurality is not that idyll; and nor is the complex pastoralism of Marx's

"middle landscape" which I propose Saskatchewan resembles. This complexity, and its earlier American representations, is that with which Marx contends throughout his text; by way of introduction, and to distinguish complex pastoralism from the sentimental,

Marx describes literary works that "qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture."39 In the realm of the literary, Marx points to works that bring in "the plight of a dispossessed herdsman" or

"the sound of a locomotive in the woods" to juxtapose "complicated order[s] of experience" with the pastoral idyll.40 Such juxtapositions are in Marx's account a glimpse of the very problem of "the machine in the landscape" to which his book title refers: "[I]t is industrialization, represented by images of machine technology, that provides the counterforce in the American archetype of the pastoral design."41

Throughout his text, and in ways that inform my analysis of Saskatchewan as mediating and moderate terrain in Canadian modernity, Marx traces attempts to reconcile

"industrialization" with "pastoral" America throughout the late nineteenth century through to the time of his writing mid-twentieth century. Repeatedly, these attempts are

38 For example, his reading of Virgil's poetry, pp. 20ff. He also locates this form in 20th century American popular culture. 9 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 25. 40 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 25. 41 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 26. There are, he reports, "endless reverberations" in American literature of "intrusions" on the idyll (pp. 15-16). 100 to establish "the industrial landscape [as] pastoralized,"42 and to proclaim a position of middle state.

This Saskatchewan settler geographic story bracketed in the 100 years of 1905-

2005 includes the technology, politics and commerce that turn soil and forest and waterways into farms, towns, railway lines, schools and mines and money. It remains rural through keeping the community and cooperative somehow central and attached to agricultural community origins, but it is not out of touch with/untouched by North

American modernity, as the premier's remarks repeatedly celebrate ("for goodness sakes, we invented the automated teller.. ,").43 The Saskatchewan settler geographic story is in these terms a version of that middle, mediating, state. The geographic story that is neutralized in this moderate modernity is how the turn to farm town railway school mine, and money, was and is a colonial turn in all the violence of that endeavor.

The premier's refrain that "we are First Nations and Metis and the descendants of immigrant pioneers"44 does reference a geography of colonialism in Saskatchewan but in his speaking deflects attention from the specifics of history in and among those subject positions. This is a refrain, and a deflection, that occurs in many Centennial moments and is an effect of attempts to conceal and naturalize the fact of colonialism and to deflect historical and political questions about relationships between Aboriginal, Metis and

"immigrant pioneers."45 The very different conditions of presence among Aboriginal,

42 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 356. In the specific example that forms the context for this quote, Marx describes a painting by Charles Sheeler titled "American Landscape," in which Marx sees that a "bleak vista conveys a strangely soft, tender feeling." The image available online at http://www.artchive.eom/artchive/S/sheeler/americanJandscape.jpg.html. (Last viewed 8 February 2008.) 43 See footnote 29, this chapter. 44 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, 24 January 2005. 45 Such deflections are discussed, for example, in Shari M. Huhnsdorf, "Nanook and His Contemporaries: Traveling with the Eskimos, 1897-1941," in Shari M. Huhnsdorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 84. Huhnsdorf describes such 101

Metis and the multiple diverse immigrant histories in Saskatchewan are glossed over in the repeated sequence of shared space in the present, as voiced by Calvert, and as we shall see later in other repeated scenarios of the Centennial. The presumed invisibility or negligibility of historical conditions that shape and stratify current encounter is very much at the heart of the racialization of space and its production of subject distinctions.

The premier's refrain invokes identification with shared space; this mediating terrain of the cooperatives-producing, automated-teller-inventing Saskatchewan is presumed as shared contemporary home for the distinct groups he names. Such "sameness" is, in invader-settler Canadian space, a racialized condition46 of encounter that disavows violent histories and varied conditions of contemporary difference; and it is by implication a disavowal of race as present in the encounter. The middle landscape identifications of Saskatchewan repeat this disavowal when this middle state is claimed, through self-deprecating personifications of a modest landscape or claims of contrast to imagined less moderate elsewheres, in ways that presume equivalent and homogenous identifications for all in and of Saskatchewan.

The neutralizing of a geographic story in Centennial intonations of an

Aboriginal/settler/immigrant population is not consistently in the form of open disavowals of, nor insistent deflections from acknowledging, colonial violence.

Repeatedly, there are moments that name displacement of Aboriginal cultures and community, and inequities in patterns and policies of immigration. Conflicted positionalities do feature in the commemorations, and Saskatchewan is in various ways

deflection as colonial strategy in her account of filmmaking and specifically the work of Robert Peary and Robert Flaherty. 46 See for example, Gill, "The Unspeakability of Racism," p. 160, where she describes this racialized condition of sameness encoded in law and in Canadian parliamentary procedure. placed as a conflicted space. There are tellings and exhibits of a colonial geography, along with naming of conflict and struggle within and about the boundaries of

Saskatchewan. The Quilt and Buffalo piece I brought to the page at the outset of this chapter, for example, is one way Centennial moments placed settler and Aboriginal histories and geographies together on the landscape of Saskatchewan. Other moments in more pointed ways expressed elements of regret or loss in this juxtaposition. The refrain, in Calvert's phrasing and elsewhere, is not a unified chorus of "peaceful coexistence."

The next section takes up some moments in which displacement and conflict are named.

Terrain of Disharmony and Displacement

Three of the four Western Development Museum's Winning the Prairie Gamble

Centennial exhibits include an "Introduction" room that displays a painted wall mural on one side: blue sky, a river waterway, buffalo, green and golden landscape, and

Aboriginal community in the foreground.47 An adjacent wall, which is directly opposite the room's entrance, displays four mannequin figures: two standing together on the left, near the painted mural and two together on the right. Behind the four mannequins is a wall with an aerial depiction of green land and water and the words, "WINNING THE

PRAIRIE GAMBLE: THE SASKATCHEWAN STORY;" the wall space between the two sets of figures, representing the land area of Saskatchewan, becomes a projection screen for video and below them is a narrow display cupboard containing objects and images

(toward the left: treaty medal, made beaver token, 1887 watercolour painting of "Indian

Camp, Winter," promissory note, scrip; toward the right: eyeglasses, handkerchief,

47 The three are Moose Jaw, North Battleford, and Yorkton. The Saskatoon exhibit does not include this Introduction room. pocket watch, and copies of pamphlets for prospective settlers). Above the cabinet and at the foot of each mannequin figure is a placard with title and text. The placard titles place each figure, and echo the designations repeated by Calvert in the refrain discussed in the previous section. The titles are: "We are the First Peoples," "We are the Metis,"

"We are Newcomers," and "We are a New Province."

During the video, light shines on each of the figures at different points in the narrative as different voices tell a story of this "prairie gamble." Phrases from the story include "now that the buffalo are gone...," "we are traders.. .but things change," "the strangers want us to share our land...," "instead of listening, they send in troops...," "we brought only a few belongings with us...," "it was so hard, and there are thousands more like us gambling...," and "John A. MacDonald had a plan...." Some of the story is sung, and the chorus of the song repeated in the video is:

We came for life, we came for love We came for freedom - Blue sky above. Some of us have been here for thousands of years. Living through the miracles, Sometimes through the tears Saskatchewan.49

The final words spoken in the narrative, light shining on the mannequin with dark suit and bow tie standing at the far right, name the "vision and hard work" needed for

"building a nation." This male voice, with earnest exclamation cites the "plan" of John

These are some of the objects identified in the display cabinet. Field Notes: Western Development Museum (WDM) exhibits. 104

A. MacDonald to forge a nation and remarks on the signs of Saskatchewan taking a place in this plan:

The NorthWest Mounted Police brought law and order. There's a railway joining east and west. Ottawa wants to fill the prairies with farmers. And there's a lot of opportunity for everyone in the towns and villages sprouting up along the railway.... Nearly two hundred thousand people live here now. One and a half million acres are under cultivation. We owe a lot to territorial premier Haultain who convinced the government in Ottawa that we should become a province. And, today, we are the new province of SASKATCHEWAN.50

In the sung and spoken narrative of this video and display, tears are identified (though not as belonging to any specific experience or persons in the history narrated), and

Aboriginal losses and colonial violence are named. Aboriginal culture and community are represented. Stories of settler arrivals describe uncertainty and grief. The crescendo toward proclaiming the "new province of SASKATCHEWAN" marks a terrain for the losses and conflicts as the land mapped, literally, in the space between the mannequins.

This story is not directly an erasure of Aboriginal presence or of colonial invasion;

Aboriginal peoples and the violence in the settler project are narrated as part of a long inhabited geography.

The narration and display of a prairie gamble is an evocation of place; it is an inhabited place and is distinctly western Canadian and part of a colonial project - a geography shaped by conflicts, changes, loss, settlers and a continuous story of inhabited land.51 In my interview with two co-chairs of Winning the Prairie Gamble, I asked them

50 Field Notes: WDM exhibits. 51 These displays of ongoing habitation are in tension with colonial discourses of wranhabited land. I write more directly about this below. about the choice of the word "gamble" for the title of this project. I asked this after having visited the exhibits, and having familiarity with the accompanying website that was available online prior to 2005. I did already know that the "gamble" of this theme was linked to a call for "stories of survival and success"52 and that it marked

Saskatchewan as a prairie story of early settlers taking a chance at farming the land and passing their stories of risks and labour along as heritage for defining the place some decades later. I asked about the choice of the theme as a way to hear an articulation of a decision to place Saskatchewan this way. The response was that the chosen theme was arrived at "after much angst,"53 that "winning" had all the connotations they wanted,

"prairie" was questionable because it focuses on the southern part of the province

"cutting out the entire north" and "gamble" was a word that had both positive and negative connotations but there was no doubt that farming was a gamble; and farm life in

Saskatchewan was the first focus of the exhibits to be developed.54 So the phrase was settled on as an apt descriptor for the exhibition theme, recognizing that "not everybody won the prairie gamble"55 but that "as a celebration of the Centennial there was a positive spin."56

I also asked whether there were conversations about what to do with stories that didn't fit with the "winning" theme and about what sort of place they might have in the exhibits:

RB: We've not left them out. In the Saskatoon exhibit for example there is quite a sizeable part of the exhibit yet to be developed on the thirties and

52 From the Winning the Prairie Gamble website, and discussed in the preface to this thesis. 53 Interview 04 (LN) 54 Interview 04 (LN) 55 Interview 04 (RB) 56 Interview 04 (RB) 106

that is not a particularly celebratory time. And it wasn't a winning situation for many First Nations and Metis people. They had very very difficult times. So, while it's the overall title of the exhibit, everything within it is not rosy.

The curatorial decisions in this exhibit placed winning (survival and success) along with risk and loss. That description of less "rosy" stories, and the exhibit itself, place

Aboriginal experience along with identified hardships in settler experience. The

Introduction rooms of three exhibits place First Nations, Metis, and settler figures, voices, stories and artefacts alongside each other to tell a story of Saskatchewan's genesis as a province. Proximity and juxtaposition in these displays repeat the story of encounters and of inhabited land without directly addressing the conditions of encounter.

This museum piece is also story about Saskatchewan as a past, but my focus here is on how this narration and display works with a story of place. I referred to this display as a continuous story of an inhabited land. Historical documents and policy reveal that such was not the language or story in the discourses of settlement, expansion and conquest of the early Canada days leading up to 1905. There is much evidence that this land was viewed as uninhabited and empty; it figures as such in much of the settler propaganda and government policy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.58

However, in this introduction room, the landscape of Saskatchewan is inhabited and is depicted as having a long history as such.

57 Interview 04 (RB) 58 See for example, Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West 1856-1900, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980/1992. Owram describes shifting claims in expansionist rhetoric about the "Canadian west" (through reading settler texts, surveyor reports, government and entrepreneurial accounts), and considers how these accounts move from remarking on the incredible incompatibility of agricultural settlement with what was conceived of as an "enduring wilderness" (p. 11) to proclaiming the natural, and "inevitable" development of "an agrarian empire" (p 107). 107

The traveling Centennial theatre performance of All My Relations - Wahkotowin59 juxtaposed settler and Aboriginal voices to tell a settler/immigrant story of seeking religious freedom and new hope together with an Aboriginal story of lost land, residential schools and policing of sacred ritual. In this play, place and land feature prominently as central character and backdrop, as six actors interactively perform these juxtaposed narratives. In this depiction, the land has a long history of habitation. Actors embody different moments of this history leading again, as does the narrative in the WDM display, toward a moment of provincehood, optimism and cohesion. In this performance, there is an emphasis on "many stories," and on stories as generative of place.

"Crazy Rosie" is referred to as a character in the narrative and displayed as a large mask forming the backdrop to the stage. "She" is the place and the land of stories in this performance. As the play opens and the large mask of Crazy Rosie is positioned at the centre background, a recorded voice speaks:

She's been known by many names. Some say she is made of uranium and hydrogen. Some say circles and seasons. Others have sworn she is not made of atoms, she is made of stories. She changes forms like we all do. A face made by ice and water. We are, all of us, tied to her by our body's need for food and our spirit's longing to be at home.60

Here, land and place merge together as this character of "Crazy Rosie" - not

Saskatchewan but land and place that becomes Saskatchewan. The land described here has a history prior to Saskatchewan, prior to Aboriginal people and cultures, prior to

59 This play, All My Relations - Wahkotowin was performed by the Dancing Sky Theatre Company at various outdoor sites throughout the province in the summer of 2005. 60 Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach. 2 August 2005. An image of "Crazy Rosie," and of a scene fromth e play, is available on the Dancing Sky Theatre website at: www.dancingskvtheatre.com/Past%20Seasons.html. (Last viewed 8 February 2008.) 108 fields of soil and grasses. In this narration, the genesis of this now inhabited land is in evolutions and in stories of original creation that precede any human habitation.

The presence of humans with this Crazy Rosie of stories and atoms, ice and water, is depicted through the movement and voices of six human actors moving between various roles in the scenes of the play. In several scenes, the interaction is marked as that between Aboriginal and settler characters. The arrival of people to the place of Crazy

Rosie is enacted as a moment of changing season; spring comes, and there are people - a child dancing and picking flowers for her mother, the child and her parents gathering duck eggs in the first walk of spring. Then "one spring," says the voice of a narrator,

"with the geese came a new people."61 The interactions of Aboriginal and settler characters happen together after these naturalized arrivals as moments of shared conversation, exchanges of food, movements representing digging and planting, and some moments when the characters' voices and stories are juxtaposed to speak of differences between Aboriginal and settler experience.

In one scene, an Aboriginal man and a EuroCanadian man at either side of the stage speak of memories of the land from their different perspectives - one speaks of

"Pasqua... a sacred place to me" and the other of "McCallum's home quarter... still feels like home." In another, an Aboriginal family and a settler family pick saskatoon berries at the same time on the stage, then the music changes and the two families (all six actors) look in different directions from where they stand and they speak in turns:

I came to find a land with no borders. I was sent to live on a reserve.

61 Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach. 2 August 2005. Note that the actors are also "narrators" in the play. 62 Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach. 2 August 2005. 109

I came for religious freedom. I had to hide my sweatlodge under the table. I came to live in a wild land. I know this land as gentle. I came to plant a seed. The buffalo are gone. A new province is born. A people are forgotten.

These voices name in short sentences that violence and loss has happened in this shared land they portray together.64 The losses, differences and shared moments between the settler and Aboriginal characters lead to a final scene in which spring returns again and two raised platforms on the stage are brought together, covered with cloth and food. One character asks, "Can we all eat at one table?" Baskets of food are passed around among the characters, and the scene ends with a voice speaking a wish that "between the hunger of our bodies and the desire of our spirits we'll find space to eat together at one table."65

A Saskatoon Star-Phoenix newspaper review of the play summarizes the intent of such moments and the performance as a whole:

The play's message speaks to the value of the land and the wonder of the seasons while making a strong plea for harmony among settlers and First

Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach. 2 August 2005. 64 In naming these as short articulations, I am recalling the introductory sections of Sara Ahmed's text, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, introduced in Chapter One. Ahmed begins with an excerpt froma n anti- immigration text of the British National Front. In relation to that text, she considers how the nation addressed as "you" in the sentences of that text implicitly rely on exclusions in their address: "These short sentences depend on longer histories of articulation, which secure the white subject as sovereign in the nation, at the same time as they generate effects in the alignment of 'you' with the national body" (p. 2). I take up similarly short forms of address to a collective, in this case Saskatchewan, in the next chapter. Here, her discussion of short articulations is a reminder of the histories embedded in and conveyed through them. 65 Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach. 2 August 2005. 110

Nations people. All this is packed into an hour-long show that leaves audiences emotional and energized.66 Strong pleas for harmony, and descriptions of the Centennial year or of particular

Centennial events as an opportunity to address inequities occur repeatedly in other

Centennial contexts as well. Glenn Hagel,67 in reference to a traveling multimedia exhibit celebrating the art and life of Cree artist Allen Sapp, says of that particular

Centennial initiative, "Saskatchewan's Centennial anniversary brings together all of the people, places and perspectives that make Saskatchewan such a unique and well- respected province." In a Prince Albert Daily Herald newspaper report about the

Saskatchewan Centennial Canoe Quest,69 an official photographer for the event reflects on his observations of "relationships and bonds that were developed along the 1 000 kilometres of rushing water" and his conclusion that "I suppose this was to be expected, removing people from their comfort zone, from their circles of friends, forcing them to talk and relate to others in an environment that was foreign and weather that was sometimes inhospitable."70 He comments that from these observations he learned "we all need to step outside our comfort zone, to travel to places which are foreign to us, and to

71 meet people of other cultures, other beliefs." This echoes a slogan repeated by the 2005

Centennial office throughout the commemorations, urging people to "Pick a place in

Saskatchewan you've never been before... and go! Make that your Centennial project;"

Cam Fuller, "Centennial Tour Tugs at Emotions: Production Fuses Song, Movement, Storytelling," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 31 August 2005, p. CI. 67 Introduced in Chapter One as the chair of the Centennial. 68 Glenn Hagel, quoted in "Renowned Saskatchewan Artist Bridges Cultures During Centennial Year." www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). I return to this exhibit again in Chapter Four. 69 The Canoe Quest was a canoe race fromClearwate r River at Dene Nation to Cumberland House, held late June into early July 2005. The canoes were intended as "replicas" of canoes used during earlier days of the fur trade in the region. 70 "Paddlers Make Voyage of a Lifetime," Prince Albert Daily Herald, 9 July 2005, p. 11. 71 "Paddlers Make Voyage of a Lifetime," p. 11. Ill this slogan was linked specifically to tourism and to becoming "a tourist in your own province," not voiced particularly as a call for harmony or connectedness.72 However it, like the review of the Dancing Sky play, the Canoe Quest photographer's observations and Hagel's reflections on the multimedia exhibit, calls attention to Saskatchewan as a place not knowable from one perspective - and to the value of accessing previously unknown or unencountered perspectives.

Touring diverse landscapes and vistas as a Centennial project is not equivalent to the cultural reconciliations imagined and invoked in some of the other moments; the calls do not urge the same actions but they do hail the same place, and they do hail a place.

Such moments claim the Saskatchewan Centennial as an opportunity to see a place, see the wonder of the land and the seasons (including "seasons" of human habitation) as long story/stories in the play, see it as a place known from many perspectives by traveling to unknown vistas or by spending time with people you don't know in an unknown and unpredictable environment, see how the Centennial is an opportunity to know the place as multi-storied and an opportunity to bring stories, people and perspectives together in this

"unique and well-respected province."73

Saskatchewan, the same place personified as a mediating middle landscape, is in some Centennial moments and scenes, also this terrain of disharmony and displacement.

Pleas for harmony, calls to step outside a comfort zone and calls to celebrate the

Centennial as a bringing together of cultures and differences, gesture to losses and conflict as constitutive of the commemorated place. Disharmony is constitutive and it coexists with this naturally reconciliatory landscape such that the assumed middle

72 Saskatchewan Centennial 2005, Straight from the Heart, undated 2005. 73 Hagel, quoted in "Renowned Saskatchewan Artist," www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). See footnote 68, this chapter. 112 landscape not only mediates between contrasting "elsewheres," but is also conflict in

Saskatchewan itself. This is a landscape of reconciliation that is placed in a Canadian national narrative. The next section describes some direct, Centennial, moments of that placement.

On the Maps of a Nation

One of the Western Development Museum mannequins described above explicitly maps Saskatchewan in John A. MacDonald/Ottawa's plan to forge a nation.

The mannequin's imagined 1905 voice marks Saskatchewan in a map of nation-building in a similar way as one of the speechmakers on many Centennial stages, federal MP from

Saskatchewan Ralph Goodale:

As we kick-off this very special weekend marking 100 years to the day on Sunday of Saskatchewan's existence -just think for a moment of the enormity of the task that laid before our grandparents and forebears a century ago this weekend - as they launched their audacious dream of provincehood.74

The 1905 mannequin character who describes Saskatchewan in MacDonald's national vision was identified by the WDM exhibit chairs as a "politician which sort of reflects the province coming together in 1905. That's his role."75 This is a province, a demarcation in the organization of a nation-state, this commemorated Saskatchewan. Perhaps it seems a point hardly to be missed, or hardly worth mentioning as remarkable, among the ways that Centennial moments place Saskatchewan. Yet these politicians (the fictional character, and the 21st century Saskatchewan MP) remark on this status of provincehood as dreamed and achieved in a way that makes that demarcation a focal point for a story of place told in other ways as well. Goodale's words name this formation of a province as

74 Ralph Goodale, Speech: Wascana Park, 2 September 2005. Emphasis added. 75 Interview 04: RN 113 audaciously dreamed, and invite the Centennial response to be one of awe at that place- making achievement. The Centennial marks 100 years of Saskatchewan's existence, making provincehood the story, the place, and the here (or where) of Saskatchewan. And paradoxically, these moments of naming that origin specify it as a happening in a place that has been, and could have been, and even perhaps is also now otherwise.

The commemorated origin of Saskatchewan as a province of course places it as part of Canada. In part, the specific naming of originary moments of provincehood reinscribe the geopolitical borders of the province on a printed national map - those straight line boundaries that demarcate Saskatchewan from Alberta to the west, Manitoba to the east, North West Territories to the north and the United States (specifically

Montana and North Dakota) to the south. However, Centennial moments that place

Saskatchewan in Canada don't always explicitly rely on or call to mind those specific borderlines. Saskatchewan is mapped in the nation, as Canadian and as particular in

Canada, in ways that call upon imaginative processes other than cartography.76

The Western Development Museum used a poster image to advertise and promote its exhibits in 2005. It is a reproduction of a 1905 advertising illustration which features a drawing of a young woman in a long dress, flowers in her hair, and her arms stretched in two directions. One arm appears to be gesturing to, or holding, a bunch of maple leaves, the other rests on a green globe that is mostly darkened except for a space beneath her resting arm which has the word "CANADA" printed in bold across an area depicting borderlines for and including the words of: "Saskatchewan" "Assiniboia" and

"Manitoba". These are the nation state's borderlines that preceded those established by

1905. Also on the globe, above the resting arm is a sheaf of wheat. Behind the globe are

76 Which is to identify cartography as also an imaginative process. 114 several silver coloured tools including a hoe, a rake, and an axe; and below the globe, heading off in several directions are a number of steam engines on railway tracks. Above the image is the logo for the WDM, and other words on the page are "Showing the World

How it Was" and "A Fascinating Look at Saskatchewan's Past" and "2005". The bottom of the poster indicates that the origin of the image is "1905 advertising illustration

(coloured 2005)". In this image, the map and globe are central, and background, in a complex image although the map itself is not that of the current or 1905 borders of the province. The marks of those borderlines are not evident and yet this is clearly an image of Saskatchewan in the nation - and world - with the tools, trains and wheat indicating its place in an often invoked image of nation-building through the expansion of a railway and the shaping of a "wheat economy."

That poster relies upon activating imaginative processes. Here the words and lines and globe do some of the work of cartography, and the accompanying images complement that place-making with other symbols of Canada as nation and

Saskatchewan in that nation. These symbols and maps were used to a similar effect in

1905 as that which is repeated in the 2005 commemoration. The poster explicitly identifies itself as an advertising illustration, situating it as a naming of Saskatchewan in

1905 recalled in 2005, and it marks an assumption that the symbols and images of then are somehow intelligible again in the Centennial year. A green ball printed with some lines and words, a bundle of dried grain, a clothed figure, shiny metal, steam, and a bouquet of red leaves might be an unusual assortment of images placed together. Or they might signal Saskatchewan in an expansionist national space. Framed as a Centennial commemoration and as an invitation to the current museum exhibits, the poster image is 115 both a past and present placement of Saskatchewan in such a space. This poster reveals one way that such a placement is constructed. In other moments the pieces assembled to convey this national mapping are less plain.

On the same Gala stage as the Quilt and Buffalo performance, this production in many ways addressed a Canadian audience, specifically as presumed individual viewers of the televised broadcast, and also as a collective audience without specified location. In my interview with the producer of the Gala, she read to me from the application made to

Canadian Heritage to seek support for the event:

The setting is Credit Union Centre in Saskatoon where 11 500 spectators will witness an amazing event two and one half hours in length. In addition, that evening, Saskatchewan will shine across Canada as the event will be broadcast live to the nation via CBC. What will we see? The evening will offer viewers a celebration of Saskatchewan during its Centennial through the lens of the arts.... Throughout the evening, the focus is only on Saskatchewan talent and showcasing that talent for Saskatchewan and Canada to celebrate.77

The Gala director's message printed in the official program describes how "our set is designed to represent the Canadian heartland."78 This representation is made through "its open, living, windswept skies. Its multicultural mosaic. Its colourful yet quietly understated history of people, places and events that have shaped who we are today."7

The stage was set for a performance of Saskatchewan as Canada, and to Canada. On the same page as the director's message, the program includes a quote from the Lieutenant

Interview 02. Pierre Boileau, "A Message from the Director". Lieutenant Governor's Celebration of the Arts. Official ogram, p. 4. Boileau, "A Message fromth e Director," p. 4. 116

Governor, that "this show will make Saskatchewan people proud. It will be an edification for the soul and a real education for Canadians."80

In interviews with the Gala producer and with the Lieutenant Governor, both described elements of the Gala that were designed in anticipation of surprising the

Canadian viewing audience with things they (that audience) might not know about

Saskatchewan/us. Speaking about the same set design described by the director in the quote above, the producer remarked:

And so we also were able to then use that as a mechanism to not only reinforce the prairie horizon, but also images from the rest of our physical surroundings, which are not only about that prairie landscape. So, the north, and the trees, and all of the different physical surroundings that we know, and the diversity that we know here, to deliver that back to the rest of Canada especially because it should surprise them. What they don't know about what kind of diversity there really is here.81

She also talked about how the Canadian audience would be surprised that the show "was not being delivered for Her Majesty. It was being delivered for Saskatchewan, in celebration of the Centennial." The presence of the Queen would be a draw for the audience, but "people were pleasantly surprised" that it was about Saskatchewan and surprised by "what the program included and how we contribute to the arts and the artistic heritage of our province. And I think we surprised them about things that they wouldn't realize they should know about us." For example, "that we're not all flat prairie landscape."83

80 Her Honour Dr. Lynda Haverstock, Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan. Lieutenant Governor's Celebration of the Arts. Offical program, p. 4. 81 Interview 01. 82 Interview 01. 83 Interview 01. 117

The Lieutenant Governor spoke of this intention to surprise the rest of Canada as well: "I guess I think we could have done the predictable. We could have had more people come out and do country western sorts of stuff. We have for example the best country and western dancers in Canada."84 She described how it was more important

"that there would be a flavour of what we really are. That we have every aspect of the arts is a possibility for anybody in the province." She described a conversation with a viewer of the Gala who affirmed for her the receptive Canadian audience:

There was a woman from British Columbia who called and said, "I've never been to Saskatchewan, I've never met a Saskatchewan person... but I've never had a prouder moment being a Canadian than watching this Gala."86

One moment in the Gala that played overtly on the "surprise" motif was when the host, comedian Brent Butt,87 introduced Regina-born singer Dione Taylor. Butt's words included:

Our next singer began her career touring the jazz circuit in Regina.... And, after that day and a half [laughter from Gala audience] she moved to Toronto. Back in Tisdale, we didn't really have a jazz quarter, per se [laughter]. Although the street I lived on did eventually become known as Bourbon Street for some reason [laughter]. Please I want you now to join me in welcoming... she's one of Canada's

84 Interview 02 85 Interview 02 86 Interview 02. The ellipses mark a comment inserted by the Lieutenant Governor about the woman she was quoting; her words, in reference to this woman not having visited Saskatchewan or met a Saskatchewan woman were "which is shocking to me in BC". 87 Brent Butt is the creator of and part of the cast of the sitcom Corner Gas. 118

most exciting and fastest rising jazz performers... please welcome the lovely and talented Dione Taylor!88

In the very same moment that the Gala stage included Taylor among performers from and performances of Saskatchewan, Butt's jokes marked jazz music and culture as surprising and literally "out of place" in Saskatchewan. In order to present Saskatchewan "to

Canada" and a Canadian audience, Butt first reiterates an improbability of Saskatchewan having a jazz quarter or a jazz circuit as the stage on which to surprise the audience.

The co-chairs of Winning the Prairie Gamble described ways that the exhibit was constructed in response to "a great lack of knowledge out there," referring to what

"people" need to know about Saskatchewan.89 In that reference, "people" included museum visitors from within Saskatchewan as well as beyond, but our conversation about the kind of knowledge of Saskatchewan as a place that they were interested in conveying focused on what would "help those outside people to have a greater understanding and appreciation for the province and its people."90 Again, "surprise" came up as a structure for interpreting this presentation of Saskatchewan:

RB: I think there's a ton of things that would surprise people. Because I think people don't know very much. They look upon Saskatchewan as flat prairie between Regina and Moose Jaw or wherever, and have very little understanding of the landscape as incredibly varied. From Cypress Hills to the Plains to the Parkland to the North, which is half the province. People don't have any concept of that from outside the province.91

Brent Butt, Lieutenant Governor's Centennial Gala, DVD. Interview 03 (RB). Interview 03 (RB). Interview 03 (RB). 119

These observations cite/site Saskatchewan as a perceived geography within Canada. It is in many ways a manifestation of the "middle landscape" notion but in my attention to these moments here I am interested in the particularly Canadian geographic knowledge that is cited.

Newspaper commentary also counters the "flat land" knowledge of

Saskatchewan. A community organizer interviewed by the Saskatchewan Star-Phoenix about her participation in a Centennial expresses this as a form of pride, that "I know when you talk to people outside the province, man, (they say) 'Saskatchewan's flat lands, there's nothing there...."92 There are other ways that newspaper commentary cites

Saskatchewan in Canada's geography - references to the view of Saskatchewan as flat land or as "a place that you drive through"93 repeat in reflections on how the Centennial functions to make Saskatchewan differently visible as a Canadian geography. These casual references do not make explicit the elements those who word them rely upon to describe and counter these Canadian tellings of Saskatchewan as a flat negligible landscape. However, in these short moments the words reveal that there is a shared reliance on transparent, readily knowable, space.94

Shared reliance on readily knowable geography in these moments reveals both insider and outsider perspectives and their mutual deployment. Some producers of or commentators on Centennial representations of Saskatchewan know the place as insiders and in many of these moments that knowledge is constituted by opposition to the flatland story of outsiders, and by reproduction of that story. That is one way that Saskatchewan

92 Janet French and Peter Wilson, "Northern Sask Parties 'Til Sundown: Big Turnouts Have Small Towns Bursting With Pride," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 6 September 2005, p. A5. The interview is with Stacey Kwansey, special events program co-ordinator for the City of Humboldt. 93 "Saskatchewan Publishes Comprehensive Encyclopedia," Edmonton Journal, 10 September 2005, p. E7. 94 Again a reference to McKittrick's analysis as above. is mapped in Canada. It is also mapped as the dreamed of province that along with

Alberta signaled a success of the National Policy95 and the dream of a nation at the turn to the twentieth century. The humble prairie. Audaciously included in the nation and mostly now overlooked. Quietly keeping its own knowledge of diversity and productivity that exceeds the nation's knowledge. Now in the Centennial "the province" can express this view of itself on a national stage. A newspaper account of the Gala exemplifies that claim:

Gilded by royalty but grounded by comedy, the show that took 100 years to create went off smoother than a Prairie harvest Thursday evening at Credit Union Centre.... No plastic stacking chair for the royals - they sat on upholstered seats surrounded by red velvet drapery. In typical Saskatchewan style, however, the esteemed guests were only metres away from folks munching on burgers wrapped in foil.... To the likely amazement of the rest of the country, the overall tone of the music was jazz and blues.... It was our night to pat ourselves on the back and the muscle pulls will be worth it.96

Gilded and grounded, Saskatchewan surprises the nation in a humble display of the 100 years story of survival and success, surprising artistic inspirations and achievements, love of place and diversity of landscape. Claiming status as "heartland of the nation" and simultaneously unknown and a surprise to the "national" audience.

Place with a Future

In the Dancing Sky play, the Crazy Rosie backdrop and character references personified a place and land that from ice and water and atoms, and as varied stories, became Saskatchewan. The Introduction Room displays in the Western Development

The National Policy was implemented as a set of economic initiatives by John A. MacDonald's government in 1879, specifically intended to expand Canadian agricultural production, transportation, communications and policing from east to west coasts, and to bolster mining and manufacturing within a protected national market. 96 Cam Fuller, "Comedian Brent Butt strikes a perfect note as host" StarPhoenix 20 May 2005. p. B2. 121

Museum exhibits situate the land as a background as well and also as the site for transitions of people and cultures from Aboriginal communities to "newcomers" who together share the new province of Saskatchewan. The Gala stage, although in perhaps less static ways, provides a landscape background to stage the celebration of

Saskatchewan performance and art; there, it is most visually present in the form of the projection screen at the back of the stage. Textual invocations including newspaper commentary and political speeches also draw upon land as continuous. There are ways that this Centennial commentary reveals and produces another kind of continuity to place and landscape; this appears particularly in the form of Saskatchewan's next century. For example in the premier's speech at a Canadian Citizenship Ceremony in Regina on 1 July

2005:

2005 marks the beginning of Saskatchewan's second century as full partners in Canada. Your first days as Canadian citizens are the first days of Saskatchewan's second century.97

This brief articulation shifts the continuity from a land on or through which changing cultures and political formations occur to a land that continues into the future as this specific knowable cultural and political formation of Saskatchewan. And among what disappears into that continuity is possibility: the possibility for a radically different geopolitical "century" or centuries.

References to Saskatchewan's next century repeatedly assert such continuity. In some moments, a text explicitly imagines future commemorations of the province, "in

2105 the theme of the bi-centennial might just possibly be '200 years of heart'."98 An imagined bi-centennial anticipates of course a continuation of the provincial identity

97 Lome Calvert, Speech: Canadian Citizenship Ceremony, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 July 2005. 98 "100 Years of Heart Was Evident Here," Moose Jaw Times Herald, 6 September 2005, p. 4. 122 established in 1905. In the 2005 Throne Speech, the Lieutenant Governor cites the

Centennial and frames the content as a government's vision for "our second century." At one point in the speech, in words about the Centennial celebrations and this new century, she invokes with it the notion of a birthright:

We celebrated our place in Canada. From the ruggedly beautiful forests and lakes of our breathtaking north, to the fertile hills and plains of our parklands, to what native son W.O. Mitchell described as the skeleton requirements of land and sky, the magnificent Saskatchewan prairie, we celebrated our birthright in a land of natural wealth and wonder. As we embark on our second century, let us consider how best to secure the birthright of the children of our Centennial."

This secure birthright for a second century vividly marks a closure on possibility for configurations of the place.

Commemorative speeches that extend Saskatchewan into a future century are accompanied by placing the future figuratively into the present landscape. The premier repeatedly places the future in his celebrations and accounts of Saskatchewan in

Centennial speeches. He repeats phrases such as there is a lot of "future" or "tomorrow" in Saskatchewan;100 and he, along with other speechmakers, uses the image of a prairie horizon to place the future in the province. Prime Minister Paul Martin, in a Centennial address describes this as a form of pride for Saskatchewan's "forebears":

'Your forebears would be proud', Martin told a group of more than 200 people who gathered to watch events in Regina. 'They would be proud

Saskatchewan. "Toward Our Next Century," Speech from the Throne 2005. Delivered on the Occasion of the Opening of The Second Session of the Twenty-Fifth Legislature, Province of Saskatchewan, 7 November 2005. 100 For example, Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Launch, Yorkton, Saskatchewan, 23 September 2004. This reference is also repeated during the Centennial Saskatchewan Summit Speech (and others). 123

that, for the people of Saskatchewan, the future stretches out as far as the plains themselves, rich, enduring, wondrous.'101 Ralph Goodale draws on the horizon as well (along with the repeated trope of "next year" that calls up the rural/agricultural context), with "We keep our eyes on that vast

Saskatchewan horizon. We dream of 'next year'. And we know we can build our tomorrows to be just as bold and exciting as we dare to imagine."102

Centennial moments commemorate, figure and fix Saskatchewan as a place in ways that certainly exceed these four interpretations that I have described. I distinguish these four - Saskatchewan as middle landscape, as (reconciliatory) terrain of disharmony and displacement, on the maps of a nation, and as a future - as useful for what they reveal about attachments to Saskatchewan geography and geographic possibility.

Race, Nostalgia and the Questionability of Place

The texts, staged moments and exhibits I described in this chapter, present

Saskatchewan as a known and knowable place. This knowledge is not coherent or consistent such that in all ways and all moments the place commemorated appears the same. However, what I contend in my interpretations is that the producers, speakers, and performers of these moments share a reliance on Saskatchewan as a knowable place.

These Centennial commemorations all rely on knowing Saskatchewan. Specifically, the forms of fixed knowledge I described in the sections above - the self-deprecating mediating middle landscape, the reconciliatory terrain of disharmony and displacement, the surprisingly productive and diverse rural heartland of the nation, the fixed future of continued political/cultural identity as Saskatchewan - all rely on a 100 years story of

101 Quoted in "Pancakes, Powwows, and Plaques Mark First Day of Centennial Events," Moose Jaw Times Herald, 3 September 2005, p. 1. 102 Ralph Goodale, Speech: Canada Day Provincial Ceremony, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 July 2005. 124

Saskatchewan in what I read as a static domain of knowledge. That is a geographic claim, with geographic effect. Specifically, it is a racialized, colonial rendering of the place.

My inquiry into specific moments of the 100 years story is itself the production of a gaze on Saskatchewan. I indicated some aspects of this in my introduction to the queries of this chapter. In considering my data descriptions as the construction of a gaze,

I am interested in accounting for the partiality (meaning both incomplete, and "partial" as in biased) of my own perspective and also reiterating the questionability of geography and my interest in the production of knowledge as queries rather than conclusions. By writing descriptions, I invite a gaze on a place called Saskatchewan, and on these

Centennial productions of Saskatchewan as place. I name this to draw attention to how my interpretations of the Centennial moments above are both a critique, and a deployment, of what Michael Taussig accounts for as the mimetic faculty:

In other words, can't we say that to give an example, to instantiate, to be concrete, are all examples of the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the represented? And does not the magical power of this embodying inhere in the fact that in reading such examples we are thereby lifted out of ourselves into those images?104 Taussig is not interested in magic in this observation; rather, his intention is "to estrange writing itself'105 as implicated in imaginative and representational processes - implicated

The notion of a "gaze" involves complicated relationships of encounter when knowledge is constructed through primarily visual means. This is taken up in theorizing of art history, film studies and other fields of inquiry focusing on the visual; and, this includes projects in colonial and postcolonial study pertaining to negotiations of power and subjectivity through contexts of human encounter. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright provide a review of various theoretical approaches to the notion of "gaze," including roots in psychoanalytic theory, and also Foucault's use of the term in describing how social institutions enact normalizing gazes on their subjects (Marita Sturken and Lisa Carwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 76ff, and pp. 355-356). 104 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 16. 105 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 16. in the "nature that culture uses to create second nature." My reading of particular moments such as words in a politician's Centennial speeches, the staging of a Centennial play or a curator's description of intent in the title or structure of a Centennial exhibit examines the creation of Saskatchewan as a form of "second nature," evident and accessibly known. To do so, I rely on creating some views of Saskatchewan myself.

The gaze of this research inquiry is deliberately meant to view, and to present a view of, Saskatchewan as geographically alterable and questionable - a view prerequisite to emancipatory work. A race-critical analysis, informed by theorizing on nostalgia, guides the geographical questionability I introduce; this questionability is counter to

Centennial moments that would secure Saskatchewan as knowable and known.

Centennial moments that place Saskatchewan as middle landscape, place of disharmony and discontent, on the maps of a nation and as a place with a future (as the second century of Saskatchewan) contribute to a powerful fiction. Throughout this chapter I have relayed elements of this fictive production, focusing on representations of

Saskatchewan as place. My final thoughts in this chapter turn to continuity and surprise as a way to provisionally synthesize my queries about how race and nostalgia feature in these representations.

Saskatchewan as a continuous landscape in the ways I have identified in this chapter (e.g., in the premier's speeches and the Dancing Sky play), culminating in its destiny of provincehood, represents a bound narrative and a bound landscape. This ascribed continuity, to which I have been alerted in my reading of these moments, appears in commemorations of Saskatchewan's disharmonious past and of the land as shared inheritance for the now present population of (in the premier's frequent

106 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. xiii. identification) "Aboriginal, Metis and the descendants of immigrant pioneers." This continuity appears also in imaginative and representational processes about

Saskatchewan's "second century" that is set to follow this Centennial marking of time. I read these ascriptions of continuity as evidence of a dominant Canadian geographical narrative, persistently called to account by Aboriginal and race-critical scholars of

Canada.

In the introductory sections of this paper, I referred to the work of Katherine

McKittrick who provides a detailed account of black women's geographies rendered surprising in the dominant geographical narratives of Canada "a nation that has and is

10S still defining its history as Euro-white or nonblack." The Gala moment I described in which the host, Brent Butt - known widely for the popularity of his televised comedy

Comer Gas - introduces jazz performer Dione Taylor with reference to jazz culture as a surprise in Saskatchewan, implicitly places Black culture and Black persons including

Dione as one of the "Saskatchewan" performers as somehow not quite in synch with the geography of Saskatchewan. I read this moment along with the reiterations of the continuous and now shared landscape and contend that they work together in the making of a racial story as "second nature" in Saskatchewan: this is the racial story of white settlement and nation-building. Moments that presume and restate Saskatchewan as the heart of that nation-building rely on and produce many "surprises" of the sort that

McKittrick describes: In terms of geography, the element of surprise is contained in the material, political, and social landscape that presumes - and fundamentally requires - that subaltern populations have no relationship to the production of space. The surprise takes place when... these populations are recognized

107 That identification gestures back to the Taussig reference on previous page. 108 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, p. 92. as viable geographic subjects who live and negotiate the world around them in complex ways. In my own reading of accounts of "surprise" in Centennial moments, I also cited ways that newspaper commentators and producers of Centennial commemorations described how Saskatchewan "surprises" the nation with its diversity (of peoples and landscapes and artistic expression). Such documenting of surprise collaborates with the dominant racial, colonial, narrative of nation and nation-building and of Saskatchewan's place therein. That surprise is visible as surprise when Saskatchewan's geography and geographic story is accepted to be that of the humble prairie heartland peopled by modest unassuming rural people attached to histories and geographies of European settlement.

Peter Fritszsche, in his account of nostalgia emerging in the context of nineteenth century Europe, says of nostalgia that it "requires both a discursive field in which discontinuity is given particular historical form and the material evidence of disruption in order to give historical forms the poignancy that allows them to be recognized over time and space."110 Such relations of nostalgia with discontinuity and disruption111 have sparked more of my curiosity about the place of continuity as I have read it in these

Centennial moments. Continuity in the fictions of Saskatchewan as landscape functions to unite its predicted future as this province and in this nation with political, cultural, and geographic forms that precede the political formation of Saskatchewan. This structures a teleological claim in which Saskatchewan as land/landscape exceeds the bounds of the

100 years of Saskatchewan as province. I regard this as a production of a particular

109 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, p. 92. 110 Fritszche, "Specters of History," p. 1617. Emphasis in original. 111 Another example is in the passage fromDyla n Trigg's work on urban ruins and nostalgia I quoted earlier - where he writes that "were there not a distinction between what was present and what was absent, the magnetism of nostalgia would inevitably dissolve. Continuity would be a given and the place of pastaess would no longer be required." 128 continuity that sustains these moments of "surprise," and that forecloses possibilities for future configurations, thus countering the geographical questionability inherent in emancipatory projects.

In the next chapter, the closure inherent in this continuity is met with the production of subjectivity that, as I will describe, relies on such closure to simultaneously imagine wnboundedness of possibility for some subjects. Chapter Four: Saskatchewan as a People

Instead, we need to direct our efforts to the conditions of communication and knowledge production that prevail, calculating not only who can speak and how they are likely to be heard but also how we know what we know and the interest we protect through our knowing.

Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye

You cannot claim to be a citizen-subject without claiming to deny, repress, bury, and be haunted by the spectre of your own subjection.

Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny

Once upon a time, there was a land inhabited by indigenous peoples.

Message from the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan

Once Upon a Time

In this chapter, my attention to Centennial moments focuses on how

Saskatchewan is portrayed, explained, celebrated as "people" in 2005 commemorations.

What do the forms and content of address to "Saskatchewan people" or words about

Saskatchewan people create or rely upon? Who is invited into or assumed as part of the address? This query about the "who" of Saskatchewan draws into analysis much about relationality, subjects, and citizenship in ways I develop through what follows. My interest here is in ways that Centennial commemorations render people, identities, bodies, or subjects out of bounds, out of visibility, out of place, or as surprisingly present. While absence and presence do feature as critical concerns in this query, I do not simply equate such moves, or their implications, with exclusionary representational practices. Rather, what moves, holds in place, and "sticks" in rendering Saskatchewan knowable and binding as place - and, here, as people - in this Canadian moment of commemoration is, as I set out in the introductory chapter, a relational question of racial subjectivity, space, and the inhabited fictions of unruly and managed practices of memory.

129 Relational boundaries that shape the domain for Saskatchewan subjects, citizens, and identity are connected to boundaries around place. In both, the query here is about

Saskatchewan. In many ways, the boundaries and fixations related to geography resemble those of subjectivity and in some occurrences, the boundaries and fixations are the same. In the previous chapter, I described ways that some Centennial texts personify

Saskatchewan as a (self-deprecating, mediating, modest) place. In those moments, the landscape is productive of personality such that the place itself has personal characteristics. In this chapter, I will consider more closely moments that attach characteristics and identities to people in, or of, Saskatchewan.

In Ahmed's work on affective economies and the cultural politics of emotion, from which I derive much of my thinking about effects and affects of nostalgia and of

Saskatchewan fictions, she examines how "different 'figures' get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often 'work' through concealment."1 The figures she names in that statement refer to "figures of speech" in what she does identify as "texts;" however, in a footnote to this statement, she elaborates on this attention to texts in a way that I believe relates to how I have earlier described my approach to discursive inquiry as not limited to logocentric text. Ahmed writes:

My own view is that research on emotions should embrace the multiple ways emotions work, whether in public culture or everyday life, and this means working with a range of different materials, which we can describe in different ways (as texts, data, information). We need to avoid assuming that emotions are 'in' the materials we assemble (which would transform emotion into a property, but think more about what the materials are 'doing,' how they work through emotions to generate effects."2

1 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 13. 2 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 19, fh 22. 131

The effects that Ahmed describes include how emotions "work to shape the 'surfaces' of individual and collective bodies."3 Through repetitions and concealment that work to produce the normative (also as I have variously recognized as the Active, and as the

"second nature" of Taussig's formulations) the 'figures of speech' that get stuck include subjects, bodies, and persons as well as the contours of a naturalized space and its histories. In the Centennial moments I will discuss in this chapter, the sticky figures of speech include racialized subjects and the notion of a "Saskatchewan people."

The Lieutenant Governor's words about a once indigenously inhabited land that are repeated in the chapter epigraph are part of a short message printed in the first of a series of three Centennial newspaper inserts distributed by the Centennial office.4 The full message as printed reads,

Once upon a time, there was a land inhabited by indigenous peoples. For thousands of years, their traditional ways had sustained them. With the arrival of newcomers, agreements were made to live in peaceful co existence. Because of this, more immigrants came but the harsh realities of the prairie resulted in six out of every ten people leaving. Who stayed behind? They were the dreamers, the builders, the tough, the determined, and the resourceful, as well as those who had chosen to share this space with them. They were your ancestors and mine. Our province's 100th birthday is the perfect time to celebrate HOPE, COURAGE, FAITH, and GENEROSITY. These characteristics define our citizens past and present. It is a time to rejoice. It is a time to pay tribute to our home... our Saskatchewan.5 These are a few lines in a ten page newspaper insert that includes other official messages, descriptions of Centennial symbols, a series of "Achievers" text boxes profiling various individuals, examples of projects that "people and organizations are planning for 2005,"

3 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 1. 41 have referred to some materials fromthes e papers in the previous chapter. The three papers, distributed as inserts in Saskatchewan newspapers and at Centennial events just prior to, during, and at the close of 2005 were titled, respectively 100 Years of Heart, Straight from the Heart, and Wasn't That a Party? 5 Dr. Lynda Haverstock, Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, "A Message fromth e Lieutenant Governor" in 100 Years of Heart, September 2004. Capitalized words in original. 132 archival photos from 1905, descriptions of official Centennial initiatives, a list of iOO great reasons to celebrate Saskatchewan," photographs that figure prominently in other official Centennial publications. Much of the material from the newspaper is also posted on the official Centennial website. The "once upon a time" passage is a short piece of text amid this broader proliferation of celebrative material. In those short lines the

Lieutenant Governor of the province evokes a peopled landscape of Saskatchewan, and an explication of who is addressed by this message. "They were your ancestors and mine" figures this speech in a way that aligns the assumed audience with a Saskatchewan collective identity presumed as the descendents of settlers and in a land that this text abruptly imagines as only "once" inhabited by indigenous peoples.

In my interpretations of Centennial moments and text such as this, I do not write or imagine Saskatchewan as peopled by settlers. Nor by the descendants of settlers. That is a fiction that powers reiterations of European and EuroCanadian claims to territory and history and the fiction against which I write. The first four words of the Lieutenant

Governor's message may mark the passage as fiction, as the phrase "once upon a time" very often does; however, in this passage those words refer explicitly to a story of indigenous inhabitance as the fictive - as that which somehow disappears in the mists of time and through an imagined peaceful transfer of territory and power. In this chapter's inquiry into ways that celebratory Centennial moments address and represent

Saskatchewan as people I do not assume that the "people" are known or knowable as any entity. I also do not assume as a starting point that I know or could know all the contours and workings of the peopled, settler, imaginary that shapes the quoted passage above.

The passage is perhaps exemplary of Canadian settler imaginaries and of their particular forms in Saskatchewan. The rendering of Aboriginal people as "once upon a time inhabitants" and as those "who chose to share the space" with the tough, determined and resourceful dreamers and builders is a familiar and well documented element of such settler imaginaries in Canada.6 In this chapter I continue to question the perpetuation of such imagining by examining ways that Centennial moments designate attributes, identities and subjectivity to a celebrated and celebrating "Saskatchewan people." I do so, again, with a view of and an intent to depict Saskatchewan as heterogeneous and questionable.

In the section that follows, I situate this questionability in a troubling of the very notion of a "people" - as recipients of Centennial address or as the subjects of commemoration - and as a category of knowledge. The text of the Lieutenant

Governor's message expresses knowledge about the "who" of Saskatchewan, about who is addressed by and included in the celebrations and about who are the "citizens past and present." My inquiry counters the surety of that knowledge and I begin with an account of the trouble inherent in addressing or celebrating people as collectively known or knowable. As in the previous chapter where my account of geography as questionable was followed by descriptions of Centennial moments that celebrated Saskatchewan as place, this questionability of "the people" is here followed by descriptions of Centennial moments in which Saskatchewan as people is the focus of commemoration.

People, Populism, and Subjects of Centennial Commemoration

In the case of the Centennial moments under consideration here, the people of

Saskatchewan comprise a collective subject called into being through commemorative

6 See for example, Marcia Crosby, "Construction of the Imaginary Indian," in Stan Douglas, ed., Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, Talonbooks, 1989, pp. 155-172. 134 address and through commemorative celebration. Speeches delivered, primarily by politicians such as the premier, address Saskatchewan people as an audience somewhat formally, and other forms of text such as the Centennial commemorative newspapers explicitly address readers as Saskatchewan people (for example in the invitation to "find somewhere in Saskatchewan you've never been before and GO" described in the previous chapter), as does the official Centennial website that invites viewers to attend homecomings, or to post stories and photos on the website. The Dancing Sky Theatre's play, the Gala, and the WDM exhibit all include narrations and performances in which

Saskatchewan people are the subjects, and they also presume an audience that is sometimes explicitly, though not exclusively, Saskatchewan people. In my interviews, I asked producers, creators, performers about how ideas of "Saskatchewan as people" were part of their creating, performing, and productions. As I described in the previous chapter, in reference to the Gala, the nation or "visitors" to the province are also addressed; they are provided with representations of Saskatchewan people along with those of Saskatchewan as a place. The precise audience may shift, but "Saskatchewan people" are repeatedly configured as the subjects of commemoration.

In the moments I consider in this chapter my inquiry is about contours of subjectivity, and specifically about racial subjectivity and racism. This query does include a concern with representation and with participation; however, it is also a concern with underlying and operative demarcations of the terrain of possibility - for citizenship, and for claims to territory and history - these are material considerations that exceed who is or is not included on the stages and pages of the Centennial. In this chapter, I preface my account of Centennial moments that address and commemorate Saskatchewan people with reference to the context of the collective subject of "people" as a contested and troubling notion. I relate this to the particular contexts of populism in Saskatchewan and the Canadian prairies more broadly, to ways that "people" as a notion has been employed in Canadian commemoration to imagine the natural base of a nation and the people as "the site of authentic and non-political patriotism;" and I relate this to ways, drawing from the political theory of Giorgio

Agamben, that invocations of "people" as a unitary subject implicitly activate exclusionary practices. I include this because notions of populism, "the people" as a nation's natural base, and people as unitary subject all help to make sense of how

Centennial address to and of Saskatchewan people contributes to the concealment and perpetuation of white racial normativity in imaginings of Canada.

John W. Warnock, describing "the roots of discontent and protest" in

Saskatchewan, identifies populism as "deeply rooted in the ideological history of

Saskatchewan"8 and as semantically linked to "people" as a subject position in ways that can be traced through political economy analyses. Warnock observes that "in

Saskatchewan, "populism" was always linked to the farmers' movements and the political forces that created the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).

Populism meant the politics of 'the people' who opposed the domination of the economy and the government by the rich and powerful."9 He situates his interpretation of

Saskatchewan populism in an account of populist movements globally, which initially

7 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 117. 8 John W. Warnock. Saskatchewan: The Roots of Discontent and Protest, Montr6al/New York/London: Black Rose Books, 2004, p. 241. 9 Warnock, Saskatchewan, p. 239. emerged in recognized form through the rise of capitalism and particularly its impacts on agriculture and agrarian life. Warnock's account includes an analysis of what he describes as "contradictions within the populist movement"10 that in recent decades in

Canada include tensions and shifts between cooperative agrarianism as a collective populist response, more individualistic interpretations of "the people" in efforts toward political reform,11 and a resurgence of populist identifications through anti-globalization movements. Warnock cites evidence for contradictions in populism in other global contexts as well and underlines, without the explicit formulation to follow from

Agamben's analyses below, how populist claims to be of "the people" coexist with often racist exclusionary identifications and associations with nationalism. He does not contend inevitability to such exclusions, but his account is revealing of the problematic assertion of "the people" as basis for identifications and social or political reform.

In her analysis of Canada 125 celebrations, Eva Mackey accounted for "how axiomatic assumptions and key concepts such as 'populism' and 'the people' began to function through policy as 'organizing principle(s)' of society."13 In her study of these

Canadian commemorations, Mackey links the government's celebratory policy to constitutional debates and programs in Canada of the early 1990s. Connected to the contradictory shifts and tensions that Warnock names, Mackey identifies workings of a

"new form of 'populism' and new definitions of 'the people'" gaining legitimacy in

Canada.14 In those celebrations, modes of inclusion and exclusion were integral to

10 Warnock, Saskatchewan, p. 250ff. 11 Including as exemplified through the trajectories of the Reform-Alliance Party in western Canada, which "has claimed a populist identification because in rhetoric it has supported a move towards more direct democracy by endorsing the initiative, referendum and recall" (Warnock, p. 263). 12 Warnock, Saskatchewan, p. 264. 13 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 108. 14 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 107. 137 deployments of "the people" as a collective unitary subject. One way they functioned was to depoliticize multiculturalism. Mackey provides many examples of'"the people' as a site of political and discursive contest"15 and shows how "concepts of the nation and the community as non-political and natural 'people' draw on notions of 'civil society' and 'the popular' that are fundamental to Western modernity and the development of 'the nation.'"16

Giorgio Agamben's essay, "What is a People?" is part of his rethinking of the categories of politics for the late 20th century; in the essay, Agamben contends that "the same term [people] names the constitutive political subject, as well as the class that is excluded - de facto, if not de jure - from politics."17 Rather than a unitary subject,

Agamben demonstrates (through consideration of its uses) how "people" always contains within itself "the fundamental biopolitical fracture": "It is what always already is, as well as what has yet to be realized; it is the pure source of identity and yet it has to redefine and purify itself continuously according to exclusion, language, blood and territory."18 He elaborates on the workings of this split, including in "specific aporias of the workers movement" and traces it to juridical sanction in early Rome that clearly distinguishes between "populas andplebs "19 to medieval divisions between artisan and merchant, and to the French Revolution where while sovereignty is entrusted to "the people," "the people become an embarrassing presence, and poverty and exclusion appear for the first time as an intolerable scandal in every sense."20 He contends:

15 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 140. 16 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 140. 17 Giorgio Agamben. "What is a People," translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino in Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 28. 18 Agamben, "What is a People," p. 31. 19 Agamben, "What is a People," p. 32. 20 Agamben, "What is a People," p. 32. 138

From this perspective, our time is nothing other than the methodical and implacable attempt to fill the split that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded. Such an attempt brings together, according to different modalities and horizons, both the right and the left, both capitalist countries and socialist countries, which have all been united in the plan to produce one single and undivided people - an ultimately futile plan that, however, has been partially realized in all industrialized countries. The obsession with development is so effective in our time because it coincides with the biopolitical plan to produce a people without fracture.21

This account resembles what Mackey identifies at work in the 125 celebrations, in terms of naturalizing Canadian identity through an apolitical notion of "the people" - through a

"management" of cultural diversity in the nation, and contributes further explanation to the contradictions in populism identified by Warnock.

In the Centennial moments and texts I consider, the forms of address and invocations of subjects are not identical in all occurrences. And it is not obvious that a collective subject consistently relies on the populist notion of a "people;" however, the fracture implicated in attending to or addressing a unitary subject is at work in practices of Centennial commemoration in ways that merit attention. In the data descriptions that follow this section, such fractures are visible. It is not just the fracture that is problematic, however, but also the attempts to cover it over or to eliminate "the excluded": Agamben's analysis also points to the futile plan to produce a single identifiable people. Unitary notions of Saskatchewan people are flexible in their deployment and not always obviously exclusionary or attached to settler colonial stories of Saskatchewan and its populace. In some texts, notably the official website of the

Centennial, "Saskatchewan" is the title of address to the celebrated and commemorating people of the province. This appears as an open, invitational and inclusive interpellation

Agamben, "What is a People," pp. 32-33. 139 that does not specify "who is possible" in the inclusion. The address is to

"Saskatchewan" as people:

In this paragraph, Saskatchewan is people ("you" who "showed your heart") and simultaneously is place. That is, the third sentence with the specified "you" of

Saskatchewan replacing the pronoun, reads: "Saskatchewan picked a place in

Saskatchewan that Saskatchewan had never been before and Saskatchewan went there

(maybe even twice)." The ready substitutions of a collective identity of Saskatchewan with a place called Saskatchewan reiterates a unity and cohesion that in the paragraph alone might rest as rhetorically acceptable and benign. However, the paragraph does not stand alone. There are fractures inherent in its interpellation and they are not benign. A further concern of this project is also to argue that the attempts to "cover them over" - or to elide the inherent fractures, are also not benign. Associations of "people" with naturalized and apolitical commonality can and do collude with disavowals of difference and structured inequities. To investigate how such concealments are activated through reiterated, and racialized, configurations of Saskatchewan as people, I turn again to

Centennial moments.

This is the text that appeared on the Centennial website homepage following the Centennial celebrations, under the heading "You're All Heart, Saskatchewan." www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). 140

Centennial Moments of Subjectivity and Subjection

Etienne Balibar asks:

Why is it that the very name which allows modern philosophy to think and designate the originary freedom of the human being - the name of 'subject' - is precisely the name which historically meant suppression of freedom, or at least an intrinsic limitation of freedom, that is, subjection?23 Is this related to the fractures implicated in collective address of Saskatchewan

Centennial moments and the association with populism? I name that as a question to begin this interpretive description of Centennial subjects on the Gala stage and in its audience, in conversations with interviewees about Centennial productions, in newspaper accounts, in website text. I do not pose this as a straightforward case that because

Saskatchewan is addressed as unitary and collective, this is then a fractured subjectivity and therefore problematic. It is the specific histories and materiality of such fracture that are at the heart of this inquiry. In this chapter, I describe elements of celebrative moments not solely to identify the use of a united and cohesive subject. In my analysis of text, image and interaction for the purposes of this query I observe and interpret ways that the subject(s) of the Centennial are differentiated as well as unified. The fractures and their history and materiality in relation to Saskatchewan's colonial coming into being as

Canadian province are evident in both forms of occurrence.

What does occur in Centennial images and textual descriptions of peopled

Saskatchewan? When the premier of the province repeats that "we are the First Nations, the Metis, and the descendants of immigrant pioneers,"24 the official Centennial website addresses "Saskatchewan" as all participants in the celebrations and as the place itself, or

Etienne Balibar, "Subjection and Subjectivation," in Joan Copjec, ed. Supposing the Subject, New York: Verso, 1996, p.8. 24 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, 24 January 2005. a three hour Gala celebration of arts and artists provides a stage for hundreds of performers presented as claiming Saskatchewan to be home, promotional materials circulate of white, Aboriginal and people of colour celebrating the Centennial, or when the Western Development Museum invites people of Saskatchewan to share stories of survival and success - whose subjectivity, and whose subjection, are articulated? To return to Balibar, he argues that "citizenship is not one among other attributes of subjectivity, on the contrary, it is subjectivity, that form of subjectivity that would no longer be identical with subjection for anyone."25 Further, he concludes, "any form of subjection is incompatible with citizenship."26 In the Centennial moments I describe in this chapter, who is possible as the citizen subject of Saskatchewan?

I take this question through Centennial texts and images of Aboriginal people in

Saskatchewan, of Saskatchewan as comprised of nation-builders and pioneers, artists, an ethnically and culturally diverse population, and people with definitive characteristics.

These textual and imaged inclusions, performances, representations of and addresses to people are not the full extent of the peopled Centennial celebrations. Their invocations and appearances do however appear with a prominence and in ways that reveal effects of

Saskatchewan as a racial and colonial Canadian project. The revelatory effects of these commemorations are also reiterations of that project. The "once upon a time" rendition of Saskatchewan's "citizens past and present" draws upon contours of subjectivity and citizenship that are repeated in multiple Centennial moments - in both explicit, and subtle, ways.

Balibar, "Subjection and Subjectivation," p. 12. Emphasis in the original. Balibar, "Subjection and Sbujectivation," p. 12. 142

Aboriginal Acknowledgments

A dance segment performed as part of the Centennial Gala show was introduced by Gordon Tootoosis, an actor from Poundmaker First Nation. On stage for this piece,

Tootoosis greets the crowd in both English and Cree. Following the audience applause that erupts after his greeting in Cree, Tootoosis laughs and remarks to the audience that of course everyone knows Cree "because you are from Saskatchewan" - words that lead to an eruption of audience laughter. Tootoosis then speaks about the Cree word

Saskatchewan as a descriptor for water flowing from melted glaciers. He speaks of how rivers a hundred years ago "were to our country what arteries are to our body. They also acted as a nervous system carrying vital information." He describes how rivers now are too often used for dumping and for waste removal. Tootoosis then directs audience attention to the dance segment ahead, making a connection between dance and the moving and ethereal qualities of water. He closes his speaking part and makes way on the stage for dancers with the words that "As the rivers come together... the different communities and different styles of dance have come together to give us a different vision."27

The introduced dance begins with drumming and dancing performed on stage by the Great Plains Dance Troupe. The dance begins in the middle of the evening Gala performance, following singers and other performances; it begins on the stage framed and occupied by the background video screen, the moveable stage pieces that resemble both grain elevators and stretched animal skins,28 the orchestra and choir, the silo-styled

27 Gordon Tootosis, Lieutenant Governor's Centennial Gala, DVD. 28 In my interview with the Gala producer I heard about the intent in juxtaposing the elevators and the animal hides: "it was a juxtaposition because what we were doing was using the... non-Aboriginal symbol 143 seating areas for the stage band, and the blue painted river on the stage floor. Also on stage with the Aboriginal dancers of the Great Plains Troupe are dancers that appear on stage throughout the evening - moving the elevator/animal hide pieces around, dancing accompaniments to some performances and dancing transitions between performances.

On the televised version to which I have access, as the Great Plains Dance Troupe is performing, these Gala dancers are visible in some shots posed and prepared at the edges of the stage for their own movement. At the sound of fingers gliding on a harp, a sound that to me has strong associations with magical disappearances,29 the Aboriginal dance troupe moves from the stage accompanied by audience applause, as the Gala dancers appear and move themselves and the stage pieces to a mounting crescendo of music. The rest of this dance segment representing the river-like flow of dance styles and communities in Saskatchewan features European cultural dances - a row of step dancers, ballet moves of the Gala dancers, and Ukrainian dancers. These were not sequential performances, but choreographed together. At the end of the dance, it seems that the stage fills with dancers who had come and gone during the segment - the step dancers, the Ukrainian dancers, the Gala dancers. The piece concludes with this stage full of dancers, a climax of music and thunderous audience applause. The Aboriginal performers who danced before the glide of the harp were not among the dancers on stage at the end of the piece.

When I viewed this on television, the "magic wand" sounds of the harp as a transition between the Great Plains Dancers and the choreographed piece that followed of the elevator, and the Aboriginal symbol of the hide and blending those images and juxtaposing them against one another" (Interview 01). 29 The sound the harp made was immediately recognizable to me from long associations as a signifier of immediate and dramatic change; I associate it with the sound of a magic wand. 144 strikingly emphasized the departure of visible Aboriginal presence on the stage. That the climax, or finale, to this piece did not include a return of those dancers along with the others marked this departure even more vividly. In a later interview with Andrea

Menard, she described some of her experience of decisions in the production of that piece for the Gala, in which she had learned prior to the show that there weren't Aboriginal dancers included. This was a discovery that quickly led her to intervene toward changes in the program. She also talked about the staging of the dance piece to facilitate this inclusion and said that attention to how things would look "for the camera" and to the timing of the choreographed piece resulted in disregard for protocols around the drum and in what she described as a message to the dancers to hurry up and get off the stage to make room for the ballet piece. She talked also about how protocols around the presence of Queen Elizabeth took precedence over those of the drum and the dancing.

As a visual event this staged dance piece represents Aboriginal presence and culture as sequentially prior to and separate from the interweaving of cultural and expressive forms choreographed as a coming together of communities and styles in

Saskatchewan. Andrea Menard's commentary on the behind the scenes staging of the moment and the precedence of imperial protocol over Aboriginal protocols reveals disregard for (in an initial omission of Aboriginal dancers), attention to (with the response of a revised presentation of the dance) and management of (through the design of the sequence and practices of stage direction) Aboriginal participation and representation on the stage. I am not assessing or presuming knowledge of the decisions or experiences of Tootoosis, the Great Plains Dancers, the drummers, or Menard herself on the stage in my interpretation of this piece in the Gala. I am also not restricting my interpretation to questions of representation; as an event, more occurs in the dance sequence than any singular decision about who would be on the stage when or where - and doing what. I will return again to this danced moment later.

I view this dance along with other texts and moments of the 2005 commemorations, some of which articulate explicitly that what is meant to occur in the

Centennial includes forms of recognition and acknowledgment of Aboriginal people in

Saskatchewan. In a Saskatchewan government news release announcing "a $1.6 million

Saskatchewan Centennial 2005 Aboriginal Strategy," Centennial Chair Glenn Hagel is quoted:

The First Nations and Metis people have been a vital part of the prairies for hundreds of years and the Aboriginal strategy provides all Saskatchewan residents and visitors to our province with an opportunity to share in that rich history. The programs supported by this strategy provide opportunity to bridge communities, connect cultures and discover the many common experiences that are shared by all people who make this province home.30

Acknowledgment and recognition as integral to Centennial commemorations is echoed by other political speakers at various Centennial events, as is the talk of a shared "home."

The premier, addressing the opening ceremonies of the First Nations Summer Games, remarks "but of course the history of Saskatchewan stretches back a lot further than 100 years. It is the history of First Nations peoples who have lived here for millennia and whose rich and diverse cultures we celebrate here tonight."31 Speaking at an event to award a Centennial medal32 collectively to First Nations and Metis women in

Glenn Hagel, quoted in "Aboriginal Centennial Celebrations Receive Funding," Saskatoon Sun, 17 April 2005, p. 34. 31 Lome Calvert, Speech: First Nations Summer Games, Kawakatoose First Nation, 3 July 2005. 32 "Recipients of these medals were selected based on the recommendation of governmental and non governmental organizations and Members of the Legislative Assembly. Community leaders, MLAs, MPs and judges will also received the medal. Approximately 4,000 Saskatchewan Centennial Medals were 146

Saskatchewan, the Lieutenant Governor says "Aboriginal women are the keepers of wisdom and traditions in their communities. They are resilient, compassionate, and generous. The Centennial Medal is but one way to acknowledge these deserving women who play such an important role in our province."33 The awarding of that particular

Centennial medal was also in the context of recognizing 2005 as "the Year of First

Nations and Metis women in Saskatchewan." Of this, the Provincial Secretary Joan

Beatty says, "I am pleased that the 100th Anniversary of our province is also a time to recognize the many contributions of First Nations and Metis people and in particular, the recognition of First Nations and Metis women who are the foundation and souls of their families and communities."34

On arrival in Saskatchewan for the "Royal Visit" to the province, including her attendance at the Centennial Gala,35 Queen Elizabeth visited the provincial legislature in

Regina for various unveilings of plaques and monuments, speeches, and handshakes. A news release for that event describes how

The Queen also named the legislative committees room "Mamawapiwinnayati". Use of the Cree word "mamawapiwin" and the Dene word "nayati" symbolizes the historic and continuing relationship between the Crown and the First Nations people in Saskatchewan. Both words translate as "meeting" or "gathering."36

In the televised broadcast of that event, the CBC commentator remarks that the reason for this naming of the room is that the government wants to restructure the work of committees and that First Nations have a history of consultation and being conciliatory. presented to individuals at ceremonies held throughout the province this year," Saskatchewan Government News Release, 10 May 2005. 33 Lieutenant Governor Lynda Haverstock in Saskatchewan Government News Release, 10 May 2005. 34 Provincial Secretary Joan Beatty in Saskatchewan Government News Release, 10 May 2005. 35 The Saskatchewan visit coincided with a Royal Visit to Alberta as well for the Centennial celebrations there. 36 Saskatchewan Government News Release, 18 May 2005. This also reflects the "historic relationship" of Saskatchewan provincial appropriations of Cree place names. "Let's face it," he continues, "there are not enough Aboriginal people in the Legislature.

This is an attempt to at least symbolically welcome First Nations people to the

Legislature and to acknowledge that history."37

These various and repeated citations of acknowledgment share space on the pages of speeches and in other Centennial expressions with varied repetitions of peaceful partnership between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the foundation and in the future of Saskatchewan as a province. The premier again,

Today we celebrate not only the 100th anniversary of Saskatchewan's entrance into confederation but also the 127th anniversary of a milestone in the ever-evolving relationship between Canada and Canadian First Nations - the signing of Treaty Six. It's very appropriate that we are able to commemorate these milestones together, because joint celebrations like this demonstrate one of Saskatchewan's greatest strengths - the strength of partnerships.38

This echoes his address to the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations Legislative

Assembly Winter Session in February of the Centennial year. His remarks reference the

100th anniversary of the province and the 2005 Year of First Nations and Metis Women and he asserts, "The Saskatchewan we live in today has been built by partnerships - partnerships between many peoples. As Saskatchewan moves forward into the 21st century, First Nations and Government, First Nations and industry, First Nations and educational institutions are more important than ever before." Calvert's attention to

"partnerships" into a Saskatchewan future also addresses youth and young Aboriginal people being integral to the future of the province, and about a growing Aboriginal population in Saskatchewan.

Costa Maragus, CBC news special, live broadcast 18 May 2005. 38 Lome Calvert, Speech: 127th Anniversary of Treaty 6, and Centennial Celebration, Flying Dust First Nation, 2 September 2005. The speech closes with "congratulations on the 127 most recent years ofyour history and Happy Centennial Saskatchewan..." 39 Lome Calvert, Speech: Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations Legislative Assembly, Regina, Saskatchewan, 22 February 2005. In my conversation with the Lieutenant Governor, as well as in several of her public addresses, she repeats a partnership story, strongly emphasizing an origin in peaceful coexistence. This chapter began with one glimpse of that in her words about

Aboriginal people choosing to "share the space." During our interview, she referred to another occasion when she voiced her view of partnership: When I stood up at the first or second time I was at a Treaty Day ... I was talking about how remarkable it was that people came together to live in peaceful coexistence.40

And later, in response to my comment that it wasn't a mutual coming together and decision to share space, and that there was violence involved, she added,

I'm not saying that there wasn't violence. I'm saying there is no way anywhere in the world that it had a better evolution to it in terms of peacefulness to it, than this nation. It's remarkable. If you're talking about was there no bloodshed, of course there was bloodshed.41

Returns to that evolutionary origin in "peaceful coexistence" through "bloodshed" (a vivid example of an elision of violence in the construction of a history) occur in the

Lieutenant Governor's conversation and public addresses. She spoke of her own clarity in her role as a representative of "the Crown" and of her attention to treaties "because treaties were signed by Lieutenant Governors. It's a treaty relationship. It's a relationship between the Crown and First Nations people."42 She also talked about

Saskatchewan as somehow unique and critical in that

If we can't make this experiment work, there's no hope for the Middle East, there's no hope for the Balkans, there's no hope where there are

40 Interview 02. 41 Interview 02. 42 Interview 02. eight and nine hundred year old hatreds. None. We are going to be a tremendous experiment.43

In the context of this "experiment" and its current urgencies in a purported framework of peacefully conducted treaty relationships, the Lieutenant Governor spoke of the Gala stage and its performances.44 In her words, she believes that there is

"inequality in almost everything," but equality in "the arts."45 She describes how art is art: "there is equality in the visual arts. If you are a great First Nations artist, you are a great artist. Forget the First Nations part."46 This is echoed in the application to

Canadian Heritage from which the Gala producer read to me (I quoted another portion of this in the previous chapter):

The event will inspire Canadians from coast to coast to coast to know that the arts and artists transcend birthplace, ethnicity, and circumstance; that any Canadian, be they born on a reserve, in a small rural town or in a major city, can achieve anything and be embraced by the entire world because of their talents. Every dream is achievable.47

In conversation, the Lieutenant Governor described the importance of staging the celebration and how it speaks to how she conceptualizes Saskatchewan. She "had no interest in people coming out and just doing a recital" nor in "saying, okay we're going to have the Queen enter this stadium, and we're going to have powwow dancers" and

43 Interview 02. 44 The Lieutenant Governor also sponsored several other "arts-based" initiatives as projects for the Centennial year. These include Lieutenant Governor Celebration of the Arts Centennial Pins awarded to persons designated as making particular contributions to the arts and their accessibility, a local libraries tour for Saskatchewan authors, and the production of a documentary focusing on the impact of land on local artists. The documentary is titled For the Love of the Land, Blue Hill Productions, 2005. 45 Interview 02. 46 Interview 02. 47 Interview 01. 48 Interview 02. 150 having "the obligatory stereotype of what's going to greet the Queen at this Gala." She wanted something more integrated, which would be "almost visceral in nature."50 The

Gala producer described the intent this way:

The second thing I think we did extremely successfully was avoid any approach to tokenism. And, in terms of the flow of the program or the representation culturally of what we built into the program. Because what we did not want to do was stop, and start, and give any sense of a loss of flow so that we would be sectioning things and delivering to the audience a sense of "we are now going to be presenting you with this sector of our population, of our culture." What we wanted to do instead was blend and layer all of the things that make for what we see as artistic contributions in Saskatchewan.51

Saskatchewan as art, artists and origins significantly shapes these articulations and is the frame for the movement of dancers and image on the Gala stage. The Gala was set as a showcase of Saskatchewan, for the Queen and for a provincial and national audience.

And it was on that stage that the startling sound of a harp accompanied a visual moment of transition in the dance described above. I view that moment in the context of these conversations with the Lieutenant Governor and the Gala producer, reported speeches of the premier, and a televised broadcast of the Queen renaming the legislative meeting room not to claim evidence of a predictable format for Aboriginal participation and subjectivity in Centennial moments. I write it in that context to convey this entangling of acknowledgment, elision of colonial violence (in the Lieutenant Governor's account of provincial origins, or, more directly - racist historical accounts), and awareness of stereotypes and simplified sequences of cultural display (the Lieutenant

49 Interview 02. 50 Interview 02. 51 Interview 01. 151

Governor and the producer's desires to avoid "recitals" "tokenism" "obligatory stereotypes" and sequential presentations of cultural performance). Such entanglements, while complex, still collude toward a kind of surety about Saskatchewan; and, I would argue, who that Saskatchewan is. This surety is marked by race. The staging of such moments may be tangled and unpredictable, but the Centennial marking of Saskatchewan reiterates a racial project of subject formation.

The explicit configuration of peaceful encounter prioritizes narratives of settler

Canada and reiterates the not-unexpected positive "spins" of an official commemoration, especially not unexpected via a designated representative of imperial legacies and present legislative practice. Celebrations of partnership with Aboriginal communities, as voiced by the premier, are similarly congruent with the "unifying address"52 attempted through state-managed commemoration. What I referred to above as collusions toward surety reiterate the spatial domain of Saskatchewan as a continuous reference point and known terrain of encounters and partnerships. Not only is Saskatchewan as the site for these encounters drawn into and reiterated as a dominant story of official Centennial design, but also Saskatchewan is reiterated as continuous. The future projected in the premier's comments about Aboriginal youth and future partnerships, he projects as a Saskatchewan future. In the context of the Centennial, that Saskatchewan does not appear as a mobile or flexible notion; this is a stasis which, among its effects, includes that of reiterated subject possibilities.

Actual Aboriginal involvement in the Centennial was certainly not equivalent to that as reiterated subjects of acknowledgment. There were of course various forms of

Aboriginal participation as well as counter-Centennial activity throughout the year. For

52 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 78. I cited this earlier, in Chapter One (p. 50 this text). 152 example, an art exhibit titled Contested Histories, funded by the 2005 Centennial and curated as a collaboration of the Art Gallery of Regina and the Sakewewak Artists'

Collective is one example of both participation and counter-activity. This was a collection of installations to contest the celebratory frame of the Centennial. The curators' text to accompany the exhibit states that:

We rightfully commemorate our collective achievements. These events and storytelling help articulate who we are, to others and ourselves. But, it is important that some of our more complex and unresolved stories are not pushed into the background. There were people here before 1905. While we honour those who arrived since then, we ought not forget the costs of those arrivals, or forget about those who were here long before.53

Another exhibit, Through the Eyes of the Cree and Beyond, organized by the

Allen Sapp Gallery of North Battleford, in partnership with the Office of the Treaty

Commissioner and again with funding support of the Centennial office is another example of participation; in many moments (such as one I cited in Chapter Three) this traveling exhibit was framed as important acknowledgement and celebrated in the

Centennial framework. However, there are also ways that it counters the staged story. I viewed this exhibit in two settings during 2005. One was at the Allen Sapp Gallery, and the other was the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon the same day that I was there to view the Winning the Prairie Gamble exhibit. The two exhibits were situated in different locations in the museum - the Prairie Gamble being mounted as a long term exhibit, and the Eyes of the Cree as temporary. In the latter exhibit room, I stood looking at Allen Sapp's paintings of his family's farm life and at a description of the permit and pass system and peasant farming policy framed on the wall; in the other, I was guided

53 David Garneau and Janell Ranae Rempell, curators, Contested Histories, June 29 - August 26, 2005. Art Gallery of Regina. Artists: Michel Boutin, Ruth Cuthand, John Henry Fine Day, Valerie Kinistino, Neal McLeod, Sharon Lee Pelletier, Sheila Orr, Gabriel Yahyahkeekoot. through the exhibit under construction and shown an area that was designated to show

"Native American and Metis attempts at farming."54

Acknowledgments, partnerships, origins in peaceful coexistence and that magic wand moment on the Gala stage accomplish a placement of Aboriginal subjects and subject possibilities in ways that make the variety of forms of participation and resistance much less visible on the Centennial stage. I am reminded here again of Agamben's analysis. The trope of partnership and the "we" of "we are First Nations and Metis and descendents of immigrant pioneers"55 resonates with the "biopolitical plan to produce a people without a fracture."56 And yet such a plan must continually confront the fractures that do exist. The Lieutenant Governor can not deny that there was bloodshed, the speeches must acknowledge that 100 years is a short and partial account of life in the land, the exhibits at the WDM and the official play that commemorate a history must include the disparities. The Centennial Summit, and the premier's address to the FSIN

Assembly must use some words to speak to conflicts and difference between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal history and experience of Saskatchewan. Every Centennial moment contains and must contend with the fracture of settler colonial history and its structured invasions, as I discussed in the introductory chapter,57 of land and territory.

Art and Artists

The Lieutenant Governor, as I noted above, described her view of "equality in the arts," which is also a perspective that figures in the production of the Centennial Gala.

The arts as an activity in Saskatchewan and as a commemorated activity, as well as an

54 Field Notes: Winning the Prairie Gamble, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 1 August 2005. 55 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, 24 January 2005. And elsewhere. 56 Agamben, "What is a People?" p. 33. 57 This was with reference to Patrick Wolfe, cited in Chapter One. activity of commemoration, extend beyond the Gala, itself a publicized focal point for celebrating Saskatchewan in 2005. In some ways like the "continuous habitation of the land" story I revealed in the previous chapter, there is a kind of wnboundedness invoked in many Centennial moments that depict the arts as an element of "who" constitutes

Saskatchewan.

The Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association (SRIA) produced compilation

CDs as a Centennial commemorative project. The title of this compilation project is, interestingly, "No Boundaries." A description of this title, in the CD jacket of the CDs includes:

Saskatchewan Centennial: No Boundaries is our tribute to a long history of music here on the prairies. Saskatchewan musicians and artists are not restricted by geographical or stylistic boundaries. Our musicians play in orchestras and symphonies, country and rock bands, and every imaginable style of music in every corner of the globe. Our sound and lighting techs, engineers and producers work with world-class international artists. We're proud of the music of Saskatchewan, the talent our province has nurtured, and the wealth of recorded material reflecting our diversity.58

Available during the summer of 2005, the first two of four intended compilations are

"rock-pop" and "country roots." A news release describes volumes three and four, intended for release in September 2005, as compiled to "honour the province's classical, instrumental and jazz artists and pre-1970 country and popular music artists."59 The "no boundaries" descriptor, as the quote above indicates, explicitly refers to musicians moving and performing beyond geopolitical boundaries of Saskatchewan as well as to an unboundedness of style or genre. This compilation of music celebrates ways that music

58 Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association (SRIA). Saskatchewan Centennial: No Boundaries. CD jacket insert. CD series mastered at Talking Dog Studios. 59 "CD Set Celebrates Sask Musicians," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 16 May 2005, p. A7. purportedly defies or enables artists to "have broken down boundaries;" the boundaries are seemingly there, but music production and artistry is not contained by them. In this

CD collection as a commemorative project, Saskatchewan itself and Saskatchewan artists defy those boundaries. What the project celebrates is particular and site-specific

Saskatchewan music and musicians not limited by geographic or genre-bound categories.

They do however remain bound together as distinctly Saskatchewan.

The website promoting these Centennial CDs cites movement beyond the boundaries of Saskatchewan as an inspiration for new generations of Saskatchewan artists. The inspiration is that "it CAN be done from here."61 This distinctly resonates with the Centennial Gala's stated intent about the achievability of dreams and how art and artists "transcend birthplace, ethnicity and circumstance."62 The transcendence of boundaries in these instances describes a double move for subjects implicit in this activity. One is that they are not constrained or limited by a Saskatchewan locale or identity (not constrained in terms of what they produce or create, nor by where); and a second, simultaneous, move is that these Saskatchewan subjects can make a claim to and be claimed by Saskatchewan identity even in this transcendence. From the printed Gala program:

Presented here, in alphabetical order, are the stars of tonight's Gala performance. Each participant not only calls Saskatchewan their birthplace, but transcends borders and circumstance to be embraced by the world.63

Whatever it is that Saskatchewan in general or any particularity within it (of birthplace, ethnicity, circumstance for example; or perhaps also musical genre or style) might

60 "CD Set Celebrates Sask Musicians," p. A7. 61 Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association, http://www.saskrecording.ca (Last viewed 8 July 2007). 62 Interview 01. 63 Lieutenant Governor's Celebration of the Arts Official program, p. 8. 156 constrain or limit can be transcended. In the Lieutenant Governor's comments and the framework for the Gala production this attributes equality to participation in "arts" - or identifies the arts with a humanist equivalence across any difference. In the "No

Boundaries" CD project, this transcendence appears to also take the form of an equality of opportunity: Even if you are from Saskatchewan, you can make it anywhere.

And many have. That is, the claim that "it can be done from here" is bolstered by the visibility of CD sales, performances, contracts, and careers of individual musicians such as those who are included in the "No Boundaries" collections. The executive director of SRIA says, "For a province with a relatively small population, we have nurtured some heavy-hitters of the music industry - and they have come from every corner of Saskatchewan."64 The people to whom this claim is attributed, and their music, do exist. In my account of this claim my interest is not an assessment of numbers of people from Saskatchewan with music careers beyond the province, nor of what may constitute a career or success in "the music industry" or any other arts endeavor. Rather, it is an interest in how this notion of Saskatchewan artists transcending boundaries within and beyond the province relies upon and reiterates the province as a bounded/static form of knowledge and as a bounded geography. One way that this occurs is through the context formed in interplays of various Centennial moments and texts and their collective integration in the 100 years story of Saskatchewan. The boundaries that are assumed to be transcended must somehow also be present to make sense of these claims and celebrations of not being bound by them. The unbounded subject possibility and transcendence of limitations of genre and geography actually contributes to (and emerges as) a settler colonial subject formation.

64 "CD Set Celebrates Sask Musicians," p. A7. 157

Integrated with Centennial celebrations of art and artists not bound by province or genre, including the Gala and these CDs, is a claim to uniqueness: art productions particular to Saskatchewan, and a unique Saskatchewan proliferation of the arts. The premier:

Saskatchewan is blessed with a host of incredibly talented artists and performers. Over the course of our history, Saskatchewan has been graced with so many accomplished individuals in all the arts, almost more than our share I dare say. One can only speculate as to why that may be. I've heard theories crediting our landscape, our spectacular skies (vastness triggers creativity) and even our weather. I won't venture an explanation myself today but I will say that the artistic impulse has been a hallmark of Saskatchewan life from the very beginning.65

The SRIA executive director echoes the identification of the landscape as implicated in this: "There is a uniqueness to Saskatchewan just like there is a uniqueness to our landscape and to our history,"66 she says in reference to the CD compilation. In neither of these examples is the uniqueness elaborated in the moment other than as a reference to

Saskatchewan particular landscape, weather and vastness of sky. The absence of elaboration echoes the transparency and knowability of geography discussed in the previous chapter; here there is an unexplained connection between the presumably known geography and an abundance of talented and unbounded artists in Saskatchewan. In this telling, Saskatchewan appears as uniquely able to serve as both particular and universal site in global geography, productive of strong place-based identifications and simultaneously of unbounded possibility - in ways that rely on each other.

Lome Calvert, Speech: Celebration of the Arts Launch, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 25 February 2005. "CD Set Celebrates Sask Musicians," p. A7. 158

Diversity

The official theme song for the Centennial, titled "Saskatchewan - We Love this

Place!" includes the refrain:

We are many, and we are one. Lift your voice and sing, Saskatchewan. We are many, and we are one, 'Cause we love this place, Saskatchewan.

The song is rather ubiquitous in things Centennial, played frequently at official events and in Centennial promotion; and accompanying this repeated refrain throughout 2005 were many celebratory invocations of a diverse population united through identification with and love for Saskatchewan. The "corporate symbol" of the Saskatchewan

Centennial, also ubiquitously present throughout the celebrations, is meant as a

"symbolic 'arms wide open' figure [that] represents numerous positive emotions, events and activities: everything from a huge homecoming hug, to multicultural dancers, to a heartfelt exclamation of joy and celebration."67 Also, this symbol "simple, yet powerful... radiates the warmth, the diversity and the welcoming spirit of Saskatchewan people from all walks of life."68 Front and centre to the Centennial are these explicit and official celebrations of a "diverse" population in Saskatchewan.

The celebration of cultural diversity is front and centre, and is also present in multiple reiterations and moments through the Centennial year. The word, "diversity" itself features prominently but the notion and its attachment to culture is also evident in less directly signified ways.

The premier:

67 Centennial website: www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007) - the same textual description is repeated in the firsto f the Centennial newspapers circulated by the Centennial office. 68 Centennial website: www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). As we enter our second century, our provincial motto From Many Peoples Strength is as meaningful as when we entered Confederation. We are First Nations and Metis peoples with centuries of history and culture. We are immigrants from around the world, descendents of pioneers and together we celebrate 100 years of Saskatchewan and 100 years of Heart. The Regina Council of Churches:

One hundred years ago, celebrations at the founding of the province included a public service with 3000 people in attendance. In multicultural 2005, it is not appropriate for the government to sponsor an event associated with a single faith tradition.70

From the list of 100 Reasons to Celebrate Saskatchewan, printed in one of the

Centennial newspapers:

#79: On any given weekend, you can hop in your car and then eat your way around Europe (French food in Gravelbourg, Thai in Moose Jaw, Dutch-Indonesian in Lumsden, Ukrainian in Yorkton, Ethiopian in Regina, Japanese in Saskatoon).71

Apparently, and notably, this culinary tour around Saskatchewan associates Thailand,

Ethiopia, Japan, Indonesia and Saskatchewan as a drive around "Europe."

A newspaper description of two special events presented at the Centre of the Arts in Regina:

One is traditional; the other exotic. Between them they will celebrate both the sense of homegrown pride that has been around since the pioneers AND a spirit of cultural diversity that has developed along the way.72

The two events alluded to in that description include on one evening the India Canada

Association's presentation of a program by the then touring Sampradaya Dance Creations of Toronto, and the following night a Prairie Gold Chorus performance of a show titled

69 Government of Saskatchewan News Release: "Centennial Message fromPremie r Lome Calvert," 2 September 2005. 70 Karen Martens Zimmerly, "Helping Churches Mark our Centennial," Regina Leader Post, 15 September 2005, p. B8. 71100 Years of Heart, p. 11. 72 Nick Miliokas, "Events Celebrate Centennial," Regina Leader Post, 16 June 2005, p. D2. "Exploring the Heart of Saskatchewan" which is described as "a look at prairie life and prairie people as seen through the eyes of an American family visiting for the centenary." Given the absence of explanation, this article clearly does not deem it necessary to specify which of the events it regards as exotic, and which traditional.

And in reference to the Northern Gathering of Elders, the Centennial website text:

Join us for a celebration of our cultural diversity and the knowledge of our First Nations Elders.74

This sampling of Centennial moments reveals that in the shared referent of

Saskatchewan in a Centennial year is a readily invoked but variously represented notion of diversity. The reference to a drive through Europe, the possessive articulation of "our cultural diversity" and "our First Nations peoples," and the blatant distinction between exotic and traditional performance variously exemplify how the unexplained and readily assumed shared referent of diversity attached to Saskatchewan functions to - readily and without explanation - reinscribe cultural hierarchy. This is much like Eva Mackey's account of Canada 125 Celebrations, where she observed how a "bid for dominance":

functions within a framework of plural cultures, and by mobilising specific definitions of culture. The major process here is not the erasure of cultural difference but the proper management of cultures - a hierarchy of cultures - within a unified project.75

Mackey analyzes the construction of "a dominant and supposedly unified, white, unmarked core culture through the proliferation of forms of limited difference;" these examples from the Centennial exhibit a similar practice. In the Saskatchewan particular moments that I have investigated, I find that the core, unmarked, culture that somehow

73 Miliokas, "Events Celebrate Centennial," p. D2. 74 Centennial website: www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). 75 Mackey, House of Difference, p. 150. Emphasis in the original. 76 Mackey, House of Difference, p. 153. possesses diversity, Aboriginally and the traditional "homegrown pride" of pioneers, is attached to a very particular and repeated signification. One moment on a Centennial stage stands out as exemplary of this.

The moment I describe is in the finale of a dance performance presented by the

Regina Multicultural Association in Regina's Wascana Park on the official anniversary weekend of September 2005. This same dance was also performed as part of the half- time show at the Saskatchewan Roughriders/Winnipeg Blue Bombers football game played on the actual anniversary day that weekend. The finale of the stage show was performed to the accompaniment of the official Centennial song I introduced at the beginning of this section: "We love this place - Saskatchewan!" In the final moment of the song during the repeated refrain of "We are many, and we are one, and we love this place, Saskatchewan," four dancers representing four of the groups that shared in the performance moved toward the front of the stage. The dancer on the left and the dancer on the right held sheaves of wheat. The two dancers in the centre each carried a loaf of bread. In the dance, the bread and wheat were brought forth as a finale not only to what was described by the announcer as a "multicultural extravaganza," but also as the finale to a longer "Centennial Kick-off evening in that Park. This had included earlier dance performances from member groups of the Regina Multicultural Association, speeches by the premier Lome Calvert, the prime minister Paul Martin, the official chair of the

Centennial Glenn Hagel, and federal liberal cabinet minister Ralph Goodale; it also included a "waking of the dragons" ceremony to open a dragon boats festival happening that same weekend, a birthday cake cutting ritual performed by the prime minister and free hotdogs in the park. The dancers brought forth the bread after speeches about 162

Saskatchewan as the heartland of the nation built by neighbors helping neighbors

(Calvert), speeches about Centennial celebrations that "bring Metis, First Nations and the descendents of settlers together" (Martin), about Saskatchewan keeping Canada strong - being nation-builders by nature, not without tragedies and sorrows but always with community and teamwork and prairie heart stretching beyond the horizon (Goodale).

In this Saskatchewan Centennial moment, the middle landscape I discussed in

Chapter Three is further figured as the common identity and shared territory of culturally diverse peoples. The speeches that preceded the dance recounted for the audience pieces of this Saskatchewan story. The bread held up on that stage is symbolic of and materially produced through "the rural" as an economics of production and consumption and also as constitutive of Saskatchewan as the heartland of Canada. This evokes, and relies upon, an idea of the rural as the heart of the nation. The bread and wheat held up with the refrain of "we love this place, Saskatchewan" signifies the core culture as a rural-based identification, and specifically attached to wheat production. The speeches that preceded the Centennial dance that evening reinscribed that story of the nation-building expansion of agriculture into this region in the late 1800s.

In Chapter Three, my account of the middle landscape and Saskatchewan in the nation was about boundedness of geography and place; here, I am interested in the rural heartland of the nation and the symbolism of the bread in terms of the binding and unbinding of subject possibilities. How subjectivities are embedded in structures and cultures of dominance is my concern; again, this is less an inquiry into individual motives or personalities than into material and symbolic conditions for subject formation. The frequently reiterated celebration of Saskatchewan's cultural diversity is not a uniform or 163 homogeneous occurrence in all moments, but the core culture of a rural wheat-producing heartland of the nation has its subject identifications and possibilities that are repeatedly affirmed. In the next section, I describe some explicit repetitions of the core culture's dominant subjects.

"We are..."

Alongside the corporate symbol for the Centennial (the "arms wide open" image described above), is a second official symbol which is also a repeated phrase used in celebration and promotion. This is the "100 Years of Heart," described on the website and in the first 2005 Centennial newspaper as a symbol, and as one that "captures the essence of the Saskatchewan 'brand' in an honest and memorable way."77 Prior to the official song designation for "Saskatchewan - We Love this Place," the Centennial planners had a "campaign anthem" that was used in promotions; this anthem bore the title and refrain of "100 Years of Heart." Many of the speeches I have quoted from throughout this text included references to or invocations of this phrase, and it was present on banners and posters at many Centennial events. The further elaboration of its intent as symbolism includes:

We are seen the world over as a people of great heart; home to some of the friendliest and most caring and giving folk you will find anywhere. We are the birthplace of medicare. We lead the nation in volunteerism. We regularly break our own records with Kinsmen Telemiracle. We hold family near and dear to our hearts. Saskatchewan is often referred to as Canada's heartland and the "heart of the west."

The repeated "we" of this paragraph certainly resonates in many ways throughout the Centennial - the "we," and the repetitions, occur in various moments. I discussed this

Centennial website, and 100 Years of Heart, p. 3. Centennial website, and 100 Years of Heart, p. 3. briefly m the introduction to this chapter, and it has featured in data descriptions in other ways above. In this section, I am considering the specific "we are" that is shaped in

Centennial moments, recognizing this unifying signification as a common feature of heritage and commemorative discourse. In her unpublished thesis about the Heritage

Minutes commercials, Katarzyna Rukszto writes extensively about the heritage industry and its "logic of a unifying address;"79 I discussed this briefly in the section on memory in Chapter One. A unifying address in the Centennial is explicit as a "we are" statement; the official Centennial website and printed text materials, and the premier's speeches contain many examples. There are repeated characteristics attributed to the "we" that is included in the address, and there is a clear thread of attachment to characteristics of builders (pioneers, nation-builders, builders of a province) and rural identity. Rukszto notes of much heritage discourse,".. .heritage employs an essentialist conception of culture as a unitary marker of identity, where each member of a bounded community shares a set of shared and readily recognizable characteristics."80 The readily recognizable characteristics of Saskatchewan imagined as a bounded community are abundant in the Centennial.

On many Centennial occasions, Premier Lome Calvert's speech notes are rich/rife with "we are" declarative and celebratory statements:

We are a proud people. We are an innovative people. We are a people who achieve.81

We don't wait to be asked — we roll up our sleeves and make things happen.... We work well together because we know working together is the best way to get things done.82

Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 78. 80 Rukszto, Minute by Minute, p. 67. 81 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Launch, 23 September 2004. 165

We are a people, forged by our circumstances, to be a cooperative people yet doggedly independent. We are a people who learn from each other. We are a people who help each other. Witness this province's response to the tsunami! We are a people with a unique knack of turning dreams as big as a prairie sky into realities as solid as the prairie soil.83

Most of all we have the best people you will ever find anywhere you might possibly go. Our people are our real strength. Our provincial motto sums it up best: From Many People's-Strength. That is our true character and our proud history.84

We are known for our community spirit, our ingenuity, our work ethic and our creativity.85

Resources and resourceful people! We, who have occupied this land, are a resilient and innovative people, in many ways forged from the rigors of this land, its geography and climate. From the First Nations peoples, to the Metis, to the immigrants, to the generations born in this land, we have faced adversity and have achieved against the odds of climate, of sometimes drought and cold winters, and of being land-locked in the heart of a continent.86

I cite so many examples of his speech texts in part to report on the frequency of this explicit repetition of shared and recognizable Saskatchewan attributes, as well as to repeat some of the content here itself. Many of the specific characteristics complement the persona of Saskatchewan characterized in ways I described in the previous chapter.

In the examples from the premier's speeches above, the characterized persona of the place Saskatchewan is explicitly extended to a personified we of a population or citizenry of Saskatchewan. These words in the context of a politician's speech repeat in direct and declarative terms the imagined citizen-subject of Centennial Saskatchewan. This is a subject position reinforced and called upon in other ways through events and images and text of the Centennial. And it is the "readily recognizable" nation-building, rural, pioneer

82 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Plate and Senior's Pin Launch, Regina, Saskatchewan, November 2004. 83 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, 24 January 2005. 84 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Bell Ringing, 1 January 2005. 85 Lome Calvert, Speech: Centennial Bell Ringing, 1 January 2005. 86 Lome Calvert, Speech: Diplomatic Forum, 1 October 2004. 166 subject position purportedly shared by all addressed as Saskatchewan or as Saskatchewan people.

This is a subject position that coexists with Aboriginal "acknowledgments," artists transcending boundaries, and "our" cultural diversity. The ascribed attributes of a particular subject, the doggedly independent, cooperative, Saskatchewan person - who earns these attributes through a particular history of rural labour and community formations - stand in as the shared, unifying, collective and recognizable subject of the

Centennial and its citizenry. Moves toward claiming this as an inclusive subject position, one that accommodates First Nations and Metis peoples, and Saskatchewan people of all ethnicities and all labour and immigration histories, work to cover over a "biopolitical fracture" of the sort identified by Agamben. In the excerpts from speeches above, as in the symbolism of "100 Years of Heart," the attributes are frequently and plainly linked to experiences of settler agricultural histories - histories which themselves are more varied than the production of a singularly recognizable subject position attest, as well as being limited to one fraction of lived life in the place commemorated as Saskatchewan.

Race, Nostalgia and Possible Subjects

Who is possible?

I pose this as a question not to answer it, but to ask it. I know from encounters and observations at Centennial events I attended, from observing and recording here some of the many varied forms of participation in the creation of Centennial moments, and from conversations about my research and its inquiries, that identifications with and in Saskatchewan are unpredictable. This research query, in the form of a gaze that I began to describe at the end of the previous chapter, asks who is invited or included in the 167 address to "Saskatchewan people." This is a gaze on Saskatchewan that asks, who is addressed by the affirmation that "you showed your heart throughout 2005 as we commemorated and celebrated our home"? In this chapter, I have shown some of the ways that Centennial moments have been peopled through acknowledgments and recognition of Aboriginal peoples, art and artists, and cultural diversity, and through reiteration of a core population defined by the labour and communities of agricultural production. Asking "who is possible" in these moments is a way of interrupting a powerful fiction of cohesion and commonality that would simultaneously suggest that all are included in showing this heart and celebrating this home - and detail the shape of that heart and home with the contours of settler agricultural experience.

White racial subjectivity is part of, and what covers over, the fractures implicit in the construction of Centennial subject-citizens. The normativity of whiteness in

Centennial moments is not reliant on a predominance of white bodies or faces in

Centennial production or promotions. Indeed, in official Centennial materials, diversity among persons is marked and obvious. Observations of white racial subjectivity as normative is not the result of a content analysis of Centennial images or texts; that has not been the work of this thesis. The point of my observation is that the normativity of whiteness is not tracked in numbers of bodies or faces in official imagery and that the visibility/invisibility of whiteness is evident in other ways. In Chapter One, I cited Sara

Ahmed's words that "whiteness is only invisible to those who inhabit it. For those who

87 Saskatchewan Centennial website. This is the text that appears on the homepage following the Centennial celebrations, under the heading "You're All Heart, Saskatchewan." www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). Also cited at footnote 15 in this chapter. 88Content analysis is a specific approach to analyzing visual images. Gillian Rose describes how this method of analysis "is based on counting the frequency of certain visual elements in a clearly defined sample of images, and then analyzing those frequencies" (Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies, London: Sage Publications, 2001, p. 56). Rose's description is based primarily on a reading of C.A. Lutz and J.L. Collins, Reading National Geographic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. 168 don't, it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere."89 Ahmed identifies the visibility of its effects, and also argues that "the project of making whiteness visible only makes sense from the point of view of those for whom it is invisible."90 Rather than point to what already is everywhere visible and thereby increase that visibility, my hope is to increase the visibility of practices that cover over and divert from the flexibility and mobility - as well as the fractures - in "who is possible." This does increase the visibility of Saskatchewan being made and remade through settler configurations of possibility and place that assume a core/unmarked/white subject position from which differences emerge. It may also increase the visibility of the fictive in these configurations. Asking

"who is possible" in the contours of a fiction is a different question than asking "who is."

Possessiveness of territory and history is a project of white settler colonial practices in Canada. Such practices do not produce whiteness as a secure subject position; this is, for example, evident through variations in experiences of settler agriculture. It is also not the case that the most privileged, those who bear the most privileged effects of white settler colonialism in Canada, are prairie farmers; nor is it the case that all settlers in Saskatchewan are, or were, white. The affirmation of this subject position - the independent, heart of the nation, rural-identified Saskatchewan people - bolsters white normativity in the nation. But it also unevenly bolsters the privilege of particular individuals.

In the next chapter, I further analyze how Saskatchewan as past features in

Centennial moments and further address how freedom from boundaries is peculiarly simultaneous with attachment to them.

89 Ahmed, "Declarations of Whiteness," paragraph 1. Cited previously in Chapter One, on page 34. 90 Ahmed, "Declarations of Whiteness," paragraph 1. Chapter Five: Saskatchewan as a Past

I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe

Nostalgia is not, therefore, simply a regressive looking backwards; it is rather a vector of movement, a way of moving forward, into the future-past.

Fiona Allon, "Nostalgia Unbound"

Pavements and Paradise

At the end of the staged Gala performance, the final piece on the program is a tribute to musician Joni Mitchell which includes a medley of her songs performed by many of the featured artists from earlier in the evening. The final moments of that performance, and the end of the staged program, involve Gala performers gathered on stage accompanied by a reprise of Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi," the repeated chorus of which includes the phrase, "they paved paradise, put up a parking lot."

Mitchell wrote the music and lyrics for the song about 35 years earlier and has described it as a response to viewing an immense parking lot from a hotel window one morning in

Hawaii, when the pavement confronted her as "this blight on paradise."1 The song's chorus includes this repetition of the paved paradise lament, accompanied by a rather upbeat and also repetitive "bop, bop, bop, bop" line. It is a song that has had wide and popular circulation, including more recent versions performed by other artists as a cover

http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/dailv/12-96/12-07-96/b01ae065.htm (Los Angeles Times account of Mitchell's words about songs on reprise albums). "I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song."

169 170 to the original.2 During this Gala celebration version, Joni Mitchell joins the performers on stage and the song continues as Queen Elizabeth, Prince Phillip, the Lieutenant

Governor and others designated as special guests/dignitaries all arrive on the stage and greet several of the performers; the visual piece on the stage's projection screen during these repeated choruses of the song and the greetings is an image of buffalo silhouettes.

In this chapter, I consider Centennial moments that feature Saskatchewan as a

"past." The previous chapters focused on Saskatchewan as place, and as people, respectively; and again, boundaries around place or geography, around people or subjectivity and now around what constitutes the past, history, and public memory are not markedly distinct. This chapter is focused on the ways that "the past" features in the

2005 celebrations, and also on how Saskatchewan as place and as people are celebrated in particular ways because of the 100 years commemoration. So while again I am not presenting my project as an assessment of the Centennial as a monolithic event that could be summarized as a singular occurrence in a particularly meaningful way, I do at this point write more broadly about an interplay of moments and texts and conversations. I have touched on this throughout, but here the interplay itself receives more focus such that I move toward a synthesis of these three data chapters.

In this chapter I describe Centennial moments that feature remembrance and history such that Saskatchewan is remembered or historicized. I focus on the past as ethereal and the past as site or inheritance as two prominent features in the Centennial materials and events I have studied. To continue with my introduction to that analysis, I return to the "paved paradise" performance.

2 This includes artists such as Amy Grant, and Counting Crows. 171

When I first encountered that performance during the live broadcast on CBC in

May 2005, the repeated words "they paved paradise" with the images of buffalo in the background and the present day Queen of England walking across the stage merited the repetition of exclamation marks on my page of notes. The confluence of encounters in that 2005 moment, within the Centennial as an evocation of events conspiring a century earlier to create the province, and accompanied by an upbeat "bop bopping" about paving over paradise punctuated for me much that was and remains the impetus for this project.

On the television screen it appeared as a stark moment of remembrance and forgetting, and of a subtly reiterated colonial project. I combine the words "stark" and "subtly" quite deliberately.

Although the Gala evening was not heavy on explicit recollections, focusing more on contemporary art and artists, one element that makes this closing moment, and all that occurred on that stage, commemorative and most decidedly about collective memory and forgetting is just simply that it is a Centennial event. Relation with the past is an essential element sustaining this production. The stark and the subtle, the explicit and the implicit, this is the stuff of powerful fictions and the power of their perpetuation. The Queen's wave and the image of buffalo overlooking the closing refrains of that song on a stage celebrating Saskatchewan bear starkly a history of violence and displacement - in a seemingly innocuous moment celebrating cultural artistic performance and collective identity. But how and to whom could it seem innocuous? Dipesh Chakrabarty, in one of the quotes I selected as epigraph to this chapter, asks for a history "that makes visible" its collusions in the assimilation of human solidarities and possibilities into modern state 172 projects.3 This chapter asks also, and turns attention both to such collusions and also to possibilities that often lie undisclosed in official commemorations.

Elusiveness and Indeterminacy of the Past

The past, a past, any pasts do not have determinate qualities or a fixed identity.

To conceptualize a time and space that precedes the present as if there were a singular and locatable "past" is recognizable shorthand, and also one that is of course contested and variously revealed as misleading and problematic. There are repeated indications in various sites and circumstances that official state commemorations disregard such contestation and indeterminacies and employ this shorthand in the interests of promoting a unified and unifying story. I have discussed this at various points on these pages. In this section I elaborate on how the past as elusive and indeterminate interrupts any surety of knowledge about Saskatchewan productive of Centennial moments. I begin by accounting for how the texts and images, events and conversations that form the material for my analysis bear the marks of commemoration and reliance on assuming sure/secure forms of knowing.

There are varying means and methods of commemoration in the texts and events I studied. What all these texts and moments do consistently though is identify

Saskatchewan as a particular place, and as a particular province in the nation of Canada.

Critical scholars such as Rukszto, and Gillis, and Spilman (all mentioned in Chapter One) have each documented the unruliness of such activity even though commemorations

3 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 45. 173 appear as consensual, or as centrally managed.4 In the case of my Centennial study, the interplay of these texts and images do emerge in a state funded and managed enterprise, but particular moments, phrases, and forms of expression engage more than the resources and infrastructures of a provincially governed "Centennial project." It is analytically useful that the "Saskatchewan Centennial" functions as a referent, and the organized activities and texts do have that "official" status as event in the nation/state. However, I am looking at it as an interplay. The referent of interest to me is the shared and overlapping commemorative practices identified with 2005 as the 100th anniversary of

Saskatchewan as a province. My actual encounters with the materials are collage-like and shaped by methods of discursive inquiry and visual methodologies. The materials for my analysis exist as a collage of photos from my camera, coded texts, DVD visuals, audio CDs, posters, newspapers, flashes of memory. These are materials of the

Saskatchewan Centennial that I read and interpret collectively, and examples from which

I have referred to throughout this dissertation as Centennial "moments."

The Saskatchewan Centennial is a genre of commemorative activity, both state- led, and as a diffuse and unruly interplay of activities. The commemorations involve attempts at "closure, at decisiveness and imposition,"5 and also attempts to counter their own "officialness." For example, this is evident in comparisons made to how Centennial celebrations proceeded in Alberta. The Centennial Chair, Glenn Hagel is quoted in an

Alberta newspaper remarking on Saskatchewan's Centennial organizing:

MLA Glenn Hagel may have been born in Alberta, but he's now the chief cheerleader of Saskatchewan centennial celebrations with its modest $21-

4 Katarzyna Rukszto, Minute by Minute; John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations; Lyn Spilman, Nation and Commemoration. 5 Gerald M. Sider and Gavin A. Smith, Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994, p. 7. million two-year budget. "People feel hands down ours is the best," he boasts. "A lot of people coming to homecomings from Alberta say over and over again to us that 'you guys are having a lot more fun.' That's good, because if we'd tried to do the big Alberta project thing in Saskatoon and Regina, we would've been fried."

In another account of this comparison, the Regina Leader Post reports toward the end of the Centennial year on Hagel's reflections about Saskatchewan's Centennial as a grassroots initiative: "People have speculated a number of times that the centennial celebrations reflected the two different cultures," Hagel is quoted as saying, "I think we effectively caught the wave that was started by the people of Saskatchewan."7 These comments pertain to Hagel, in his role as official organizer, characterizing Saskatchewan commemorative activity as less managed and imposed; this is without specific reference to any ideas about the past as such. Rather, these claims of grassroots inspiration glide over any recognition that the marking of Saskatchewan in the ways of a Centennial is a deliberate decision, not the outcome of a natural and inevitable tide of time's progress.

The past is not determinate and knowable, spatially or temporally. In Chapter

One, my introduction to memory as one of the theoretical constructs central to my investigation, I emphasized the role of memory in the making of fictions. Memory as reconstruction is not a difficult concept to grasp. However, as the making of fictions

(such as of a terrain as reliably known) occurs through the forces of inhabitance,8 they often bear the guise of material truth such that the process of construction is missed.

Thus, an occasion to celebrate Saskatchewan as 100 years old appears in some views as a natural phenomenon. This naturalness and inevitability relies upon evading history and memory as continually constructed through processes of forgetting, of omission, of

6 Martin, "No Alberta Envy in Saskatchewan," p. A3. 7 Will Chabun, "Birthday Memories to Last a Lifetime," Regina Leader Post, 27 December 2005, p. Bl. 8 See Chapter One. 175 repetitions, and as practices that infuse the everyday not just moments of structured or collective attentiveness to relations with the past.

Centennial Moments that Remember Saskatchewan

The two features I identified as prominent in Saskatchewan Centennial moments, ethereality and inheritance, both refer to qualities of the past in the materials of this analysis. Both denote the past as simultaneously present and absent. In moments that engage/construct the past as ethereal, what are present are glimpses of something that was once, but purportedly no longer is. In moments that construct the past as inheritance, what is present of the past is in the form of "heritage," "tradition," "legacy" or even as something as seemingly precise as "the pride of forebears." While the ethereal past is somehow otherworldly in its remembered and represented forms, inheritance appears in more solid and purportedly tangible forms. These are not ontological differences between two discernible "pasts," as if the past really were distinguished as ethereal or inherited; the difference exists at the sites of representation and interpretation in the present. Nor is this distinction the limit of difference in how Saskatchewan as past is represented; it is, however, evident as a distinction and revealing of what moves and what stays firm in Saskatchewan's Centennial remembrances. The ethereal appears as a visit from some other time and place; in forms of inheritance, artefacts and practices from some other time and place are apparent as determinate and normative in the present. In the present, it is possible to practice a tradition, to experience the pride of "forebears" or to witness a quality of person or place that has remained and is still influencing the present - that is, to interact with this inherited past. 176

The Ethereal Past

The past as ethereal is a quality produced by the confluence of images and repeated narrations of European settlement in the prairies as the genesis of a modern

Saskatchewan, and of images and narratives that mark 1905 as a pivotal moment in the nation-building of Canada. The 1905 marker attaches Saskatchewan to a linear chronology that is in some ways literally represented as such, for example on constructed timelines, in the Centennial commemorations. That marking of time, the 100 years designation, of course appears in many other forms of commemoration; an effect that also appears is that Saskatchewan is the bracket that demarcates continuity - marking which trajectories of life and sociality contribute across time, and what else of life and sociality presumably falls away. In this fiction of a bounded Saskatchewan, the life and sociality that is constructed as "fallen away" through disappearance or displacement and other forms of loss fall outside the bounds of Saskatchewan's present. The 100 years story marking Saskatchewan's present is not only linear and temporal; it marks space (as I described in Chapter Three) and subject possibilities (as in Chapter Four).

The ethereal past in Centennial moments appears in the form of glimpses of what is imagined as having "fallen away" in the making of Saskatchewan as "modern" space; for example, it appears variously as the gaze of a buffalo, the sound of a magic wand marking a transition between Aboriginal and European dancing, and at times the conjured image of a glacial sea. This is a past significantly constituted by loss and disappearances that precede that 1905 genesis, and also by ongoing processes of "bracketing out" spaces and subjectivities. Although ethereality is strongly associated with settler colonial representations of Aboriginality, settler representation does also include Aboriginal peoples and cultures in the past as inheritance, for example: 177

A weekend of Centennial celebrating was kicked off with a mixture of pancakes, powwows and plaques in Saskatchewan on Friday.9

The ethereal and the inherited interact in complicated ways that betray their fragility as conceptions of the past. In earlier chapters, I described the provincial premier's frequent statement, in various versions, that "we are the descendants of First Nations, Metis, and immigrant pioneers." The "once was" quality of ethereality coexists with the reiterated acknowledgements of and claims to ongoing traditions and development of Aboriginal cultures and communities, within the discursive parameters of the Centennial.

Productions of ethereality are well documented as an aspect of white settler management of space and time, as are processes of othering, and excluding Aboriginality and Aboriginal peoples in particular, through governance structures and the making of dominant culture. Critical studies of white settler nations repeatedly account for these moves. This is for example evident in the work of Sherene Razack, Bonita Lawrence and other writers of Race, Space, and the Law discussed at points earlier in this text.10

Canadian literary studies, film studies, various forms of social and cultural critique document how a nation forged via colonial violence and its forms of governance and culture exclude Aboriginality and attempt to render Aboriginal peoples and cultures outside of the trajectories of history and modernity. Specifically in terms of how

Centennial moments manage and negotiate representations of the past, the production of ethereal image and text colludes with notions of haunting, also widely examined in settler contexts. For example, scholars examine the prominence of "haunting" in Canadian

9 "Pancakes, Powwows, and Plaques," p. 1. 10 Razack, Race, Space, and the Law. See for example, the introduction in which Razack writes that "through claims to reciprocity and equality, the story produces European settlers as the bearers of civilization while simultaneously tapping Aboriginal people in the pre-modern, that is, before civilization has occurred" (p. 2). literature. Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul, for example, have recently introduced a collection of essays that consider "the extent to which the return of the trope of haunting was potentially bound up with Canada's status as settler-invader society historically engaged in the project of nation-building and currently occupied with the challenges of post-nationalism (and the return of nationalism) and globalization."11 Renee L. Bergland engages with this analysis in terms of American literature; Bergland argues that "the interior logic of the modern nation requires that citizens be haunted, and that American nationalism is sustained by writings that conjure forth spectral Native Americans."12

Further, she argues that:

When we describe hegemonies as socially constructed, we mean that they are built on history, memory, fear, and desire. They are made from the same things that ghosts are made from. Because the politics of the national, the racial, the classed, and the gendered are the politics of memory and false memory, they are also, necessarily, the politics of spectrality.13

I use the word ethereal because, while related to spectrality and ghosts, I employ it as a broader notion inclusive of more than spectral subjects. The ethereal is also related to terrain (that is, ghost seems more attached to subjects or beings).

As an analytic strategy for investigating current sociality, as I claim to do, Avery

Gordon writes of haunting that:

haunting is a shared structure of feeling, a shared possession, a specific type of sociality. I might even suggest that haunting is the most general instance of the clamoring return of the reduced to a delicate social experience struggling, even unaware, with its shadowy but exigent

11 Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul, "Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production," University of Toronto Quarterly Vol. 75, No. 2,2006, p. 648 12 Ren^e L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2000, p. 4. 13 Bergland, The National Uncanny, p. 6. 179

presence. Haunting is the sociality of living with ghosts, a sociality both tangible and tactile as well as ephemeral and imaginary.14

In Gordon's extensive account of how contemporary social processes are haunted, she reckons with disappearances in Venezuela, and the long violences of slavery in America.

In a related account from a Canadian context, Mona Oikawa, in a study of remembered experiences of Japanese internments in Canada writes that "the piecing together of fragmented geographies is always incomplete; the fissures of the 'missing' and geographical spaces haunted and haunting. These 'past' ruptures of relationships and communities continue to leak into the present."15

This leaking as an ethereal glimpse is an effect of the bracketing off of time and space, and the marking of a genesis. It is an effect of official commemoration, of the making of a nation and of rendering time as a trajectory and citizen-subjectivity in the present as somehow originating in relation to the marked genesis of, in this context, colonized/colonizing Canada.16 The past as ethereal is an effect of an invader-settler history, culture and structures of governance. It is repeated in settler contexts as an effect of particular colonial imperialisms. In the notion of haunting as a form of sociality in colonial contexts, what remains and appears as though haunting the present from some

"other place" comprises forms of agency that are, rather, very present in place but unrecognized by modern and imperialist legacies and commemoration. The "fallen away" is a constructed notion, an interpretation through the lens of a subject position

14 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 201 15 Mona Oikawa, "Cartographies of Violence: Women, Memory, and Subjects of the 'Internment,'" in Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law, p. 96 16 Richard Slotkin's trilogy of texts on American mythologies of the frontier includes extensive analysis of the violent processes of invader-settler attempts to claim such a genesis in long inhabited space. In the first text of that trilogy, Slotkin describes that settler myth of originary presence enacted as "regeneration" through the violence of settler claims to territory. (Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 180 secure in colonial claims to truth; this is again the formidable, and the fragile, imposition of colonialism that must continually recast itself17 because of the realities that colonial powers have never held sway. The fact of survival and of migrations and identities that never conform to colonialism's binds and containments is evident always and everywhere in Canada and globally. The ruptures on colonial claims to secure truth and possession of history and territory, such as this 100 years of Saskatchewan "bracket" I repeatedly invoke, reveal that such constructions of time and space that would purport to have displaced Aboriginal life rely on the lie of displacement as accomplished and irreversible.

Marcia Crosby, discussing Aboriginal art and cultural production in Canada writes,

The portrayal of indigenous people as victims, contaminated by European culture and dying rather than changing, has benefitted those who have participated in its construction. This is not to say that aboriginal cultures did not go through dramatic changes that were violently imposed on our communities. However, we did not all die. We are still here - altered forever, and without the "authenticity" that some, nostalgically, would like to impose. Neither have we all been successfully assimilated into Euro- Canadian culture.

Haunting, as an effect of possessive claims to history, time, culture and space reveals the absurdity of modern colonialism and imperialism, and white normativity's conceits.

There is of course no completeness to the violent colonial projects of annihilation and assimilation.

The materials available, the images, the stories, and the interpretive repertoire of

Centennial commemoration must and do reckon with this dynamic. What I describe here as the ethereal past is an effect of that reckoning and of its obfuscation. I will illustrate this with a return to the three "sites" or moments I alluded to above: the gaze of the buffalo, the magic wand, and the conjured images of a glacial sea. These are illustrations

17 See discussion of Adele Perry's historical work, in Chapter One. 18 Crosby, "Construction of the Imaginary Indian," p. 270. of what I have encountered as the ethereal past in various Centennial moments. My choice of language for these moments emerges from the forms in which I encountered these ethereal productions in the Centennial.

I described a video-projected gaze of a buffalo that appeared on the screen of the

Gala stage as part of my discussion of geographic contours in Centennial moments. That gaze and the buffalo body imaged on the screen in the context of Centennial commemoration is an example of the effect I describe as the ethereal past in this analysis.

Other moments where I see this portrayal of the past through the gaze or presence of buffalo include a proposal for one of the art projects which remains as an installation following the Centennial year, a mural project jointly commemorating Alberta and

Saskatchewan Centennials, and images and textual references that gesture explicitly to a now disappeared time and space. Buffalo have specific and complex histories of movement and displacement and meaning through long histories in the place commemorated as Saskatchewan. In the few Centennial moments I recount here, however, the buffalo, as Saskatchewan does itself, stands as knowable. Buffalo themselves are in these moments envisioned as a knowable terrain, within a known terrain. They appear as knowable and accessible in meaning and connection to

Saskatchewan, and yet they are lost. They stand in as the past that has slipped away, as part of what was. Present, and returning, but as an absence, a loss: this is the ethereality effect.

The buffalo images on the Gala screen I propose as instances of the ethereal past include the gaze that frames the "Quilt and Buffalo" piece described in Chapter Three as well as the silhouettes projected during the final moments of the Gala, described at the beginning of the present chapter. The gaze in the image is a frame for what the Gala producer describes, of this segment, as "a snapshot of the history of the province."19 The effect of the projected image is a connection or communication between audience and the imaged animal. This imagined gaze effects an immediacy of contact between the imaged buffalo and we 21st century viewers, in the live audience, watching on television, or remembering the moment. The buffalo appears as immediately present, and simultaneously evokes a time that is past, a presence that has turned to absence. The silhouette images appear during the singing of "Big Yellow Taxi" and the refrain about paving paradise. They are not as central to the moment as the image in the earlier scene; however their presence as background and accompaniment to the Gala climax embodies this ethereality.

The art installation to which I refer is one of four sculptures commissioned as

"legacy artworks" for the Centennial.20 These were selected by the Saskatchewan Arts

Board to stand as permanent exhibits in four communities, Estevan, Yorkton,

Lloydminster, and La Ronge, identified by the Board as "gateway" or "cardinal points" for the province.21 The Estevan installation is titled, "Spinning Prairie." The website description of this piece includes the statement:

Mechanically, this structure is based upon a windmill design using wind force to generate kinetic movement. Each of the four fans depicts an essential Saskatchewan icon: spiral backbone, buffalo, wheat sheaves and the Western Red Lily.

The "four essential icons" are each described briefly. Including:

19 Interview 01. 20 See Saskatchewan Arts Board, www.artsboard.sk,ca/showcase/Centennial%20Commission%20Project%202005/news_commission- feb06update.htm for current details (Last viewed 8 February 2008). 21 The Centennial website identified these as "cardinal points of access to and from the province," in "A Province with Art in our Hearts" www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). 183

The buffalo is symbolic of First Nations culture and history. To the First Nations people living on the prairies, the buffalo was a sustainable natural resource as well as a powerful spiritual talisman.

In the final construction of the piece, the buffalo is not visible. I do not provide this description to contend anything significantly deliberate about the eventual exclusion of the buffalo image. It was present in the described intent of this installation, as an accompaniment to the spiral backbone of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, wheat sheaves, and a

Western Prairie Lily. The wheat, and wind and location in Estevan mark this, and explicitly so in a description of the piece, as "celebrating Saskatchewan agricultural and mining traditions while providing encouragement for new forms of energy production using one of our most renewable resources, the wind."22

The Buffalo mural project to which I refer is titled "Buffalo Twins" and is commemorative of both Saskatchewan and Alberta, and specifically of the pre-1905 proposal that the two provinces become one called "Buffalo." This mural does not actually include a prominent image of a buffalo; rather the focal image is that of two young children in an embrace and the "provincial flowers" of Alberta (wild rose) and

Saskatchewan (prairie lily). These images are formed in a mosaic comprised of 336 smaller paintings, all of which are contributed by artists in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

There are buffalo images among the many varied paintings, but the prominent presence of buffalo here, and that which draws my attention for this account, is in the invocation of the province that might have been:

The design and premise of the Alberta/Saskatchewan Centennial mural, Buffalo Twins, is based upon the little known fact that back in 1905 they were almost made into one province named Buffalo. It was later decided

22Saskatchewan Arts Board, http://www.artsboard.sk.ca/showcase/Centennial%20Commission%20PrQJect%202005/news commission- workslittle.htm#about (Located in "About the Art Work.") 184

to draw a boundary line that would split the two populations and land masses almost equally down the middle thus creating the two provinces as we know them today.23

The mural is astounding in its effect and size; the skill and creativity evident in drawing the disparate pieces into one image is extraordinary. However, I make note here of the organizing image, which is the Buffalo province.

The mural is among several other references to that "little known fact" of the province that never was. This includes a panel discussion at a Saskatchewan Centennial history conference in September, 2005, in which two former premiers - Allan Blakeney of Saskatchewan, and Peter Lougheed of Alberta - were each invited to speak on what they imagine the province of Buffalo would have been like were Alberta and

Saskatchewan to have been one.24 In a related invitation to imagine, a special Centennial issue of Canadian Geographic in January/February 2005, images a buffalo on the cover and the title, "How the West Was Divided: Imagine One Big Province Called Buffalo."25

The issue includes an essay by Aritha van Herk addressing this invitation to imagine the province that might have been. She provides an account of public political deliberations in the lead up to the 1905 division along the 110th meridian and reflections on the arbitrary nature of borders imposed on a landscape; she begins with the question, "what is the substance of a boundary or border?"26 The essay concludes with her description of an imagined Centennial commemoration, an image she attributes to writer George Melnyk,

in which commemorative canoe trips would follow rivers now moving between the two

231905-2005 Alberta/Saskatchewan Centennial Mural Commemorative Booklet, p. 3. 24 The session was titled, "What if Sir Wilfrid Laurier Had Created One Province in 1905?" Saskatchewan Centennial History Conference, September 8-10, 2005. Regina, Saskatchewan. I also note that the History department of the University of Saskatchewan is now hosting annual "Buffalo Province History Conferences." 25 Canadian Geographic January/February 2005. 26 Aritha van Herk, "Imagine One Big Province," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, p. 42. 185 provinces, "symbolizing a unity that was there before the division." The imagined commemoration, and her essay's conclusion, suggest:

There could be a flotilla, a return to the time when the rivers were the highways of the West, and bridges were irrelevant. And at the head, steering the first canoe, could be the ghost of Frederick Haultain, the provincial premier who never was, paddling his way through the wide expanse of Buffalo, the province that never was.28

These imaginings of the shared province consider the imposition of a border at that "110th meridian," and invite a return to the past, a return that summons discarded possibilities superseded by the placement of that border. In this case, the glimpse of something that is no more is explicitly a glimpse of something that never was, the single province. Haultain's proposal of a singular province was one among several other options given consideration in the pre-autonomy deliberations. These speculative commemorations of the envisioned province of Buffalo, such as van Herk's description or the panel presentations of Blakeney and Lougheed, are particularly interesting for the attention they draw to that border as an imposition on an implied original unity.

This is where the Buffalo province conjured as a remembrance and as an invitation to consider how Saskatchewan and Alberta result from particular actions that might have been otherwise, converges with imaging the bodies of actual buffalo. The buffalo province and the buffalo beings represent something that was and could now be otherwise. Such moments represent an acknowledgment of imposition: a cultural and political imposition. This is an acknowledgment that doubles as nostalgia for the presumably lost. In these instances, the buffalo has the quality of the ethereal, standing in as the presence of an absence, of an "otherwise" that has not held sway in the present

27 van Herk, "Imagine One Big Province," p. 47. 28 van Herk, "Imagine One Big Province," p. 47. 186 form of the landscape. The Canadian Geographic cover which includes both the image of an actual living buffalo along with the title that calls readers to "imagine one big province called Buffalo" relies on both simultaneously - the once dominant animal, and a differently bordered terrain (attaching much significance to one less border, that of the

"110th meridian.") On this same cover, beneath the hooves of the buffalo are three captions referring to articles in this issue, each of which evokes the borderless and remembered terrain:

"Lloydminster's split personality" "Range roamers: Bison return to the grasslands" "Prairie potash: Feeding the world from an ancient sea"

Lloydminster is a community situated on both sides of the Alberta/Saskatchewan divide, referred to as a "border city." A photo essay and short commentary in the issue point to how the city's border-straddling status both draws attention to, and undermines the significance of, the provincial boundary.29 The article on the return of bison to grasslands of Alberta and Saskatchewan describes successful efforts of ranchers and conservationists to increase the land areas designated for the animals. The article's writer, observing 50 young "plains bison" moving out onto the 1200 hectares now reserved for their grazing, remarks:

Their great heavy heads lowered to the grass, they flow out across the land toward what appears to be untrammelled horizons. A whoop of elation goes up from the viewing stand. In my mind's eye, I multiply those thrilling dark forms by a hundred, a thousand, a million, remembering the accounts I've read of the old days - before the boundaries of Alberta and Saskatchewan were etched onto the map - when some 30 to 60 million bison coursed across the grasslands of

Monique Roy-Sole, "Split City," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, p. 104-105. Photography by Laura Leyshon. 187

half a continent, from the Canadian prairies south to northern Mexico and from the Rocky Mountains east to the Mississippi drainage.30

She turns from that imagined visualization back to the present day happenings, with the words "before I can bring that lost world into focus.. .."31 The article goes on to temper the "newsworthy" accounts of the bison's return with reference to their limited, and fenced-in presence. She does not laud this as an actual return to bison "roaming freely on the Canadian prairies for the first time in more than 100 years;"32 the article does include a more critical appraisal of the event's significance. However, the invocation of the lost world and the conjured image of the free roaming prior to the creation of the two provinces, participates in the ethereal effect of placing buffalo in the Centennial commemorations. That placement is facilitated here by the production of this Canadian

Geographic issue celebrating the occasion of: "Alberta/Saskatchewan turn 100."33 The third article highlighted on the front page of the issue, about prairie potash and "feeding the world from an ancient sea" briefly evokes another medium for ethereality I identified in Centennial commemorations, that of the glacial sea preceding human habitation in the prairies.

This article on potash mining does not itself bear particular prominence in the

Centennial commemorations, and nor does the association of this mining industry with an ancient sea receive much broad circulation in Saskatchewan or beyond. However, here it sits in this Centennial commemorative issue of Canadian Geographic, alongside these calls to imagine an "undivided West." The focus of the article is a descriptive account of life and work organized around and in a potash mine in Rocanville, Saskatchewan and

30 Candace Savage, "Back Home on the Range," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, p. 52. 31 Savage, "Back Home on the Range," p. 52. 32 Savage, "Back Home on the Range," p. 52. 33 From the issue cover - about the aforementioned title "How the West was Divided." includes the writer's account of touring the mine. Among the introductory words to this description:

The descent is really a trip back in geologic time to what, in the Devonian period, was the soggy surface of the Earth. To get some sense of the time scale, the redoubtable dinosaurs would not appear on the evolutionary scene for roughly another 200 million years. In those much warmer days, the prairies-to-be were a vast lowland, frequently inundated by Arctic sea water, only to dry out again. As the flood-dry cycle repeated itself over an extended period of time, deep salt beds known to today's geologists as the Prairie Evaporite layer - and to miners as potash - were created. Today, they lie intact under a kilometer of younger sedimentary layers.34

This remembered glacial sea is the same sea that appears in the Dancing Sky Theatre's

Centennial production, discussed more fully in Chapter Three.

One of the first voiced lines in "All My Relations" is that "all things are born in water." With that line, actors hold up a large teardrop shaped image near the eye of

Crazy Rosie who is the backdrop mask and central character of the play. Soon after, with more narration and music, actors move about the stage area with blue fabric as moving water. The stage for this version of an unfolding story of Saskatchewan, then, is set with references to this water. As the mask that actor and narrator voices name as Crazy Rosie is placed at the back of the stage, the narration is:

Allan Casey, "Salt of the Earth," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, p. 78. Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach 2 August 2005. Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach 2 August 2005. 189

I referred to this same narration in Chapter Three and interpreted this, in the context of the play, as a move to mark how the origins of this now inhabited land precede any human habitation. I saw this as a move to reiterate the continuity of the land through various "seasons" of human presence and cultural/community forms; there, I was writing about how that move represents Saskatchewan as a place. In my return to that quote here,

I am interested in how the story of a glacial origin represents the past and its relation to the 2005 present. The ancient sea is a glimpse of life and landscape that was there but is now in the past. This is the same sea that the writer of the potash tour names, a sea that is no more but has left traces below the surface of the now lived terrain. This is the sea that precedes the millions of buffalo now remembered, the sea that underlies the lost unity evoked by imagining no border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. These

Centennial moments produce an ethereal past, an invitation to imagine an impossible return to a lost borderless place. Later in the Dancing Sky play, at the first appearance of the settler characters, one of them says "I come... to find a land with no borders." The glacial sea, the free roaming buffalo, the arbitrariness of drawing a cartographic line to designate two provinces are evoked as glimpses of a time before borders.

And in the Gala moment that signals a transition in dance with a sound strikingly like that of a magic wand - that instrument for conjuring disappearances and appearances

- the flowing together of many cultures and peoples in an originally borderless land resembles an evolutionary tale. The sound of a wand is a sound of vanishing. Of course, the association of that sound with that of a magic wand is an interpretation that I am making in this analysis. There is no actual magic wand visually, nor described in any conversation I had about the production of the Gala in the course of my research. Nor are

37 Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach 2 August 2005. 190 there any magic wands visible or described in other moments I investigated. There are, however, signals of transition. My attention to the sound of this harp coinciding with the departure of the Plains Indians Dance Troupe from the Gala stage is one striking example of such a marked transition.

In the Dancing Sky play, the yearly change of seasons is repeated as a signal of transition in long seasons of habitation and transformation in the land now known as

Saskatchewan and represented in the play as Crazy Rosie. The line that "one spring, with the geese came a new people,"38 signals a transition to the presence of European settlers.

Later in the play, in a season introduced as winter, a voice of one of the actors identifies winter as a season for gathering to share stories, and as a time of death and mourning.

Another voice adds, "in stories we remember the ashes of things past." And another asks,

"What are the deaths we call to mind?" This is followed by the four actors naming such

"deaths" which include:

Unbroken, unploughed prairie. Fertility of soil. Buffalo. Family farm. Hunting and gathering. Elevators. Languages of our people. School, store, rink, town. Plains grizzly, wolf, passenger pigeon, burrowing owl. Life close to the land. Life close to the land.

Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach 2 August 2005. Field Notes: Dancing Sky Performance at Manitou Beach 2 August 2005. 191

In this play, the seasonal changes motif signals a more cyclical story of transition in which death and life cycle together in a long story of transformations, rather than one of a marked linear boundary between the death of one life or time and origin of another.

There is, however, a marked new season, a spring, in which European settlers arrive. In this version of the passage of time in Saskatchewan, that transition is one of many in a long story of change. The deaths that are recounted in the intercultural shared stories of

"the ashes of things past" such as unploughed land, buffalo, Aboriginal languages, family farms and life close to the land, do not tell the varied conditions of their passing. All death and loss weigh together as borne collectively by Aboriginal and European settler culture and memory. This equation of loss is similar to the audio introduction to the

Winning the Prairie Gamble exhibit with the refrain about "sorrow and tears", and to the repeated words of federal cabinet minister Ralph Goodale that Saskatchewan is "not without tragedies and sorrows."40 What do such tellings of loss as shared or as equivalent suggest about signals of transition, or about the past?

More significantly for the intents of this project, I consider the question as what do such tellings do as engagements with Saskatchewan as a past? These moments that suppose a long story of transformations in which the entrance of European settlers on the scene is but one, though a significant, marked change exhibit a reliance on and reiteration of the ethereal or the spectrally absent/present as a version of Saskatchewan's past. That ethereal past functions through Centennial commemoration's attachment to colonial boundaries of time and space, but that reliance also reveals the perpetuation of these boundaries through other means. The forms of this perpetuation to which I attend, and that I contend are integral to Saskatchewan as a continuous terrain in Canadian national

40 Ralph Goodale, Speech: Wascana Park, 2 September 2005. 192 imaginings, are through domains of subject formation and space as embodied reiterations of colonialism that infuse the everyday. These moments constituted by images of buffalo in a commemorative magazine and on the Gala stage, by narrated encounters on the temporary "stage" of a traveling play, by the text of Centennial-related descriptions activate a repertoire of Saskatchewan as past.

In the text from which I drew the notion of "scenario" as related to my approach to Centennial moments, Diana Taylor distinguishes the idea of a repertoire, as that which enacts embodied memory, from notions of an archive, or of archival memory, reliant on

"supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones)."41 Thinking in terms of the repertoire, Taylor describes how it is that "people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by 'being there,' being a part of the transmission."42 The two forms of transmission interact with each other and are accessed in varied ways both deliberate (including by researchers who would investigate texts or examine performed acts to interpret their meanings and influences) and less so. The interplays of archive and repertoire in terms of Saskatchewan as a continuous domain - as I see activated in the Centennial - relate both to Centennial constructions of

Saskatchewan as past, and also to the interpretations I provide here of Centennial moments as performatic as well as discursive. Taylor's work stresses that both the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of knowledge production function through both the repertoire and archival practices of transmission. In her account, she makes this distinction against the notion that the relation of archive and repertoire is dichotomous, with "the written and archival constituting hegemonic power and the repertoire providing

41 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 19. 42 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 20. 193 the anti-hegemonic challenge."43 This is useful for thinking through the Centennial commemorations as knowledge production, and this project of inquiry as such as well.

Tellings of loss as shared and equivalent activate a repertoire of Saskatchewan as constituted by the displacement of a borderless past, which includes a repertoire of hegemonic colonial performances of territorial possession. Of course this is not only performed through repeated practices of attachment to the core, unmarked, settler subject position but also enacted through Canadian colonial legislation and appropriation of land.

This works through, for example, operations of what geographer Nicholas Blomely identifies as a "property regime"44 which relies upon "the mobilization of violence."45

The borders of Saskatchewan invoked as arbitrary and recognized as imposition have not in some merely generalized way displaced alternatives for the shape of the land, but have emerged through very specific practices of land surveys, a reserve system and its related invasive structures, that impact directly and persistently on individuals in specific ways.

Centennial moments that construct, and rely on constructions of, an ethereal past

- through calls to an impossible return in the form of calls to imagine one big province called Buffalo that might have been, to remember the unfenced plains, to know that the terrain mapped as Saskatchewan emerges from a now receded sea existing below the surface as a borderless memory - hold Saskatchewan in place as a distinct time and space. Such moments hold Saskatchewan in place through a relationship to a past made distinctly "other" and gone, but also near enough to be resource for regenerating

Saskatchewan in its formation as a province. Earlier in the thesis I have made

43 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 22. 44 Nicholas Blomley, "Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 93, No. 1,2003, pp. 121-141. 45 Blomely, "Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence," p. 126. 194 observations about a continuous landscape on which historical changes occur; this continuity is also formed through drawing an ethereal borderless past into the fiction of colonial possession. As I have observed these moments I have often thought of this as a version of finding "common ground." The reiterated refrains described earlier, of "we are First Nations, Metis, and the descendents of settlers," the evocation of seasonal shifts in habitation and even the recognition of "disharmony and displacement" creating the grounds for reconciliation, hold Saskatchewan as the ground/domain in or on which change, loss, displacement, reconciliation all occurs. This common ground underlies a

"game of truth," to repeat a phrase from my discussion of Foucault earlier, in which possible knowledge circulates. These productions of an ethereal, unbound, past regenerate Saskatchewan as the common ground and continuous landscape when that past becomes precursor to, and possession of, Saskatchewan.

The Past as Inheritance

Centennial moments also remember Saskatchewan's past as an inheritance. I distinguish this quality of remembrance from that which places Saskatchewan's past as a shadow, as ashes, death, loss, the irrecoverable and as the seemingly ethereal. Inheritance connotes a rather more tangible legacy, or relics and practices from another time and place that are determinate and informing of the present. Inheritance is a particular kind of continuity which I distinguish from, and relate to, the continuity of seasonal transitions and fallings away described above. The distinction, and the relation, is revealing. What I am observing here as an inherited past circulates in the same games of truth as the ethereal, in the making of Saskatchewan. 195

On the anniversary weekend of September 2005,1 attended many of the events held in Regina's Wascana Centre, on grounds adjacent to the provincial legislature. In

Chapter Four, I described one moment from that weekend in which dancers in a

"multicultural extravaganza" held up loaves of bread and sheaves of wheat, and elsewhere I have cited some words of political speech from the stages of that park. On

Sunday morning of the anniversary day, the city of Regina hosted a stage event to commemorate the weekend. It was an event organized by the city, but with a decidedly provincial and officially "Centennial" flare. This included the presence of the premier, the Lieutenant Governor, federal cabinet minister Ralph Goodale, and the official

Centennial chair Glenn Hagel. Their words on the stage were preceded by what was posed as a historical re-enactment of events in Regina of September 4,1905. That purported re-enactment was hosted by an actor posing as Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier.

The Laurier character addressed the 2005 crowd and retrospectively described his own experiences of the 1905 ceremonies of provincial inauguration:

I am Wilfrid Laurier, the first French Canadian prime minister of Canada. It was my pleasure to be here 100 years ago to celebrate Saskatchewan's entry into the great nation of Canada. I felt a little bit bad, and I am sorry still, that I was three days late. I had to be in Alberta to help them celebrate their entry into Confederation as well. And they were kind enough to forgive me then and I hope you still do. Looking at this old newspaper makes it easy to remember how it was that long time ago. It will help me to tell you about that great day. And you'll be able to read about it in the copies of this newspaper.46

The Laurier character continued with detail about the events of that day and "how it was that long time ago," addressing the 2005 crowd as witnesses to the 1905 events and drawing the crowd into the imagined reconstruction.

Field Notes: Wascana Park, 4 September 2005. 196

Lauder's introductions and "reminiscences" of those events were preceded by drumming and dancing offered by Kawacatoose First Nations on the same staged area.

The audience was seated and standing in a grassy area ahead of the stage, which also included hotdog stands, face-painting, a large Centennial logo banner on the grass for people to sign before its placement in a time capsule, a teepee. The backdrop for the stage included a series of enlarged black and white photos from the inauguration day ceremonies in September 1905. Two radio hosts who were MCs for the morning identified the backdrop images as "photos from the archive that depict September 4th,

1905," and asked the audience to take a look at them and "see how it was then."47 The

Laurier character's reminiscences of that day were accompanied by performances of a children's choir holding a Union Jack and singing "The Maple Leaf Forever," and a faux musical ride performed by men costumed in RCMP red tunics and toy horses. Following his account and these imaginings of the inauguration events, the Laurier character departed, and the stage was set for present day politicians and the Lieutenant Governor to address the audience.

The celebratory speeches concluded with the premier and Lieutenant Governor unveiling a plaque to launch "Saskatchewan's second century." The closing remarks of the premier's speech and his introduction to that unveiling repeated similar themes of other speeches I have excerpted in these pages:

Today we celebrate Saskatchewan. Our ancestors had their dreams and their visions for this great province, and to those dreams they gave their labour. Today we launch Saskatchewan's second century. And we too dream. We dream of a province that is open to the world. We dream of a province with energy. We dream of a vibrant community. We dream of a land with opportunities for our young and with equal opportunities for all and we dream of a province where the values of cooperation and caring,

47 Field Notes: Wascana Park, 4 September 2005. The radio hosts were from Lite 92 FM. 197

optimism and hope are the foundation of an unbreakable social fabric. Here in the heartland of the nation, may we always be a people with heart, (applause) And may God continue to bless the great province and people of Saskatchewan. To officially launch Saskatchewan's second century, in a moment I will invite the Lieutenant Governor Lynda Haverstock on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen to unveil Saskatchewan's Centennial plaque. A plaque that will hang and be displayed in the Legislative Grounds, currently now a national historic site. This plaque will stand forever as tribute to those who have gone before us but as promise for the future. My friends, there is a lot of tomorrow in this province. I now invite her Honour, Dr. Lynda Haverstock the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, to unveil the Centennial plaque and mark the official beginning of Saskatchewan's second century.48

Constructed as remembrance in this passage are dreams, labour and ancestors, with that dreaming identified as an inheritance or legacy perpetuated in the present-day dreams for a second provincial century.

These staged moments invoke and claim the dreams and labours of ancestors, a place in the nation, and enduring subject-forming values (of cooperation, caring, optimism and hope) as Saskatchewan's inheritance. The closing lines of the premier's speech prior to the unveiling of the plaque make explicit in speech what is embodied in the imagined re-enactment, and in the broader address of that morning's events. The presence of the actor impersonating Wilfrid Laurier and inviting those present to imagine that a century earlier, in that very place, pivotal events unfolded that determined the shape of the place in the present epitomize the significance of tangibility claimed in this quality of remembrance. The legacy of labour and dreams and nation-making is posited as tangible through inviting the Centennial audience to imagine them/ourselves experiencing the events of inauguration, in the very place of their occurrence. This differs from and relies upon remembrances that invoke a lost landscape of running buffalo and melting glaciers.

Field Notes: Wascana Park, 4 September 2005. 198

These stage moments in that park exhibit many elements of commemoration present in other Centennial contexts. Also, these commemorative moments bear extra claim to tangibility in that they are located on the grounds of the provincial legislature and on the actual calendar date of what was declared as the inaugural anniversary,

September 4th. The invitation to imagine a return to the inauguration day in Regina reinforces that day as a genesis for the conditions of life in 2005 Saskatchewan, and as accessible for "re-enacting." This is an invitation that coexists with attempts to counter a homogenous or singular story. The particular invitation in this staged event was actually produced as part of a Centennial committee initiative to de-centralize commemorations.

On the anniversary day, fifteen communities across the province hosted official commemorative events and this event in Regina was just one among these many.49 This scattering of events was also a move to cohere with the overall emphasis on "grassroots" and community based celebrations throughout the Centennial year. Centennial plans focused on decentralized initiatives in a way that explicitly differed from Alberta's commemorations, as I described in an earlier section of this chapter. Such emphases are perhaps a resistance to reiterating one moment or one site as inaugural. That is a resistance that echoes the voiced intentions of the Lieutenant Governor and the Gala producer who stated a desire to avoid certain portrayals of sequential or stereotyped images of culture in Saskatchewan. It echoes the celebrations of surprise and of resisting stereotyped portrayals of Saskatchewan in representations beyond the province. That said, the Laurier character and the present day politicians on that stage addressed the audience collectively as "Saskatchewan" and invited us to acknowledge a shared moment

49 The fifteen communities were Meadow Lake, La Ronge, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Yorkton, Saskatoon, Regina, Estevan, Weyburn, The Battlefords, Prince Albert, Humboldt, Melfort, Melville, and Lloydminster. of origin. The posed re-enactment was an invitation to return to that shared origin in the midst of stated and practiced resistances to repeating a centralized or homogenizing tale.

Caught up in the same games of truth as is an ethereal past, "Laurier's" address that

Sunday in the park attaches Saskatchewan's present not only to what is constructed as inheritance, but also to a reiterated common ground for shared remembrance, and continuity.

Race, Nostalgia and Returns to Saskatchewan's Past

What are the effects of this interplay of moments in which the past is staged as ethereal and as inheritance - and in which Saskatchewan is a place with "a lot of tomorrow"? My research has not intended to, nor has it, accessed the experiences of a remembering subject or subjects. So, in terms of remembrance, the effects that I can identify are not related to such experiences directly. I have aligned this project with critical investigations of powerful fictions and with attention to, what I described in

Chapter One as, "the workings of power in such merging of fiction and flesh." The power in which I have been and continue to be interested in interpreting through this analysis is that which is implicated in how race and nation function together in Canada, and in how Saskatchewan fictions of past, place, and people operate in national imagining and as domains of possibility within Saskatchewan. In my writing about this, I have continually returned to a view of fictions that "hold Saskatchewan in place;" as a conclusion to this chapter and toward the conclusions of the thesis as a whole, I want to turn more directly to interpreting this hold by drawing on an analysis of nostalgia and the notion of "return." 200

Nostalgia as a relation to the not-present, to the past and to the absent, is an attempt to make present what is lost or an attempt to be present somewhere else. In the

Centennial moments I have been interpreting throughout this text, my analysis has revealed many invocations to "return" to Saskatchewan though I have not yet explicitly identified this invited movement as return. Some Centennial texts and images call on a desire to return through the commemoration of Saskatchewan as home and with explicit invitations to the "Saskatchewan people" of commemorative address to return from elsewhere to visit this/their home. The return is evident in other less explicit invocations as well.

Linda Hutcheon, in her essay on nostalgia and irony cited earlier, associates nostalgia with "the sad fact that time cannot be returned to - ever; time is irreversible."50

Nostalgia's fusion of a desire to return with the inevitable impossibility of return complements modern notions of time passing. In this chapter, I have identified ways that the quality of ethereality functions as an effect of modern Saskatchewan existing on the grounds of a lost world, of a borderless terrain, an ancient sea and of things that are presumed to have fallen away in the production of modern Saskatchewan. Also, in

Chapter Three, in the account of the middle landscape, I described how Saskatchewan's modernity is commemorated as a form of modernity that has managed to avoid its excesses - such as excess industrialism and uninhibited progress. This was, for example, highlighted in comparisons made with Alberta. Saskatchewan's peculiar but certain modernity is shaped not only by the irretrievability of what has fallen away into the ashes of time, but also by a certain visibility and nearness of the "premodern" as a lingering

Hutcheon, "Irony, Nostagia, and the Postmodern," paragraph 8. 201 presence and by formations of a collective persona as landscape and citizenry distinct in the nation in its role of preserving itself as the nation's heart.

The ethereal past in Saskatchewan commemoration, that of the borderless terrain, roaming buffalo, and the receding glacial sea - and the inherited past borne through

"dreams and labours of ancestors" and through the ascribed continuity of political and cultural formations - collide as precursors to and remnants in present day Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan appears to bear the peculiar nearness of premodernity as Canada's prairie heart, even as it preserves the nation-building emergent modernity cultivated in the genesis of a Canadian wheat economy. Nostalgia's longing to return meets in

Saskatchewan both the irretrievability of the presumed borderless time and terrain, and the preservation of its proximity. Saskatchewan's "middle landscape" continually provides a return for/to Canada's myth of benign nation-building through a (purportedly!) only moderately violent colonization process.51 This return is heightened in moments of

Centennial commemoration that produce the ethereal and the inherited past, and situates these moments in racist colonial/imperial possessiveness of geography, histories and citizenship.

Renato Rosaldo provides an account of imperialist nostalgia as a form of longing and addresses how nostalgia is produced as an effect of imperial acquisition. This effect is that "agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed."52 The intentionality of destruction is neutralized or modified in the

"reconciliatory" terrain of Saskatchewan because Saskatchewan is not so far removed from the processes of colonizing modernity - the landscape is seen to be not

51 The parentheses and exclamation is to signal here that I am repeating the racist national imaginary, not making the claim to moderation myself. 52 Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 69. 202 dramatically/excessively industrialized or urbanized. The returns invoked in

Saskatchewan commemorations structure a desire for reconciliation and for a peaceable story of loss and acquisition and they hold out the promise of nearness both to the "lost" and to reminders/assurance of this presumed peaceable genesis of colonial modernity.

Figuring the past as a place to return functions through nostalgia's attachment of time to space. I introduced this, at the outset of the thesis, as an affective attachment; drawing on the work of Ahmed and the sociality of emotion, I interpret this as attachment that works through "moving" objects (of feeling) and investing, or sticking, them in relation. Objects that move in the imperial/colonial attachments of Saskatchewan include images, performances, text, and repeated forms of address activated in Centennial moments such as the inherited legacies imagined in the September weekend play in

Wascana Park and the borderless landscape imagined as Saskatchewan's ethereally present past. While the Centennial as a commemoration takes the past as its "moving" object in particularly deliberate ways, time and space are also already attached in, and as,

Saskatchewan. This attachment is also a form of concealment when, as I have emphasized in my analyses throughout, the attachment appears as a static domain or continuous terrain of possibility. The 100 years commemoration of Saskatchewan reiterates temporal and spatial boundaries of Saskatchewan, and as I will discuss in the closing pages of this thesis, takes not only Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan's past as its object, but also takes a form of concealment - a form that sticks to Saskatchewan, and

sticks Saskatchewan in the nation. Chapter Six: Conclusion

The conduct of life today is completely and utterly dependent on the sea and the ships it bears, yet nothing is more invisible.

Michael Taussig, "The Beach (A Fantasy)"

Derek Walcott wrote, 'the sea is history,' I knew that before I knew it was history I was looking at.

Dionne Brand, Map to the Door of No Return

We're very unusual, this province. This landlocked place of 652 thousand square kilometers.

Lieutenant Governor Lynda Haverstock

The Invisibility of the Sea

While a now receded glacial sea marks contours of Saskatchewan landscape, and while references to its lingering effects as a shared history for all present inhabitants mark

Saskatchewan's place in the evolution of the planet, a description of the province as land locked also implies relation to many seas, to their histories and their contemporary activities that contour much on the planet. The implied relation is one of distance, that

Saskatchewan is buffered from and not touched by the distant seas.

In this project, the claim of borders that do not touch the shores of current open waters appears in many guises. This claim is evident in a phrase such as "land-locked"1 and in other varied references to the peculiarities of Canadian "prairie," and its accompanying inland terrains of forest and parkland. The claim functions to conceal ongoing connections to the sea - through movements, memories and relations of people, and through trade and transport of foods and other materials - that contour life in

Saskatchewan as very much a part of very many elsewheres. This concealment works in

1 Which is repeated elsewhere, in addition to the Lieutenant Governor's words in the chapter epigraph.

203 more ways than explicit references to distance between the straight-line borders of the province and the coastlines of any sea.

This "invisibility" of the sea in Michael Taussig's essay, the insight from which I begin these concluding reflections, refers not only to activities and places removed from the sights of shorelines. As well as referring to geographies remote from coasts, Taussig also forms an analysis of processes that remove attention from shores, seas and their activities:

Today the old ports have gone. Concrete container terminals have replaced them, and the wharves have moved to industrial sites far from the people who come as tourists to the gentrified old ports where sailing ships are resurrected as museums. Yet as never before, so we are told, is the whole world unified into the One Big Market, which must mean immense amount of shipping and human dependence on sea-borne freight: the iron ore from Australia and Canada, the apples we eat from Tasmania, the cheap steel from China, sun-ripened tomatoes from Israel, transistor radios and teevees from Taiwan, cars and computers from the US and Japan, the blue jeans from Medellin, oil from Venezuela and Kuwait, and so on.2

This observation precedes the statement included as epigraph above, that in spite of this dependence on the sea and its activities, "nothing is more invisible." The invisibility is not an absence of the sea's effects in material movements, and nor is invisibility an absence of its effects in the play of fantasy and imagination. Writes Taussig, "for it is by virtue of the separation and loss that the sea acquires a new magnificence."

The acquired magnificence takes form in part through a "phantasmatic recovery" and the increased popularity of the "beach" as site of affluence and desire.4 Relatedly,

Taussig describes a turn to the sea as "not something to be inhabited but something to be

2 Michael Taussig, "The Beach (A Fantasy)," in W.J.T. Mitchell ed., Landscape and Power, Second Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 318. 3 Taussig, "The Beach," p. 326. 4 Taussig, "The Beach," p. 319. contemplated''' and attaches this description to his interpretations of "second nature," in that through alienation from the inhabited and traversed sea it becomes less physically natured as present, and instead known more through its imagined constructed phantasmatic nature. Reading Taussig's essay in the context of my encounters with

Saskatchewan reiterated as a "middle" terrain, land-locked in Canada and as a 100-years story, brought to the fore how the invisibility of the sea occurs through these discursive constructions - and not as an absence, but as a concealment and as part of the second nature of Saskatchewan. This notion of the invisibility of the sea helps to make sense of what "moves" and "holds in place" the powerful fiction that is Saskatchewan's boundedness in Canada.

If "the sea is history," many histories relate to the sea. In Saskatchewan, immigration and settlement are strong stories tied to the sea. But the sea stories of a bounded Saskatchewan, told as though settled into a provincial place in national imaginings and in its own future possibilities, wash over diverse diasporic movements and transnational mobilities of today, of the century commemorated, and of histories preceding 1905. The reiterations of the "landlocked" story rely on a relation with the histories of the sea, a relation that situates the sea as a distant place of past and present crossings and Saskatchewan as bound inland and not directly touching or touched by current movements of the sea.

However, Saskatchewan is indeed not bounded by four straight lines on a map, nor by 100 years of a shared and known history. Those boundaries are not locked, not by land, nor by any other seemingly continuous domain of knowledge.

5 Taussig, "The Beach," p. 325. 206

Saskatchewan's Fictions

Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made- up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created, and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real and that all around the ground lay firm.

Michael Taussig, Mimesis andAlterity

The ground does not lie firm. Throughout this thesis, I have shown how

Centennial moments serve as attempts to secure the stability of a terrain and its interpretations - even while depicting "seasons" of inhabitance as change in that terrain - and I have discussed ways that this works to commemorate a fixed collective subjectivity and shared, knowable, past for Saskatchewan. I have argued that what occurs in such commemorative moments involves a reiteration of colonial binds on geography, history and subjectivity. While official commemorations in Canadian provinces as a state- managed practice do not unexpectedly repeat such boundaries, I have contended that there is more revealed about the binding effects of Saskatchewan's commemoration than that it is officially sanctioned. This commemorative reiteration relies on a firmness and presumed continuity of Saskatchewan identifications as place, people, and past.

Attentive to the workings and effects of race and of nostalgia in Centennial celebrations of these identifications, this study has considered affective attachments of Saskatchewan to such notions as the personified middle landscape, a terrain of reconciliation, place that calls into being a recognizable "people" within Canada, and that bears an inherited dreamed-of future on a once unbounded land.

The World Could Use a Little More Saskatchewan

This refrain, that the world could use more "Saskatchewan," appeared repeatedly in the premier's speeches at Centennial events and in multiple pages on the official 207

Centennial website, including the message posted on the home page at the close of the

Centennial year - a message repeated in the final edition of the official Centennial souvenir newspaper:

Saskatchewan - you showed your heart throughout 2005 as we commemorated and celebrated our home. You sang our song and wrote your own poems and stories. You raised the flag and wore the gear. You picked a place in Saskatchewan you'd never been to before and you went there (maybe even twice). You discovered your roots and planted a centennial tree. You planned events and special projects that built lasting - and living - legacies. You proved that nobody throws a party like Saskatchewan! You celebrated with family and friends and created memories to last another 100 years. You shared your centennial spirit and provincial pride with the many visitors that enjoyed our birthday celebrations! You showed the world it could use a little more Saskatchewan. And you're not stopping anytime soon! Keep your provincial pride close to your heart; keep telling the world just how much we love this place - Saskatchewan! For making us all Saskatchewan proud - thank you - from the bottom of our 100 years of heart!6

This refrain was repeatedly linked to Saskatchewan as a place with a particular inheritance as the heart of the nation, and linked to a collective subjectivity the contours of which I discussed in Chapter Four. My reading of this repetitious claim, in the context of these Centennial moments, is that it functions as an invitation into a nostalgic feeling in which Saskatchewan is a return "home." Saskatchewan, bound in this hundred year story, is the possibility of a homeplace in modernity - or, in a world of "elsewheres."

This is a nostalgia bound up in colonialism. The "world's need" for more Saskatchewan contains and reproduces transnational imperialisms in which home as a settler space serves as attempt to redeem the violences of imperial acquisition.

Saskatchewan as a return home features in many Centennial moments, an occurrence that is deeply twined with the repetition of Saskatchewan as heart of the

6 Centennial website: www.sask2005.ca (Last viewed 10 June 2007). Also in Wasn V that a party? Newspaper insert. Emphasis added. 208 nation. For example, in the CBC commentary for Queen Elizabeth's visit to

Saskatchewan's provincial legislature, the reporters remark on how the Queen has described experiencing Saskatchewan as a "home away from home:" they can see "how relaxed she is here" which seems to them to uphold her observations of that homeliness.7

The Canadian Prime Minister, on that same occasion of the "Official Welcome" to the

Queen and Prince Phillip, names the Saskatchewan Centennial as an opportunity to welcome the Queen to "Canada's heartland;" and, in a now familiar recounting of the tough practicality of settlers and how "First Nations shared this bountiful land," the Prime

Minister muses that "those who dare to dream look up at the stars in the prairie sky and they know that this is their home."8

The repeated celebrations of Saskatchewan as home, and heart of a nation in speeches and text commemorating the Centennial and this repeated claim that

Saskatchewan bears particular value for "the world," fix Saskatchewan as a reliably productive site. That repeated short sentence, "the world could use a little more

Saskatchewan," is an articulation bolstered by moments such as one on the Wascana Park stage when the four dancers came forward, holding bread and wheat, at the end of the

"multicultural extravaganza" danced to the Centennial theme song. As I described in

Chapter Four, the dancers held up the sheaves of wheat and loaves of bread during the final chorus of "We are many and we are one, and we love this place, Saskatchewan."

When the premier and others echo that celebration of cohesion and love in the related refrain about the world's need for more Saskatchewan, what is held up is bound in a colonial story that has materialized in geography, economy, culture and politics.

7 Field Notes: Royal Visit televised, 18 May 2005. CBC commentary. 8 Field Notes: Royal Visit televised, 18 May 2005. Prime Minister's speech. 209

Holding up a particular configuration of cohesion and shared love for place, in a symbolic gesture of raised bread and wheat or in the repeated refrain that holds up

Saskatchewan as a place-bound exemplar of human solidarity and social formation, is not determinate of the forms of recognition or identification participants in or observers of such moments make in them. But the moments, the bread, the love for place,

Saskatchewan as a world's ideal, held together in a naturalized fiction, attach to limited - and conditional - possibilities for the configurations of love meant by this imagistic affirmation. I make sense of this through reading Ahmed's analysis of how multicultural love as a national ideal in Britain actually works to limit possibility and equity:

The idea of a world where we all love each other, a world of lovers, is a humanist fantasy that informs much of the multicultural discourses of love, which I have formulated as the hope: If only we got closer we would be as one. The multicultural fantasy works as a form of conditional love, in which the conditions of love work to associate 'others' with the failure to return the national ideal.9

And in the Centennial, so the song literally goes. We are many. We are one. And we love this place Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan the collective ideal, the imagined cohesion.

Shared history and geography as proximity and harmony. With Ahmed, I recognize this as conditional love. And the conditions are, at least in part, evident in the bread.

The holding up of bread, and throughout the Centennial the holding up of volunteerism, community, and of a reconciliatory terrain that is home to a continuing story of inhabitance and to the heart of a nation - holds up colonial/teleological

Saskatchewan as the shape of possibility for the place, people, and past of this terrain.

9 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 139. Ahmed discusses the national ideal of "multicultural love" at length in her sixth chapter; her account emphasizes how "love for nation is...bound up with how bodies inhabit the nation in relation to an ideal" (p. 133), and shows how a national ideal of cohesion functions to reveal "a breach in the ideal image of the nation in the concrete difference of others" (p. 133). The nation as object of love and imaged as harmony means that drawing attention to inequities appears as difference and as "failure" to return that love. Bread and wheat are symbolic and also (though not the only) material effects of

Saskatchewan as a site in the Canadian nation; and, their production is deeply entwined with incursions on land and with the global structures of colonialism that support them even through the many shifts in the agricultural economies of Saskatchewan and Canada since the time of the province's formation in the National Policy years. What can be found in tracing the mobilities of bread include the divisions and violence of race and racism in the wheat economy, and in immigration experiences, in legalized racism toward

Aboriginal peoples, in policing, in schooling, in the theft of land and other practices that constitute this place as Saskatchewan. There are, also, past and present diasporic mobilities in that bread, and in Saskatchewan, which are not easily traced through bounded stories of shared love.

The conditional effects of love as I read in Ahmed, and the evocative power of bread as a wholesome organic affirmation explain something of what perpetuates celebrative accounts of benign togetherness. Centennial commemorations more easily sing the liberal humanist fantasy of proximity as harmony. To dispute the celebration is to confront the question, "what have you got against bread?"

It is also to confront the question: What could anyone have against this cohesive, idealized collectivity? What could anyone have against Saskatchewan?

Is questioning the celebrations an injury inflicted on love for this moderate and reconciliatory place? Or, might it be that diverting from such questions in order to hold up the cohesion means continual disavowals of daily injuries inflicted by the economies, politics and racialization of the "cohesion"? And is thus also a diversion from engaging 211 in and celebrating more equitable and heterogeneous possibilities for surviving and thriving - past, present, and future.

Implications: Courage to Invent New Fictions

Earlier, I aligned my project with inventiveness, with the garnering of courage to reinvent and live new fictions.10 Such courage is of course daily and persistently enacted off the pages of critical texts such as this, in all kinds of ways that contest the cohesiveness or any inevitabilities of Saskatchewan. The fictions to which my analyses of Centennial moments draw attention do press upon inhabitants of Saskatchewan terrain.

However, my recounting of these moments here and my interpreting the shape of some dominant fictions that secure particular guises of Saskatchewan as knowable and as objects of affection is also, I hope, a revealing of invention itself. I have tried in these pages to show that the Centennial in unruly and managed ways is a. powerful inventor of

Saskatchewan subjectivity, space and memory. A middle landscape in the heart of an invader-settler nation may be "what sticks" through circulations of Saskatchewan as object of collective love and object of desire to return to lost imaginings. However, this powerful, sticky, fictive Saskatchewan as naturally productive of reconciliation and homeplace for the "world's need" reveals its own concealments when it is regarded with a view toward broader horizons of possibility that extend beyond perceived boundaries of time, space, and Saskatchewan.

By broader horizons of possibility and new fictions in and of Saskatchewan I really do not mean a turn toward a future not yet in place. Coaxing colonial hegemonies loose from their workings of power, I did acknowledge at the outset, is of course an effort

10 See Chapter Two, in the section, "The Project as Critical Work," in reference to Taussig. 212 that exceeds pointing to their illegitimacies and narrowness or to the fact of their invention. And discovering how a commemorative event activates pedagogies of national belonging to conceal fractures and promote cohesion over conflict and complication does not accomplish an abandonment of such practices. What I do hope that this project can contribute is an analysis that at the very least reveals very particular forms of concealment and normativity attached to and activated by Saskatchewan's presumably land-locked borders. The possibilities, though concealed in colonial fictions, are already in place.

Also in place are the opportunities and impetus to continue this analysis and attach it to actions. Negotiations of Saskatchewan space, subjectivity and memory occur daily in classrooms, boardrooms, streets and of course many other domains that could be specified endlessly. As Joyce Green, in her study of the Commission of Inquiry into the violent death of a young Cree man in Saskatchewan named Neil Stonechild, emphasizes in direct reference to Saskatchewan - racism is a "deadly phenomenon."11 Green articulates this emphasis not only in reference to individualized violence but also to ways that Saskatchewan's future needs to be detached from bolstering the fragile privileges and securities of the already comfortable in support of "the expensive and difficult transformation of a racist social order to one that is genuinely post-colonial."12 While a

"genuine" postcolonial Saskatchewan is certainly not a configuration that could take obvious or uncontested forms as an achieved transformation, Green does point to specific efforts made in Saskatchewan toward shifting the foundations of racism and the

11 Green, "From Stonechild to Social Cohesion," p. 510. 12 Green, "From Stonechild to Social Cohesion," p. 523. 213 perpetuation of colonial relations. Green uses the language of cohesion to further emphasize that costly as transformation out of a racist and racially ordered society may seem to be from the perspective of those who bear its privileges, there is and must be a

"collective stake in a transformed future."14

That impetus, in the end, elicits a return to the problematic notion of "common ground." This thesis disrupts the fiction that the common ground in which equitable human solidarities adequate to the world's needs - or to confronting its violences - are formed is Saskatchewan bound in the contours of 100 years as a Canadian province. In proposing a direction for future studies and for engaging the pedagogical significance of such disruption, I resist formulating such directions as steps forward from a now known, albeit constructed or fictive, present and the imagined boundaries of its future possibility for Saskatchewan or elsewhere. I do not pose this analysis as a totalizing account of either the Centennial or of lives lived in or against the fictions mobilized through moments of commemoration. Rather, I hope the analysis documented here can be useful as an interpretation of attachments to knowledge, and for engaging with more loose, mobile, and unbound domains of possibility.

Further work in relation to Saskatchewan, and specifically work that undermines and transforms a racist social order, could make use of this analysis to address the limits that in many ways constrain the very naming of race and racism as a problem in

Saskatchewan. As an example of contexts for such application, the report of a recent

"Youth Summit" held in Saskatchewan in which young people aged 19-30 gathered to discuss topics including employment, education, "inclusive" community, and

13 Some examples Green provides include specific efforts to transform practices and knowledge in policing, police education, law schools and education faculties in Saskatchewan. 14 Green, "From Stonechild to Social Cohesion," p. 522. sustainability in the province indicates some discussion about racism and identifies recommendations for curriculum initiatives and teaching practices that would address what the report names as an "absurd" lack of knowledge in regard to Aboriginal

"history."15 In those deliberations, as in the recommended implementations including those directed toward anti-racist education, being alert to how "Saskatchewan" itself figures as the ground for encounters would be a useful intervention toward revealing where absurdity lies.

What happens in such deliberations about racism, and in structuring curricular or other practices toward equitable and hopeful living outside the bounds of racist colonialism, when Saskatchewan is posed as question rather than as the common and continuous ground for conversation, including grounds for reconciliation or transformation? What happens when Saskatchewan is viewed in ongoing connection to the sea? What happens.. .when Saskatchewan is recognized to be as connected to the seas as is anywhere else?

The analysis of this thesis, which prompts questions such as these, suggests that what could happen is that classrooms, commemorations, and other contexts of knowledge production, might actively resist repeating the colonial boundaries as a common and closed reference point. I do mean that explicitly in reference to the mapped borders of

Saskatchewan as well as those that mark a 100 year time line; but my intent in the analysis of this thesis has been to draw more of that colonial boundedness into question as well. The invisibility of the sea as I have interpreted it here, and specifically in relation to the tellings of Saskatchewan I have interpreted in Centennial moments, is an

15 Saskatchewan Youth Summit 2007. Final Report, p. 14. Retrieved 6 September 2007, from www.saskatchewanyouthsummit.ca 215 inhabited fiction that extends beyond commemorative practice. Further study, and pedagogical applications, could involve assessing anti-racist efforts in Saskatchewan to investigate how these boundaries writ large in the Centennial constrain transformative and anti-racist effort, and also seek to identify ways that the forms of closure and concealment described here are already ruptured in these efforts.

Beyond Saskatchewan, we might ask how Canada, its national subject-citizens and boundaries of national belonging, would be differently configured with a

Saskatchewan opened to continual question and not reliably/repeatedly situated as a bounded and mediating space in a colonial teleology. Could Canada, and the world, use a little more unpredictable and contested Saskatchewan? I end this thesis aware that many more questions spin off from here, and I conclude wondering how we might ask these questions with an eye also to present shifting and contested terrains of neoliberal globalization in which Saskatchewan and Canada and their fictions and forms of inhabitance are situated, as much as is anywhere else. It is one thing to invoke the sea imagistically in critique: how might the boundaries and possibilities, and affective attachments that conceal colonialism and stick to Saskatchewan, be traced in the mobilities and histories being made on the world maps of the 21st century? Bibliography of Works Cited

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Huhnsdorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Hutcheon, Linda. "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern," University of Toronto English Language (UTEL) Main Collection, 1998, Electronic Resource: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html.

Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Kroetsch, Robert. "Don't Give Me No More of Your Lip; or, the Prairie Horizon as Allowed Mouth," in Robert Wardaugh, ed., Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 2001, pp. 209-216.

Kuffert, Len ed. The Prairies Lost and Found. Winnipeg: St. John's College Press, 2007.

Laroque, Emma. "Preface, or Here Are Our Voices - Who Will Hear?" in Jeanne Perrault and Sylvia Vance, eds., Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada. NuWest Publishers, 1990, pp. xv-xxx.

Lawrence, Bonita. "Rewriting Histories of the Land: Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Eastern Canada," in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002, pp. 23-46.

Lawrence, Bonita. 'Real' Indians and Others: Mixed-Race Urban Native People, the Indian Act, and the Rebuilding of Indigenous Nations. PhD, OISE/UT, 1999.

Loomba, Ania. Colonalism/Postcolonialism. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Mackey, Eva. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Mandel, Eli. "Images of Prairie Man," in Richard Allen, ed., A Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1973.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964 / 2000.

Massad, Joseph. "The 'Post-Colonial' Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel," in Fawzia Afzal-Kahn and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, eds., The Pre-Occupation ofPostcolonial Studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 311-346.

"Maurice Florence" (Michel Foucault). "Foucault," in James D. Faubion, ed., Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984. New York: The New Press, 1998, pp. 459-463.

Mawani, Renisa. "In between and out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor and the Law in British Columbia, 1850-1913," in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002, pp. 47-70.

Mbembe, Achille. "Aesthetics of Superfluity," Public Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 373-406.

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McDougall, Russell. "Reading Saskatchewan Poetry: An Australian Short Story," in Kenneth G. Probert, ed., Writing Saskatchewan: Twenty Critical Essays, Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989, pp. 1-22.

McHoul, Alec, and Wendy Grace. A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

McKay, Ian. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth- Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. 221

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds:Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Miedma, Gary R. For Canada's Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.

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Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

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Pannekoek, Frits. "Who Matters? Public History and the Invention of the Canadian Past," Acadiensis Vol. 29, No. 2, 2000, pp. 205-217.

Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001.

Pitsula, James M. "First Nations and Saskatchewan Politics," in Howard A. Leeson, ed., Saskatchewan Politics: Into the Twenty-First Century. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 2001.

Probert, Kenneth, ed. Writing Saskatchewan: Twenty Critical Essays. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989.

Rabinow, Paul, ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Razack, Sherene. Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Razack, Sherene. "Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George," in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002, pp. 121-156.

Razack, Sherene, ed. Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002. 222

Razack, Sherene. "Simple Logic: The Identity Documents Rule and the Fantasy of a Nation Besieged and Betrayed," Journal of Law and Social Policy Vol. 15,2000.

Razack, Sherene. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Rosaldo, Renato. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies. London: Sage Publications, 2001.

Rukszto, Katarzyna. Minute by Minute: Canadian History Reimagined for Television Audiences. PhD, York University, 2003.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory Volume I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London and New York: Verso, 1994.

Schick, Carol. "Keeping the Ivory Tower White: Discourses of Racial Domination," in Sherene Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000, pp. 99-120.

Sider, Gerald M., and Gavin A. Smith. Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemoration. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994.

Simon, Roger. The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning and Ethics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Spilman, Lyn. Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Stimson, Adrian A. Buffalo Boy's Heart On: Buffalo Boy's 100 years of wearing his heart on his sleeve. University of Saskatchewan MA Thesis, 2005.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Carwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Stoler, Ann Laura. "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies," The Journal of American History Vol. 88, No. 3, 2001, pp. 829-865. 223

Taussig, Michael. "The Beach (A Fantasy)," in W J.T. Mitchell ed., Landscape and Power. Second Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 317-346.

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Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. van Herk, Aritha. "Invented History: False Document, or Waiting for Saskatchewan," in Kenneth G. Probert, ed., Writing Saskatchewan: Twenty Critical Essays. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989, pp. 81-87.

Vernon, Karina. "Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness: Addena Sumter Frietag's Stay Black and Die and Cheryl Foggo's Pourin' Down Rain," Canadian Literature Vancouver: Autumn 2004, Issue 182, pp 67-83.

Wardaugh, Robert, ed. Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 2001.

Ware, Vron, and Les Back. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Ware, Vron. "Moments of Danger: Race, Gender and Memories of Empire," in Ann- Louise Shapiro, ed., Feminists Revision History. Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 217-245.

Warnock, John W. Saskatchewan: The Roots of Discontent and Protest. Montreal/New York/London: Black Rose Books, 2004.

Wetherell, Margaret, and Jonathan Potter. Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999.

Wortley, Scot, and Julian Tanner. "Inflammatory Rhetoric? Baseless Accusation? A Response to Gabor's Critique of Racial Profiling Research in Canada," Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice/Revue canadienne de criminologie et de justicepenale, Vol. 47, No. 3, July 2005, pp. 581-609. 224

Newspaper and Magazine Articles:

"100 Years of Heart Was Evident Here," Moose Jaw Times Herald, 6 September 2005, p. 4.

"Aboriginal Centennial Celebrations Receive Funding," Saskatoon Sun, 17 April 2005, p. 34.

Casey, Allan. "Salt of the Earth," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, pp. 74-82.

Chabun, Will. "Birthday Memories to Last a Lifetime," Regina Leader Post, 27 December 2005, p. Bl.

"Corner Gas heads to America," Globe and Mail 24 November 2006.

"CD Set Celebrates Sask Musicians," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 16 May 2005, p. A7.

Doyle, John. "Will Iraqis find Corner Gas funny?" Globe and Mail 27 November 2007.

French, Janet, and Peter Wilson. "Northern Sask Parties 'Til Sundown: Big Turnouts Have Small Towns Bursting With Pride," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 6 September 2005, p. A5.

Fuller, Cam. "Comedian Brent Butt strikes a perfect note as host" StarPhoenix 20 May 2005. p. B2.

Fuller, Cam. "Centennial Tour Tugs at Emotions: Production Fuses Song, Movement, Storytelling," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 31 August 2005, p. CI.

Fuller, Cam. "Comedian Butt Strikes Perfect Note as a Host," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 20 May 2005, p. B2.

Martens Zimmerly, Karen. "Helping Churches Mark our Centennial," Regina Leader Post, 15 September 2005, p. B8.

Martin, Don. "Sleeping Next to the Elephant: How the Nation Views Alberta," National Post, 9 September 2005, p. A6.

Martin, Don. "No Alberta Envy in Saskatchewan Series: Canada's Superprovince," Calgary Herald, 9 September 2005, p. A3.

Miliokas, Nick. "Events Celebrate Centennial," Regina Leader Post, 16 June 2005, p. D2

"Paddlers Make Voyage of a Lifetime," Prince Albert Daily Herald, 9 July 2005, p. 11. 225

"Pancakes, Powwows, and Plaques Mark First Day of Centennial Events," Moose Jaw Times Herald, 3 September 2005, p. 1.

Roy-Sole, Monique. "Split City," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, pp. 104-105.

"Saskatchewan Publishes Comprehensive Encyclopedia," Edmonton Journal, 10 September 2005, p. E7.

Savage, Candace. "Back Home on the Range," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, pp. 50-62.

Small, Jason. "Saskatchewan Should Lose its Inferiority Complex," Moose Jaw Times Herald 22 September 2005, p. 4.

van Herk, Aritha. "Imagine One Big Province," Canadian Geographic January/February 2005, pp. 41-47.

News Releases:

Government of Canada News Release, "Canada Expands Security and Reconstruction Efforts in Afghanistan," 16 May 2005 (NR-05.035).

Government of Saskatchewan News Release, "Centennial Message from Premier Lome Calvert," 2 September 2005.

Government of Saskatchewan News Release, "Province Welcomes Royal Couple at the Legislative Building," 18 May 2005.

Government of Saskatchewan News Release, "Centennial Medals Presented to Aboriginal and Metis Women," 10 May 2005.

Reports and Government Publications:

Canada. Speech from the Throne to Open the Thirty-Eighth Session of the Parliament of Canada, October 2005.

Canada. Securing an Open Society: Building a National Security Policy for Canada. Government of Canada Publications, April 2004.

Saskatchewan Youth Summit 2007. Final Report. Retrieved 6 September 2007, from www.saskatchewanyouthsummit.ca

Saskatchewan. Final Report of the Special Committee to Prevent the Abuse and Exploitation of Children through the Sex Trade. Delivered to the 2nd Session of the 24th Legislature, Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, June 2001.

Saskatchewan. Celebrating Saskatchewan: Celebrating a Century of Progress 1905- 2005. Saskatchewan Government Publications, March 2001.

Wright, David H., Mr. Justice. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Matters Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild. Regina: Government of Saskatchewan, 2004.

Speeches:

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: 127th Anniversary of Treaty 6, and Centennial Celebration, Flying Dust First Nation, 2 September 2005.

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: First Nations Summer Games, Kawakatoose First Nation, 3 July 2005.

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Canadian Citizenship Ceremony, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 July 2005

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations Legislative Assembly, Regina, Saskatchewan, 22 February 2005.

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Centennial Saskatchewan Summit, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 24 January 2005.

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Centennial Bell Ringing, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 January 2005.

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Centennial Plate and Senior's Pin Launch, Regina, Saskatchewan, November 2004.

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Centennial Launch, Yorkton, Saskatchewan, 23 September 2004

Calvert, Lome. Premier's Speech: Diplomatic Forum, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1 October 2004.

Goodale, Ralph. Speech: Canada Day Provincial Ceremony, 1 July 2005, Regina, Saskatchewan.

Goodale, Ralph. Speech: Wascana Park, 2 September 2005. Other Print Materials:

1905-2005 Alberta / Saskatchewan Centennial Mural. Commemorative booklet. Mural design by Lewis Lavoie.

A Saskatchewan Starry Night: Lieutenant Governor's Celebration of the Arts. Lisa Donahue and Aidan Cosgrave, Producers. Pierre Boileau and Shelagh O'Brien, Directors. Ron Goetz, Executive Producer. Official Program, 2005.

Garneau, David, and Janell Ranae Rempell. Contested Histories. Curators' statement. Art Gallery of Regina, 29 June - 26 August 2005.

Saskatchewan Centennial 2005. Wasn 't That a Party? Newspaper insert, 31 December 2005.

Saskatchewan Centennial 2005. Straight From the Heart. Newspaper insert, Undated 2005.

Saskatchewan Centennial 2005.100 Years of Heart. Newspaper insert, September 2004.

Audio-Visual Broadcasts and Recordings:

CBC Television, News Special: Official Welcome of Queen and Prince Phillip, 18 May 2005.

CBC Television, The National, 22 October 2004.

Garchinski, Stan. "Saskatchewan, We Love this Place," The Official Song of the Saskatchewan Centennial, performed by Brad Johner. Craig Salkeld, Producer/Arranger. Carol Gay Bell, Executive Producer. CD. Recorded at CBC Saskatchewan, 2005.

Lieutenant Governor's Centennial Gala. Lisa Donahue and Aidan Cosgrave, Producers. Pierre Boileau and Shelagh O'Brien, Directors. Ron Goetz, Executive Producer. Promotional DVD. Original television broadcast: 19 May 2005, CBC Television.

Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association. Saskatchewan Centennial: No Boundaries. Lorena Kelly, Executive Producer. CD. Mastered at Talking Dog Studios, 2005.

Websites:

Canadian Light Source/Centre canadien de rayonnement synchrotron. www.lightsource.ca. Last viewed 31 January 2008.

Canadian Plains Research Centre, www.cprc.uregina.ca Last viewed 19 February 2008. 228

Dancing Sky Theatre Company. All My Relations: Wahkotowin. Past Season Performances, www.dancingskytheatre.com Last viewed 8 February 2008.

Harden, Mark. The Artchive, http://www.artchive.eom/artchive/S/sheeler/american landscape.jpg.html Last viewed 8 February 2008.

Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Centennial 2005, www.sask2005.ca Last viewed 10 June 2007. No longer accessible online.

Saskatchewan. Wide Open Future, www.wideopenfuture.ca. Last viewed 11 May 2004. No longer accessible online.

Saskatchewan Arts Board, www.artsboard.sk.ca Last viewed 8 February 2008.

Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association, http://www.saskrecording.ca Last viewed 1 March 2008.

Saskatchewan Western Development Museum. Winning the Prairie Gamble, www.wdmprairieRamble.com Last viewed 8 February 2008.

Southcoast Today. "Joni Mitchell Looks at Both Sides Now: Hits and Misses," http://archive.southcoasttodav.com/daily/12-96/12-07-96/b01ae065.htmLast viewed 8 February 2008.

University of Alberta, "Western Canadian History Conference," History and Classics Department, www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/historyandclassics/WCSC.cfm Last viewed 19 February 2008.

World Year of Physics 2005. World Year of Physics: Einstein in the 21s' Century www.physics2005.org Last viewed 1 March 2008.