UNSETTLING THE SETTLER AT NIAGARA FALLS: READING COLONIAL CULTURE THROUGH THE MAID OF THE MIST

Robinder Kaur Sehdev

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This dissertation questions the normalized state of the settler nation, indicated through the conflicted, emerging and submerging cultural form of the Maid of the Mist, the signifier of difference in a place of settler homogeneity. The myth signals colonial power as it operates in the day-to-day and exposes the state of settler impermanence on Indigenous lands. The first chapter concerns the construction of colonial history and myth making within which the settler myth of the Maid of the Mist draws meaning as a sexually-charged figure of racial difference. The region's colonial historiography reveals a desire to construct Aboriginal peoples as "savage." Following this, I offer an analysis of colonial representational and border politics. The systematic vanishing of the settler myth of the Maid of the Mist and the alienation of Aboriginal people from settler border places normalizes the colonial representational relationship as it buttresses settler borders against the threatening "Indian"

Other.

The next chapter confronts the settler popular cultural invocation of violence and militancy used to disavow responsibility for colonization in order to argue that love is a method of identifying and challenging systemic violence which imperils the relationship between settler and Native, embodied in the Covenant Chain of Silver and Gus Wen Tah (or

Two Row Wampum). I set these representational politics against the lived experiences of violence against community and specifically against women.

The next chapter debates the colonial politics of treaty-making and attempts to rescue

Treaty from colonial nation-building practices, resuscitating the understanding of Treaty in iv Indigenous political philosophies. I am also concemed with the profound ontological dissonance between Indigenous and settler perceptions of home, belonging and community in

Native spaces that have been recast as settler spaces. I therefore argue that the settler nation must be "unhomed" from Indigenous space.

Borrowing the notion of bridge crossing from Third World feminism and the image of the Fallsview Bridge at Niagara Falls (a bridge which, to the entrepreneurs, tourists and

settlers at Niagara Falls, signified "innovation" and the "proper" use of the land), I debate these profoundly divergent notions of home and belonging in the contested space of the settler nation. Finally, I question the politics of shame and apology in Canada today.

v Acknowledgements

I owe a good deal to a great many people. My supervisor, Dr. Jody Berland and my committee members, Drs. John 0'Neill and Ato Sekyi-Otu remained critical and meticulous throughout. I am truly thankful that they did. In addition to their support and hard work, they have all nurtured, encouraged and challenged me. Fm honored by their guidance and

friendship.

Dr. David McNab served on my examining committee as dean's representative and

Dr. Renate Eigenbrod served as my external examiner. Both offered immensely helpful and pointed questions and comments; my work has benefitted enormously from them. I thank

them for the care and attention they have afforded this dissertation. Thanks to Dr. Amin

Alhassan for his work as Chair of my oral examination.

On the Canadian side the Niagara Falls Public Library's archives were simply

invaluable. I also thank the Niagara Parks Commission and the City of Niagara Falls. On the

American side I am very grateful to the Niagara Falls Public Library's Local History

Department for their enthusiastic assistance and generosity. Thanks also to the Niagara Falls

Bridge Commission. The border guards at the Peace Bridge never failed to keep me on my

toes; never before have I had to explain the purpose of a notebook and pen. Thanks to them

for keeping me alert on those early mornings and late afternoons!

My friends have endured my hermit-like tendencies these many years and they

deserve medals. Bradford Bebb, Dena Nishizaki, Vivian Khouw, Sabine LeBel, Kiera Chion,

Claire 0'Connor and Alison Tylor are gems! Chrystos continues to inspire me and I am vi thankful for her fire. Drs. Cathy Boyd-Withers, Denise McConney, Patricia Monture, Sheryl

Nestel, Mona Oikawa, Karen Solomon, Sal Renshaw, Stacey Mayhall and Wendy Peters have

offered their support throughout this process. I offer a special thanks to Dr. Karen Dubinsky

for her generosity. And the GTA's sangat is truly the best in the west! Fateh!

The Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality Network, the Midwest Society

for Women in Philosophy's Women of Color Caucus, and the Australian Association for

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies are important associations for critical race and decolonial

scholarship and I am glad to have found and joined them.

The life of a graduate student is often austere. As funding shrank while the cost of

living steadily rose I was and remain eternally grateful for the support of my union, CUPE

3903, especially Fred Ho, Raj Virk and Parbattie Ramasarran. I simply would not have been

able to complete this dissertation had it not been for them. I am grateful to the Ontario

Graduate Scholarship Program for their financial support.

I thank my family, especially my father, Rajinder Singh who never saw this project

completed. His example of integrity and perseverance guides me even though he no longer

can. Thanks to my mother, Pamela Diane, a cheerleaderpar excellence. Harsharan and

Chad's encouragement, humor, wheels and workspace were more appreciated than I could

ever properly express. Thanks also to Inderjit. Kelly Pyke, Daryl and Adam Brisson sheltered,

fed and watered me in Niagara. Linda, Bob, Jane and Christopher McMillan showed me their

Niagara and I thank them for the spectacular view.

vii Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements vi

List of Figures x

1. Introduction 1 Surveying Niagara's vanishing subject 3 Settler stories 7 Stories 12 Difference and power in Canada 18 Sovereignty 23 Chapter breakdown 25

2. Magic in the myth: The mystification of colonial power 30 Truths 31 The myth 37 Unsettled histories 51 The myth experienced 62

3. Vanishing at the border 74 Vanishing Indians 84 "How does it feel to be a problem?" 96 Unhoming settler states and making whiteness strange 105 Toward the limits of representation 110

4. The ethical limits of mediated suffering 112 Made to suffer 113 Victims and warriors of the local Third World 121 Concerning women concerning violence 135

5. Toward decolonization: Treaty and sovereignty in Canada 154 "Motion toward the world" 159 Complete disorder: From Treaty to treaty 165 Recovering the path to Treaty 178

6. Home at the bridge 180 Homeless, radically and otherwise 187 Fighting for home 201 vin Homecoming at the bridge 213

7. Conclusion 226 Shame politics in the ashamed nations 227 Concluding remarks 232

Figures 236

References 248

IX ListofFigures

1.1 Silk Hat Ceremony for return of Maid of the Mist boats to United States side.... 236

1.2 Roger Woodward with Captain Keech (Maid of the Mist) 237

2.1 Maid of the Mist Marketplace 238

2.2 Legend of the White Canoe postcard 239

2.3 Spirit of Niagara poster 240

2.4 Niagara movie poster 241

3.1 Chief Clinton Rickard (Tuscarora Nation) 242

4.1 Archway and medallion, Adams Power Station 243

4.2 Medallion detail 244

4.3 Memorial plaque, Adams Power Station 245

4.4 Indian Defense League's Border Crossing Ceremony 246

4.5 Collapsed Fallsview Bridge 247

x Chapter 1 Introduction

Dedicated to an Indian maiden, Lelawalo, daughter of Chief Eagle Eye of the Ongiaras, after whom Niagara Falls was supposedly named. Legend has it she was chosen as the tribe's loveliest sacrifices to the "Great Thunderer." Adorned in soft doe skin, wearing a crown of woodland flowers, she unhesitatingly piloted her white birch canoe over the cataract. On certain summer mornings, when the sun and a southeasterly wind combine to give an intriguing shifting tint to the eternal curtain of spray at the Horseshoe 's base, you see Lelawalo again. A vision ofdusky beauty gazing upward with one arm raised as ifin supplication, she has long since been renamed Maid of the Mist. -Andy O'Brien, 1964, n.p.

The Maid of the Mist, as ephemeral, vanishing or confused icon, inspires many questions about the changing culture that produces and vanishes her, and the terms of her appearance, belonging, alienation and death. In the nascent days of the moving image,

France's Pathé Cinematograph Company sent a birch bark canoe over the edge of Niagara

Falls.1 Inside was a dummy dressed as "an Indian maiden" (Dubinsky, 1999, p. 69). Eighteen years later, in 1928 the act was repeated. Why stuff the canoes with "Indian maiden" styled dummies?2 Why send them careening to their destruction? Who was this woman so dramatically killed in effigy? If this disturbing appearance of the doomed Native women were isolated to these two incidents alone, its significance might be diminished, the icon and performance dismissed as an odd spectacle, a discreet act of racism and sexism on the waters of the Niagara. The truth of the matter is that this woman continues to appear in various forms at Niagara Falls. These days better known for the fleet of tour boats named in her honor than

1 For more on early film in Canada see Morris, 1978. On early northern Canadian photography and cinematography, see Geiler, 2004. 21 offer a discussion of the "Indian Maiden" as a literary and cultural convention in the following chapter. 1 for these simulated murders, the woman (Lelawala or the Maid of the Mist) is now an obscure

icon who shifts between cultural forms.

Why did the maid possess such cultural currency to settler culture and why has it now

vaporized? Settler myths enable the settler nation's ignorance of Indigeneity. This dissertation

questions the normalized state of the settler nation, indicated through the conflicted, emerging

and submerging cultural form of the Maid of the Mist, the signifier of difference in a place of

settler homogeneity. The myth signals colonial power as it operates in the day-to-day and

exposes the state of settler impermanence on Indigenous lands. Briefly stated (and I will

elaborate on the myth in the pages to follow) the myth of the Maid of the Mist as it emerges in

settler culture tells the story of pre-contact a Aboriginal community that sacrifices a young

and beautiful "maiden" in order to ensure its safety from a great snake that preys on the

people. Before investigating the terms of her appearance in Niagara Fall's settler culture, I

offer a survey of the Maid of the Mist as she appears and does not appear in critical histories

of Niagara Falls. I follow with a discussion of settler states and the significance of stories,

place and Treaty in First Nations. Because this dissertation is concerned with the currents of

power that structure settler culture, I outline the debates about difference and accommodation

in Canada, which are chiefly influenced by Charles Taylor, who is in turn influenced by

Frantz Fanon. I argue that Taylor's politics of recognition fail to meaningfully confront

Canada as a settler (and not an unqualified) state. Canada's current imbrication in settler politics means that the discourses of difference and race in Canada must plot the ways that

2 settler culture attempts to decentre Aboriginal Treaty and render its Treaty relations with First

Nations invisible.

Survey ing Niagara's vanishing subject

The story of the Maid of the Mist is largely absent from histories of Niagara Falls.

Works such as the Kiwanis Club's Niagara Falls: A historv of the city and the world famous beauty spot (1968); George Seibel's Niagara: River of farne (1968); James Rennie's Niagara township: Centennial historv (Rennie, 1967); Sherman Zavitz's It happened at Niagara

(1999); and Pierre Berton's A picture book of Niagara Falls (1993) and Niagara: A historv of the falls (Berton, 1992) are strikingly similar in their approach to their cultural histories of

Niagara Falls. All begin with a history of First Nations peoples at the Falls which is quickly overshadowed by stories of European-Native contact, both of which pale in comparison to stories of European "discovery" of the Falls and settler "development" of communities and industry. The words, "conquest" and "colonization" are never attached to such historical accounts and a critical reflection of the impact of colonization and settlement on Indigenous peoples in the region are absent. Also absent is any mention of the settler's reliance on the myth. These histories then proceed to the developments in the tourist industry, along with discussions of the various daredevils who "challenged" the waterfall, whirlpool and rapids.

When the Maid of the Mist surfaces in this context it is as a progenitor daredevil (as with

Andy 0'Brien's Daredevils of Niagara, 1969, who is quoted in the epigraph). Gordon

Donaldson's Niagara! The eternal circus (1979) offers a standard assessment of Indigenous land tenure, cosmology and settler contact histories. Indigenous land tenure, he implies, is 3 essentially identical to European notions of land tenure, where land is claimed and fought over, and this is evident in his historical account of pre-contact Niagara. To Donaldson, this is a history of bloody conflict between the Wendat (also known as Huron) and Haudenosaunee

(also known as Iroquois) Confederacies in the area. According to Donaldson, "the lords of

Niagara" (1979, p. 8) were caught in the midst of the Wendat and Haudenosaunee

Confederacies' wars, and they were a smaller and weaker confederacy known simply as the

"Neutrals" because of their reluctance to become involved in the constant conflict between the

Wendat and Haudenosaunee (1979).

Donaldson acknowledges that to the Neutrals, Niagara Falls is a sacred place where thunder gods live (1979, p. 9). "The dubious legend of the Maid of the Mist" (ibid),

Donaldson asserts, is loosely based on the sacred beliefs of the "massacred" Neutrals (ibid).

Donaldson is not the only one to question the "authenticity" of the legend. Pierre Berton

(1992) dismisses the story as "false" on the grounds that "local Indians had never indulged in human sacrifice" (p. 163). Rather than engaging the ways settler culture fitfully takes up and rejects the myth, Berton leaves it unexamined. Some, like Seibel (1968) recount the problems associated with the developing tourist industry, namely with frauds, hackmen and dubious guarantees of authenticity from unscrupulous salespersons who claimed to provide

"authentic" Indian artifacts. "Authenticity" is never neutral and it has been mobilized in the colonial regulation of Aboriginal identities and culture (see Lawrence, 2003).3 When the maid

3 In this case, the notion of authenticity is wielded as a weapon that is often aimed on the bodies of Aboriginal women: settler "Indian" policies policed "Indian" identity through the creation and enforcement of "Indian status" 4 of the mist does appear, it is predominantly in the context of the tour boats named after her,

and this further obscures the ways that power is mobilized through the story. Popular history's

failure to acknowledge the popularity of the Maid of the Mist settler myth mirrors this

discursive vanishment of First Nations from popular histories.

Recent years have revealed a deepening critical reflection on the subject of Niagara

Falls. Michael Power and Nancy Butler (1993) as well as Owen Thomas (1996) examine

Niagara's standing as the Underground Railroad's destination. They examine the importance

of local communities of freed slaves in the city's development. Linda Revie (2003) traces the

development of the sublime through portraiture, literature and discovery narratives of Niagara

Falls. Rob Shields (1991) examines Niagara's geographic liminality. He argues it is "outside

the borders of reason" (p. 122) on the edge of early European maps, in the expectations of

what "landscape" meant. Karen Dubinsky (1999) questions the site's reputation as a major

Honeymoon destination and significant site of heterosexual tourism. She also offers cogent

analysis of the distribution of racialized labour in the tourist industry and how these workers

were marginalized in tourist spaces (2004). Dubinsky offers a brief history on the origins of

which disregarded the centrality of women by declaring male lineage as the grounds of recognition. To be "authentically Indian" one had to demonstrate status through the male line. Kim Anderson (2000) and Bonita Lawrence (2003; 2004) offer analyses of the impact of Indian status on Aboriginal peoples. Anderson's analysis of Native womanhood confronts the Indian Act and patriarchal and racist displacement of Aboriginal women from the centre to the periphery. These policies, as well as the settler cultural construction of Aboriginal women as "inherently rapable" (Smith, 2005, p. 3) enables sexualized violence against Aboriginal women. Violence against Aboriginal women is a weapon of genocide which, as Andrea Smith (Cherokee) says, "destroys [Aboriginal people's] sense of being a people" (ibid). 5 the Maid of the Mist myth in the context of the commodification of Indianness4 in the tourist

economy. While she notes that its origins are unclear, she does not connect the tourist myth

with Aboriginal stories about Niagara, nor does she document Haudenosaunee resistance to

settler society there. John F. Sears (1989), on the other hand, acknowledges the spiritual

significance of Niagara Falls, even if only in the eyes of early European tourists (he is silent

on the topic of the place's spiritual significance to Aboriginal people). In this sense, being at

Niagara Falls is understood as a religious experience, where the landscape brings one closer to

a Judeo-Christian interpretation of the divine. Sears explains that this link between the

landscape and the divine drives the powerful desire to "preserve" Niagara Falls by managing

the "chaos" of the tourist industry (1989). Sears does not examine how the desire for

closeness to the divine and the subsequent imperative to "preserve" the space by containing

the tourist industry marginalized Tuscarora and Seneca people who engaged the tourist

industry. Nor does Sears explore how the tourist industry's workforce was largely racialized

and thus condemnéd.

What remains to be done in the field of critical Niagara Falls studies is an examination

of the settlement of the area as a contemporary process that undergirds the tourist desire to

experience, know and collect. Naming colonialism and genocide, both as historical as well as

contemporary practices, is vitally important. Devon Mihesuah and Angela Wilson (2002), Lee

Maracle (1996; 1993), and Patricia Monture-Angus (2002; 1999) note the importance of

41 adopt Gerald Vizenor's use of the word "Indian," which he uses to indicate the colonial cultural construction of the image of Indigeneity. I offer a detailed discussion of the term "Indian" in the context of the disavowal of First Nation's sovereignty in the chapter, "Vanishing at the border." 6 naming colonization and genocide as a contemporary practice, the direct result of colonial

histories (which include political and cultural policies and practices) and of the continuation

of these practices and policies within settler culture today.5 They also note the difficulties

inherent in such naming colonialism as contemporary, since the systemic and every-day

practices of violence and genocide remains outside the settler's field of vision. The purpose of my dissertation is to investigate the normalizing strategies of settler culture in Niagara Falls. I

am concerned with representational strategies and the way that apparently distinct representations communicate to construct the ideological settling of the settler. I argue that telling and then rejecting the story of the Maid of the Mist, Niagara's vanishing subjeet, is one

such normalizing strategy. Through a story that tells of a woman who haunts but never inhabits the land, this displaced myth reveals colonialism's narrative form. To remain ignorant of its place within colonialism is to continue the violence it communicates, violence

that implicates every telling, teller and listener alike.

Settler stories

Razack (2002b) defines settler society as "established by Europeans on non-European

soil" (p. 1). The place of the settler is secured through the establishment and reproduction of racial hierarchies, which place European settlers and their descendants as the rightful inheritors of the "New World" (Razack, 2002b). She notes that settler society is created and maintained through dispossession and genocide, which can never be acknowledged as

51 offer a definition of "settler culture" immediately below, but briefly stated, settler culture refers to the everyday cultural practices of those who have settled on Aboriginal people's territories. 7 . violence (ibid). Settler myths are vital here, as they offer a "disavowal" of the systematic and systemic acts of violence against Aboriginal people and people of colour in the creation of the settler state (Razack, 2002b, p. 2). These myths also offer stories of shared origins and belonging on the land and in the nation. "Settler culture" refers to the lived experience, representations and discourses of colonists who have made a home in Indigenous spaces

(Razack, 2003; 2002a; 2002b). More than simply a matter of transoceanic movement, settlerhood is contingent on the assumption of its normativity (and its subsequent denial of the normative status of First Nations). This dissertation is concerned with settler cultural politics, which reveal that the settler state is never a settled state, never fixed and never stable despite the myths it tells. In its day-to-day operation, internal contradictions are exposed and the normalized settler culture unwittingly reveals its own normalization.

The settler's home is based on a number of myths: myths of total conquest (which disregards Indigenous resistance and cultural life beyond colonization); exclusive ownership of the land (along with Eurocentric presumptions of what the land means, and how best to use it); and innate superiority (where the language of race is operationalized to justify colonial acts) (Razack, 2002a; 2002b). Janice Acoose (1995), Philip Bellfy (2005), Beth Brant (1987),

Philip Deloria (1998), Rayna Green (1994), Emma LaRocque (1990; 1975) are just a few of many who have argued that the stories of intercultural contact reveal more about the storyteller than they do about contact or the lives, cultures and societies of Aboriginal people.6

6 Ute Lischke and David T. McNab (2005) enumerate the various types of "Indian" in settler culture, noting that they are seen as intellectual categories rather than as people (p. 5). 8 Edward Said's analysis of the representations of the Orient reveals the way that the "Other" is made (1978). In his careful emphasis on the process ofbeing made Other, Said explains that the cultural forms of imperial forces, in this case the Occident, matter because they demonstrate how the construction of the Other include the production of knowledge of an

Other who is strange and unintelligible but through the representations and "expert knowledge" of the Occidental interlocutor (ibid). The Other is a convenient construction because it enables the Occident to construct its own identity through negative comparison

(ibid). This means that the Occident never has to directly talk about its own self-assessed

"superiority" so long as it can discursively construct the Other as its inferior, strange and dark sibling (ibid). Stories of Others are not factual accounts of Others; they are stories about the ways that knowledge is opportunistically mobilized to secure imperial power (ibid). The colonization of North America was and remains dependant upon representations of

Indigenous people that serve the colonial project. Thomas King (Cherokee and Greek) identifies the establishment of permanent settlements in the Americas as "the beginning of the stories that Europeans would tell about Native peoples" (2003, p. 70). These stories King explains, are not innocent. Images of naked, wild, noble, immoral and cannibalistic

Indigenous peoples were fabricated and mobilized to consolidate settler culture and express a settler nationalism, independent from its imperial roots (King, 2003). Thus the creation of the image of "an Indian who could be a cultural treasure, a piece of North American antiquity. A mythic figure who could reflect the strength and freedom of an emerging continent" (King,

2003, p. 79). 9 The Maid of the Mist (who is occasionally referred to as "Lelawala") is likewise opportunistically mobilized. The settler story goes: Lelawala, the daughter of a powerful chief of an ancient and "savage" tribe, lived on the shores of the Niagara River. She was granted the highest honor that a woman in her community could possibly be afforded: decked with fragrant flowers in the finest white doe skins, she rode a white birch bark canoe over the brink of the Niagara's colossal waterfalls (Burke, 1851; Groll, 1971; Parker, 1922). This is one version of the myth. In other versions, Lelawala was chosen as a punishment for spurning the love of a malicious medicine man (Trumbull, 1884). Her people had installed the custom because a terrible and giant snake would attack the community at night (Burke, 1851;

Cadman, 1926; Groll, 1971; Hadley, 1898; Parker, 1922; Trumbull, 1884). They believed that if they sacrificed someone to the river's god, it would defend the community against the monstrous serpent (ibid). Some accounts report that Lelawala plunged over the cataract alone, her people stoically or callously witnessing by the shore (Groll, 1971). Other versions report that she was joined by her father or her lover who attempted to intercept her canoe and that both plummeted over the brink (Burke, 1851; Parker, 1922; Trumbull, 1884). That version is captured on canvas in James Francis Brown's portrait, "The Maid of the Mist Indian Legend"

(1891). Still others report that instead of dying (Burke, 1851; Parker, 1922; Trumbull, 1884), as she and everyone else expected her to, Lelawala was caught in the mist by the river god

Hinu who lived behind the waterfalls (Groll, 1971). Enraptured by Lelawala's beauty, Hinu asked for her hand. She agreed to marry him if he would help to save her people from the

10 snake. After much organizing and battle, Hinu and Lelawala's people killed the snake god,

whose body curled into a horseshoe shape that then formed the Horseshoe Falls.

The settler story of the Maid7 of the Mist has many variations and serves many purposes, sometimes sexualized to titillate the tourist (as with Andy 0'Brien's dedication to his book, Daredevils of Niagara, quoted in full in this chapter's epigraph); other tellings of the maid's story present it as a children's morality tale (as with Lini Grol's children's book,

Lelawala: A legend of the Maid of the Mist). That Lelawala consents to act as a sacrifice and,

for all intents and purposes, performs that role, remains constant, even while other details of the story fade, such as her being saved by Hinu and living with him behind the waterfalls. In

some versions, she simply dies. In others, her story is generalized and afforded the weight of a

neutral historical report of a pre-contact people's "savagery."8 Today, little remains of the

story. Her nåme is often forgotten, replaced by the more general tag, the Maid of the Mist, a

moniker appropriated by the steamboat company whose fleet ferries tourists around the base of the waterfalls, taking them close enough to the drop to feel the mist. The displacement of the nåme from story to boat, likely aided by the nautical tradition of naming vessels after women, complicates and also confuses the maid's meanings. Today, disassociated from her

7 The word "maid" is used over other less provocative terms to indicate the womarTs sexuality as per colonial cultural expectations. The "Indian maid" as Terry Goldie explains (1989), is a cultural trope, employed to contain and focus the settler's sexual anxieties. I discuss this in some depth in the following chapter. 8 In 1996, Seneca and Tuscarora leaders and activists mobilized an effective protest campa;ign against the Maid of the Mist Steamboat Corporation because the myth was told as historical fact. In a protracted battle with the corporation, leaders from the Tuscarora and Seneca Nations, the American Indian Movement, the arts and cultural group Nanto patiently explained that human sacrifice was never practiced and the persistence of the settler Maid of the Mist myth was racist because it painted Aboriginal peoples as "savages." I offer an analysis of this in the chapter "Vanishing at the border." 11 nåme and human form, the Maid of the Mist is a literal vehicle for tourist experience. Then again, as a product of the tourist industry, she was not intended to convey muen meaning or retain much particularity; rather, her purpose was to spark the imagination of tourists drawn to the cataract, whieh engendered (and continues to engender) poetic musings on the wonders of nature, science, beauty, death, creation and the divine. Niagara Falls has meant many things to many people and as a once metaphorical, but now literal vehicle, the Maid of the Mist was always intended to draw them there. Settler stories and the power they mobilize stand in stark contrast to Aboriginal stories, which are embedded in Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing.

Stories

"Indians have always known that stories are important," writes Chippewa communications scholar Gail Guthrie Valaskakis (2005, p. 3) who explains that stories and the telling of them are intricately connected to individual identities and the identity of a people or community. Drawing upon British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Valaskakis identifies stories as a cohesive force for community identity in Indian country. To her, this indicates creativity and survival in spite of colonization. Stuart Hall argues that while experiences, discourses, and social forces present apparently insurmountable obstacles to group unity,

"discursive elements and social forces" as Valaskakis puts it, provide a means to unify in spite of this difference (Valaskakis, 2005, p. 4; Grossberg & Hall, 1996, p. 141). Hall calls this potential unity amongst discourse and social forces, "articulation." "An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions" (in Grossberg & Hall, 1996, p. 141, original emphasis). These conditions are not 12 fixed, but change with shifting power and political circumstances. Valaskakis says that even while there is no de facto "Indian" (or Aboriginal) identity, Aboriginal stories about and

against colonization present the potential for unity. Valiskakis turns to the year 1969 for an example of articulation in action when many diverse forms of cultural expression and political

action helped to cohere a strategic pan-Aboriginal identity across the Canadian-United States border (2005). Valaskakis points to the occupation of San Francisco's Alcatraz Island by the

Indians of All Nations (United States), the National Indian Brotherhood's (Canada) response to the federal Liberal government's proposal to abolish the Indian Act through the "White

Paper on Indian Policy," along with the publication of a number of very influential texts by

Native intellectuals like Harold Cardinal (Cree), Vine Deloria Jr. (Nakota) and N. Scott

Momaday (Kiowa) which contributed to the expression of unity despite important differences in cultures, languages, First Nations and traditions (ibid). Stories of resistance, in other words, have done more than piece together a contingent form of identity; they make possible other stories of political struggle and creativity.

However, the notion of a pan-Aboriginal identity is difficult to navigate for the purposes of decolonization. Given that colonization seeks to delegitimize Aboriginal sovereignty, the diversity of Aboriginal nations needs to be acknowledged and their normative status must be meaningfully recognized. Bonita Lawrence (Mi'kmaw) argues that any less than this would only contribute to the colonial imperative to destabilize Aboriginal nationhood (2003).

13 In general, Native resistance to colonization rejects notions of "pan-Indian" identities that can, at best, only aspire for equality within a settler state framework. For Indigenous people, resisting colonial relations involves a refusal to accept the authority of Canada or the United States as settler states, and a focus on rebuilding the nations that the colonizer has sought to destroy. (Lawrence, 2003, p. 5)

The value of cultural studies is in its ability to lend insight into the ways that individual and collective identities are harnessed to representational practices and forms through which power flows. Roland Barthes's work on mythology (1973) and visual representation (1980) is important to my project. His understanding of myths (1973) allows a reckoning of their centrality to settler consciousness with their indeterminate meanings. His work on visual representations (specifically the photograph) casts light on the way that meaning is constructed through visual queues within ever-dynamic visual cultures (1980). How meaning is made between stories and visual representations is vitally important since settler culture is dependant on myths of the settler's naturalized belonging on the lands of Others and in constructing these myths, draws heavily from a visual lexicon of victimhood and suffering. I draw upon Barthes in my analysis of settler culture's abundant imagery of Aboriginal peoples as unified in suffering or in militancy.

Identifying stories as conduits of power, and as discursive sites of unity-forming potential is helpful in understanding how group identity is strategically navigated for the oppressed. This enables us to recognize and think through the strategic uses of identity in political and cultural terrains, in ways that might allow for the recognition of creativity, agency and resilience in the face of oppression. However, stories and the telling of them can be appropriated to defend power and secure dominance.

14 Stories and their telling are powerful, writes Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, and telling,

collecting and modifying (in short, appropriating) these stories without regard for what stories

are demonstrates the abuse of power. "Stories are not just entertainment. Stories are power,"

Keeshig-Tobias (1987) argues. "They reflect the deepest, most intimate perceptions,

relationships and attitudes of a people. Stories show how a people, a culture thinks. Such

wonderful offerings are seldom reproduced by outsiders" (Keeshig-Tobias, 1987, p. 98).

Stories are governed by protocols of telling and listening that respect the power they haraess

and the relationships between the story, spiritual and animal worlds, teller and listener

(Keeshig-Tobias, 1987). The colonial practice of appropriation seeks to vanish the

significance of relations in which stories exist, by reducing the story to escapist or incidental

fancy,9 or to raw materials for research that lacks accountability to these stories and the

people who tell and keep them. Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that Indigenous

peoples globally have been witness to the erasure of their own stories and histories as they are

tåken up and distorted by non-Indigenous scholars (1999, pp. 29, 33). Telling stories and

histories demand the "rewriting and rerighting" (Smith, 1999, p. 28) of colonial texts; it is a

matter of "self-determination" (ibid). The reductive treatment of stories by attempting to rend

them from their knowledge systems does violence to them, which is further aggravated by the

assumption that stories are free for the taking, without regard for the relationships between

tellers and listeners, the story and the land (Keeshig-Tobias, 1987). "These are powerful

9 Thomas King's The truth about stories (2003), in particular the chapter "Let me entertain you" explains that Aboriginal stories, deemed "entertainment" in non-Aboriginal contexts implies that they are viewed to be unnecessary, non-educative flourishes which accompany non-Aboriginal discourse. 15 stories, powerful as medicine or tobacco. But, like medicine or the tobacco whose smoke is used to carry prayers up to Creator, stories must be used wisely and well or they may be harmful to both tellers and hearers alike" (Burchac, 1987, p. 93). Stories as powerful as medicine or tobacco demand care and the fastidious observation of relations.

Aboriginal stories are rooted in knowledge systems and knowledge systems are rooted in the land. This connection to the land and the water is sacred.1 The colonial alienation of

Aboriginal people from their land threatens carries profound consequences to the being of

First Nations.11 Member of the Sacred Law and Medicine Society of the Anishinaabe,

Midewewin Fred Kelly identifies the alienation of traditional territories as an attack on the

spirit and nationhood of Aboriginal people whose connection to the land is intrinsic to their being (2008). The stories at Niagara Falls are important because they speak to the connections between land, people, the animals and the spirit world. Edward Benton-Banai (1988) tells traditional Anishinaabe stories that explain the spiritual connections between the land, people and animals. Niagara Falls is a sacred space, called Ani-mi-kee' wa-bu (or Thunder Water) (p.

96) and Kichi-ka-be-kong' (meaning Great Falls) (p. 98). It is the Second of Seven Stopping

Places in the chi-bi-moo-day-win (or by Elder Benton-Benai's translation, migration) of the

Anishinaabe (1988, pp. 96, 98). To the Ska ru re (Tuscarora) of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)

Confederacy, Niagara' s waterfall is the place of Mature Flowers or Mature Earth, the woman

10 See McNab, 2004b notes that islands are sacred places and sites of resistance against colonization. Islands are important because they are surrounded by water (ibid). "Water is also a spiritual border" (McNab, 2004b, p. 45) because it is necessary for life and they are therefore protected by Aboriginal people. Islands also operate as "multi- dimensional borders", between nations, cultures and people (ibid). 11 McNab discusses the spiritual significance of Walpole Island and the Treaties signed there. McNab argues that the colonial violation of sacred spaces is met with grave consequences (2004b). 16 who fell from the Sky World touched down and gave birth to a people (see Rickard, J., 1992, p. 105). A team of waterfowl caught Mature Flowers, and guided her to a great turtle, on whose back she walked about, scattering earth that grew into the land she and her children would inhabit (ibid). To the Seneca (another member nation of the Haudenosaunee

Confederacy) Niagara Falls is a place of Thunder Beings. Darwin John (Seneca) explains,

Thunder Beings were trying to remove a serpent that had been terrorizing the area, and during the struggle they threw down the huge snake and that carved out the horseshoe shape of the Canadian Falls. He [the snake] was placed in the underworld, and the route to the underworld was through De vil' s Hole State Park. There's a cave there and that' s where the snake passed on his way to the underworld. (John quoted in Strand, 2008, pp. 16-17)

These are stories that tell us not only how to live with other people, but how to live with the animals, the land and the spirit world.12

Storytelling acknowledges the centrality of Aboriginal knowledges, and in colonial space where this knowledge is often dismissed, storytelling can provide an "anchor" in the

"ideological and spatial diaspora" to which Aboriginal peoples have been subjected, says Cree artist and scholar Neal McLeod (2001). This is no small task. Aboriginal knowledge systems and philosophies are routinely misrepresented and poorly understood. Aboriginal political philosophers Audra Simpson (citizen of the Kanawake First Nation) and Dale Turner (citizen of the Temagami First Nation) note that Indigenous philosophies have thrived for millennia without the influence of Europeans (2008, p. 10) and that settlers fail to recognize the limits

Treaties between animals and humans ensure mutual accountability. See Anishnaabe researcher, educator and negotiator Leanne Simpson (2008) and Anishnaabe legal scholar John Borrows (2002) for analyses of the interrelations between Treaties and stories with the animal world. For an eloquent and complex analysis of the relations between human and animal worlds against the popular cultural reduction of Aboriginal spiritualities, see Vine Deloria Jr. (2006). 17 of Eurocentric understanding. The imposition of silence (which attempts to mute Aboriginal

knowledge systems) counts as yet another manifestation of colonization (ibid). Further,

Aboriginal political philosophies teach that relatedness between people, the land, animals and

the spirit world, sacredness and tradition are normative principles in which Aboriginal

political claims are rooted (2008, p. 14). This is not easily translatable "into cultures that

unproblematically accept the discourses of rights, sovereignty, and nationhood as the only

authoritative sources of Indigenous political claims" (ibid).

Difference and power in Canada

Niagara Falls is shaped by more edges than the one in the river. It is cut in two by the

Canadian-American settler border and it is a nodal point in the global tourist network, it is a place of profound contestations over land tenure and occupation between settlers and First

Nations. In short, Niagara Falls is a product of the borders that cut through it and in this

Niagara reveals the formative nature of borders, which enunciate and contain difference.

Borders drawn on the colonial map mark an attempted imposition of colonial knowledge; they

in short can signal sites and processes of domination. Perhaps this is why borders figure prominently in Canadian national criticism,13 especially given the national cultural need to

differentiate Canada from the United States.14 Debates concerning difference are always

13 For examples see lan Angus's A border within (1997), Jody Berland's North of empire (forthcoming) and "Writing on the border" (2001). 14 George Grant's Lament for a nation (1970) and Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972) both engage the Canadian nationalist desire to differentiate from the United States and the apparent sentiment of inferiority that undergirds it. 18 implicated in border discourses and in this regard, borders serve a means of differentiating and defining both Niagara and the nation.

Charles Taylor's (1994) now-canonical work on difference in Canada, "The politics of recognition," has inspired many responses that further query the nature of Canadian national identity and the structures of power and privilege that determine it. Taylor argues that freedoms flow from the recognition of differences, therefore, in order to defend the "principle of human equality" (1994, p. 42), which he prizes, we must recognize them. Just who constitutes this "we" and "them," and how this "we" has seemed to amass such power in relation to "them" are questions that remain unanswered in Taylor's theory of liberal inclusion in the nation.

These are questions lan Angus asks of Taylor's politics of recognition. When Taylor speaks of the recognition of cultural difference in pluralist societies he bypasses any meaningful discussion of the nature of the culture-which-recognizes (the "we" who appear to have the uncontested power to recognize) (Angus, 1997). Angus notes that "we" is a difficult term to employ in the case of Canadian cultural recognition because all cultures aside from those of First Nation's come from elsewhere (ibid). The analysis of difference must actively question this invocation of those-who-recognize and those-who-are-recognized and such invocations obliquely reference vastly uneven relations to power (ibid). In his questioning of the national "we" that Taylor invokes, Angus argues that access to the nation without håving constitutive access to that nation is another form of colonization (ibid). In other words, the idea that domination is the result of a lack of recognition is insufficient, and I pursue Angus's 19 critique of Taylor's politics of recognition in the chapters to follow. The conversation must now be tumed from the recognition of difference to a confrontation with the ways that power and domination organize the nation.

Himani Bannerji (2000) further criticizes Taylor's imperative of inclusive recognition, arguing that he over-emphasizes the importance of recognition and thereby further obscures the profound structural problems that ensure racial dominance involved in the definition and disciplining of Canadianness (p. 96).15 Bannerji revisits the discourse of official multiculturalism as a method of outward inclusion, which preserves the authority of white settlers to define the terms and limits of Canadian citizenship and belonging (ibid). Bannerji's focus on racism in Canada enables the identification of whiteness as encoded in national identity. Imbalances in power are made apparent in the production and articulation of colonial knowledge (of what is considered worth knowing, saying, defending, experiencing). Sherene

Razack (1998, p. 10) says, "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 interests we protect through our knowing." In other words, the terms of communication and knowledge were and remain coercive.16 It is the responsibility of the scholar not to avoid these problems, but to confront

15 A number of Canadian scholars have further developed the argument that Canadian national identity is a means of policing racialized bodies. For example, Sunera Thobani's Exalted subjects (2007) and "Closing ranks" (2000) investigates how racism is folded into the regulation of Canadian citizenship. The desire informing many of these critiques of dominance lurking below the surface of the claim to the inclusion of difference in the nation-state is to demystify the settler nation through its founding myths. Sherene Razack's (2004) examination of the atrocities committed by Canadian peacekeepers does not fail to engage this apparent contradiction with the myth of the Canadian peacekeeper. W. Peter Ward's (2002) study of anti-Oriental public 20 them. The imperative to "return the gaze" (Bannerji, 1993) or "look white people in the eye"

(Razack, 1998) attempts to redirect the question of self-representation in a political context where spectacular difference is desired, expected and holds considerable market value. In other words, when the racialized Other is expected to perform and embody their Otherness

(which often entails the performance of "disadvantage"17), the ability to counter the dominating gaze with a critical gaze of one's own turns dominant expectations on its ear.

"When are those of you who inflict racism, who appropriate pain, who speak with no knowledge or respect when you ought to know to listen and accept, going to take hard looks at yourself instead of me. How can you continue to look to me to carry what is your responsibility?" asks Haudenosaunee legal scholar Patricia Monture:Angus (1995, p. 21).

The colonial fixation upon violence and oppression which structures its relations with its

Others is made the focus of critique here. Such questions both direct the gaze to whiteness while attempting to disengage from the entitlement and power implicit in colonial looking and knowing. Settler national myths are space-bound because they explain and perpetuate settler claims to Indigenous place. In this sense marking boundaries is a deeply ideological and carefully mystified act that needs to be exposed (Razack, 2002, p. 5).

policy and attitudes flies in the face of the myth of the welcomingly multicultural nation. These works are more than a public airing of the nation's dirty laundry; they directly cohfront the myth that the nation was formed primarily by European settlers while carefully plotting the ways that domination structures national belonging. In short, these works, are concerned with, as Adrienne Lai (2000) says, "renegotiating the terms of [national] inclusion" from immigrant to nation-builder. This marks the progression in the debate from the language of "difference" to the need to nåme race as race, rather than the more politically neutral "difference." 171 critique the notion of disadvantage and representation in my chapter, "The ethical limits of mediated suffering." 21 I am greatly influenced by Frantz Fanon whose work offers lessons on the problem of

recognition within colonialism, but more than just a matter of recognition: Fanon, in particular

his understanding of love offers a way of minking and acting in spite of colonial violence that

would pervert and poison relations. Charles Taylor takes from Fanon the profound

implications of misrecognition on the identities and psyches of the colonized. However, his

emphasis on Fanon's concern with recognition, and the psyches and identites of the colonized

is far over-determined. Glen Coulthard (Dene) turns to Taylor's over-emphases on

recognition, noting that to Fanon, concern with recognition and m/srecognition is placed

within a context of struggle against the internal (the psyche of the colonized/colonizer),

external (the community), political and social forces (2008). To be sure, Fanon repeatedly

argues that the problem of colonization is not exclusively located at the psychic level of the

colonizer and colonized. The problem of colonial misrecognition is only one colonial problem

among many and an understanding of Fanon's account of love, or ethical relations in spite of

the violence of colonization, needs to be developed to understand the ways that struggle is a

part of colonial and decolonial relations. Love as per Fanon pro vides the means for

recognizing how colonization structures relations. More than this, the restoration of love is not

only possible, it is, as Fanon argues, crucial as another means in which decolonial struggle

can be engaged. It is my hope that my understanding of love can offer a way of moving beyond the limitations of the liberal politics of recognition (that Taylor espouses), toward the

demystification and decentering of settler culture.

22 Sovereignty

As Sherene Razack (1998, p. 169) has argued, one cannot acknowledge difference without confronting domination. One expression of domination in Canada occurs at the imposition of plains of equivalence that, in effect, would level the very difference that distinguishes First Nations' sovereignty from ethnic, linguistic, or cultural sovereignty of other minorities within the nation. To First Nations, the gesture of national accommodation and inclusion does not even begin to address the fundamental problems of imposing a national structure on an existing colonial relation. Legal scholar and citizen of the Chicksaw Nation,

James (Sakéj) Youngblood Henderson begins from the fundamental position that Treaties formed between First Nations and the British Crown affirm First Nations' sovereignty18 and argues that the offer of Canadian citizenship to Aboriginal peoples threatens to undermine

Aboriginal sovereignty by "transform[ing] the sacred homeland of Aboriginal nations" into a parade of ethnic difference in the service of "Euro-Canadian self-congratulation and individualism" (2002, p. 416). Aboriginal sovereignty offers "a sui generis citizenship" that

"accentuates relationships [and] responsibilities [between people] to a particular ecology"

(Henderson, 2002, p. 425). In other words, settler sovereignty is not normative, nor does it have the authority or legitimacy to confer recognition or grant inclusion. Aboriginal sovereignty is normative.

My chapter, "Toward decolonization: Treaty and sovereignty in Canada" expands on this point in depth. 23 Contrary to the settler myth that Aboriginal people were ignorant of Treaty making practices, it was European newcomers who needed to be versed in Aboriginal Treaty practices. Treaties between Aboriginal and European nations were governed by the Covenant

Chain of Silver (communicated in Gus Wen Tah,20 or Two Row Wampum). According to

Métis historian David McNab,

The Covenant Chain is an Aboriginal concept of relationships in their totality which have included, among other things, cultures, diplomacy and trade. The Chain, which was adopted by the Dutch, the French and then the English, was originally wrought in iron and then in silver; it was a metaphor for their partnership, or covenant, meaning a sacred agreement, between the Aboriginal and European nation in all matters regarding their mutual relationship. (1999, p. 8)

Peace, respect and friendship were the basis of all subsequent Treaties, or in McNab's words,

"This was the original meeting ground" (1999, p. 11). The Covenant Chain of Silver ensures that all Treaties re-affirm this relationship. In July 1764, the Treaty of Niagara was signed between Aboriginal and English nations, and this Treaty recognized the English as partners with First Nations as per the Covenant Chain of Silver (McNab, 1999, p. 49).

Traditions and stories surrounding Treaty educate everyone about the relationships entered into and communicated by Treaty. Cree reverend and moderator Stan McKay describes the spiritual significance of Treaty: "Treaty talks were about sharing the sacred land, and that required prayerful preparation. The treaty negotiations were understood to be tripartite. The talks involved the Creator, the Queen's representatives, and the Aboriginal

My use of capitals is intentional here. I use the capital "T" to denote Aboriginal Treaties, which are living agreements made between nations in the presence of the Creator and as such must be returned to regularly. I use the lowercase "t" to indicate the colonial and later settler reduction of Treaty to forms which, rather than affirming relations, attempted to cede rights, lands and responsibilities, thereby stultifying relations. 20 See McNab, 1999, p. 49. 24 peoples" (2008, p. 110). Aboriginal Treaty making practice involves the spiritual world and this, McKay says, that is lost on settler society, which wrongly understands Treaty to mean the imposition of agreements by a powerful body onto a comparatively powerless one (2008).

To put it another way, settler society defined Treaties as an imposition on Aboriginal peoples.

Such a view fails to recognize Treaty making practices as a vitally important part of

Aboriginal spiritual and political life (ibid). Failing to recognize the vitality of Aboriginal political philosophies and practices amounts to another act of colonization. Fanon's view of love does not displace or replace Aboriginal Treaty; rather it provides us a way of tracking the perversions of relations that colonization creates.

Chapter breakdown

This dissertation is an attempt to confront the normalization of settler culture at

Niagara Falls. Through the figure of the Maid of the Mist (and her flickering between visibility and invisibility) I will extend my analysis beyond the particular representational politics of settler culture at Niagara Falls, to Canadian settler culture, which includes representational politics as well structures and lived experiences of violence and oppression.

The following chapter, "Magic in the myth: The mystification of colonial power" concerns the construction of colonial history, made necessary by the myth of the Maid of the Misfs invocation of an allegedly "savage" pre-contact history. The region's colonial historiography

25 reveals a desire21 to construct Aboriginal peoples, specifically the Haudenosaunee and the

Wendat Confederacies as "savage" and the production of colonial history. The production of colonial myths, taking the form of both history-production and storytelling dramatizes the

colonial narrative norm in the face of its apparent contradiction. At Niagara Falls, the myths

of the Maid of the Mist and the histories of pre-contact and settlement societies present a

narrative in need of order. This is further complicated by the fact of its disordered reception;

settler histories and myths are presented, often repeated in near-compulsive ways. As Niagara

Falls is known for its frantic disorder, these narratives lose form, content and become infra-

knowledge at best for an audience in search of tangible souvenirs. Borrowed from Barthes

(1980), infra-knowledge is the semblance of knowledge that is gleaned through visual

representations; it is not knowledge itself. Infra-knowledge is an important concept in this

chapter because it indicates the operation of the belief in the collection of knowledge through representational forms and also the belief that knowledge can, will and should be

progressively developed upon. These are modernist assumptions that I refute.

Following this, in the chapter "Vanishing at the border" I offer an analysis of colonial

representational and border politics, specifically vanishment at a representational practice.

The Maid of the Mist settler myth is significant because through her intermittent visibility and

invisibility she demonstrates that supremacy over representation is not a prerequisite for a

culture of oppression. The Maid of the Mist fades from Niagara Falls popular culture,

211 pursue the subject of settler desire in my discussion of the myth and the "Indian maiden" in the following chapter. Desire and sexuality also figure prominently in my analysis of victim imagery in the chapter, "The ethical limits of mediated suffering." 26 replaced with generic images of boats and marketplaces as the language of race is wielded to

alienate Aboriginal peoples (in this case the Seneca and Tuscarora Nations) from the settler

nation. I therefore actively critique the notion of inclusion and accommodation. The

ramification of that vanishment is the normalization of the colonial representational

relationship as it buttresses settler borders against the threatening "Indian." The next chapter,

"The ethical limits of mediated suffering" confronts the invocation of violence and militancy

used to disavow responsibility for colonization in order to argue that love is a method of

decolonization which can enable a reckoning with relations rendered violent through

colonialism and which must be espoused in the field of representations. I set this against the

real world of colonial violence - colonial violence is violence against community and,

specifically, against women. Then, drawing upon Aboriginal feminisms, I return to the notion

of retrieval of relations that have been perverted by colonialism.

In next chapter, "Toward decolonization: Treaty and sovereignty in Canada" I debate

the colonial politics of treaty making and attempt to rescue them from colonial nation-

building practices by turning to an understanding of Treaty in Indigenous political philosophies. I am also concerned with the profound ontological dissonance between

Indigenous and settler perceptions of home, belonging and community in Native spaces that have been recast as settler spaces in the chapter "Home at the bridge." I therefore argue that the settler nation must be "unhomed" from Indigenous space. I am influenced by Third World feminism because of the insights it lends on the intersectional nature of dominance. I take Lee

Maracle's (citizen of the Sto:lo Nation) lead in relation to the use of Third World feminisms 27 in settler spaces. Maracle muses on her friendship with Audre Lorde, one of the progenitors of the movement and a self-identified black, lesbian, mother, poet warrior,22 saying that their friendship was inevitable.

Audre Lorde and I were destined to be close. The combined knowledge of African ex- slaves and colonized Natives in North America is going to tear asunder the holy citadel of patriarchy. Who can understand the pain of this land hetter than a Native woman? Who can understand the oppression that capitalism metes out to working people better than a Black woman. The road to freedom is paved with the intimate knowledge of the oppressed. (Maracle, 1996, p. 139)

Third World feminism demonstrates our interdependence in the project of decolonization while retaining and honoring our differences. As a vantage point and a methodology, my use of Third World feminism presents the possibility of an ethical coalitional politics necessary for decolonial strategy. Deploying Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua's (1983) notion of bridge-crossing (from the canonical text, This bridge called my back), and the image of the

Fallsview Bridge at Niagara Falls (a bridge which, to the entrepreneurs, tourists and settlers at

Niagara Falls, signified "innovation" and the "proper" use of the land) I debate these profoundly divergent notions of home and belonging in the contested space of the settler nation. Bridge crossing as per Moraga and Anzaldua is vitally important here because it recognizes the struggle and perils involved in crossing between (and thereby bringing together) communities. The bridge has two meanings in this chapter. First, at its most basic level it refers to the physical structures upon which people cross. The second meaning is philosophical and I borrow it from Gus Wen Tah, or Two Row Wampum and much like

22 See Lorde's The cancer journals (1980) in which she expresses the need to declare herself a black, lesbian, mother, poet warrior over the medical community's imposition of the identity as a cancer patient. 28 physical bridges, this one also links communities. This second meaning of bridge also enunciates Aboriginal sovereignty as well as the commitment between Aboriginal and newcomer nations to ensure that the bridge linking their communities is properly maintained.

Finally, in the conclusion I question the politics of shame and apology in Canada today.

Through this critique of contemporary appearances of shame and apology, I question whether the settler nation has embarked on the path of Treaty, toward decolonization.

How was Lelawala, the Maid of the Mist, historically encountered? How is she encountered today? Although the Maid of the Mist Steamboat Company no longer retells the story to its passengers, she still haunts the waters, if only in nåme. The emptying of the settler story of the maid from the nåme is important in relation to the ways that myth is adapted in settler culture. Equally important is the need to trace the maid's liminality: the myth's visual and historical liminiality within settler culture attempts to banish the settler's unsettled state in

Indigenous lands. This dissertation's engagement with the settler myth of the Maid of the Mist appreciates the operation of visibility and invisibility as formative to the myth.

29 Chapter2 Magic in the myth: The mystification of colonial power

There 's magic in the mist. -Maid of the Mist Steamboat Company promotional pamphlet, 2005

There is no magic

-Chrystos, 1988, p. 67

This chapter investigates the co-production of the Maid of the Mist tourist story and settler histories of Niagara Falls. Like most other case studies of popular cultural icons of

First Nations women, the Maid of the Misfs oscillation between the ephemeral and ubiquitous appears magically disconnected from the political context of settler states and their unsettled histories. The image of the tragically fated "Indian maiden" occupies considerable space in literature and other forms of cultural production and this image is not innocent; rather plays a critical role in ensuring the normalcy of the settler state (Bergland, 2000; Goldie,

1989; Green, R., 1988; Marubbio, 2006; Valiskakis, 2005). The "fluff and feathers"23 that comprise today's images of "Indianness" are structured by the power of language in myth. I will argue for a Barthesian understanding of myth as a body of often-ambiguous meanings in the service of ideology. Myth extends beyond story, its system of symbols operating on the levels of value and emotion, and it offers a narrative path for action. Given this more complex understanding of myth, what I call the Maid of the Mist myth is more than the story of the maid, even more than a body of competing maid stories. The Maid of the Mist myth is

23 "Fluff and feathers" comes from Deborah Doxtator's exhibit, "Fluff and feathers" at the Woodland Cultural Centre and her book by the same nåme (1992). Doxtator's exhibit and book chronicle the symbols of "Indianness" in non-Native eyes. She questions the symbolic and actual dispossession and infantalization of First Nations and the political and material ends that dispossession and infantalization served. 30 integral to settler ideology concerning perceptions of Indigeneity, settlerhood, sex and gender in the rough waters of the Niagara River.

Truths

History is no longer tåken to be the sequential revelation of truths, and the power motives that govern the construction of history are largely demystified, thanks to the work of pioneering scholars whose analyses are focused on historiography, or the methods of history- writing and the conditions which inform this task.24 According to Seneca historian John

Mohawk, "contemporary historians have proceeded from the presumption that modern people are different from and superior to those who came before - especially those designated as

'primitives'" (2000, p. 261). Such versions of history present colonization and settlement as natural, indeed inevitable features of social evolution (Mohawk, 2000). Conferring

"primitive" status was an ideological project that obscured the dependence of colonists and later, settler states on Indigenous nations (ibid).25 "Race science," or the systematic coding of nations of people on the fundamentally shaky grounds of race biology, was a tool of

European colonial expansion that offered the gloss of legitimacy to the assumption of the

Hayden White's work on history writing as narrative prose is pioneering. White argues that historians write stories to explain historical events, thus they provide the reader their explanation of what history ought to be, rather than a neutral report of what happened (1973). 25 See David McNab, Bruce W. Hodgins and Dale Standen (2001) for their analysis of Aboriginal resistance at the canoe and the European dependence on Aboriginal people. Lee Maracle (1996) argues that settler society in Canada is dependant on Aboriginal peoples for guidance on how to "turn around" (p. 109) settler society. 26 Race biology attempts to locate race within the body, rather within the socio-economic and historical forces that give race meaning. Where historically, phenotype (physical appearance) was the focus of scientific examination, scientific advancements, culminating in the Human Genome Project attempted to locate the "truth" of race within the human cell. The Human Genome Project was unsuccessful in this regard (see Gilroy, 2000; 1998). See Audrey Smedley and Brian D. Smedley (2005) for their concise report on the construction of race. See Andrea Smith (2005) especially her chapter, "Better dead than pregnant" for a brilliant analysis of the attack on Indigenous women's reproductive freedom specifically, and other racialized women generally. 31 European's innate superiority (Mohawk, 2000, pp. 155-176). These modernist presumptions

are impoverished because they would render traditional knowledge irrelevant in favor of

"distortions and incomplete and even dishonest renderings of the past" (2000, p. 261) to serve the modernist assumption of linear progress. Mohawk argues that the revival of traditional knowledge is necessary to expose colonial histories as gross distortions, and modernism as enabling colonialism (2000).

The lines between history and myth are porous at best, as history is inculcated in the narrative ordering of the colonized and the rhetorical settlement of "new" worlds. These histories are now recognized as an extension of colonial power, therefore making all the more pressing the need to demystify the production of these histories and challenge the narratives they offer (Miller, 2008). Seminole citizen and historian Susan Miller (2008) notes the importance of identifying the United States (and Canada) "as a currently colonial nation" (p.

14). This identification is unsettling to "readers accustomed to euphemism [and they] often become uncomfortable as Indigenous writers nåme names and deploy specific language such as genocide and atrocity while discussing events that have defined their people's histories with Europeans and Euroamericans" (Miller, 2008, p. 14). In spite of the settler's discomfort with naming names and identifying genocide as genocide, Aboriginal historiography, Miller argues, is essential to the recovery of history and the restoration of justice (2008). Critically important here is the recovery of Aboriginal women's histories and stories from the discursive silencing which settler histories perpetuate.

32 Reclaiming Aboriginal women's histories is critical to the restoration of harmony which patriarchy has violated. The need to reclaim Aboriginal histories to restore the centrality of women in Aboriginal spiritual and cultural life is therefore essential, after all, "the roots of oppression is memory loss" says Laguna, Sioux and Lebanese writer and critic Paula Gunn

Allen (1992, p. 213). The absence of Aboriginal women from the historical record is not an accident, but a culturally engineered erasure, another act of colonialism that directly targets

Aboriginal women says Seneca scholar Barbara Alice Mann (2004), Paula Gunn Allen

(1992), Haudenosaunee writer Beth Brant (1987) and many others.27 This discursive vanishment of Aboriginal women from these histories is what Beth Brant calls "a silent genocide" (1987, p. 112). If rendered silent, the centrality of women is likewise silenced, and in the silence, women's strength is ignored. Cree and Métis educator and writer Kim

Anderson (2000) notes that womanhood is a source of power in Aboriginal traditions. Early newcomers were astonished by the centrality of women to Aboriginal life and the absence of violence against women there (Anderson, 2000, p. 95). Likewise, Patricia Monture-Angus

(1995), Joyce Green (2007a; 2007b), and Kim Anderson (2000) report that Aboriginal communities had strict sanctions in place to prevent violence against women.

Further, women and their ability to bear children sets them apart from men, and is the reason why women are so prominently featured in Aboriginal creation stories. Cree writer

Tomson Highway identifies O-ma-ma, the female creative force according to the Cree (2003).

27 See Joyce Green's anthology, Making space for Indigenous feminism (2007), in particular Denise K. Henning's chapter, "Yes, my daughters, we are Cherokee women" (2007, pp. 187-198) for her analysis of the matriarchy of the Cherokee nation, the centrality of women in Cherokee creation stories and women's resistance to the imposition of colonial patriarchy. 33 O-ma-ma is self-generative, "there appears to be no overwhelming evidence of a masculine

involvement in the process of procreation" but her creative acts are directly connected to her body, which is to say, O-ma-ma literally gives birth to all creation (Highway, 2003, p. 39).

Women's reproductive abilities, therefore, were not the object of shame or sanction, but respect. Highway compares this vision of women's creativity against the image of

Christianity's vision of a male generative power and that to Christianity, rather than being respected for their ability to give birth, women are condemned as spiritually inferior (2003).

The Christian vision of "women's stupidity" (p. 31) (as per the story of Adam and Eve's eviction from the Garden of Eden) and of a creation that is sterile, where the Christian creator lacks bodily or emotional connection to his creations (p. 30-31) and exclusively male, resulted in the relegation of Christian women to the fringes of spiritual, social and cultural life

(Highway, 2003). Patriarchy was a colonial export:

At that point God as man met God as woman [...] and thereby hangs a tale of what are probably the worst cases of rape, wife battery, and attempted wife murder in the history of the world as we know it. At that point in time, in other words, the circle of matriarchy was punctured by the straight line of patriarchy, the circle of the womb, was punctured, most brutally, by the straight line of the phallus. And the bleeding was profuse. (Highway, 2003, p. 47)

Janice Acoose's (Sakimay First Nation and the Ninankawe Marival Métis) analysis of the cultural tropes of the "Indian princess" and "easy squaw," exposes the interlocking nature of various forms of oppression, what she calls "white-eurocanadian-christian-patriarchy" (1995, p. 13), that are united in colonialism. But in spite of the patriarchal violence directed at

34 Aboriginal women through colonization, they remain vital to cultural life and political

28 resistance.

In prying apart assumption from historical records, myth is understood to be distortion or lie and this has necessitated counter-histories of the oppressed. Choctaw historian Devon

Mihesuah and Wahpetunwan Dakota historian Angela Cavender Wilson demand that history not only be revisited, but that writers of history be held to account for their representations of

First Peoples and their confusion of fiction with fact. In other words, history writing as political work must be recognized as such. Native intellectuals insist that scholars be accountable to tribes for how they portray their histories and cultures. We also argue that work published on Natives should be for the benefit of Natives, not just of the author. Those who maintain the colonial power structure, however, do not want to connect the past to the present, use Native perspectives in their data-collecting or analysis, or utilizing Indigenous scholars' theories. Instead they focus their research on Natives of the past with no concern for their descendants, or they have no basis in reality. (Mihesuah & Wilson, 2002, pp. 146-7)

This demand for scholarly representational responsibility resonates with Niagara Falls history-production because here in the tourist zone, history is accessed through myths of

European discovery. These colonial and settler histories contribute to myths of Indigenous

"savagery," through the modernist narrative of discovery and progress and demonstrate a lack

See Kim Anderson (2000) for a thorough analysis of the reclamation of Native womanhood in epistemological and cosmological terms and in the arena of community politics. For a thoughtful discussion of women's responsibilities to "stand up to protect the water" see Renée Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard (Nishnaabekwe) (2008). Marie Anna Jaimes Guerrero (1997) offers an analysis of Aboriginal women's central involvement in resource and land reclamations in the United States and Canada and draws heavily on the cosmological significance of women and Two Spirited people. June Twain (2003) writes about the joy of women's involvement (along with children, and churches - she notes a nun who was arrested at the blockade) in the Terne-Augama Anishnabai blockades of 1988-1989. This joy comes from being united people in their responsibilities to the land as per the Creator's wishes (Twain, 2003, p. 18). 35 of concern for and accountability to the descendants of those whose actions they purport to

chronicle.

Niagara Falls exists at a place of perpetual rupture between the earnest telling of setter history and the tourists' quest for fun. Many plaques mark Niagara's landscape and they

signal important events (the plaque which memorializes the first visit by a European - Louis

Hennepin) or places (for example, hydroelectric power stations which according to the

plaques that memorialize them, were integral to "progress" in the area and the settler nations)

in settler history. At a lookout point on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, a plaque

acknowledges the Recollet Priest Louis Hennepin as the first European to set eyes on the

waterfalls on December 6, 1678. Hennepin's Haudenosaunee guides are acknowledged but,

unsurprisingly, remain anonymous. This plaque could be read as a stand-alone text but

reading the text means reading it along the myriad stories and distractions of its immediate

surroundings. The plaque, along with the pervading smell of carnival food, the constant drone

of the waterfalls, the countless tourists posing along the safety-railings before clicking

cameras, exposes a significant rupture between the apparent simplistic revelation of history

(as per the modernist tradition) communicated by the plaque and the managed chaos that is

Niagara Falls today. Even while the plaque invites us to imagine what it might have been like

back then, when the tourists, bridges and stores surrounding it were not here, the stubbornness

of perception and experience hijacks this imaginative task. This means that the pretence to

"progress" and its implied narrative of "savagery" is disrupted in this settler and tourist space.

Sometimes, however, we take on the work of convincing ourselves: the plaque indicates one 36 historical event which we are to understand is pivotal to our standing before it. This is an event of discovery and revelation with seemingly profound importance to the organization and reorganization of people and land. We are then left to patch over the chronological distance between the referenced event and our present time. Other queues, such as souvenir shops that resemble pioneer shacks, statues of colonial and dominion rulers, and commemorative spaces for hydroelectric power stations, assist us in piecing together a narrative of progress and an experience of linear history, however questionable. Settler histories, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maori) argues, attempt to justify colonialism by positioning

Indigenous peoples as less evolved than colonizers (1999). These histories are "about power.

In fact, history is mostly about power" (Smith, 1999, p. 34), and we enact the task of colonial knowledge-production in this way. That is to say that the task of bridging incommensurate differences is one we take on, not one that magically completes itself. In our production of » history as a linear narrative, where the affront of colonization appears to have tåken place in the irretrievable past, responsibility and agency are contained on the far end of the historical timeline.

The myth

What is myth? Popular knowledge understands myth as deception, untruth or lie.

There is merit here. The perception of Niagara Falls as a natural wonder gives way to the critical eye's observation of the physical and imaginative work involved in maintaining the image of pristine waters and verdant landscapes. Pristine and verdant it is not: a significant amount of its current (half in the summertime, and up to two thirds in the winter) is diverted 37 for hydroelectric power generation (Irwin, 1996). The water is polluted and tracts of land are toxic. In 1957 a school and residential neighborhood were built upon a toxic waste disposal site known as the Love Canal. Residents were exposed to industrial contaminants and women suffered alarming miscarriage rates, over 50% of the children born in the mid 1970s suffered birth defects and only in 1978 were residents relocated (New York State Department of

Health, 2002). The land is unstable. Precarious rock formations, natural to the process of erosion at Niagara Falls, have been blown apart, cleared away or reinforced to contain the rock and beautify the landscape. (In 1969 the water was diverted from the America side of the falls so that rock piles building up from the splash basin could be cleared away, transforming the American Falls to meet tourist expectations of how a waterfall should look.) On both sides of the border, the city's centre is virtually deserted, its streets are often empty and its storefronts have long since been abandoned. Tourists congregate blocks away on Clifton Hill or Table Rock where they inject considerable amounts of money into retail chains (such as the

Hard Rock Cafe or the Hershey Store). According to critics and municipal governments on both sides of the border, the city is in dire need of economic development.29 From rose gardens to wax museums and souvenir shops built in the form of pioneer shacks, the area is a fabrication, a carefully (and sometimes carelessly) constructed area built in the image of some place else. In the decontextualized words of Gertrude Stein, "there's no there there" (1971).

Yet, even as the depth and variation of meaning is read into and against Niagara Falls,

29 Critics often list the strong Canadian and comparatively weak American dollars, threats of recession, heightened border security, and the 2003 Toronto SARS crisis as reasons for the weak local tourism economy. See Beech, 2007; Pinchin 2007. Economic revitalization initiatives have returned from tourism to the manufacturing sector. See New York State Power Authority, 2008. 38 exposing fact as fiction at best and deception at worst, the area retains its undeniable magnetism. To borrow from the Maid of the Mist promotional pamphlet, what captures the imagination at Niagara Falls is something as vague as "magic in the mist."

The same might be said of the Maid of the Misfs story. Seneca and Tuscarora leaders have argued tirelessly against the tourist industry's myth since it speaks of a practice of the ritual sacrifice of women that First Nations at Niagara Falls did not practice; yet the story remains magnetic. Is there magic in this myth? At the very least it is the cause of justifiable alarm as this story of Indigenous femicide has been reported as fact to tourists eagerly awaiting the self-styled "authentic" and up-close experience of the falls that the Maid of the

Mist tour boat claims to pro vide. This was the focal point of Native cultural activism in 1996 when leaders, organizers and community members managed to pressure the Maid of the Mist

Steamboat Company to stop reporting the fiction of human sacrifice among Indigenous

Peoples as an historically factual curiosity for the entertainment of its paying customers.30

Given that colonial representational politics continue to operate in relatively unabashed ways, the myth is more sleight of hand than enchantment or charm because it does two things: it normalizes contested representational politics and it offers the gloss of historical authenticity to passing (and often disinterested) tourists. In this section, I trace the development of the settler's Maid of the Mist story in an attempt to complicate the popular conflation of myth and lie. Myth is not lie and though there is some merit to the belief that myth is deception, limi ting its meaning to truth and lie and the attendant associations of morality and immorality suggests .

301 pursue this development in Native representational politics at some length in the following chapter. 39 that the introduction of the truth will dispel the myth. This is not the case. Just as there is more to myth than story, there is more to myth than truth and deception.

Myths, Roland Barthes argues, are systems of meaning that are comprised of at times discordant images and narratives whose purpose it is to "distort, not to make disappear"

(1973, p. 131). To Barthes, "Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflection" (1973, p. 140). In other words, the myth of

Niagara Falls distorts the perception and narrative of the area, but it does not make its constructedness disappear. "Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk

about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact" (Barthes, 1973, p. 156). This is why myth does not deceive: it is made innocent by the ambiguity of meaning and the dehistoricization of the images and narratives it uses. In this way the myth becomes

naturalized, unremarkable, a plausible inflection of the truth and a passable statement of fact.

What I call the Maid of the Mist myth is more than just the story (or a collection of

stories) of the maid; it is the system of stories, images, assumptions and perceptions of

Indigeneity at Niagara Falls and this system works to naturalize historical and contemporary colonialisms. Myth is truth and untruth, but more importantly, it is perception, representation and experience. This particular myth (the Maid of the Mist myth) organizes the senses and consciousness according to one salient image of a Native woman in a canoe falling over the brink. The cultural context of the myth's reception is one that denies colonialism as a violent

40 and continuing system and this surely affects the meaning derived from the Maid of the Mist myth.

What do myths do here in the context of the disavowal of colonialism? Barthes's analysis of the image of a Black boy in a French uniform saluting the French flag speaks to that specific image while analyzing beyond its specificities, to consider its broader cultural meaning. Barthes suggests that from the image, the viewer can connote that the French empire is vast and strong; that it is comprised of diverse and loyal servants working toward a shared goal: to serve the greatness of the empire. Barthes's goal is to move from the particular

signification of the image (the boy, the flag, the uniform, the up-turned eyes and the salute) to its situatedness within power and language systems; that is, within ideology. The particular image matters within the economies of racial difference, nationalism, language and visual excess. However, the myth of this image is more significant than the image itself. Myth is ideological; more than one image, "myth is speech justified in excess" (1973, p. 141, original emphasis). In other words, myth is naturalized, and in viewing the image, "everything happens as if the picture naturally conjured up the concept, as if the signifier gave a foundation to the signified [in this case, French imperialism]: the myth exists from the precise moment when French imperiality achieves the natural state" (pp. 140-141, original emphasis).

Before engaging the natural state of Canadian colonialism that the maid's image helps to naturalize, the component parts of the Maid of the Mist settler myth must be addressed. These components (signifiers, to carry forward the language of semiology) shift over the various tellings of the Lelawala story and it is worth explicating their development from obscure 41 cultural reference to full-blown cultural phenomenon and ideological marker of settler-hood in Indigenous lands.

*** Like many other images of "Indian maidens", Lelawala's (as racialized as it is deeply sexed) demonstrates the settler's sexual and racial anxieties. In settler representational forms, what Terry Goldie calls the "white text" (1989, p. 86), is secured as "white space" (p. 61) by containing race and sex in one salient image: the Aboriginal "maiden." The "Indian maiden" is a literary convention that enables otherwise inexpressible colonial sexual anxieties (Goldie,

1989). In other words, the settler's sexuality is repressed and emerges in the image of the

Aboriginal "maiden" as the bearer of irresistible and dangerous sexuality that is inevitably met with racialized and sexual violence (Goldie, 1989, p. 84-86). This is why, as M. Elise

Marubbio (2006) argues, the "Indian maiden" of the silver screen dies. Settler culture's

"Indian maiden" merges the image of the woman with the landscape, thus making her symbolic of a frontier envisioned as both "savage" and sexual (Goldie, 1989; Marubbio,

2006). In this symbolic merging of the land and woman's body, the assumed "right" to conquer both land and women's bodies become intertwined and violently enacted (ibid).

Beth Brant turns to the image of Pocohontas in settler history, deconstructs the representation by reconstructing the woman's history. Rather than surrendering to the popular cultural practice of reducing Aboriginal women, so vital to the political, spiritual and cultural lives of their communities, to "Indian maidens," Brant suggests, "Somewhere outside their legends the real truth lies" (ibid). Beginning from popular settler myths of Pocohontas as "a

42 good Christian [sic]," "a good capitalist" who "enthusiastically fell in love" with British colonist John Rolfe (Brant, 1992, p. 102), Brant offers an alternate narrative of Pocohontas's life as way of visioning the lives of women beyond the seemingly-totalizing image of the maid. Similarily, Lelawala can be a site of resistance, a marker of Indigeneity in a sacred place. This is both a powerful and tricky proposition: on one hand, the settler myth of the

Maid of the Mist tells a story of a woman's death in keeping with the colonial "Indian maiden" trope (I discuss this trope below). On the other hand, it affirms Indigeneity as central to the place by returning the eye to the feminine, the Indigenous and the sacred. It is evocative of Mature Flowers (the Tuscarora's nåme for the woman who fell from the Sky World, and with the help of the water and animal worlds, gives birth to the land's first people). She offers a powerful reminder that Niagara is a place of meeting and meaning, governed by the principle of relations grounded in peace, respect and friendship and the directing power of the

Covenant Chain of Silver. How has the Maid of the Mist story been told and retold amongst settlers at Niagara Falls?

While the story existed earlier in folklore, the first literary appearance of Lelawala is found in Andrew Burke's "Descriptive guide; or, the Visitors' companion to Niagara Falls: Its strange and wonderful localities" (1851). At first glance, the maid of the mist appears out of place at the very end of the chapter, "Accidents which have occurred at the Falls" which is dedicated to deaths (both intentional and accidental) at Niagara. Of the six morbid stories, four involve people falling over the brink (the remaining two concern rock fall deaths). There is one account of suicide but the other stories involve children who are victims of 43 circumstance or young people enjoying the breath-taking view before inevitable tragedy befalls them. All of Burke's stories invoke the image of innocence before the literal fall.

Before the end of the chapter, Burke provides the section, "The white canoes: An Indian legend." In his version, the maid is named Lena; her father, called Oronta is a proud Seneca chief. Every autumn, his people send a canoe loaded with the summer's harvest over the waterfall, "to be paddled by the fairest maiden that had just then arrived at woman-hood"

(1851, p. 102). In Burke's tone and language, he conveys the story as "an Indian legend" and disavows his authority as writer and embellisher of the story. Few details are offered beyond the circumstances of her death and that she sacrifices herself willingly, but not before her father can join her in his own white canoe in an act Burke oddly describes as hopeful:

By a strange chance, Lena's little vessel pauses by a rock, just on the verge of descent - permitting Oronta's to come near - when, both together rise upon the plunging rapids, one look - one mutual look of love, of hope, of happiness, is exchanged - and the forest rings again with the yell of the Senecas, as the father and child drop down the cataract together with their WHITE CANOES! (p. 104)

Burke ends his morbid tale by likening the Falls to an altar, whose mists resemble incense as they cross the rainbow and rise to heaven.

William TrumbuH's (1884) versed and metered book-length poem, "The legend of the white canoe," embellishes Burke's story by adding the elements of betrayal and paternal love.

From the start we are introduced to an image of a community on the brink of destruction: the

Seneca "children of the forest" face starvation, are prey to bloody raids of competing communities, and abide by the whims of cruel and blood-starved gods:

Here the children of the forest, spellbound by that deafening roar, Stopped to gaze with listening wonder, in the simpler days of yore; 44 Awe-struck, gazing in silent worship, well beseeming Nature's child, As in chase they roamed the plain, or tracked in war the pathless wild: And as often as they listened, on the voices of the flood Deep were borne the Spirit's mutterings, calling fierce for human blood; Ay, and sacrifice more cruel in that cry they understood: Gift of Nature's choicest treasure, peerless budding womanhood! (p.3)

According to the narrator, the Seneca have abandoned their spiritual (or superstitious) obligations, the result of which is starvation, pestilence and war.

The maid's (whose nåme is now Wenonah) offers the image of calm beauty and ripening sexuality in this chaotic context. Wenonah's ignorance of her influence on men tempers our view of her budding sexuality. We are presented with the image of a woman on the verge of sexual maturity, who is also utterly innocent:

Fairest of the laughing daughters by blue Seneca's rippling tide, Was the Indian maid, Wenonah, sturdy Kwansind's joy and pride: Eyes of laughter, like the sunshine dancing in her native lake, 0'er whose depths, anon, fleet shadows chasing east their trailing wake; Lips of tempting ruddy hue like mountain berries gleaming fair; Raven locks, whose glossy luster shone like dark-stemmed maidenhair; Whilst rich mantling color [sic] tinged an olive cheek, whose crimson flush Vied with flaming woodland leaves when touched with Autumn's scarlet blush.

And the music of her laughter, when amid the joyous throng, She, hailed Queen by all the maidens, led with merriest quip and song, Fell in sweetest rippling cadence, sounding thro' the leafy way Like the purl of hidden brooklet murmuring soft in distant play; As in freest fancy roving, far removed from cares or strife, With fresh eager zest exulting in youth's bounding sense of life, Bright she moved, a winsome picture, framed by nature's matchless art In all scenes of joy and beauty royally to bear her part. (Trumbull, 1894, p. 5, 7)

Håving spuraed the romantic efforts of the much older medicine man, Wenonah has sealed her fate. The pride-sore, scheming medicine man, taking advantage of the now-abandoned practice of human sacrifice, their superstitious fears and the precarious future which threatens

45 the community, meets with the "warriors' council" to tell them that the spirit of the Niagara has demanded the sacrifice of a young virgin, lest peace and nature's bounty be denied them forever. Notably the river god is presented to us as a man, and the references to Wenonah as his "bride" leave us to draw the obvious conclusions about Wenonah's new role as sex object and potential reproductive agent for the god.31 The council, concerned with the precarious future of their small, vulnerable and slow-to-adapt community, see the medicine man's proposal as their most viable option for their community's security. They determine that

Wenonah, the tribe's most beautiful daughter, is the most obvious candidate for sacrifice.

Wenonah's father, Kwansind (a raiding tribe has slaughtered his wife) is the wise chief who can see through the medicine man's lies but is powerless to defy the council. He tells his daughter that she is to die. With the standard stoicism afforded such popular images of

Indigenous peoples, Wenonah consents without objection. Her role as tantalizing sacrifice to an angry male river god utterly eclipses her internal life, and while she is the reason for the story, she is not the centre of the story. Rather, Kwansind's struggle as leader of a community at the brink of oblivion, rival of a devious medicine man and father of a potential human sacrifice provides the substance to the story.

When the fated day arrives, the crowd gathers on the shore, in an orgiastic fit, and awaits the arrival (and departure) of Wenonah in her white canoe. Again, Trumbull reminds

31 Lini GroPs children's story, Lelawala: A legend of the Maid of the Mist presents a tåmer version of Trumbull's virgin-temptress: she is "too good for any man, meant for a god" (1971, p. 17). 46 his readers of the child-like simplicity and eagerness of her people to appease their angry gods, even at the cost of human life.

- There they danced in wild carousal, thro' that glorious moonlit night, Love and friendship all forgotten, in their orgies' fierce delight; Thinking thus, poor simple children, best the dread wrath to assuage Of that Spirit dark, whose roaring told of boundless, sullen rage. (p. 43)

We are left on the shore to watch with the frantic crowd (who will abandon their own to a sullen god) as Wenonah's canoe is tåken by the current, she resting dumbly and beautifully amid summer flowers and the harvesfs bounty. At the last moment, Kwansind submits to his paternal instincts and paddles a canoe out to Wenonah, to join her in death:

Ay; 'twas Kwansind! Love, triumphant over every fear and doubt, Love had won the final victory, putting stubborn pride to rout. By that one brief glance at meeting, in his tender yearning eyes, Clear she reads the pregnant meaning of that love-wrought sacrifice: - Not forgotten, not forsaken, in that lonely, bitter hour! Then, tho' certain death await her, answering to his love's strong power Leaps the light of new-born gladness in her eyes! - with quickened breath, Clasped as one, they pass the portal to the shadowy realm of death. (p. 51)

Trumbull tells us that even now, as Wenonah's specter pushes off from the shore in her white canoe, she is again joined at the brink by the specter of her father. They embrace as they slip beyond the brink.

Willard Parker's "Niagara's rainbow: The legend of the white canoe" (1922) has the maid riding over the brink, but this time with her lover, while her devoted father witnesses helplessly on the shore. In this version, the river and the god who requires the sacrifice are separate: the god is masculine, the river is feminine and both are angry. The scheming

47 medicine man is effaced and in this version Wenonah has a lover, the young warrior Uncas.

This time, all are present when the "wise men" pronounce Wenonah's fate. Her father objects,

'Nay! nay!' He cries, 'If naught but that our doom can stay, We'll brave the famine' s pestilential breath, Till all the tribe lies stark and cold in death!'" (stanza V) Wenonah protests in a speech that is vaguely reminiscent of a Shakespearean heroine's monologue, and that transcends her femininity by condemning it:

Up springs Wenonah: "Father! near me speak! Though but a woman, think me not so weak That I would shrink, a coward, from flood or fire, To save my tribe! My blood is thine, my sire! Lead on, Oh! warriors, to Niagara's Fall Its might shall not my woman's heart appal [sic]! Farewell, my sire! Uncas, my love, farewell! Great Water-god! sound thou Wenonah's knell!

As the head-strong heroine pushes from the shore, Uncas sprints his canoe to join her in a final embrace before the fatal drop. His fellow warriors are horrified, then grief-stricken by the loss of the brave. The river seems to share their sentiment and sends up a rainbow in tribute to Uncas:

The spray-drops fall, tinted with rainbow's hue "The Spirit weeps," they cry, "for Uncas brave - The Spirit's bow lies upon Uncas' Grave!" And still the mists from her vexed bosom rise, Niagara's tears for Love's great sacrifice, And still o'er Uncas' grave the spirit's rainbow lies. (XII stanza)

The rainbow is the river's lament for the loss of Uncas, while Wenonah's death is left oddly and conspicuously un-commemorated.

48 The Lelawala story has been tåken up in many other forms. It has been set to music in

Henry Hadley's (1898) ballad "Lelawala: A legend of Niagara," which was written for a chorus and opera. In 1926 Charles Wakefield Cadman published his three-part operetta,

"Lelawala: Or the maid of Niagara" (see Cadman, 1926). This period in which Hadley and

Cadman's musical efforts were published and mounted is known for its stylized and demeaning representations of Native Peoples. Known as the Indianist Movement (spanning the 1880s to the 1920s), cultural expression from this era was explicitly racist by today's standards, and drew upon the well-established ideas of nobel savagery and Indian degeneracy.

Such songs and performances enjoyed wide popularity. Duane A. Matz (1988) and Rayna

Green (1994) offer exhaustive analyses of the Indianist Movement and its influence on musical representations (both Green and Matz's analyses span popular cultural forms). Matz explains that Indianist songs were heavily influenced by the wealth of "coon songs" in North

American popular culture (1988, p. 245). "Coon songs" were deeply racist and comedic portrayals of Black people, and these songs were written and performed by and for white people. "Coon songs" and other parodies and performances of racial alterity are instructive because, as Eric Lott (1993) explains in the context of blackface minstrelsy, they demonstrate the white nation's containment and control of racial alterity as it absorbs difference (and immunizes against it). In other words, the construction, performance and consumption of this difference were critical to the development and defense of whiteness in the settler nation.

32 For insight into the overwhelmingly approving reception of Indianist operettas see Will Earhart's glowing review of Cadman's "Lelawala, the maid of Niagara" (1927). 49 While "coon songs" and Indianist cultural production shared the traits of racist humour, the motifs of human sacrifice, ambivalent gods and unforgiving nature were unique to Indianist art.

***

The Maid of the Mist settler myth certainly does not end here and in the remainder of this chapter I argue that even if the maid does not appear overtly within Niagara Falls culture, the myth remains and continues to structure experience and to frame our historical perceptions. In a souvenir shop on Table Rock just like the ones on Clifton Hill, and elsewhere in Niagara, plaster of Paris figurines of Indian maidens pose in their requisite canoes. Maid of the Mist bottle openers, novelty cameras, magnets, the list is virtually endless, fill countless bins, but one keychain stands out above the others. This one is round, inside is a rotating coin-like insert framed by a ring that reads "Maid of the Mist - Niagara

Falls." Flipped one way and the words frame an image of the boat. Flipped the other way and those words now frame these:

Named after the legendary Indian Maiden Lelawala, whose spirit is said to reign over Niagara Falls, the popular boat cruises have been thrilling visitors from the world over since 1846. Originally used to ferry passengers across the river, the boat became a tourist attraction in 1848 when a suspension bridge was opened. Since then, millions of visitors including royalty and presidents have experienced the thunder of the Falls and its gentle mist on a succession of boats named "Maid of the Mist."

Flipping between dry historical account, "legendary Indian maidens," and tour boats is not exclusive to this single keychain.

50 Unsettled histories

The settlement of history is ideological, where myths of terra nullius and manifest

destiny combine to produce a narrative of the natural settler state. While settler histories and

myth appear to be opposed (the first seen as reflection of truth and the second as pure

fantasy), they share much in common. Myths convince because they do not insist on their own plausibility, rather, much like colonial historical narratives, myths assume plausibility.

Leaving exact meanings open to interpretation, myths rely upon emotion, association and circulating historical knowledge with little concern for historical. accuracy. Likewise, no historical record can claim to express the uncontested truth. While the Lelawala myth presents

a means through which we can understand and experience the place of Niagara Falls in the

colonial context, the chaos that typifies moving in and through this cultural and physical space

seems to resist any attempts at order. Here the border separating history and myth is exposed

as incomplete. How is settler history presented and encountered at Niagara Falls? How is it naturalized at Niagara Falls?

According to colonial history, Niagara Falls was inhabited by the Neutrals, a small

nation settled between two competing and often warring confederacies: the Wendat (Huron) and Five Nations (also called Haudenosaunee or Iroquois) Confederacies. This nation's

apparent neutrality between the Wendat (Huron) and Haudenosaunee came to define it, as its nåme is now displaced. Colonial history reports that the Neutrals allowed members of both confederacies to cross their lands. This, according to the writers of this history, demonstrated their lack of political sophistication because, in European eyes, the Neutrals passively 51 submitted to both Haudenosaunee and Wendat Confederacies without recognizing the

advantage they could exploit from this strategic positioning (see Coyne, 1895). Recollet

missionaries, the first to live among and attempt to convert First Nations of the region,

reported that the Neutrals were war-like, easily manipulated by their neighbors and incapable

of taking full advantage of the bounties of their lands.33 Their utter incompetence extended

onto the Niagara River:

The Neutrals, however, did not understand the management of canoes, especially of the rapids, of which there were only two, but long and dangerous. Their proper trade was hunting and war. They were very lazy and immoral. Their manners and customs were very much the same as those of the Hurons. Their language was different, but the members of the two nations understood one another. They went entirely unclad. (Coyne, 1895, p. 6)

Popular history only affirms this position. "Life was so good for the early Indians [the

Neutrals] that they grew 'soft.' They were large and affable. As it turned out, they were easy prey for other Indians" (Rennie, 1967, p. 7). Eventually, the "savage" Five Nations

slaughtered all the Wendat and when they were done they did the same to the Neutrals: "After the Hurons [Wendat] were slaughtered, the Iroquois [Haudenosaunee] attacked the Neutrals

and gave them the same treatment. Niagara was wiped clean of permanent dwellers. Neutrals who were able to escape joined nearby tribes, and Niagara, for all of its abundance, lay unsettled" (Rennie, 1967, p. 8).

Recollet missionaries were the first to make contact with First Nations of the Great Lakes and they were quickly followed and ultimately replaced by the Jesuits. Where the Recollets practiced poverty, the Jesuits were closely connected with the French aristocracy and were deeply interested in securing Indigenous populations for French imperial trade. Recollets and Jesuits actively worked to convert, but the Jesuits merged politics with conversion by trading furs for rifles to converts only. Both orders would offer important, though significantly prejudiced, records of local languages, customs and beliefs. In the fall of 1626, Recollet priest De Laroche-Daillon li ved amongst a small nation settled between two competing and, at that time, warring confederacies, the Wendat and Haudenosaunee Confederacies. 52 Popular histories do little to trouble the basic assumption that by the time Hennepin arrived, there were no more Native People at Niagara Falls. From Pierre Berton's A picture book of Niagara Falls (1993), to Sherman Zavitz's It happened at Niagara (1999) Niagara

Falls is as empty of human habitation when Hennepin gazed with horror from the rock's edge.

In these popular histories, the story of the Indigenous Peoples' disappearance is either absent or described as the irrational and sudden act of the Haudenosaunee (Five Nations

Confederacy). Hennepin's own account of Indigenous Peoples of the region was largely speculative. To him, Niagara Falls was terrifying, unruly and the closest to hell on earth any

God-fearing Christian would want to be. Describing the landscape as "hideous," "horrible,"

"unimaginable," and presenting the image of a monstrous drop, left him to speculate that the rough and apparently inhospitable terrain "might oblige the savages to seek out a more commodious habitation" (Hennepin cited in Holley, 1883, 8).34 Placing Hennepin at the farthest point on the timeline affords him pride of place, as the "founder" and "father" of

Niagara Falls today while the question of conquest and the opportunism of colonial historians are unhinged from their contemporary relevance. The analysis of colonial history production

(historiography) endeavors to reconnect power and history.

Historiographic analyses indicate that if myths offer order, even if only impermanent, then history imperils that order through the chaotic tangle of events, motives and unintended consequences it presents. The imposition of linearity in historical records is only occasionally

34 Hennepin's status as the first European to see Niagara Falls is now contested. Recollet Priest Etienne Brulé, who lived with the Neutral Nation and Wendat Confederacy in the early 1600s, is now believed to have visited Niagara Falls in 1615. 53 successful at tempering this chaos. Paul Carter argues that control of the historical narrative through the muffling of the chaos of history via the arrangement of linear chronology and cause-effect events demonstrates mastery over colonial history production (1989). This signals an important distinction between history and historiography, one that, for the purposes of this discussion, remain in productive tension. Forever guided by the conditions of its writing, so too is it influenced by the context of its reading. In other words, the image of linearity in history is externally imposed. The plodding chronological presentation of historical "facts" and artifacts present a "history where the past has been settled even more effectively than the country" (Carter, 1987, p. xx). Already, the confluence of history and myth obscure the lines that differentiate them. Where do mythical narratives end and historical narratives begin? Daniel Frances indicates that myth and history are co-produced:

But myths are not lies, or at least, not always. Rather, they express important truths. They usually do not provide a precise record of events, but that is because they serve other purposes. Myths idealize. They select particular events and institutions which seem to embody important cultural values and elevate them to the status of legend. In Canadian history that would be the Mounties, to take an example, or the transcontinental railway, or the North. Conversely, myths demonize. They vilify, or at least marginalize, anyone who seems to be frustrating the main cultural project - Indians, for example, or communists, or Quebec separatists. Myths organize the past into a coherent story, the story of Canada, which simplifies the complex ebb and flow of events and weaves together the disparate threads of experience. Myths are echoes of the past, resonating in the present. (1997, pil)

Frances suggests that myth and history are so intricately intertwined that they do not and perhaps cannot exist independently. Returning to the image of the Hennepin plaque and its view of the falls, the experience of reading it amid the tourist landscape indicates a linear history which, truth or not, we are prompted, by virtue of our surroundings, to patch together.

54 Our perceptions of history are primed by our acceptance of circulating myths, and this

anticipation of the linear historical narrative, along with its implicit causal logic attempts to

settle the ambiguities of history through the imposition of the myth of history as the sequential

revelation of fact. We anticipate narratives of progress and adaptation: Hennepin discovered

Niagara Falls; the First Nations somehow disappeared; civilization advances; society

improves; history is past.

The impulse to toss aside colonial reports of Indigenous Peoples, like Hennepin's

largely speculative report, is tempting but fundamentally misplaced. They offer insights into

the assumptions and perceptions of Europeans, and they provide clues into the effects of

contact in Indigenous communities. I turn to Wendat historian George Sioui for direction

here.35 His approach to history begins with the understanding that representation in historical

records often presents colonization as inevitable (Sioui, 1992). From this starting position, he

argues, we must engage historical texts that have grossly misrepresented First Nations experience in a way that challenges the authority of colonial historiography (2001, 1992). At

contact, European views of Wendat people were infused with European religious convictions,

values and assumptions, and this permeates the settler's historical record (Sioui, 1999). As

such, Sioui calls these histories "mythologies" (Sioui, 1999). Historical texts offer a window

on the methodology of colonial mythmaking, and so present a cleavage point to the academic committed to anti-colonial scholarship, to demystify the production of the history of the

35 The Wendat and Haudenosaunee share creation stories (Sioui, 1999, p. 16). In the Wendat tradition, the woman who fell from the Sky World was named Aataentsic and she fell onto the back of Big Turtle. It was Toad who dove below the deep water to recover earth (Sioui, 1999, pp. 16-19). Small Turtle spread this earth on Big Turtle's back and thus provided the ground on which Aataentsic and her children could build a home (ibid). 55 Americas (ibid). According to Sioui, the modem vision of the Americas is rooted in colonial historical representations of vast and uninhabited landscapes rather than ordered societies with their own methods of history production (ibid). By looking for the "correspondences between" (1992, p. xxii) significantly different records, for example, the Hennepin plaque and the contemporary tourist landscape in which it is read, an alternate and significantly complicated history of images and absences begins to emerge. This also has the effect of challenging the myth of historical absolutes and is necessary because it permits an engagement with subjects that are absent from popular or dominant historical records. The plaque tells of the attempt to settle Niagara's history. What have alternate histories told of

Niagara and the contact and pre-contact periods?

The history of Native-European contact that the Hennepin plaque indicates is woven together with myths which helped Europeans understand societies, languages, cultures, cosmologies and spaces to which they were entirely foreign. These myths influenced their production of history, and they are woven into our understandings of history. Chief amongst these is the myth that this land was primitive, untouched, strange and cruel. Historians have patched together stories of linguistic, political and cultural groups of the region with the aid of

archeological evidence, linguistics, colonial and oral histories (see Dickason & McNab, 2009;

Sioui, 1992; Trigger, 1987; 1969; Wright, G. K., 1963). These nations spoke Iroquoian languages and the cultures and traditions they practiced, while not identical, were related.

These nations valued trade and alliances with their neighbors, and their intricate trade networks spanned vast distances. Two major confederacies spanning the regions of the 56 Niagara Peninsula to Georgian Bay competed in this trade network in what is now known as

Ontario. These two confederacies were the Wendat and the Five Nations (to become the Six

Nations) Confederacies. The Niagara Region was the primary territory of what is now commonly referred to as the Neutral Nation, named so by the French in the seventeenth century because they were neutral in the competition between the Wendat and the Five

Nations Confederacies. At contact the Neutral Nation was struggling with a collection of divergent political, economic, militaristic and pathological factors, the complexity of which

European newcomers could only guess (Sioui, 2001; 1992). Europeans competed amongst one another for a foothold in these trade networks, and of ten intentionally destabilized

Indigenous national and international politics in order to secure their interests.

The shorthand "Neutral" changed from a convenient characterization of the nation's political neutrality to the dominant nåme even as the Jesuits lived among them and their neighbors. According to Trigger (1987), the Wendat called the Neutrals the "Attiwandaronk," a nåme they in turn used for the Wendat, which means "people who speak a slightly different language" (p. 95). Jean de Brébeuf, patron saint of Canada37 (canonized in 1930) lived among the Wendat from 1634 to 1638, establishing a mission at what is now called Saint Marie

Cartier kidnapped Donnaconna, a leader of the Laurentian Haudenosaunee at Stadacona (what is now Quebec City), two of his sons and seven other members of his family. Cartier knew this would upset the local political structure and it was to the French advantage to secure control over the Native Peoples in the European race to establish trade routes (Dickason & McNab, 2009; LaRocque, 1975, p. 52; Trigger, 1987; Ménard, J. & Vallée, 1999). The European approach to contact diplomacy was inconsistent and Cartier would not be the last to execute "diplomacy" through highly dubious means. 37 Brébeuf also penned The Huron Carol in 1643. 57 Among the Hurons. Brébeuf combined the church and politics by refusing to trade arms to those Wendat who had not converted to Christianity. This threatened the political balance in the intricate Indigenous trade network. According to Trigger, Brébeuf and other missionaries amongst the Wendat attempted to dismantle Indigenous belief systems. When epidemics decimated Huronia, Brébeuf and his brothers were believed to be responsible and were thus executed. This has only contributed to Brébeuf s legacy as a saint in the wilderness.39

At the time of contact, the Neutral Nation had already suffered from the effects of smallpox, chickenpox, whooping cough, and other forms of contagion unknowingly introduced by Europeans. These vimses were common childhood infections in Europe, but in the Americas, where Indigenous Peoples' immunity had never encountered such diseases, mortality rates were astronomical. Many historians have supposed that the uneven trade in

Eurpoean weaponry contributed to the death of the Neutral nation. While the French would trade guns and ammunition to Christian converts only, the Dutch would without restriction.

The Dutch traded with the Haudenosaunee, while the French trade was with the Wendat. The

Neutrals had no access to arms. The result was that only a select few Wendat men had firearms, while the Haudenosaunee were armed (Wright, G. K., 1963, p. 43). This argument is disputed on the grounds that the arms Europeans traded with First Nations were of inferior quality and that the time required to reload the weapons presented impediments that greatly

38 Bruce Trigger attributes Brébeuf to the nåme "Huron" - a derogatory nåme derived from the French word for "savage" or "wild boar" (Trigger, 1998, p. 27). Barbara Alice Mann, on the other hand, attributes the nåme to Jacques Cartier. According to Mann, his use of the term was to honor the way they wore their hair (in "Mohawks"), but that it quickly became an insult (Mann, 2000, p. 19). Wendat (also spelt Wyandot), Georges Sioui (1999; 1992) and Mann (2000) remind us, is the true nåme. 39 Pope Pius XI canonized Brébeuf Canada's patron saint in 1930. 58 outweighed the strategic gains provided by guns (1962, p. 43). At any rate, the effect of

imported contagion, combined with the significant upset caused by European manipulation of

Indigenous political structures, the uneven trade in arms, and the attempts to usurp Indigenous

cosmologies by Recollet and Jesuit missionaries were enormously destructive because they

confronted First Nations suddenly and simultaneously (Sioui, 1992).

Fluid national borders due to the reorganization of the political landscape compounded

by the intricacies of Indigenous land tenure and trade confounded early European mapmakers

who laboured under the principle of the individual ownership of land. While Jesuit

missionaries fastidiously recorded information about the cultures, languages and traditions of

their First Nations' hosts, the maps they drew of the Niagara Region were inconsistent and

nationalities often confused (Pendergast, 1994). To the linear mind, the causal link between

the presence and now absence of the Wendat Confederacy on these maps meant that the

absence of the Wendat Confederacy indicated the death of a language, culture and people.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's move to attack and absorb the Wendat Confederacy to the

north and Neutral Nation in the Niagara Peninsula was not an act of genocide, says Sioui, but

of the consolidation of power as an act of resistance against European invaders (1992;

1999).40 The Haudenosaunee Confederacy expanded once again after the absorption of the

40 Rene Sioui Labelle offers an eloquent read on this complex history and its contemporary implications for the Wendat in his documentary "Kanata: Legacy of the children of Aataentsic." Perhaps the most striking example of the deep influence of the myth of static and distant history shows itself just minutes into the documentary. Regent G. Sioui Garihwa (a Wendat man) explains the political significance of Wendat dispossession in the face of arbitrary settler borders and temporally myopic governments which claim the Wendat do not have territorial rights because the archeological evidence of the Wendat Confederacy is physically displaced from Wendat communities today. This is dizzying logic given the multiple dis- and re-locations the Wendat have survived. Regent Sioui, along with 59 Neutrals and Wendat. In the 1720s the Tuscarora Nation was pushed from their homeland in what is now called the Carolinas. Fleeing northward, the nation appealed to the

Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Seneca permitted them to settle in the Niagara Region and the Tuscarora were adopted as "little brothers," thus expanding the Haudenosaunee

Confederacy from five to six nations.

Yet, as Georges Sioui explains, settler histories have failed to understand the

Confederacy's political and diplomatic strategies since contact: "History books call them [the

Haudenosaunee Confederacy] cruel and bloodthirsty. They've been called Indian Nazis. In reality, they'd assimilated circular political traditions that showed them and their adoptees, a way to survive in a world where most were disappearing. An Amerindian world, under direct threat of extinction and annihilation" (Georges Sioui in Ménard & Vallée, 1999). The impulse of earlier and some contemporary historians to either condemn or exonerate the

Haudenosaunee Confederacy misses more than one mark. Imposing an all-or-nothing scenario of moral correctness upon complex political and environmental problems simplifies or simply ignores the complexities of colonial contact on intricate political systems by dismissing

Haudenosaunee understandings of how to adapt to European invasion as mindlessly violent.

The rush to moralize reifies the myth of the omniscient historian while reinforcing the dominance of western knowledge and morality. The imposition of historical linearity on

"circular societies" (Sioui, 1992; 1999) forces reflection and nuanced understandings of three other men were arrested in 1982 when, after ceremonies in Jacques-Cartier Park, they cut down trees, camped and set small camp fires. They appealed their conviction, arguing that they had a Treaty right to use the land. This Treaty, which was both written and oral, was finally recognized when the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the validity of oral Treaties in 1990. See Kulchyski, 1994 for an analysis of the case and judgment. 60 power from view as the image of progress predominates. George Sioui characterizes

Indigenous societies as "circular societies" (1992; 1999), which mans that all forms of life, including people, animals and spirits, are connected. This is not an ephemeral connection, but an intimate relationship. The prospect of regeneration figures prominently in circular societies since it is antithetical to the idea of linear progress.

Once there was contact with Europeans, Amerindians - because of their circular, non- evolutionist vision - saw the others as humans whose culture was undergoing denigration and needed to be regenerated, while Europeans, because of their linear and evolutionist vision, saw Amerindians as a backward human type that must at all costs be forced into the European process of evolution and development. (Sioui, 1992, p. 100)

The settler myths of Niagara Falls as an empty Eden, the Haudenosaunee as untrustworthy murders and the Wendat as vanished are couched in the assumption of historical linearity.

What is the significance of historical linearity? It localizes the colonial myth of empty land, or terra nullius on what was and remains Indigenous territories. This is to say that the land is empty and, if the region is "cleansed" of Indigenous inhabitation, as Hennepin and others suggest, it is freed of any prior claim. It is, in short, free for the taking. The idea that

First Nations should retain valid claim to their territories is then sealed behind a barrier of history.41 The land, empty as it is of its original inhabitants because of the "savagery" of their neighbors, cries out for civilized habitation, for some measure of order to be imposed on the chaos of the wild. In spite of the violence, both direct and symbolic, that was and continues to be aimed at First Peoples of the region, this myth of the "savage" Haudenosaunee dominates,

My chapter "Home at the bridge" confronts the colonial concept of land tenure and settler belonging. 61 and the realities of the savage British and French, and later Canadian and American colonists recedes into the distant and foggy past.

The myth experienced

How does the legend structure experience? How does the woman become the boat become the ride? The Maid of the Mist tour boat is a popular tourist ride. It is a ride rather than tour because the boats are carefully choreographed, appearing to court danger as they approach the powerful sheets of water but never coming so close as to pose any real danger.

To be tåken for a ride, on the other hand, is a real threat. Niagara Falls is commonly associated with deception and scams. Tourists of the 1800s bemoaned the encroachment of conmen and barkers, who, they believed, cheapened the area and by extension, the integrity of their bourgeois return to nature (McKinsey, 1985). This section argues that while tourists consume myth in the superficial sense, they are also consuming the Barthesian meaning of myth-as-ideological. The outcome is that when the tourist consents to being tåken for a ride, their experience at the mist, and the willing sacrifice of their money, approximates the encounter with or embodiment of Indianness.

Karen Dubinsky supposes that the oral version of the Lelawala story can be traced as far back as 1753, to an anonymous fur trader's yarn of a Haudenosaunee man who loses control of his canoe and is carried over the falls (1999, p. 68). To be sure, there were many such stories of Haudenosaunee men losing control of their canoes before the cataract, falling from precarious staircases or bridge-like structures at Goat Island or the gorge, or drowning in the lower river's whirlpool. Such stories are thinly-veiled attacks on Indigenous belonging in 62 Indigenous spaces. These, in turn, were endorsements of settler belonging and superiority, themselves thinly-veiled by the language of "innovation" and "utility."42 The attendant assumptions were that Indigenous men (because women, especially Indigenous women, were not recognized as carriers and innovatørs of technological and ecological knowledges) lacked the knowledge and ability to inhabit and control their lands and waters. The notion of the land and waters as things to control, and expressly of Indigenous men 's failure to control even the trajectory of their own bodies on the land- and waterscape, hints at the operation of colonial sexual anxiety and the notion that the waters must be directly experienced.

If the roots of the Lelawala story can be traced to yarns about Indigenous men, the conspicuous masculinity of those unfortunate and fatally incompetent men is worth some attention in comparison to Lelawala's expressed femininity and her suicidal trajectory. Anne

McClintock (1995) writes of imperialism as the site of profound sexual anxieties, as much as it is the amalgam of discourses, perceptions and practices of domination. Imperial Europe's creation and subsequent fixation upon the "monstrous sexuality" of its Other ensured that stories like those of Lelawala, the "dusky beauty," were not just possibilities; they were inevitabilities. A young, beautiful Native woman, embodying primitive sexuality strong enough to satiate a temperamental god, finds its roots in the image of Native male incompetence; Lelawala's journeying over the falls is intentional, while these men are simply swept over against their wills. Then there are the strange redundancies of dominant masculine

42 See my chapter, "Home at the bridge" for a discussion of the assumptions of the settler's superior belonging through the imposition of Eurocentric standards of "civilization" and "advancement." 63 figures in the stories: Lelawala, the "bride" of the waterfall's god, the god (an unseen but altogether masculine force), against the apparent masculinity of her sullen father and her impetuous lover who also go over. If Lelawala is a sacrificial bride to the waterfall god, so top are the men who join her in death. Water vessels as sexual symbols, images of submission to and mastery over currents, and the association of control over the canoe with sexual adeptness with control over the canoe are well-circulated in Canadian culture. The cultural cachet of the canoe aids in the sexual associations of journeying over Niagara Falls, as well as in the confusion of the woman (Lelawala) with the boat (the Maid of the Mist tour boats).

The canoe has special historical, technological and cosmological significance; it represents "the human journey through the mortal world to the world of the spirits (McNab,

Hodgins & Standen, 2001, p. 238).43 The canoe was the foundational technology for the navigation of water systems in the development and maintenance of fur trading routes between Europeans and First Nations. It also has spiritual significance; many Aboriginal creation stories feature canoes (McNab, Hodgins & Standen, 2001, p. 239). Aboriginal ' people's decision to snare this technology (which included knowledge about how to build and operate canoes) was critical to European survival (McNab, Hodgins & Stande, 2001). The canoe is represented in Two Row Wampum as the means for our journeying together, bridged by peace, respect and friendship. This and its central role as a literal and metaphysical vehicle

43 See McNab, Hodgins & Standen (2001) for a detailed account of the canoe's special place, culturally and historically, especially as a technology of resistance to colonization. Aboriginal people's knowledge of how to build and operate the canoe, of the relationship between the canoe and the land (both in the navigation of waters and in how to constmct the canoe) and of the appreciation of European economic dependence on the canoe enabled this resistance (ibid). 64 in many creation stories means that when Aboriginal peoples shared the canoe, something of deep spiritual significance, their acts referenced the deep significance of the canoe. In this way, Aboriginal people exercised agency while honoring the Covenant Chain of Silver

(McNab, Hodgins & Stande, 2001, p. 239).

Sleeping, eating, writing, painting, singing and even, as Pierre Berton famously observed, making love are emblematically Canadian when performed in canoes.44 Europeans and Indigenous Peoples, in the service of imperial trade and "exploration" spent a considerable amount of time in and around their canoes (both on land and in water). Learning how to live normally meant learning how to perform daily tasks like eating and sleeping on the water and this demanded hard labour as well as innovation and adaptation.45 The idea of canoeing as an expression of solidarity with or connection to nature is a relatively recent cultural development, one that finds its roots in the early 1900s belief in nature's therapeutic value (Hodgins & Hoyle, 1994, p. 25). In turn, the wilderness canoe trip grew from earlier notions that nature was to be tamed, and the canoe served as a method of disciplining the landscape and wildlife. As Daniel Frances explains, such activities were settler cultural pursuits organized around the belief that to experience nature meant embodying the Indian

(1997). Wilderness youth camps, provincial parks, developments in canoe construction techniques (especially the shift from wooden canoes to lighter materials) all helped to change the nature and function of the canoe from vehicle of work to one of therapy and leisure, while

44 According to Berton, "A Canadian is somebody who knows how to make love in a canoe" (see Brown, 1973). 45 Portageurs were Europeans (predominantly French) and Aboriginal peoples who canoed water systems and carried their canoes and supplies over land to connect to other water systems. 65 in a seemingly paradoxical gesture, retaining the aura of the landscape's wildness and the conviction that canoeing would bring one closer to it (1997). This is what Daniel Frances calls

"the ideology of the canoe" (1997). For Frances, the canoe represents the myth of colonial discovery and expansion, and the perception of the landscape as "canoeable" (p. 142) represents vulnerability to colonial expansion. But this work of the canoe, or more accurately, the work the canoeist must spend, is obscured by Frances's language of the canoeable landscape. The latent irony of Berton's enthusiastic declaration that the canoe is innate to

Canadianness (and Canadian sexuality) is that today, summer vacationers who paddle canoes are more likely to make love in Gore-Tex sleeping bags or cabins.46 The canoe as the "official symbol of the country" (Francis, D., 1997, p. 151) should inspire us to ask for whom is the canoe a symbol? For whom is the canoe a necessity of work?

The history of the canoe and colonial expansion is dependent on Indigenous women who worked as guides, translatørs, hunters, protectors, and "country wives" to often ill- prepared "explorers" and traders. Sylvia Van Kirk (1980) outlines this work performed by

Indigenous women in and around these canoes. She explains that although these women reaped material and social benefits from the work they did, they were undeniably exploited, and the children they bore to European men were often doubly alienated: by their Indigenous

In her investigation of the spatialization of settler society, Razack offers this comment on the way that sexuality and canoes is appropriated in popular settler culture: "So compelling is this spatial vision of pristine wilderness that a contemporary advertising campaign for StanfiekTs underwear is able to proclaim: a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe" (2002, p. 4). 66 and European communities. The canoe then shifts again from a place of work to a site of

oppression and seat of the prenatal colonial nation. More than the exclusive means of

disciplining wilderness, the canoe is the means of disciplining Indigeneity. Such discipline is

sexual discipline. That is, disciplining the reproductivity of Indigenous Peoples (particularly

women) and so disciplining colonial desire by couching it in the discourse of empire and

nation. Colonialism, racism and the colonial discourse of containing racialized desire are, as

Laura Ann Stoler argues, fundamentally "charged with instrumentality" (1995, p. 46). Race

and raced desire played a fundamental role in the development of the discourse of purity of

imperial blood and a need to contain native and "mixed-blood bastard" (ibid) populations

whose "impurity" of blood demanded colonial intervention and containment. In this same

vein, discourses of degeneracy reflected keenly-felt bourgeois anxieties about the weakening

of the colonial politics of exclusion and the extension of Europeanness to the colonies.

"European status was a valuable commodity" (Stoler, 1995, p. 48-9) and as such, it was (and

continues to be) rigorously guarded. In this way, race is inscribed not only on the bodies of

the colonizer, colonized and their "mongrel" (p. 46) children, but also on desire itself. In

short, "discourses on libidinal desires were invariably shaped by how those desires were seen

in relationship to their reproductive consequences" (p. 48). The management of conjugal

relations between colonizer and colonized was a colonial imperative that was rooted in the

First Nations women resisted genocide. Cree historian Winona Stevenson (1999) explains the many ways that First Nations women worked to retain their sovereignty in spite of the enormous pressures of mission schools, Christianity, patriarchal standards imported by European colonizers and imposed upon matrifocal First Nations. 67 discourses of racial differentiation, the containment of desire and along with it, the

"scientifically" bounded notions of the immorality of women and the colonized.

The state of desire around the canoe is never static. As much as the canoe operated as

a site of policing Indigeneity and regulating colonial desire, once it moves from a vehicle of

labour to one of pleasure, Indigeneity is policed in new ways and the desire to perform

Indigeneity in order to signal superior canoeing skills, emerges with considerable cultural

force. Haun-Moss rightly identifies desire in the experience and representation of canoeing.

She argues that the fascination with the canoe springs from the Romantic idea that Nature can and should be directly experienced, and that canoeists were "free spirits expressing their own

imaginative truths, with Nature seen as a responsive mirror of the soul" (2002, p. 43). This

desire for a direct experience with Nature (that is, the ideal of nature) is fundamentally part of

the desire for the Indigenous other, from mimicking (or aping) the settler ideal of pre-contact

Aboriginal life48 to the desire to demonstrate superior canoeing skills. Haun-Moss explains

that white canoeists competing against and losing to Aboriginal canoeists in recreational races

sought to redesign the canoe for speed so as not to be considered inferior to inferiors (2002, p.

48). These canoeing exploits and the notion of the so-called authentic canoe experience

emerges with the desire to be "one with the land," harkening back to Rousseau's Nobel

Savage.49 The well-circulated image of Canadian sex-symbol and former Prime Minister,

For example, Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the bush (1852). 49 A line of popular canoe paddles named Grey Owl takes its nåme from the Englishman Archibald Belaney, who claimed to be an Ojibwe man. Belaney, under the nåme and persona of Grey Owl toured England to promote conservation of Canadian wilderness in the 1930s. He was a prolific writer, and actively condemned the 68 Pierre Trudeau, posing in his buckskin jacket seated in his canoe exemplifies this Romantic desire to perform Indigeneity in the quest for the authentic waterborne experience.50 The performance of Indigeneity in the water lent charm and a delighted audience to the Maid of the Mist Pageant, held in honor of the return of the tour boat company to the United States side of Niagara Falls in 1961 (figure 1.1).

The latent sexuality of this water-born desire is impossible to ignore, given the sexually suggestive descriptions of canoeing and river systems (especially waterfalls). Anna

Jameson's canoeist's travel journal, Winter studies and summer rambles in Canada (1839) contains a highly sexually charged description of a First Nation's man who skillfully navigates the rapids of the Falls of St. Mary's, near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. When another

First Nation's canoeist takes her through the same rapids, her response is near-orgasmic.

According to Haun-Moss, Jameson's reaction is clearly rooted in the Romantic notion that nature can be directly experienced (and mastered) and that once experienced, nature operates as a reflection of that experience and of the soul (see 2002,44-45). Jameson's literary account of sexuality in canoes is not unique to her. Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson read E.

environmental destruction wrought by "the white man." More than a perplexing national figure, Belaney has come to be a study in the settler's perception of Indian authenticity. 50 This merging of myth, desire and history is what makes Terrance Houle (Blood) and Trevor Freeman's performance "Portage" alarming and amusing. Houle in moccasins and a buckskin loincloth, and Freeman portaged a canoe down the busy streets of downtown Vancouver (2007) and Calgary (2005). For Houle, the equation of desire in the canoe, when performed in urban space by Aboriginal men, presents a joke which threatens white Canada even while white Canada laughs: "It's absurd and it's putting that absurdity to a reality. I guess I just want to beat people to the punch, that's where my weird humour comes from. Whafs weirder than an Indian telling an Indian joke? And you're telling it to a bunch of racist people and they're laughing. Fucking idiots" (Houle, interviewed in Morton, 2008, p. 30). 69 Pauline Johnson's51 famous poem, "The song my paddle sings" as a declaration of women's

sexual agency (2000, p. 154). Strong-Boag and Gerson remind us that it is the woman who

guides the canoe when the wind fails to assist, that the paddle slips into and is caressed by the

waters, that the waves thrust against the vessel and cause it to tremble. This is but one

example of Johnson's erotic canoeist poems, whose common theme is women's adeptness at

the paddle, indicating sexual agency and self-possession (2002, pp. 141-146). The masculinist

competition in canoes, only hinted at in Haun-Moss's argument on desire and the canoe, when

placed in relation to the rich literary stores of canoeing and women's sexuality and the

sexualized division of canoe-labour speaks to the profoundly sexualized tensions and

anxieties which construct a national symbol from a water-vessel.

The Falls is understandably also the object of considerable fear. The present danger

that Niagara Falls offers is made apparent by the stories of suicide (realized and attempted),

accidental and near-deaths. It is no accident that Niagara Falls is known both as the

honeymoon and suicide capitols of the world. This is an association that Joyce Carol Oates

uses to her considerable advantage in her novel, The falls, where a newly-wed couple

sojourns at Niagara Falls and the groom commits suicide by dramatically leaping over the

guardrail into the misty waterfall. In her novel The whirlpool, Jane Urquhart similarly

51 Johnson was a poet and performer from Six Nation's Reserve at Grand River. Johnson's mother was English and her father was Mohawk. This, added to her practice of wearing buckskin to perform poetry, and then changing into evening gowns has given ground to the charge that she was a colonial profiteer, selfishly bound to the performance of her Indianness in order to demonstrate how apart from it she fundamentally was. This is a charge that Strong- Boag and Gerson strongly refute, arguing rather that Johnson's embodiment of her racial difference and sameness (her performance of her Indigeneity as well as her whiteness) demonstrated a more complex and at bottom, skillfully cutting criticism of the binary racial divide (that is, of the Indian and the white). 70 harnesses Niagara Falls's sexual-suicidal reputation in her stories of local deaths and a tragic extramarital love affair. "Niagara Falls is literally a place of death" (McGreevy, 1992, p. 51).

As Patrick McGreevy observes, "Part of Niagara's attraction, it seems, is based on a fascination with death itself' (ibid). In this fascination, the brink of the falls offers a tantalizing metaphor for the idea that death can be approached and evaded. The figure of the rivermen play the role of hero as they pluck people from the brink of the falls, or, as

Urquharfs no vel morbidly portrays, scout and retrieve body parts at the lower river. This is an image of brutish masculinity that can approach the brink, the whirlpool, death itself, but can resist its pull. The faint-hearted, in short, have no business here. Such is the case with Clark

Kent, who sees a young boy fall from a guardrail over the Horseshoe's drop. Kent must evade his companion Lois Låne to shed his studied timidity and expose his true seif, Superman. In one dexterous move, he flies through the mist and catches the grateful though stunned boy in his arms before the river can take him (Spengler, 1980). And the tourist who is no

"superman?" The tour boat approximates a close encounter with the thréat of the Falls, and offers the semblance of immediate encounter through the threat of death and stories of daredevilry, accidents, and suicides.

McGreevy argues that this death fixation at Niagara Falls and the allure of the brink

(as the apt metaphor for death and evading it) encompasses a fascination with what lies beyond the watery grave (1992). Niagara Falls then bécomes a portal to purgatory, whose borders are determined by the cataract's brink and which is inhabited by those who have crossed over (ibid). Burke's early association with the falls as an altar suggests that Lelawala, 71 the benevolent sacrifice, is a Christ figure. Charles M. Skinner's elaborate story of (entirely fictional) Indigenous faith systems fuses Indigenous femicide with the Christ figure in a story that dresses up as history but cannot lay claim to any accuracy:

The last recorded sacrifice was in 1679, when Lelawala, the daughter of chief Eagle Eye, was chosen, in spite of the urgings and protests of the chevalier La Salle, who had been trying to restrain the people from their idolatries by an exposition of the Christian dogma. To his protests he received the unexpected answer, "Your words witness against you. Christ, you say, set us an example. We will follow it. Why should one death be great, while our sacrifice is horrible?" So the tribe gathered at the bank to watch the såiling of the white canoe. The chief watched the embarkation with the stoicism usual to the Indian when he is observed by others, but when the little bark swung out into the current his affection mastered him, and he leaped into his own canoe and tried to overtake his daughter. In a moment both were beyond the power of rescue. After their death they were changed into spirits of pure strength and goodness, and live in a crystal heaven so far beneath the fall that its roaring is a music to them: she, the maid of the mist; he, the ruler of the cataract. Another version of the legend makes a lover and his mistress the chief actors. Some years later a patriarch of the tribe and all his sons went over the fall when the white men had seized their lands, preferring death to flight or war. (Skinner, 1896)

The fiction of human sacrifice at the altar of the Falls inevitably meets the tour boat whose nåme suggests an intimate connection with the drop. On 9 July 1960, Roger

Woodward, a 7-year-old boy, plunged over Niagara Falls wearing only a partially secured, adult-sized lifejacket and swirnming trunks. Near the base of the waterfall, the crew of the

Maid of the Mist steamboat noticed the orange of Woodward's lifejacket in the grey water and Captain Clifford Keech took the boat toward the boy. Woodward was pulled aboard and hurried to the Greater Niagara General Hospital in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He suffered a slight concussion, scrapes and bruises, but no broken bones and no internal damage. The newspapers exclaimed Roger's survival a miracle. Quite apart from the images of Lelawala's young lover and stoic father, Roger is shown in this image embracing Captain Keech, his

72 pristine form and placid face seem to bear witness to the local stories of divine intervention

(figure 1.2), in Niagara Falls tourist lore, his survival is attributed to Lelawala's benevolent spirit. For his part, Roger Woodward, a self-described Christian evangelist, says, "It wasn't the hand of fate, it wasn't the hand of luck, it wasn't the spirit of Lelawala, it was the spirit of the living God that saved my life that day and saved my sister and gave us the hope that one day we would come to know him [sic]" (Niagara Falls and Roger, n.d.).

Today, death and the Maid of the Mist come together on the land, rather than in the water. As the tourist industry flags in the shadow of international terrorism, contagion52 and the weakening United States' and Canadian economies, fewer tourists are coming to

Niagara. Rather than an object of desire, a vehicle for experience, or an approximation of the divine, the Maid of the Mist is a matter of economic survival. What does the maid's movement between appearance and disappearance anticipate or signal?

52 The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis of 2003 cost the Niagara Falls tourist industry $142 million (Canadian) or 28% of its annual income in 2003 (SARS cost Canadian, 2003). 53 In an effort to revitalize local tourism, the City of Niagara Falls, New York launched the Maid of the Mist Festival, complete with a Maid of the Mist Pageant. Of Niagara's many festivals (on both sides of the border), this one attracted a startlingly small crowd of approximately one hundred people (Screwing up, 2005). 73 Chapter 3 Vanishing at the border

Vanishing is no metaphor

- Chrystos, 1988, p. 40

Today, Lelawala is virtually absent from Niagara Falls in all but nåme. Even then, she

is not known as "Lelawala," rather as the "Maid of the Mist," the nåme of the popular tour boats which take passengers to the base of the cataract. Even while the steamboat company

named its fleet in honour of the Maid of the Mist tourist myth, the boats have come to eclipse

the image of the maid, and the nåme is largely thought to exclusively reference the nautical

tradition of naming vessels after women, rather than the company's historical reliance on the

popular tourist myth. What is the significance of Lelawala's vanishing from the colonial

representational landscape? What can Lelawala' s absence lend to the understanding of settler

cultural politics, both historically and today? In order to confront the ephemeral nature of the

Maid of the Mist at Niagara, in this chapter I examine the intersection of colonial

representations, history and politics within the settler state and especially at its borders.

I have examined the slippage between Niagara Falls histories and the Maid of the Mist

settler story. The maid is a vehicle for tourist experience as well as a reminder of the settler's

alienation from their home and this confrontation with popular history and tourist culture, brings to the surface the fact that these historical narratives are in competition. Far removed from the myth of a singular historical narrative, the production of colonial histories attempts to settle colonialism (which is fundamentally unsettled). In a range of contexts from popular texts to the organization of tourist experience, in order to present the semblance of historical 74 authenticity. Colonial histories collide and rupture, and at Niagara Falls, a great deal of effort has been invested in writing histories that affirm the racist assumptions that Niagara's original inhabitants were inherently unworthy of their lands. The settler's Maid of the Mist myth is born of such assumptions, and is given the additional task of calling upon the tourist to

"experience" Niagara. Colonial representational politics lie just below the surface of such seemingly casual invitations, where violence and outwardly discreet representations like the

Maid of the Mist are both produced. I have investigated colonial representational politics and their nascent and resulting violence. Colonial representations indicate the perversion of the just path and I had attempted to demonstrate the connection between colonial representations and colonial violence. The use of Lelawala then becomes the occasion of representational violence against Indigenous women and girls. This is, however, not an inevitability, but a commitment to colonialism's ethical perversions. Does the absence of Lelawala today indicate a desire to forge a path toward decolonization?

In September 1996 the Maid of the Mist Steamboat Corporation finally heeded the protests of First Nations leaders, activists, scholars and community members and stopped using the myth of the maid to seil their tour. Prior to this, tourists were treated to the tragic story of the sacrificial Indian woman which was pre-recorded and played on the tour boat and featured in promotional materials. The steamboat corporation is not alone in its use of this tourist industry myth; in fact, it is ubiquitous at Niagara Falls. The Maid of the Mist has graced everything from comic books to key chains since the development of this tourist industry, and in her many mundane appearances, it is simply presumed that she is a direct 75 transfer from Native storytelling. Her role as human sacrifice is is, in fact, a fabrication of the tourist industry, designed to give context and meaning to tourist experience at the cataract.

The tourist's maid of the mist, is a marker of authenticity in a place that is known for its theme park atmosphere. As authentically inauthentic as she is, she is, to borrow again from

Menominee poet Chrystos, "such an old old story" (1988, p. 41).

Indian images have long been rigorously confronted by academic, cultural, and political communities. They nonetheless remain abundant. The language of authenticity is mobilized to serve colonial ends, and the idea of authenticity of experience, artifact, story demonstrates the mobilization of colonial power over who "counts" as "authentically Indian."

"Authenticity" is determined by colonizer and its another tool for claiming control over

Aboriginal identities (Bellfy, 2005).54

The Maid of the Mist as tragic Indian maiden has been exposed as the invention of the tourist industry made possible by colonial and eventually late capitalist conceptions of land, consumption and experience, to be sold to the global tourist audience. In spite of the important move to distance the image from Native cultures, she remains the shorthand for

Nativeness at Niagara Falls. Here the tenacity of the Indian image cordons off political action in the context of contemporary colonialism. Lelawala gives us pause to look again at the process of visibility in colonial culture, at what and who her ubiquitous and unremarkable presence obscures or renders invisible. If Lelawala - or any contemporary image of the Indian

54 Philip Bellfy (2005) analyzes the abundance of "Indian" images in American popular culture and how he has had to procure the permission of the "owners" of these images in order to reproduce them in his scholarly work. Thus the Aboriginal scholar is made to seek "permission" from "possessors." 76 - is to be meaningfully tåken up at all it must be with full knowledge that while the image is all surface and no depth, it is a part of a community of superficial images which articulate a politic of colonization.

The settler cultural landscape is where we find Lelawala and other Indian images that simplify the complex colonial histories of First Nations at Niagara Falls, histories of political organization, movements, dispossessions and confrontations with colonialism and its representational practices. Indian images reduce the genocide of the Neutral or

Attawandaronk Nation - a nation that inhabited the Niagara region until contact (Revie, 2003;

Wright, G. K., 1963) - to the myth of a simple and childlike people who fell prey to the allegedly warmongering neighboring Five Nations Confederacy. These images also blot out the history of forced removal of the Tuscarora Nation from their traditional lands in what we now call the Carolinas, and how Tuscarora communities were attacked by white settlers there and many eventually fled northward in the 1720s (Dubinsky, 1999). These communities of dispossessed peoples appealed to the then Five Nations Confederacy for refuge in the Niagara area, a region they were permitted to share with the Seneca Nation of the Five Nations

Confederacy. The Confederacy eventually adopted the Tuscarora Nation, making it the Six

Nations Confederacy we know today. In these narratives the complexities of colonial history are reduced to the image of the tragic Indian who cannot exercise individual or national sovereignty, but can only vanish. Put simply, Lelawala appears while the Attawandaronk and

Tuscarora Nations vanish from the public imaginary. This contingent visibility is the operation of colonialism in cultural, historical and manifestly political ways. This chapter is 77 about the grounds for making people, sovereignty and responsibility visible or invisible. What are the grounds for visibility in colonial culture and how has and could this terrain be navigated for the purposes of decolonization? These contingent visibilities constitute a border separating representation and lived experience that are just as concrete as, in fact work to co- produce national borders. The Canadian-U.S. border is a relatively recent imposition that bisects Indigenous communities. While the Tuscarora Nation at Niagara Falls resides on the

U.S. side of the border, the nation's access to traditional lands and neighbouring communities north of the border is ensured to them by the Jay Treaty of 1794 and the Treaty of Ghent of

1814. But the recognition of this right has been hard fought for (see Rickard, C, 1973) and the increased emphasis on securing the border today has violated First People's preexisting rights to exercise their sovereignty and access their lands and communities.

Sherene Razack argues that "unmapping" settler culture exposes the ways in which dominance is socially and spatially organized, and that this throws into doubt the presumed normalcy of the settler's organization of space and society through the nation (2002). A necessary part of this project is questioning the way us and them structure social and spatial realities (Razack, 1998). In Canada (and other settler societies) we is not clearly organized along racial lines, but implicates the racialized in a process of disavowal of Indigenous sovereignties (Razack, 2002; 1998). In other words, settlers include racialized people. Any analysis of settler society must work to uncover the complicated positions of the racialized in the settler state and the ways dominance is confronted or submitted to. The settler state is dependent on myths of a shared origin and a palpable desire to mimic the imperial centre 78 (Stasiulis & Jhappan, 1995). The concept of the settler society, Stasiulis and Jhappan maintain

(1995, p. 98), is deficient for the purposes of structuring the nation and fails in the following respects. First People's contributions to the development of Canada and against colonization

are rendered invisible. The diversity that has always existed here is obscured behind the myth of shared origins (Stasiulis & Jhappan, 1995). In turn, this obscures the ways that racial hierarchies were constructed to define the settlement of colony and later the nation. The at times violent competition between the European empires for domination over the continent is ignored (ibid). The notion is profoundly androcentric, ignoring the work of women from

Indigenous women who served as translators, guides and interpreters, and country wives to the European mail-order brides and relocated orphans. To this end, it is fundamentally unhelpful to leave the notion of the "settler" society or culture unexamined.

Terra nullius, the 16* century socio-legal concept of "empty land," which held that lands were unoccupied if they were not claimed in ways that were intelligible to Europeans, implied that First Peoples were stateless wanderers. This concept partially patches over the conflict that First Nations' presence poses to the settler state's legitimacy. If they are wanderers, they have no rightful claim to land. If they are stateless, they are without organization and governance. But this patching over is only partial because colonial myths run up against the facts of First Peoples' social, legal and spatial organization independent of, in conflict, or cooperation with settler states. The idea of an "Indian Problem" attempts to make First Nations strange to the settler state by asking what we are to do with the Indian.

79 The settler cultural landscape is also where we are located, it is the home where we build meaning and community. I cannot indicate by way of silence that I and we are not imbricated in colonial representational practices. My use of we signals a troubling of the

assumption that there is a positivist we, a coherent community of critics and committed

scholars: we should spur questions of location and belonging, rather than settle them. The

Third World Women's Movement55 continues, decades later, to resonate with today's political

and academic environment by challenging us to acknowledge we as a corruptible collective where pristine beginnings and collaborations are pure fantasy. "The more we have in common, including love, the greater the heartache between us, the more we hurt each other,"

Gloria Anzaldua writes (1990, p. 144). The appearance of coherence is not readily translatable into praxis. Reactionary critiques of whiteness studies describe an academic and political movement that is synchronous, consistent and collaborative, yet within whiteness studies we come up against the problems of location, politics and scholarly work. These problems come from the nature of the settler context, colonial subjectivities and racial politics.

In the settler state whiteness studies scholars are haunted with the knowledge that our subject comes into existence through fundamental injustices against First Peoples; the profound dislodging of people from rights, communities from history, nations from land.

55 The Third World Women's Movement emerged in the 1970s chiefly in the United States and Britain, though Indigenous women in Canada (for example, Lee Maracle) and New Zealand (for example, the Maori self-identified feminist scholar Nguhuia Te Awekotuku) are associated with the kinds of questions that the Third World Women's Movement raised, and these questions concern the implication of global women's movements in colonialism. Many activists and scholars from the Third World Women's Movement (for example, Pratibha Parmar, Gloria Anzaldua, Trinh Minh-ha, and Chela Sandoval) eventually came to address questions of representation, authority and voice, and perhaps for this reason, tend to locate themselves within the area of cultural production (largely film) and the academic fields of cultural studies and postcolonialism. 80 Critical race scholar and Geonpul woman from Quandamooka Aileen Moreton-Robinson

(2003) explains how dispossessions mean that Indigenous people come to find refuge on other

First Nation's lands, as settler states interfere with and undermine First Nations' sovereignties and force First Peoples to move again and again. The difference between Indigenous and settler-immigrant migrancies, she argues, is "an incommensurate doubleness superimposed by marginality and centring [sic]. Marginality is the result of colonization and the proximity to whiteness, while centring is achieved through the continuity of ontology and cultural protocols between and amongst Indigenous peoples" (2003, p. 53). The crucial significance of

Indigenous ontology and protocols surrounds the settler state but seldom passes its borders in meaningful ways. This means that Indigenous ways of knowing and doing are made strange in the settler state, and this, coupled with forced migrancies of First Peoples, produces an at- home homelessness. Moreton-Robinson says the result is that First Peoples come to belong in the settler state when white people permit them to belong. For the Indigenous person, the settler state is no post-colonial reality: its continual unhoming of Indigenous protocols and ontologies is a perpetual colonialism. Minjungbul poet Lisa Bellear writes, "Don't throw post- colonialism/ in my face/ This is australia [sic]" (Bellear, 1997, p. 2).56 This observation is fundamental. We cannot move down the path of committed scholarship, as fraught as that is, until this is acknowledged. The matter at hand is one of home and belonging to peoples, nations, lands and cultures. The centrality of Indigenous ontologies and the unhoming of

56 Postcolonialism will not do, argues Thomas King, because it begins from contact and disconnects Aboriginal cultural production from traditions (1996, pp. 242-243). It is further problematic because it "is joined at the hip with nationalism" (ibid) and therefore cannot take up Aboriginal sovereignty as a contemporary practice. 81 settler ontologies compels us to rethink responsibility and complicity in creative ways and this

begins with a confrontation with the ways in which we come into existence.

The lessons of colonial history warn us to be cautious of conflating the unspoken with

the natural. We, in the nåme of national dreams and global security can pass from active

criticism to passive acceptance. As we do, those of us who stand to be counted as us obscure

those on the periphery, who are not permitted to move into visibility. We today, in the context

of this chapter and the climate in which I write, is an altogether mystified construct, bolstered

by histories of violence, politics of visibility and opportunistic invocations of inclusiveness.

We can refer to scholars, settlers, nationals, activists, but the critical point is the way we (both

the concept and the group) are mobilized.

We can be mobilized in two ways. The first is homogenizing, the ideological hail that

compels us to twist ourselves to match the "hey you," and respond as a coherent group. Such

a we means that the focus of our concern is the centre of power and how we relate to and

within it. We then respond to the settler state and to whiteness in stilted and reifying ways.

This we is deeply raced, classed and gendered and those of us on the periphery of this we can

gain admission at the cost of our ways of knowing and doing. The Third World Women's

Movement of the United States and Britain in the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, strongly criticized second wave feminists for reproducing modes of oppression and exclusivity which decades earlier they had condemned as patriarchal (see Amos and Parmar, 1984; Anzaldua,

1990; Lorde, 1984; Trinh, 1986-87). Once at the centre of localized politics, the second wave feminists who are the subject of Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar's critique (1984), argued 82 that Third World women's cultures were inherently oppressive and that the specific concerns of Third World women would be attended to after other, allegedly more pressing priorities.

This marks an important distinction in contemporary political struggle. The reduction of Third

World women's ways of knowing and doing, and prioritization in the nåme of progressive politics is not merely the aping of oppressive politics, this grafts the vocabulary and grammar of political struggle onto oppressive politics.

The second mobilization of we is less stable though potentially more creative. Turning to the Third World Women's Movement, Trinh Minh-ha writes of the "inappropriate/d other"

(1986-87). Trinh imagines the inappropriate/d other as a Third World feminist who by virtue of her Third World-ness and gender registers as Other, and by virtue of her politics is deemed inappropriate. She is alienated, but in her alienation is the source of potential creativity and productivity. Being peripheral she cannot be appropriated, and her difference mo ves from her damnation to her strength. To be both inappropriate and inappropriateable is to work outside the borders of dominance. Audre Lorde writes, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master 's housé''' (1984, p. 110, original emphasis), and the inappropriate/d other knows that there are more important houses, more useful tools, and that the universe is not contained within one structure of oppression. The inappropriate/d other begins as peripheral to power and comes to work within new centres of power; hers is a political move. lan Angus writes that Canadian philosophers experience a "radical homelessness" (1997, p. 126). Located between empires and myths of place, we are at the hinterland and so drawing a border means we have answered Northrop Frye's riddle: "Canadians are bedeviled not by the question Who 83 am I? but by the riddle Where is here?" (Frye, 1971, p. 220). Here is where we are, at the border that we have drawn and here becomes more about politics and less about place.

Radical homelessness necessitates this border and through this kind of border, productive difference is revealed. The Other is not abject, but internal to us.

[I]t is in the drawing of a line, a border that separates here from there, that lets there appear an Other, a mismatch, a difference. In relation to this difference we are not fused with origin, but drawn towards the Other. Origin is plural if it is traced back elsewhere; origin is wilderness here. [...] [English Canadian philosophy] must begin in this radical incompletion itself, this struggling on. (Angus, 1997, p. 126)

We are different, Other and homeless. This we is not about the closing down of inclusiveness on the basis of race, gender, sex and the rest: it is about an articulation of politics that is constantly and so always productively incomplete.

Vanishing Indians

Daily First Peoples are confronted with vanishing. Not as a disembodied metaphor, but as a lived experience. The myth of the vanishing Indian - a version of the Noble Savage - declared that the Indian was a relic, tragically out of step with the inevitable march of progress (see Francis, D., 1992; McKinsey, 1985). Unable to adapt to white ways, the myth confidently predicted that the Indian would die out altogether or become so polluted by white influence as to be utterly unrecognizable. All in all, the Indian's days were numbered. This myth, Lischke and McNab (2005) and Daniel Francis (1992) reminds us, has not vanished but remains the structuring principle of the settler's imagined relations with First Peoples. In other words, the settler has invented an image of who First Peoples are or should be; this image of the Indian and the associated myth of vanishing continue to appear in varied and material 84 ways. This image, as Lischke and McNab (2005) are careful to explain is met with Aboriginal cultural criticism that critiques this stereotype. Anishinaabe cultural critic Gerald Vizenor helps us to tease apart the representation of the Indian and its associated logics from the lived experience of First Peoples: "The word Indian [...] is a colonial enactment, not a loan [lone?] word, and the dominance is sustained by the simulation that has superseded the real tribal names" (1999, p. 11, original emphasis). Colonial representation is the process of transforming First Nations into Indians. Tuscarora, Seneca, Ojibwe, Assiniboine, Dene (to nåme only a few nations) all become Indian and with one word the specificities, histories, locatedness and agency of these distinct and sovereign nations are discursively steamrollered.

I adopt Vizenor's use of the word Indian to indicate the colonial construction, not First

Nations peoples. Vizenor helps us to understand how colonial power permeates visibility and perception. The appearance or absence of Indianness in the visual terrain are not colonialism's destination, but are signposts in the mapping of colonial power.

Lelawala is a colonial cultural product who is marked by her Indianness, femininity, stoicism and uncanny ability to die again and again with each new telling. But tåken on her own she means very little and does nothing new. As stated above, this image in the context of other images indicates colonial power and clutters the visual landscape with images we simply take for granted. The absence of the image is just as important as its presence. Today, the figure of the woman in her canoe is present, in comparatively discreet forms on tourist paraphernalia but beyond this, she takes up very little space in the public tourist arena. The steamboafs now abandoned pre-recorded retelling of the myth turns out to be a very public 85 broadcast which today is unparalleled. On the Canadian side, the Maid of the Mist

Marketplace (figure 2.1) houses the tourist industry's wares but there are no images of the woman to be found. Aside from the women who populate this image, the space is stripped bare of women. In spite of the popularity of the nåme, there is an abundance of mist and a conspicuous absence of the maid. The Maid of the Mist myth is, briefly stated, the cultural side of colonial violence, the åbstracted end of oppression's materiality.

The works of decolonial scholars teach us that colonialism is violence and this violence is performed in many spaces -the physical, cultural, and psychological (see Alcoff,

2001; Fanon, 1967a, pp. 141-209). Outwardly privileging the visual but ultimately relying on the mind, what rests just beyond our field of vision is just as if not more important than that on which our eyes apparently focus. Race structures visibility and demands a colonial revisionist approach to its own history. This makes race appear constant and absolute. It is a monolith that is so high we cannot summit it and so vast we cannot get around it. Because race is always the operation of colonialism, the racial subject is alienated, locked in the colonial encounter where race materializes. Once spotted, once made visible according to the parameters of race, the racialized subject becomes invisible to herself.

The apparent ease with which one passes into and out of visibility as one would pass into and out of a room obscures the violence that is the structuring principle of visibility in colonialism. But the "fact of blackness" is not the "fact of Indianness." Blood quantum, or the notion that one drop of black blood would make a person black and so the property or potential property of a white, finds its strange and distinct sibling in the colonial definition of 86 Indianness where one drop of white blood was grounds for assimilation, the denial of

sovereignty, the abrogation of rights, the annexation of resources and lands. We see the

visceral intersection of the myth of the vanishing Indian with the lived experience of First

Peoples dressed in the discourse of civic engagement in Canada today just as we can trace it

historically in the arena of Indian policy. Put simply, visibility has market value, political

power, and cultural pull.

Niagara Falls comes into colonial visibility by means of "exploration" literature in

which the land and the people who inhabit it are routinely described as "savage." By

"exploration literature" I mean the letters, journals and books written by Europeans during the

time of contact with First Peoples. Read as historical artifacts, this literature tells us less about

First Peoples than it does about the fixations and mores of the authors. As with other colonial

sites, Niagara Falls' "exploration" literature contributed to new cultural and political

economies of colonial expansion. European monetary and imaginative investments were critical to the development of "exploration" literature, which became increasingly competitive

as European presence in the area became more established. The Falls were first represented to

Europeans by the Recollet priest, Father Louis Hennepin who arrived there with the considerable assistance of Haudenosaunee guides on December 6, 1678. The priest's account exaggerated the dimensions of the Falls, making them three times their actual height and appreciably narrower than they are (Berton, 1993; 1992 McKinsey, 1985; Re vie, 2003).

Unable to accept what he saw - a waterfall sourced from a lake, rather than a mountain as is

87 typical of Europe - Hennepin added an upstream mountain range to his written and visual representations.

The noise of the Falls was far beyond the noise produced from any waterfall Hennepin

might have encountered in Europe and the sight of it, by his own account, terrified him. He wrote, "this most dreadful Gulph [one] could not behold without a shudder" (Berton, 1993, p.

19). And also: "The waters which fall from this horrible precipice do foam and boil after the

most hideous manner imaginable, making an outrageous noise, more terrible than that of thunder" (Holley, 1883, p. 6). The size and ferocity of the snakes in the region add to the priest's description of Niagara Falls as a classical Christian hell on earth. This narrative of terror twinned with wonder characterizes the early treatment of Niagara Falls in the

"exploration" literature and accompanying pictorial representations.

Pehr Kalm, who was trained in the "natural sciences," provided a more accurate

account of the Niagara landscape, while offering quasi-ethnographies of First Nations of the region. On Hennepin's observations Kalm wrote, "Father Hennepin, supposes it [the waterfall] 600 Feet Perpendicular; but he has gained little credit in Canada; the nåme of honour [sic] they give him there, is un grand Menteur, or The great hiar; he writes of what he

saw in places where he never was," hastening to add, '"tis true he saw this Fall: but as it is the way of some travelers [sic] to magnify everything, so has he done with regard to the fall of

Niagara" (Kalm, 1751, p. 84, original emphasis). Though Kalm and Hennepin were separated by time, Kalm's competition with Hennepin's textual accounts of Niagara Falls were a direct result of competition for money, resources and political support to those wishing to 88 "accurately" record the details of the New World (that is, to discredit the previous European's observations). By discrediting Europeans who preceded them, producers of exploration literature secured financial security and their historical legacies while contributing to the confusion about First Nations generally by producing conflicting, and often fantastic reports.57

A good deal of the "exploration" literature of Niagara Falls and the area includes stories of various forms of brutality, like torture and cannibalism committed by the Haudenosaunee and Wendat Confederacies, although human sacrifice was never practiced by member nations of the Six Nation's Confederacy. "We're portrayed as savages. This has to stop," (Fairbanks,

1996) said Bill "Grandpa Bear" Swanson, Executive Director of the American Indian

Movemenfs New York chapter, in defense of the 1996 movement against the steamboat corporation. Some went further, explaining that the persistence of the tourist industry's myth obscured history, and damaged the esteem and integrity of First Nations. This was the position of Allen Jameson, the director of the Native American arts and cultural group, Nanto.

He argued that the myth was "racist propaganda" (ibid). The corporation's vice president,

Christopher M. Glynn objected, "To accuse us of racism is outrageous. [...] And we are not real anxious to change what we've been doing for 100 years" (ibid). When the daytime talk show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee was scheduled to film on location at Niagara Falls in

September, Nanto, AJM and others planned to stage a public demonstration there to bring

Jonathan Swiffs Gulliver's Travels (1996), originally published in 1726, is a satiric commentary on this economy of fantastical records and the public's love of reading them. Kalm's haste to affirm Hennepin's actual presence at the Falls should come as little surprise; some producers of exploration literature to bypass the ocean voyage and entirely invent the experience. 89 attention to their cause. Because of this, by 5 September, 1996, the corporation had backed

away from the tourist legend, stating that the story was best left to historians and Native

Americans to retell and explain (Stephens, 1996, p. 1).

Upon announcing the corporation's decision to not use or retell the story of the Maid of

the Mist, the steamboat corporation's president, James V. Glenn stated, "Since the legend is

not important to the existing experience we provide our visitors to the Falls, it will no longer

be described" (Ricciuto, 1996, p. 1). He added that the myth would be stricken from all of the

corporation's literature and promotional materials. Today, tourists will hear tri via and

information of a geological and historical nature when they take the tour boat, the capacity of

the Falls, rock formations, the history of daredevilry and accidents, for example. They will not

hear about the tourist industry's maiden legend from the steamboat corporation. Likewise, the

history of its reliance on Lelawala and the myth of the "savage" Indian who would commit

human sacrifice, along with the company's initial refusal to abandon her, is also rendered

invisible.

Throughout its confrontation with First Nations in 1996, the corporation maintained the position that it had not started the myth, but was only one among many who used it. The fact that the company named itself and its fleet of steamboats after the myth59 in order to market

its tour, casts considerable light on the corporation's agency and its decision to tap an image rich in tourist industry symbolism. As Glynn stated, "We're not in the business of offending

58 1996 marked the 150* anniversary of the tour boat. In celebration, the company launched a promotions campaign encouraging tourists to take the tour in celebration of its legacy. Passengers were encouraged to keep the iconic blue rain jackets, emblazoned with the boat's image and the company nåme. 59 The first Maid of the Mist tour boat was christened in 1846. 90 people" (Fairbanks, 1996). The corporation's refusal to abandon the myth and ultimate

decision to cleanse its records of all reference to the myth under threat of public scrutiny via

Regis and Kathie Lee, indicates something more than the desire to avoid offence. The Niagara

Falls tourist industry, like all other tourist places, relies on public opinion and in this debate,

the steamboat company had nothing to gain by appearing stubborn and insensitive. Erasing

Lelawala does not "set the record straight"; it demonstrates the ways that Indian images are

viscerally connected to the practice of erasure and how casually they are called upon or east

away.

Lelawala first appeared in a guidebook to Niagara Falls by Andrew Burke (1851),

though it is possible that the myth was in local circulation prior to Burke's written account,

and that Burke was simply the first to commit it to paper. The Maid of the Mist surfaced in a

chapter that chronicles Indian "savagery" against white settlers and soldiers, relatively recent

enhancements to the area that permit the tourist more direct access to the Falls, and several

gruesome stories of fatal or near-fatal accidents, where settlers and care-free tourists are swept

over the Falls or into the rapids, their bodies discovered days later in horrible states if they are

found at all. Burke then describes "An Indian Legend," where the maid of the mist appears as

a beautiful - the "fairest" - young maiden, who, according to tribal custom, must sacrifice

herself to the waterfall to ensure her people's survival into another year (1851, p. 103). She is

the daughter of the ruthless chief who must compel her to be sacrificed lest he "show his

weakness" (ibid). Dutifully, Lelawala fulfils her obligations to her father and community, being "the only offering fitting the occasion" (ibid). 91 As Niagara Falls became a popular honeymoon destination in the mid 1800s, Lelawala blossomed into the sexualized figure that remains with us today (Dubinsky, 1999, pp. 67-71).

The story still described Lelawala as virtuous and dutiful but images which accompany it typically showed her naked, bubbles or spray strategically placed to preserve the viewer's scruples. The portrait, "The Maid of the Mist of Indian Legend" by James Francis Brown

(1891) depicts a naked Lelawala as her white canoe tips over the brink, her father attempting and failing to intercept her before she goes over. This image was reproduced on several widely circulated postcard series from the early 1900s (figure 2.2), re-titled, "The Legend of the White Canoe." In the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, an exposition to promote tourism and trade in the Niagara region, the Maid of the Mist serves as the reference point for Evelyn

Rumsey Cary's promotional poster, "Spirit of Niagara" (Aichele, 1984, p. 47).60 Rather than an Indian woman, this one is identifiably white and wears what looks to be laurel leaves around her head; a cityscape complete with industrial smoke stacks can be seen behind her

(figure 2.3). The image produced a minor scandal because this woman was portrayed naked above the waist, her lower half obscured by broad brush strokes. Ultimately the image was abandoned (Aichele, 1984). While the Spirit of Niagara was met with scandal, Lelawala in the nude, who had been in wide circulation years longer than the spirit, was not met with the same reaction. This is not necessarily because scruples had changed dramatically over the course of a decade. It is unlikely that industry carrying these images were concerned that pictures of naked women would alienate business people and tourists (both images were used in

60 See also William Irwin's, The new Niagara (1996) for an analysis of industrialism and Cary's poster. 92 comparable ways). We are then left to speculate whether images of white and Indian women are met with varying degrees of acceptability.61 More recently, the 1953 Hollywood movie

"Niagara," which casts Marilyn Munroe as a sexually charged adulteress who plots her husband's murder, borrows from both the "Spirit of Niagara" and "The Legend of the White

Canoe;" the movie's promotional poster depicts Marilyn as the edge over which the torrent of water flows (figure 2.4). The poster illustrates the movie's theme that some dangerous women are the cataract over which daring or foolish (perhaps both) men will east themselves, framed in the kitsch aesthetic that is now characteristic of Niagara Falls and postwar Hollywood.

Looking through Lelawala's surface to the related images of women at the Falls and the associated myth of vanishing, we are confronted with the material limitations of representation. The representations obscure the materiality of colonialism, the necessities of

Indigenous labour as well as the labour of people of colour in the construction of an apparently apolitical tourist site. They obscure the flows of capital emanating from the tourist site which structure the labour and movements of First People. Niagara Falls is a space where the tourist encounter with First Peoples is mediated, serving to disappear First Nations' sovereignty. Jolene Rickard (Low, 2002; Rickard, J., 1992) speaks of the myth of the imperiled Indian as a grafting on of Indian to landscape at a time when the tourist, power, and manufacturing industries of Niagara Falls were significantly altering the local environment and engendering romantic ideals of landscape. What then amounted to a nostalgic gesture to

61 We must then question what purpose this sliding scale of acceptability serves. Indigenous women are highly sexualized in colonial societies and cultures and a pointed argument concerning the connections between the abundance of sexualized images of Lelawala and colonial violence absolutely needs to be made. 93 save the beleaguered Indian and his natural environment (because the Indian is often depicted as a man) was localized on Indigenous women and their work. Jolene Rickard reminds us that

Niagara Falls, as part of the Grand Tour - or European and American bourgeois travel circuit

- relied heavily on Tuscarora women to produce beadwork, which, in the early to mid 1800s, functioned as the tourist's certificate of authenticity, proof of håving made the trek to the famous cataract and as a curiosity or artifact which permitted the tourist to own something that was surely the last of its kind (Rickard, J., 1992). The tourists who so eagerly bought beadwork from Tuscarora and Seneca women on Goat Island are similarly complicit: "The money put down on the table is merely a token. What is really being purchased is a monetary release from the crimes of the past" (Rickard, J., 1992, p. 109). The women who produced the beadwork thus became, in the minds of the tourists consuming their goods, spectralized bodies whose only impact on the physical world was affected through bead and leather. They disappear, leaving the souvenir behind. The problem lies in the culture that rends beadwork from the women and cultures that produce it.

Tuscarora women's labour and the tourist dollar figured significantly when in the

1830s the U.S. federal government declared that it would deport the Tuscarora from their lands in the Niagara region to Oklahoma unless they could demonstrate that they could be economically self-sustaining (Low, 2002). A rich prospector named Augustus Porter bought

62 The Tuscarora have a reserve on the U.S. side of the border at Niagara Falls and so were subject to U.S. Indian policies. 94 Goat Island (ibid). He charged tourists admission to enter the island and permitted Tuscarora women to seil their beadwork there (Low, 2002). If not for the productivity of Tuscarora women, Porter's capital and entrepreneurial spirit, and the tourists' impulse to authenticity, the Tuscarora Nation would likely have faced a second dispossession. This "inevitably lopsided cultural exchange" (Rickard, J., 1992, p. 109) should not diminish the significance of the beadwork and the intellectual, cultural and physical work that went into its production.

Jolene Rickard positions the beadwork and the women who created it as "messengers" who communicate a faithful adherence to their nation's sovereignty as well as "a reminder of our spiritual, economic and cultural survival" in spite of the grossly unequal conditions of cultural consumption and continued colonization (Rickard, J, 1992, p. 109).

The settler border appears remarkably pliable as tourists and their money routinely crossed from one side to the other. Both the United States and Canada were using Indian images, Lelawala in particular, to market tourism, but Canada's Dominion status in comparison to the U.S. revolution and civil war created a space that was more amenable to the

European tourist in the late 1880s. The rapid development of road systems, fee-based tour paths around and behind the Falls, hotels, restaurants, museums and the like on the Canadian side of the border reveal a conspicuous reorganization of land, resources and people for the bourgeois tourist who bitterly complained about the commercialism and side-show quality of the town. Elizabeth McKinsey (1985) points out that the construction of Niagara Falls as an appropriate tourist destination for the European and American elite of the 1800s marks the co-

63 Goat Island divides the American from the Horseshoe Falls. 95 production of the venerable sublime to the crassly commercial. The desire to "master" the

Falls as promised to tourists in guidebooks like Holley's (1883), the construction of tourist infrastructure, coupled with the rise of the working class holiday, threatened to make Niagara

Falls a victim of the "low brow" on many levels. It further aggravated the "discerning touristV anxieties about the exclusivity of "their" place of leisure (McKinsey, 1985, p. 131).

The unflinching use of Lelawala as iconic of unadulterated authenticity in the context of obvious commercialism and claims of cultural vulgarity by the upper classes, who before the rise of the working-class holiday had near exclusive access to the Falls, come together at the border. Sourced from the colonial visual lexicon, referencing myths of a defeated and disappearing people, the exchange of souvenir for capital in the context of threatened dispossession embodies the troubling relationship between image and action, cultural and material capital. This slip between the representation and the action is routine, and this is the lived experience of colonialism.

"How does it feel to be a problem?"

As "the veil" of race is east over him, du Bois is met with this question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" and the knowledge that he is two-ed, confronted with the notion of

Americanness that actively excludes him (1986, p. 363). As du Bois wrote this, black people had achieved emancipation approximately forty years prior in 1863. However, Jim Crow laws ensured that while black people were no longer considered property, they were most certainly not on par with the white American. Indeed, "white" and "American" were redundant and exclusive. The American nation depended on the labour of slaves and indentured workers, and 96 this reliance conflicts with the national myth of the American spirit of liberty, hard work and

fair play. "How does it feel to be a problem?" is a question of nation and a clear expression of

national anxiety. du Bois never hears this question posed as such, because posing the question

in an unambiguous way could threaten to expose the fundamental contradiction of the

American national dream: liberty and justice for all but those who need it most. The discourse

of the Indian Problem operates in similar though not identical ways, suggesting that the Indian

is a problem for national cohesion. Bearing in mind the active role that colonial myths and

images play in the construction of settler cultures, this is plainly true: the preexistence of First

Peoples, even the caricature Indian, poses a question of place that unsettles the settler claim to

nation. Haudenosaunee political philosopher and activist Taiaiake Alfred says "the Indian

problem is the Indian" (2005a), meaning that colonial politics reduce Indigenous

sovereignties to a matter of civic engagement, rights and entitlements based on a racialized

idea of who First Peoples are and should be.

The "Indian Problem" emerged in North American settler culture as the grounds for

nationalism were laid and the borders of nation-states formed. Indian policies in the United

States and Canada hinged on the tallying of Indian bodies to catalogue an allegedly

"vanishing race." This tally was used to calculate the amount of land to which they would be

granted access. The United States operated according to the principle of aggressive

assimilation and relocation to lands west of the republic, realized by strategies best expressed by then-President Thomas Jefferson in 1803:

97 our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. (cited in Washburn, 1861)

North of the border, Canada's approach to the Indian Problem was to procedurally enforce vanishing. Canadian policies concerning First Peoples were based on the idea that it was impossible to be an Indian in the face of "civilization." The crown took it as its duty to introduce and enforce this brand of exclusionary civilization and to this end, the franchise, specifically its imposition, was used as a technology of vanishing. During his tenure as

Deputy Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs (1913-1932), Duncan Campbell Scott proposed that education systems could be appropriated in the service of the franchise, the reasoning being that Aboriginal peoples needed assistance in the project of becoming civilized. This would serve as the basis of residential schooling and the systemic attack on

Aboriginal parenting.64 Said Scott in defense of the Bill-to-become-law in 1920: "Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the

Robert Arthur Alexie's novel (2002), Porcupines and china dolls takes place in a Qwich'in community (in the Northwest Territories) whose members continue to live with the impact of the violence of residential schooling. Alexie begins by recounting Gwich'in history from the time of white arrival (in 1789) to the establishment of Christian missions and residential schools. (According to the children in the novel, when their hair was cut and delousing powder applied, the boys looked like porcupines and the girls like china dolls.) Thomas King's lecture and chapter (in his book based on his 2003 Massey Lecture Series of the same title, The truth about stories: A Native narrative) is named, "A million porcupines crying in the dark" after Alexie's novel. Beverley Jacobs and Andrea J. Williams (2008) examine the long-term impacts of residential schools and their destruction of Aboriginal families in their analysis of the culture of violence against Aboriginal women (see especially pp. 126-127). For a comprehensive analysis of the possibility of reconciliation and restorative justice after residential schooling see From truth to reconciliation: Transforming the legacv of residential schools (2008), edited by Marlene Brant Castellano, Linda Archibald and Mike DeGagné. 98 body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill" (cited in Leslie, et al., 1978, p. 115). More directly, Scott saw Indigeneity as a problem which needed the guiding hand of the government and social institutions such as the educational system to solve,65 and he declared:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. That is my whole point. I do not want to pass into the citizens' class people who are paupers. This is not the intention of the Bill. But after one hundred years, after being in close contact with ciyilization it is enervating to the individual or to a band to continue in that state of tutelage, when he or they are able to take their position as British citizens or Canadian citizens, to support themselves, and stand alone. That has been the whole purpose of Indian education and advancement since the earliest times. One of the very earliest enactments was to provide for the enfranchisement of the Indian. So it is written in our law that the Indian was eventually to become enfranchised. (cited in Leslie, et al., 1978, p. 115)

First Peoples were granted the franchise unconditionally in 1960. Before this, they had the right to vote provided they renounce their Indian Status, which would mean they had elected to release the federal government of its Treaty responsibilities to them. The renunciation of Treaty carries with it very material consequences. Treaty ensures that First

Peoples have access to reserves, health care, education, among other things. Perhaps the most significant consequence to the lives of enfranchised First Peoples was that they could no longer live on reserves and so would be physically alienated from their communities. Further,

First Peoples could have the franchise imposed upon them by a jury whose decision could not

McNab (2004a) explains that Scott was an Indigenous and European man, whose Onondaga nåme was Dehawennontye. Scott, McNab argues, struggled with his European family history: his father was a Wesleyan Methodist missionary who was charged with the task of assimilating Aboriginal peoples (McNab, 2004a, p. 263- 265). Though committed to "justice and equity" for Aboriginal people (Scott quoted in McNab, 2004a, p. 266) and speaking out against forced removals (McNab, 2004a, p. 267), his family context and broader political context (as a government official working within a context of racist policies against Aboriginal people) presented challenges with which he would struggle all his life. 99 be appealed (Surtees, 1988). This leads Daniel Francis to say, "When Canadians said 'Indian,' they meant doomed" (1992, p. 57). The question that rests just under the surface of Frances's statement is one that needs to be explored: who are they, and are we therrf!

lan Angus maintains that Canadianness is crisscrossed by borders, both physical and abstract; necessary, not natural. English and French Canada erect a border between, Canada erects a border against the pervasiveness of U.S. empire, before this it erected a border against

England, just as it erects a border against the threats of wilderness (1997, pp. 105-134). This constant and shifting need for an Other means that Canadian national identity is not static; the we constantly shifts. Angus is arguing for a negotiation of Canadianness between the English,

French and First Nations but the normative status of English and by implication, white

Canada endangers any honest dialogue between these parties. Periodic threats that French

Canada will separate occasionally provokes some on the English side of the border to accuse the French of trampling First Nations rights (Angus, 1997, p. 105). A questionable accusation to be sure, as English Canada has made no remarkable advances in the arena of Indigenous rights and sovereignties.66 The Indian Problem polices the border that continues to be drawn around First Peoples, that opens on the condition of Indianness but remains tightly shut against sovereign First Nations. "How does it feel to be a problem?" is posed to First Nations,

The question of Quebec's relationship with First Nations were it to become sovereign from English Canada periodically surfaces in the context of tolerance for Aboriginal difference. The charge that Quebec politics and society are comparatively more racist toward First Peoples is often made in order to delegitimate Quebec's claims to independence. For a comprehensive analysis of the invocation of racism in relation to a proposed independent Quebec, see Eva Mackey's The house of difference: Cultural politics and national identity in Canada (1999). 100 making sovereignty strange while indigenizing the Indian. In the meantime, the we who pose the question remain normative, rightful and reasonable.

When multiculturalism emerged as official policy in 1971 and was recognized in the

Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1985, the matter of racism became more and more urgent as it became less and less visible in the Canadian public sphere (Bannerji, 2000). The basis of multiculturalism as we know it today was the Just Society, which was meant to temper

English-French antagonisms and in addition to entrenching bilingualism, granted "founding nations" status to the English and French; a nod to the roles of these linguistic, and by extension, settler communities in forming Canada. The creation of the "just society" - through the recognition of the linguistic and cultural significance of the francophone, decriminalization of homosexuality, opening the borders to people from nations beyond

Britain and the United States - advanced rights discourse and was the defining feature of

Trudeau liberalism in the 1970s. As part of the Just Society package, then Minister of Indian

Affairs, Jean Chrétien,67 proposed to undo the federal government's Treaty responsibilities.

The implications of the notorious and ironically named White Paper were enormous.68 It would mean that First Peoples would completely lose all rights ensured to them by Treaties, the contracts that allowed the crown to establish colonies on Indigenous territories, which rriade the Canadian nation a possibility in the first place. In short, there would be no legal difference between First Peoples and other visible minorities in the nation.

67 Chrétien would later serve as Prime Minister from 1993 to 2003. 68 All proposed bilis enter debate as "white papers" but the procedural designation used in this case poetically exposes the intersections of white supremacy and federal Indian policy. 101 Harold Cardinal's (Cree) Unjust society: The tragedy of Canada's Indians was written as

a direct response to Chrétien's 1969 White Paper and Trudeau's Just Society mandate. Unjust

society reoriented focus from Aboriginal Peoples to systemic racism, which structured (and

structures) Canadian nationalism. Cardinal begins his criticism:

The history of Canada's Indians is a shameful chronicle of the white man's disinterest, his deliberate trampling of Indian rights and his repeated betrayal of our trust. Generations of Indians have grown up behind a buckskin curtain of indifference, ignorance and, all too often, plain bigotry. Now, at a time when our fellow Canadians consider the promise of the Just Society, once more Indians of Canada are betrayed by a programme which offers nothing better than cultural genocide. (1999, p. 1)

It is not the treaties, Cardinal argues, that bar Aboriginal Peoples from participating in

Canadian society and politics, but the structures of racism that permeate Canada and erect a

barrier of "indifference, ignorance and, all too often, plain bigotry" (ibid). The attempt to

further alienate Native people through the White Paper's proposal to abolish the Indian Act

amounted to another entry in Canada's "shameful chronicle" of cultural genocide. Cardinal

contributed significantly to the drafting of the Indian Association of Alberta's response to the

White Paper, "Citizens plus," which is popularly known as "The Red Paper" (1970). "Citizens

plus" critiques the White Paper's blindness to racism and argues that were it not for

Aboriginal People there would be no Canada.

The borders between representation and experience are made concrete and we indicates the indifference to Indigenous sovereignties that binds the settler nation. This means that we ignore the fact that we live on lands leased to us, that we all are (First Nations and

settlers) implicated in Treaty and therefore have responsibilities to ensure that they are

102 attended to as living documents, not as historical relics that are drained of their significance.

As I argue in the chapter, "Toward decolonization," treaties are agreements between sovereign nations and they must be read as declarations of sovereignty, not as the surrender to colonial powers (Rickard, C, 1973). The White Paper officially died but we see it re-emerge in land claim disputes, roadblocks, government policies and proposed bilis with alarming regularity.69 Even when First Nations were later included in the list of founding nations,70 their status in the confederacy was discursively sealed in the past by the implication that

Indigenous sovereignty is trumped by the Canadian nation-state.

The desire to create a just society at the expense of justice to First Nations also hints at the insufficiencies of recognizing difference through official multiculturalism. As it was presented, official multiculturalism identified the existence of diversity but provided no framework through which racism could be meaningfully discussed and challenged (Bannerji

2000; Miki 1998; Philip 1992). If justice was the goal then official multiculturalism was the wrong tool for the wrong thing used in the wrong way. Scholars began to question the placement of multiculturalism at a time when the effects of systemic racism were most keenly felt, and while the rights of First Peoples continued to be eroded. "Multiculty," as some called it (see Bannerji, 1997), dominated public discourse and pushed serious talk about systemic racism out of the public sphere, while it further distanced us Canadians and our elected

69 See my previous chapter, "The ethical limits of mediated suffering," particularly the section, "Victims and warriors of the local Third World" for a discussion of the persistence of the spirit of the White Paper. 70 See Morin, 2005 for a discussion of the "evolution of Canada" and the use of the founding nations concept during the signing of the numbered treaties. See Cassidy, 2005 for a discussion of how the founding nations and the associated problems of Quebec sovereignty in contemporary Native-settler politics in Canada. 103 representatives from the very pressing subject of Indigenous sovereignty. So effective was multiculturalism in ensuring the status quo that one scholar declared, "multiculturalism is anti-anti-racism" (ibid). It is little wonder that we is considered a disingenuous claim to collectivity.

The inability to dismantle the border between unqualified Canadians and racialized

Others within Canada is exactly where dominant articulations of Canadianness fail, says

Angus (2005). The impulse to insist on difference from the U.S. and the threat of empire is internal to Canadian identity and yet, in its dominant form, it would colonize within the nation's borders (Angus, 2005). Access to the nation under multiculturalism means little if racism is swept under the nation's carpet and the franchise means colonization if it is imposed or not met with the ability to confront, refocus and change the terms of inclusion, Angus says.

Yet, even as the borders fluctuate and the we who determine and are determined by these borders constantly shifts, the primary claim to the nation remains unspoken and deeply problematic. I do not argue that the settler nation be dismantled, after all, where would we go?

I am instead underlining the problems and ambiguities inherent to the settler state. Further,

Angus is by no means suggesting that inclusion for First Peoples should come at the expense of sovereignty, or that this primary nation claim is somehow normative. But as we question the production of the settler state we must also question the ways in which even the most radical articulation of inclusion butts up against a history and culture of assimilation and genocide.

104 Unhoming settler states and making whiteness strange

Colonization is continued through the operation of this contingent visibility in the form of conditional inclusion of a people in exchange for their sovereignty. This entry in our nation's shameful chronicles renders us incapable of recognizing how colonialism is experiential as well as representational. Indifference to colonialism's violence as well as to the sovereignties of First Nations surfaces here and is stunningly difficult, though not impossible to confront. To be blind to our political realities means we are blind to our agency within them. Taiaike Alfred puts it plainly:

Considering 100 or 300 years of interactions, it would become clear even to the Settlers that the real problem facing their country is that two nations are fighting over questions of conquest and survival, of empire or genocide, and moral claims to be just societies. Considering the long view and true facts, the Indian Problem becomes a question of the struggle for right and wrong, for justice in its most basic form. Something was stolen, lies were told, and they've never been made right. That, I believe, is the crux of the problem. (2005b, p. 153)

Alfred identifies the disavowal of the responsibility to recognize this colonial reality as an injustice at the level of the relationship between Natives and non-Natives. Similarly Fanon

(1967b) wrote to French people during the Algerian war of independence saying that they had responsibilities to Algerians. This responsibility is not analogous to the idea that we are all one another's keepers. That characterization of responsibility is fuhdamentally unhelpful because it depoliticizes the responsibility to acknowledge the violence of colonization by framing it as a general and apolitical state of existence.71 The responsibility Fanon and Alfred

71 This perspective has unfortunately found home in western discourse about equity, see Kierans, 1994. 105 are referring to is deeply political and needs to be carried collectively and individually.

Without a recognition of a fundamental wrong and the undeniable need to confront the

injustice in order to recognize the ways that colonization organizes our relations with others,

our efforts to develop an inclusive, diverse and just society can only result in failure and

frustration.

The relationship between the representational and the material exposes contradictions

that are inherent to any we in the settler state. Colonial representations, read through their

histories and the context that surrounds them today, illustrate the process of making and normalizing the settler state. Tåken together, the inherent contradictions of the profoundly

unstable and conspicuously unqualified settler nation begin to emerge. Demystifying the

settler state commits us to factoring the unstable and indifferent into our analyses. The term

settler society presents an opportunity to unsettle this presumed collective, to look at the coercive potential of collectivities within colonialism and the ways whiteness continues to

structure our experience either through confrontations with it or by adopting dominant

standards of success and inclusion; by accepting the reduction of justice to a matter of

visibility and invisibility. The term settler society indicates struggle (after all, something had

to be wnsettled before becoming settled), which in the context of progressive politics and

committed scholarship means constantly confronting how power in the abstracted sense and

the lived experience becomes localized in this group claim.

106 Rinku Sen recently wrote, "white progressives don 't get it" (2007, original emphasis).

She argues that white progressives in the U.S. surface periodically to blame allegedly politically immature progressives of colour for the lack of cohesion in progressive politics.

These white progressives, according to Sen, argue that the immobilization of progressive politics happens because of racialized progressives' apparently insensible devotion to ensuring that there are the requisite number of people of colour in any given organization. Sen

says that this is a ridiculous misinterpretation of the politics of progressive people of colour

and this misinterpretation ensures the persistence of racial injustice. Here the movement for racial justice is reduced to a wildly simplistic version of identity politics that is about inclusion without reflexivity. The question of racial justice is sidestepped as progressives of colour are east as the politically damaging Other on the inside.

We see similar arguments surface in the context of multiculturalism and national

security in Canada. After the arrests of 18 members of an alleged terrorist cell in the Greater

Toronto Area in the summer of 2006 (Plot suspects, 2006), debates emerged concerning whether we had compromised our national fabric and the collective endeavor of making

Canada a socially responsible and diverse nation by opening our borders too widely, by being too welcoming.72 Had we, in the quest to realize the national dream of the cultural mosaic gone too far? Were we too multicultural? It is important to Canadian nationalism that we position ourselves as a progressive nation in comparison to the United States, eschewing isolationism and homogeneity in favour of global aid, peacekeeping and multiculturalism.

72 For a particularly caustic example see Wente, 2006. 107 These concepts loom large in the national imaginary regardless of what the facts of today's

political precariousness may reveal. The response to both Sen's example and the case of the

now famed "Toronto 18" is the same: shut down equity to protect what we have worked

toward, be it a loose idea of progressive politics and policies or a national myth. In this way,

the terms of engagement are then set and reinforced by the impulse to sameness, the

superficial inclusion of difference and the apparently justifiable right to include or exclude. It

is this illogic that collapses Muslim into terrorist, First Nation into Indian, racial justice into political decay, the radical us into the constricting we. This illogic reduces the politics of

representation to visibility and invisibility, and in framing progressive politics this way,

deflects meaningful critique of the terms of the argument:

It is white progressives who are stuck in identity politics; progressives of color [sic] have long since mo ved on. The resulting agenda requires far more from the nation, and from our movement, than representation. The failure to incorporate racial justice into a progressive program has deprived progressivism of its true potential - to build a better world for all of us. (Sen, 2007)

Racialized Canadian cultural critics might agree, arguing that the principle of racial justice directs their politics and produces strategies based on relationality, informed, not

thwarted by identity politics (Mathur, 2005). Canadian race theory, notably the work of

Himani Bannerji, Sherene Razack, Roy Miki and others, has informed this specification.

Whiteness is the unmarked standard against which we are all judged. Because of this, in

73 The most notable example of Canadian racialized cultural critics and producers organizing against reductive identity politics can be found in the public debates about the Writing Thru Race conference in 1994. They had wanted to create an exclusive space for one session of the conference but were met with very loud and aggressive public condemnation. Organizers were accused of "reverse racism" against white people, manipulators of public funds by Pierre Berton, and author Timothy Findlay accused the organizers of being "Nazis." The organizers lost their federal funding but managed to raise the necessary funds from writers, critics and activists across the country and the conference took place as scheduled. See Sehdev, 2002. 108 Canadian race theory, whiteness is considered non-racialized. Strategies of relationality

produce short-term alliances for specific political goals. The long-term viability of this

strategy of necessary precariousness is open to investigation and certainly is no panacea but the point is that representation of oppressed peoples in institutions, nations, culture is not the

objective; it is one point along the way. The objective is justice and this involves representation, though not at the expense of dynamic political strategies.

Whiteness studies has helped us to develop an understanding of the ways whiteness responds to its political environment. It helps us to understand glib reductions of identity politics as a way of alienating agency from the white subject. While on the surface there

appears to be little binding a white person who claims to be colour-blind and blameless, and to the very material benefits that whiteness accrues, given an understanding of structural racism and the normativity of whiteness, we are able to identify the currents of power that run through the act of disavowing one's blame. Similarly, disappearing Lelawala from the

steamboat company's public records needs to be understood in more nuanced ways than a desire to "make good," given that this disappearance has not been met with an apology or even an acknowledgement of a wrong done and given the community of similar images that create the appearance of settler home-ness at Niagara Falls. Whiteness studies enables us to take this long view and ask difficult questions about power, location, agency and responsibility.

The responsibility to decolonize confronts us all: every we. The we of the settler state and whiteness, if left undifferentiated and unexamined, is not bound to a recognition of 109 agency and responsibility. The settler state produced Lelawala, her changing context shaped

her over time, and she is deeply colonial. Whiteness studies can help us in the radical

repositioning of the question: "how does it feel to be a problem?" to where it rightly belongs:

on whiteness itself. As we ask this question we need to continue to question our treatment of

whiteness'as an agent and how this impacts or obscures the location of our personal and

collective responsibilities. This personal and collective location is an opportunity, an act of

hope, where we might begin to think through agency and responsibility in ways that are not

bound up with dominant articulations of race and location. We, rethought as agency, compels

us to do this difficult work. To do otherwise is to develop those shameful chronicles rather

than interrogating them, to create a discipline that is indifferent to politics and to create a politics by means of disavowal.

Toward the limits of representation

Confronted with the overwhelming negativity of colonial culture's representational forms, the impulse is to seek out or produce "positive" images to challenge the "negative"

ones, but this would neglect the more central question: what are these images, "good" and

"bad," called upon to do within colonial culture? Rather than tally the "good" and "bad" or

"positive" and "negative" images, as some scholars who are concerned with racial justice

are,741 am concerned with the representational ethics and the disavowal of responsibility through representations, both "positive" and "negative."

74 For example, Beretta Smith-Shomade (2002) examines stereotypical representations of African-American women in television. Through case studies of "Fresh Prince of Bel Air" and Missy Elliot's music video "She's a Bitch" 110 Representations continue to serve important political purposes. Chief Clinton Rickard of the Tuscarora First Nation, on the U.S. side of the border, made political use of his appeal as a photographable Indian in a visual landscape dominated by whiteness (figure 3.1). He appears in this image in Algonquin traditional dress, carrying the wampum entrusted to him by the Algonquin community at Lake of Two Mountains. He wrote that he proudly wore this

Algonquin traditional dress and carried these wampum as he appealed directly to tourists to pressure the U.S. and Canadian governments to recognize and respect all First Nations' right to cross the colonial border (Rickard, C, 1973).75 It is woefully disempowering to claim that

Chief Rickard was unaware of the ethical and political problems inherent in this appeal to settler morality through the emotional vehicle of spectacular difference. It would be equally disempowering and fundamentally inaccurate to imply that Chief Rickard's appeal through the performance of his Indigeneity was a last resort, the desperate act of a man backed into a corner. Representation was one tool available to him, and in employing this tool, he navigated the politics of representations of suffering and the material limits of representation.

Smith-Shomade argues that representations of African-American women ensure white supremacist notions of innate inferiority of African-Americans, particularly African-American women who are portrayed as hyper-sexualized and morally bankrupt. African-Americans must, she argues, reappropriate the media to produce positive images. 751 focus on this struggle in my chapter, "Home at the bridge." 111 Chapter 4

The ethical limits of mediated suffering

Colonial cultural politics can signal the disavowal or perversion of the responsibility to ethical representations. I would be remiss if I invoked the image of the Maid of the Mist, a

Native woman who faces certain death, without speaking to the wealth of other images of dying Native women that people Canadian culture. After all, the Maid of the Mist is a profoundly violent image of a woman who obediently consents to and enables her own destruction, and is made victim by her own people. The stereotypes that violence is internal to

Aboriginal communities and that Native women are passive victims is clearly not unique to this maid. The degree to which these stereotypes inform cultural representations, perceptions of history, and settler-Native interactions makes it clear that this is not exclusively a matter of representational politics. The Maid of the Mist, in other words, must be placed in relation to the real world of colonial representational violence. This real world of images contributes to cultures of colonial violence by reinforcing the apparent facelessness and unnameability of women-victims. This violence is not accidentally sexualized, colonial violence is intrinsically sexualized. As Anne McClintock says, "imperialism cannot be fully understood without a theory of gender power. Gender power was not the superficial patina of empire, an ephemeral gloss over the more decisive mechanics of class or race. Rather, gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise" (1995, pp.

112 6-7). Colonial gendering is infused with Eurocentric conceptions of community, of relations

with masculinity, of perceptions of femininity.

Images of suffering and pain often serve double-duty by first representing suffering

and second by implying community amongst those who are shown to suffer. The weight of the

representation's community-binding potential should not be underestimated, as those represented as historically suffering have suffered because of colonization, a system of

oppression, which has rendered the Indigenous terms of community irrelevant by commandeering the authority to define, represent and police the borders of community. The

generic images of the suffering community and its desperately militant and masculine warrior call upon the community distanced from those represented to view them. The viewing community is made impervious to responsibility, distanced from action by scopic conventions. Such is the casual treatment of violence and victimization in colonialism. Images

and stories of suffering, particularly of the Kashechewan water crisis of 2005 (though this crisis is on-going) and of alleged latent militancy at the events surrounding the Assembly of

First Nation's inaugural National Day of Action in 2007, serve as the focal points for this discussion about the operation of the image as truth and ethics in colonial Canada.

Made to suffer

The constant clicking of cameras that compete with the drone of the Falls speaks to the important connection between experience and photographic representation at Niagara Falls, and beyond its shores. Early in her career, Sontag called the capture of image on film the semblance of a brutal violation, a rape, or death (1973, pp. 23-24). Barthes would agree with 113 her, adding that the image as semblance of death provides knowledge in pieces that flatter the individual 's fetish for knowledge collection with little appreciation for their assembled meanings and contexts (1980, pp. 30-31). "Infra-knowledge," according to Barthes refers to these pieces of knowledge that are gleaned from details within the image that are not necessarily featured but are present all the same (ibid). A woman's scarf, a pen in a pocket, an observant passer-by in the background all reveal something about the historical circumstances of that photograph's production; they expose the photograph for what it is: an elaborate production and incomplete story with the semblance of naturalness and fullness. Photographic representations bespeak the unfolding of a deeply depersonalized logic: add more light or take it away and the structure, outline and detail of the image fades or comes into view, but fundamentally does not change. This logic of photographic representation as window to the truth is, of course, only a partial report of the photograph's representational authority and abilities. Much more goes into the creation of a photograph than simply modifying light levels. The photograph, Sontag and Barthes note, is different from other forms of visual representation because it possesses the appearance of authority, and this authority hinges on the assumption that the photograph faithfully captures the scene. In other words, the photograph produces a convincing approximation of truth. It is precisely because the photograph appears to sit so closely to the truth that it has been used as evidence to affirm the alleged truth of dominant forms of looking.

76 Sander Gilman (1985) offers a canonic analysis of the production of colonial "knowledge" of women's sexuality through the visual representation and simultaneous representational capacity of the stereotype in the representations 114 The photographic image and its close association with (the perception of) truth work in tandem to produce the semblance of community through representation. Ato Sekyi-Otu refers to colonized peoples as organized within "communities of suffering" (2005, p. 250) and this highlights the community-forming significance of shared histories of pain. Communities of suffering have witnessed their mediation since their suffering began. Indeed, it is suffering that attracts mediation and through mediation comes the semblance of community through suffering. In other words, the representation imposes an apparent equivalence and affiliation among suffering individuals, which translates into suffering as community-binding (if they are all suffering, they are all suffering together). At times, the subjects of such representations have been able to exercise some degree of agency over these representations, but this agency is not sustained enough to translate into representational agency,77 much less political or social agency. Huynh Cong Ut's (Nick Ut) famous 1972 photograph of Kim Phuk crying and running naked from the napalm which engulfed her nine-year-old body became iconic of the

Vietnam War and helped to galvanize the American population against their government's military involvement. The photo also raised questions about the ethics of representing pain, the pain of a people as well as the pain of a person. For her part, Phuk recognizes the image as an important visual record of her life and her country and now tours the globe under the

of marginal women. The Victorian representations of Saartje Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus," both during her life and after her death along with the representations of institutionalized Russian prostitutes exposes the extent to which the stereotype structures visual representation and the perception of difference. See also Hall, 1997. 771 understand representational agency to be broader and more defining than agency over apparently discreet representations. Representational agency is not merely agency over production, it entails the radical redefinition of the conventions of production (encompassing questions concerning who the subject of representations will be, as well as more technically-oriented questions concerning image composition) and expectations of reception. 115 banner of peace. Yet, the image often overshadows as much as it has directed her life's work.

We too commonly forget that she is no longer "that girl in the picture," while she will remain

undeniably attached to it. Ut won a Pulitzer for this image.78 The United States remained in

Vietnam until 1975, the American public became increasingly cynical about its government's

involvement in international conflicts, and today parts of Vietnam continue to suffer from the

devastation the war wrought. If representations of community suffering have anything to tell

us, it is that simply because an image conveys the pain of a people, the politics and history

informing that pain determines the applicability of "communities of suffering." In short, not

all representations of suffering are created equal.79

The notion of communities of suffering exposes pain and help, time and urgency: pain

is both now and historical, help is and was urgently needed. The term indicates a state of

constant crisis and hints at the responsibilities of those who produce and receive the images.

Left unexamined, the notion appears to describe a de facto state of being, but reading it this

Exactly thirty-five years after his remarkable photograph first went to print, Ut captured images of a sobbing Paris Hilton, in the back of a California squad car, being sent, once again, to prison for violating parole. 79 Other images of collective and individual pain, recently those of the "jumpers" from the World Trade Center on 9/11 come readily to mind. Broadly circulated in the days and weeks following the attacks, images of people jumping out of the World Trade Center towers were used to help in the gruesome task of identifying remains, compiling lists of those killed and representing the terror felt by those inside the towers (see Cauchon and Moore, 2002). As conflicted as the population was and remains, those images supplied a human form to the largest terrorist attack the American public have experienced to date (see Singer, 2006).| But 9/11 imagery is quite different from the imagery by and about communities of suffering. American citizens, despite the cries of some (formerly many) high- profile politicians, are far from an embattled and suffering peoples. (Though, with events such as the devastation in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the argument has been and continues to be made that raced and working class communities in the U.S.A. constitute embattled and suffering communities, living in conditions of abject poverty and desperation within a powerful and wealthy nation.) Though the discourses of terror and threat circulate broadly and with stunning endurance, the day-to-day erosion of whole ways of knowing and doing are, as all evidence reveals, not in danger of realization at the hands of dark and turbaned terrorists. The mutilation is more local; civil liberties and freedoms are rendered unrecognizable by their apparently democratically elected public representatives. 116 way reduces its political importance. Sekyi-Otu explains that these people suffer because they are made to suffer, not made-to-suffer. In other words, communities of suffering are people first; suffering has been imposed from without as has the community designation. How does one represent the suffering of a potentially disparate collection of people without representing community and suffering as codetermined? When is the ethical limit of mediated suffering reached?

Suffering attracts representation and the attendant discourse of representation for social justice. Sontag confronts the paradox that haunts the notion of representation for social justice in her final book: the impossibility of gleaning ethical and political knowledge from the photograph against the demands that we gain direct access to such knowledge through the photograph. Sontag points out how closely photography is placed to knowledge and ethics, and yet reaches its limit at "ethical or political knowledge" because,

The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices - a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape. The very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness. The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility (Sontag, 1973, p. 24).

In spite of the classist undertones of Sontag's assessment of photographic knowledge,

"knowledge at bargain prices" refers to the simplification of knowledge that was initially

Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film, "Bamako" (named after the Maliån capital where the story is set) chiefly concerns a trial where colonialism and globalization are defendants that stand against chargés of genocide leveled by the African people (Freyd & Sissako, 2006). One witness for the prosecution states that the continent suffers from poverty, famine and war not because it is poor but because it is enormously wealthy (ibid). Colonialism and capitalism descend to feed upon the riches of the so-called Third World, leaving behind a place many worlds removed. This demonstrates the extent to which cause and consequence are often confused when it comes to representing communities of suffering. 117 hard-fought for and is now rendered so easily accessible that its meaning is fundamentally

compromised. Sontag says that we know that the photograph is merely an approximation of

the trutn, but we accept it as the truth regardless. Or, put another way, we accept the

semblance for the truth in spite of its utter impossibility. Today however, the assumed

connection between image and truth is interrupted because of developments in

communication technology. The personal camera and the internet have shortened time between the production and dissemination of the image and call to help.81 Furthermore, our

cultural landscape is saturated with images that demand that someone act to effect social

change, but the question of agency is lost in the viewing. We might individually feel

compelled to respond, and so satisfy the call that someone (anyone) act, but atomized actions

seldom result in systemic change. More often than not, the photograph freezes the immediacy

of crises and alienates us from those pictured. Photographs of the Rwandan genocide, Sontag

notes, are bdth witness, provocateur and salve by proffering proof and compelling us to stop

the genocide (and by extension, underscoring a connection between the viewers and the

victims of genocide) while affirming the otherness of the genocide. "They [photographs]

show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is

the sort of thing that happens in thatplace. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those

81 See Liesbet van Zoonen (1994) for a discussion of the impact of the personal video camera and the beating of Rodney King. Such discussions also open up debates concerning the potential gains and losses of using personal cameras and the internet for ensuring the integrity of surveillance and for counter-policing. The website www.copwatch.com. whose tagline is "policing the police," relies on community posts, photographs, links to online newspapers and testimonials from people who claim their rights have been abused by law enforcement in the United States (see Copwatch.com, n.d.). The camera is such a powerful tool in this effort that Citizens are enjoined to "shoot for peace," visually referencing (through posted photographs) the use of the camera in the case of the L.A. police officers who were accused (and eventually acquitted) in the beating of Rodney King in 1991. 118 horrors, cannot help but nourish the belief in the inevitability oftragedy in the benighted or backward - that is, poor - parts of the world''' (Sontag, 2003, p. 71, emphasis mine). These poor parts of the world where atrocities happen are closer than their images might lead us to believe as the generic logic of photography imposes a distance between the represented subject and the viewing audience.

An abundance of images and a lack of action make it clear that the ability to use the image to mobilize social change is threatened by the image's familiarity. The ethical limit of mediated suffering is reached here, where consequence is represented as cause when suffering determines or eclipses community. The foundational supposition is that it is acceptable, even expected, to represent suffering and pain so long as it is used to inspire or provoke action to end that suffering and pain. This might be appropriate for short-term crises where suffering suddenly arrives, but for long-term problems, the sort of problems that afflict communities of suffering, the politics of representation collapses under the weight of the ostensible permanence of suffering by virtue of the image's longe vi ty. Suffering and pain then become

Sontag does not consider photography from the vantage point of today's skeptical viewer. The skeptical viewer today is not naive about photography and the truth, or at least she is not as naive as she was twenty-five years ago. In August, 2006, Reuters photographer, Adnan Hajj was accused of manipulating images of an Israeli bombing of Beirut, Lebanon. The original accusation was made on the blog www.littlegreenfootballs.com (in the posting, "Reuters doctoring photos from Beirut?") where the photograph of a bombed-out cityscape was analyzed in magnified sections. The blogger pointed out repeating smoke-billow patterns and speculated that Hajj had digitally manipulated the photo using a clone function (similar to a copy function in word programmes) in an imaging program (Reuters doctoring, 2006). Reuters responded by investigating the matter, firing Hajj and reassuring the public that its photographers were truthful keepers of the public trust (Reuters drops, 2006). This demonstrates more than the potential watchdog power of the blogosphere over the media; there is a growing skepticism of the photographic image's role as witness to and window on the truth. The cliché a picture is worth a thousand words still holds today, though we are less likely to unquestioningly believe the story. The viewer's skepticism reinforces what Sontag had been arguing all along: we, the viewers, believe that photography and truth should and must interlock. 119 fixed states, made permanent through their representations. In the face of the ethical limit of representations of suffering and community, the real world, the colonial world, of images

demands consideration.

Recently, photographic (along with other media) representations of Native People in

Canada advance the discourse that Native Peoples live in Third World conditions. Commonly

called the Fourth World83 by non-governmental organizations concerned with human rights

and poverty (Amnesty International, for example), the Fourth World is defined as pockets of extreme poverty, inhabited by Indigenous Peoples within the First World, that is, the settler

state. Not far removed from other images of Native Peoples that call upon romantic notions of

"authenticity" and "retrieval," the image of Native Peoples suffering in Third World conditions permits the disavowal of responsibility and the notion that the distance separating us (all) is incommensurate. This deeply depersonalized logic of representations, a partial story

though it is, precedes the more complicated story of lived experience. Like treaty, representation within colonialism hems in our perception of our agency and of the terms of the production and consumption of colonial representations. Colonial representations offer a variation of truth that departs from ethics. Most recently, the popular representations of the

Assembly of First Nation's National Day of Action, the first such day in Canada's history, demonstrated the shallow understanding of colonial violence through the images of militant and masculine warriors and helpless communities.

83 George Manuel, a former Grand Chief of the National Indian Brotherhood of the Shushwap Nation popularized the phrase "fourth world" in his book The fourth world: An Indian realitv (1974). Manuel argues that Indigenous peoples are made economically dependant on settler states because they are alienated from their own resources and wealth on their own lands. 120 Victims and warriors of the local Third World

The image of the warrior as an anti-colonial agent has a great deal of popular cultural salience, not least because it invokes romantic images of heroically ill-fated struggle against the impossible forces of modernity; pulled from the pages of the dime-store paperback and projected onto television screens84 and newspapers, the image also helps to contain and delegitimize anti-colonial resistance. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis reads the media treatment of the

"Oka crisis"85 as illustrative of the ways that masculinity and militancy are intertwined in the

Popular culture re-entrenches the assumption that warrior-hood and masculinity are co-produced. Rather than offering a coherent understanding of agency and responsibility inherent to the warrior, warriorhood on the television screen is a crass stereotype. "Last One Standing," airing in the fall of 2007, purports to test the virility of its contestants - all of whom are male - by immersing them in Indigenous communities where they are expected to participate in male rights of passage (see Donahue, 2007). Through the lens of the camera, these rights of passage are portrayed as dramatic, brutal and needing no nuanced cultural understanding to be performed or appreciated. This show is the latest of a long and tired lineup, which have included the popular programs "SurVivor" and "The Amazing Race." In marked contrast and for thoughtful examinations of warrior society and ethics see Gerald (Taiaiake) R. Alfred's Heeding the Voices of our Ancestors: Kahnawake Mohawk Politics and the Rise of Native Nationalism (1995) and Douglas M. George-Kanentiio's Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation (2006). 85 The use of the word "crisis" attracts well-deserved skepticism, as the events at Oka in 1990 escalated to crisis level because of the actions of the Quebec government and the RCMP. What is now known as the Oka "crisis" began with community action to preserve traditional territories from so-called development. People from the Kanehsatake, Kahnawake and later Akwesasne Mohawk reserves (of the Mohawk Nation) occupied an area known as "the Pines" at Oka, Quebec in the spring of 1990. This land had been the subject of a claim in the 1970s which had been overturned in favor of the crown, and that nonetheless, remained the subject of dispute. The Mohawk argued that their lands had been held in trust for them by Ursuline Nuns in the 17th century; never did the Mohawk hand their land over. In 1989, Oka mayor Jean Ouellette announced that the Pines would be cleared, meaning that the ancient cemetery in the Pines would be desecrated. All this to build a members-only golf course. Many of the people camped out in the Pines were women: elan mothers and leaders of their communities. Elders, children and non-Mohawk supporters were also present. In spite of this, the camouflaged and armed (male) warrior quickly became iconic of the action. As the summer advanced, the warriors had barricaded a former treatment centre, tensions mounted, the centre was stormed, community members were assaulted and Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Sureté du Québec was shot and killed in the Pines. The SQ as pulled back and the military was deployed. Mohawk warriors were accused of the murder, but it was later found that the shot that had killed Corporal Lemay came from an army gun. For an intricate report of the crisis, including its context and aftermath, see Geoffrey York's People of the pines: The warriors and the legacv of Oka (1991). For a thoughtful treatment of the roles of Mohawk women in the occupation, see Alanis Obamsawin's "Kanehsatake: 270 years of resistance" (Koenig & Obamsawin, 2006). Gail Guthrie Valiskakis (2005) offers a discussion of the media representation of the warrior during the crisis. Taiaike Alfred (2005) suggests that the standoff illustrates the power of reserve-based resistance, arguing that it can offer 121 media production of the warrior, who is iconic of a people pushed to the wall. "For the media,

there has always been one dominant image of Indian struggle, one dominant narrative of

Indian confrontation: warriors and the militant stories they tell" (Valaskakis, 2005, p. 39).

What militant stories do these media-warriors tell? The subtext of the media-warrior's story is

one of grief and loss, unable to rend himself (this gendering is intentional) from history and

incapable of confronting the demands of the present, he has no choice but to fight. He is as

stubborn as he is criminal, but above all, he is a tragic, noble and vanishing "savage."86 Even

as the media-warrior speaks, the generic community he defends is rendered vulnerable,

faceless and noticeably non-masculine against his apparent prowess. If he has stories to tell, it

is because the community he represents and defends is helplessly silent.

The representations of the National Day of Action of June 29, 2007 are important in the

context of this discussion of decolonial ethics and media representations because the images

of the media warrior and the victimized and generic community surfaced in ways that

attempted to locate and disavow responsibility through the specter of violence. Intended to be

a day of reckoning with the nation's colonial past and present, the management of

representations and the specter of violence worked to defuse the day's decolonial potential.

momentum for resistance against colonial injustice. Such acts unify as they "teach us the true nature of colonial power" (2005, p. 65). 6 See my chapter, "Vanishing at the border" for in depth discussion of tragic, noble and vanishing "savages." 87 The media-warrior is a simplification of warrior society. Literature on Mohawk warrior society suggests that the association between the warrior and masculinity is outdated and counter-intuitive (Alfred, 1995). Gerald Alfred explains that it is a media myth that masculinity and militancy are inherent to warriorhood. To be a warrior, he says, is to take on an ethic of struggle. Warrior actions are a matter of critical reflection and they are actors in decolonial struggle. The Oka crisis presented the most immediate example of warriors confronting the Canadian state as a colonial state, most palpable in the image of the stare-down between an army officer and a Mohawk warrior. See Heather Smyth (2000) for a thoughtful analysis of this political and cultural negotiation.

122 These representations were not fixed in the days and weeks up to and after the event; the

perception of the vulnerable community shifted from Native communities (located within the

image of the now-iconic Kashechewan) to be ambiguously located at non-Native

communities. In turn, the aggressor changed from the colonial state to the media warrior and

the threat of violence he presented.

On May 23, 2007, Assembly of First Nations' Grand Chief Phil Fontaine called upon

Aboriginal People to participate in a loosely coordinated day of peaceful demonstrations and

protests to educate the non-Native public about the deplorable social, political and economic

conditions that Native People face. The Day of Action and the media representations

surrounding it demonstrate two things: the first is how the image of the warrior is used to

delegitimize anti-colonial resistance by classifying anti-colonial action as irrational militancy.

The second is the strategic invocation of the victim-community to disassociate injustice and

agency. Native communities initially surfaced as generic victim-communities, but as the

media-warrior came into focus, non-Native communities were recast as victim-communities.

The oscillation between victim and victimizer points to the instability of the settler's view of justice, and the opportunistic and fundamentally ambiguous call to community and the warped

perception of violence.

Fontaine used the image of suffering Native communities, specifically the image of a

community facing a water crisis - Kashechewan - to galvanize (Native and non-Native)

public sentiment around the day. Before Fontaine's use of the community's image,

Kashechewan received national attention and was already iconic of poor living conditions in 123 reserves across Canada. In late October 2005, citizens of the Kashechewan First Nation were evacuated from their reserve (located at the north shore of the Fort Albany River in northern

Ontario) because the water supply was contaminated with E. coli bacteria. News of this erupted in the national media, prompting INACs (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada) national clean water plan and the solemn vow that it would improve living and social conditions on all reserves (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 2005, November 3). "It is unacceptable that many First Nations communities across Canada continue to face ongoing risk to the safety of their drinking water" (Prentice announces clean, 2006), thus declared former Minister of Indian Affairs Jim Prentice at a press conference to announce a national clean water plan in the spring of 2006. Contaminated water supplies are a fact of approximately two thirds of reserves across the country, many of which are not equipped with running water.

Once the news of contaminated water in Kashechewan erupted, more stories from other communities facing similar crises began to surface. National dailies like the Globe and

Mail, and National Post, along with CBC Radio and Television and a host of other television and internet news sources, began publishing the names of these reserves.88 Community leaders came forward to report that they had complained, had tried to cope with the problem, had tried to mobilize people to spur the federal government toward a solution but

As of the winter of 2006, 76 communities were under boiled water advisories (Aboriginal waters, 2006). 124 > contaminated community water continued to be ignored at the federal le vel. Under the weight of so many damning accusations, it became impossible for INAC to deny that it did not know of the scope and gravity of the problem before the crisis erupted. Contaminated water at Kashechewan then became a symbol of INACs poor custodianship. Citizens (Native and non-Native alike) wrote to newspapers and called in on radio shows to question what

INAC had been doing (or not doing) all this time; what had they been spending tax dollars on, anyway?

Water at Kashechewan has never been potable, and as I have stated above,

Kashechewan is not alone. Yet it was only in 2005 that the case received sustained national attention. Historically, government response to Kashechewan has been inadequate; the reserve was created north of the Albany River in 1905 and since then, flooding - a cause of water contamination - has been an annual, sometimes twice annual occurrence (Pope, 2006). In

1997 a dyke was constructed to protect the community from flooding. A year later, substantial cracks were found in it, but it has never been completely fixed. Community leaders have been vocal about the need for safe drinking water (ibid). In spite of these grave and long-standing problems, when the story broke in the national media, then-Minister of Indian Affairs Andy

The federal government is responsible for addressing the complaints of First Peoples. Recently, because provincial governments have become involved in land claim disputes (provinces are responsible for resource extraction and land development), the Ontario government has created a Native affairs portfolio. 90 Five years after the "Walkerton water crisis," and after the Public Utilities Commission Supervisor Stan Koebel and water foreman Frank Koebel had been held criminally responsible for that crisis, the threat of unsafe drinking water resonated with Canadians in a way that before it might not have (Inside Walkerton, 2004). 125 Scott responded as though he were responding to a natural disaster, and not the inevitable consequence of so much government neglect. Without a hint of irony or shame, Scott said,

"We are working with our partners to improve not only water quality but the quality of life in

Kashechewan. [...] A successful fesolution to this situation requires a collective effort"

(Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, October 27, 2005).

The contaminated water supply reached crisis proportions not because leaders and citizens of Kashechewan were not working together to amend the problem, but because without government resources their collective efforts could not keep pace with the mounting threat. INAC had allowed the crisis to develop. Images of people from Kashechewan drinking bottled water attempted to demonstrate that INAC was in control while, in an apparent contradiction, these images also demonstrated just how grave INAC had allowed the crisis to become. The people of Kashechewan continue to face many serious problems. Severe flooding remains a live threat and in the spring of 2007, INAC turned down Kashechewan

Chief Leo Friday's urgent request to relocate the community to higher ground. In January

2007 alone, 21 youth attempted suicide in the community (La Rose, 2007), and since the Day of Action, the community has received little media attention.

Kashechewan suffering did not present a simple image of generic and inexplicable human suffering, rather questions of governmental (ir)responsibility were threaded into the

91 Andy Scott served as Minister of Indian Affairs under the Liberal government until 2006, when Jim Prentice took over the portfolio for the Conservative government. In 2007 Chuck Strahl took over the post from Prentice (also Conservative). 92 Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the naturalness of natural disasters is debatable (see Hartman & Squires, 2006). 126 very fabric of the image. With the knowledge that the Canadian government had failed the

community and its leaders, the use of the community as icon of the local Third World

inhabited by First Peoples prompted non-Native Canadians to confront the deeply unsettling

question of community responsibility for the suffering of its other. The Canadian government

had failed Kashechewan through its intentional inaction and non-Native Canada had failed its

fellow citizens through its failure to remain interested and demand that IN AC be accountable

to Native and non-Native people. In other words, the image of Kashechewan challenged the

convenient stereotype of the passive, voiceless and victimized Native community and the

AFN attempted to harness this image of an assertive, interested people who were failed by the

structural incompetence of the Canadian government. In the spring of 2007, the Assembly of

First Nations' (AFN) statement that Aboriginal Peoples live in Third World conditions93

surprised very few. Phil Fontaine indicated that deplorable living conditions and social problems are the result of malevolent federal and provincial governments who actively work

to keep non-Native Canadians in the dark. "Canadians wouldn't stand for it if they knew. It's

this country's dirty little secret. Poverty among Canada's first nations [sic] peoples rivals

Third World conditions" (Fontaine, June 22, 2007). Fontaine's invocation of Kachetchewan

as a victim-community was to draw attention to and support for Native communities in relation to the government's malevolent neglect, while the various Ministers of Indian Affairs would have presented the community as a victim of circumstance, environment, or the preceding administration. The more pertinent questions to this chapter and the matter of

93 See the Assembly of First Nations' Fact sheet: The realitv for First Nations in Canada (n.d.). 127 movement toward decolonization are located in the invocation of community and

responsibility at the Day of Action, and the media warrior, located in the image of Sean Brant,

helps to explain the shifting use of community and the stilted interpretation of violence.

Before Fontaine announced the AFN's Day of Action in May 2007, Sean Brant of the

Tyendinaga Mohawk of the Bay of Quinte, already cut the figure of the militant warrior.

Earlier on April 20, 2007 Brant coordinated a blockade of the highway and VIA Rail line that

connect Toronto to Montreal. This was to prevent mining at a gravel quarry located on

contested land. As a result of this action hundreds of commuters were stranded in Toronto's

Union Station on a Friday evening; Brant was arrested and charged with mischief. With this

blockade still fresh in the minds of VIA Rail and its stranded customers, and as the Day of

Action approached, Brant made it clear that on the Day of Action he would repeat his earlier

actions, interrupting access to Highway 401 and the Via Rail Line. In doing so, he would be

violating his parole, and would surely serve time in prison.

Emergency services, the transportation industry, commuters and vacationers began

developing contingency plans in anticipation of extensive roadblocks. On 28 June, VIA Rail

warned the public that it would cancel its train and bus service between Montreal and

Toronto. VIA media and communications senior manager Catherine Kaloutski explained the

reason for the decision: "The decision was not made very lightly and [sic] made in

consideration of the uncertainty of the situation, the potential risks and the potential

magnitude the National Day of Action could enfold [sic] into [sic]" (Via Rail shuts, 2007).

Julian Fantino, the Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner, urged the public to exercise 128 patience : "In certain places there will be inconvenience caused. We have to be mindful of that. And I think what we have to do as well is be patient - all of us" (Rook, 2007, p. A4).

Fontaine's appeal to the morality of the non-Native public came just five days before the Day of Action, a day intended to educate Canadians about this local Third World. In his appeal to non-Native morality, he supposed that ignorance95 was the only thing barring non-

Native Canadians from expressing outrage toward their government. In the days and hours preceding the Day of Action, Fontaine urged Native People to obey Canadian law, adding that he understood the motivations and frustrations of Brant and others like him, but that cooperation with the government, his priority as Grand Chief, was endangered by illegal actions. Native People, he and Fantino agreed, had the right to demonstrate, not disrupt.

Fontaine's earlier deference to Canadian law provided a definitive contrast to Brant, who disputes its legitimacy. Because of his position that Canadian law is colonial law and therefore illegitimate, Brant's nåme became associated with criminality and latent violence.

What of Fontaine? Fontaine's messages to the media and public varied little from his insistence that demonstrators operate within Canadian law; consequently, he received far less attention than Brant. Margaret Wente, a columnist notorious for her extremely conservative and poorly researched articles, criticized Fontaine, specifically his appeal to Canadians:

it's the worst-kept secret in the world. You'd have to be brain dead not to be aware of the poverty on the reserves, the awful housing, the bad water, the sickness, the

94 The Ipperwash Commission released its report weeks before the Day of Action. It condemned the OPP and the Harris government for escalating violence and leading to the death of demonstrator Dudley George. As a result, the OPP's treatment of the Day of Action attracted a good deal of media and public attention. 95 This impulse to target ignorance to ameliorate racism resonates with anti-racist practice of the 1990s and the more recent imperative to "unlearn whiteness" or "unlearn white privilege" (see Bishop, 1994; Wilmot, 2005). 129 suicides, the hopelessness. People have grown weary of this story because it never changes. [...] Everyone is trapped in the narrative we've constructed to explain it. The Europeans arrived, wiped out most of the natives [sic], stole their land and tried to stamp out their culture. All the dysfunction of aboriginal [sic] communities stems from the original sins of the conquerors. Only the restoration of their land and culture (plus more money) will restore their dignity and fortunes. (Wente, 2007)

Describing Fontaine as an enabler of Native social, political and economic dysfunction,

Treaty complaints as antiquated, the living conditions of Native Peoples as self-inflicted,

Wente proffered a solution: "It's called self-empowerment. And nobody can give it to you"

(ibid). Apparently the Day of Action did not qualify as legitimate "self-empowerment."96 In effect, Wente answered Fontaine's call to settler morality by relocating responsibility:

Canadians already know the Third World conditions of First Peoples, but it is the

responsibility of First Peoples to lift themselves out of this local Third World. This would

foreshadow the media's treatment of the participants on the Day of Action.

In spite of the continual invocation of Kashechewan's specter, the image of desperate communities began to evaporate as the National Day of Action approached, replaced with

images of masked and armed warriors who threatened the security and economic stability of

non-Native communities. The warrior does not neatly encapsulate Indian struggle for the

settler, though it does offer a way of understanding and subsequently distancing the act of resistance through the image of militancy, even, and especially, when that militancy is

Use of self-improvement discourse in relation to systemic and social problems is a commonly-used tactic to personalize and psychologize social problems. Fanon writes of the misuse of psychoanalysis in his damning critique of O. Mannoni in his "The so-called dependency complex" in Black skin white masks. In this section Fanon is concerned with Manonni's argument that the colonized subject internalizes their social situation and thereby reproduces it. In reply, Fanon scoffs at this, declaring Mannoni's analysis too narrowly fixed on the internal psychology of the colonized, rather than on the system of colonization and the psychology of the colonizer. He warns: "one should not lose sight of the real" (1967a, p. 83) and Mannoni's fixation on the psychology of the colonized to the exclusion of all other evidence does just this. 130 fictional. Sean Brant camouflaged and in defiance of the Ontario Provincial Police in the

summer of 2007 served as a reminder of Oka in 1990 where the image of the warrior, as

masculine and militant, eclipsed the community that was defending The Pines. In colonial eyes it did not matter that women played vital roles as warriors and leaders from the Oka

"crisis" to the Day of Action. What figured in those eyes was resistance, which was seen as

insurrection, insurrection seen as militancy, militancy seen as masculinity. This

representational straw man (resistance-as-insurrection-as-militancy-as-masculinity), fundamentally stilted and illogical though it is, stands in as knowledge, just as the infra- knowledge that the photograph lends presents an approximation of the truth, which while

never quite the truth, will suffice nonetheless.

On the morning of the Day of Action, the Globe and Mail, National Post and Toronto

Star newspapers all featured strikingly similar images on their front pages: men, many of

whose faces were concealed behind bandanas, all wearing army fatigues and all posed around

fire.97 Inside the Globe and Mail, the editorial cartoon featured a bucktoothed and bewildered-

looking beaver holding up a Canadian flag, perhaps in a gesture of celebration (given that the

29th marked the start of the Canada Day weekend celebrations), perhaps in a gesture of

surrender as the beaver was shown taking shelter and the flag was pierced by arrows.

Meanwhile, Shawn Brant became the subject of increasingly romantic and image-oriented news coverage after the 29th. One nearly elegiac article described Brant's mannerisms,

97 Fire is the popular symbol of the media-warrior' s militancy. For example, the website caledoniawakeupcall.com (a website which opposes the Six Nation's roadblock in the town of Caledonia and claims that the action is "terrorism") use the image of fire to convey the threat embodied in the image of the Mohawk warriors who are preventing condominium construction on their traditional territories. 131 personal life (including the suicides of two of his children), status as leader and acceptance that he would be incarcerated for his actions,

And should he choose to speak with you, he speaks only to you - his soft voice, slight smile and concerned eyes are almost hypnotic.

Brant likes things his way, so for his part, yesterday went well: three blockades were erected, including the certain-to-be historie highway 401 closure in which he sat casually on the median of the empty roadway, passing out cigarettes to his obedient followers. (Cherry, 2007, p. A21)

Variously described as a "criminal," a "hardliner" and "hothead," "slightly - but not criminally - menacing" with "testicular fortitude," an image of Brant as doomed media warrior began to come into view. He would, after all, almost inevitably serve time in jail.

Days after the National Day of Action, Brant handed himself over to the RCMP. At his bail hearing, Brant's lawyer likened him to Gandhi, both leaders fighting colonial oppression. On

5 July, the Judge D.K. Kirkland denied Brant bail, arguing that Brant was responsible for

"economic disruption," something that Kirkland claimed, contradicted Brant's likeness to

Gandhi. Never mind that Gandhi's Salt March (March 12 to April 6, 1930) was a demonstration against the Imperial salt tax. Gandhi and his followers marched to the shores at

Dandi, Gujarat to collect salt, thus denying the crown its tax. The action was a symbolic protest against British imperialism, and was a form of symbolic economic disruption.

According to Kirkland, Brant's actions were "arrogant" and if allowed to continue unchecked, would lead to "chaos" (quoted in 0'Rourke, 2007).

As I have earlier indicated, neither the producers nor the consumers of media imagery assume that media images directly reflect the truth. This is an important point to remember as

132 debate shifted in the days following the Day of Action; even as images of the militant warrior

circulated, the image of the victim followed close behind. Because the day was not violent

and because so much speculation in the political and media spheres concerned the impending

threat of Native violence against non-Native communities, the utter absence of violence was

remarkable in itself. The subject of the media's apparent fixation on the threat of violence to

produce a marketable news event emerged alongside speculation that leaders like Fontaine

and Brant fed the media's desire for stories of impending crisis. Columnist for the Toronto

Star, Thomas Walkom argued that Brant, Fontaine and others had little choice but to use the

media to effect social change:

As for the road and rail blockades, these were necessary theatre. Phil Fontaine [...] may have tut-tutted when veteran anti-poverty protestor Shawn Brant and his group of Mohawks blockaded Highway 410. But Fontaine needed something like a blockade to grab public attention. If Brant had not existed, the grand chief would have had to invent him. Peaceful picnics do not top the newscasts. (2007, p. A21).

As with the media representations of the Oka crisis, the media reported "warriors" because it

wanted to see "warriors." The dominant image of Native anti-colonial struggle is the media-

warrior and his twinned stories of militancy and victimization. The media-warrior is, after all,

a man driven to desperation. He is, after all and above all, a man, and though he is capable of explosive violence, ultimately he is ineffective. The victim serves a dual purpose as reason for

militancy and as authentic witness to and victim of injustice.

Fanon reminds us that all acts in defiance of the colonial "order" are interpreted as

violent acts. This is, of course, hypocritical. Colonialism is sustained, systemic and

naturalized violence (1963, p. 61). In order to ensure that it remains the naturalized and so

133 unchallenged state of affairs, any acts of resistance are held up as proof of the allegedly

inherent violence of the colonized. Seeing threats, rebels and bombs everywhere, masculinity

becomes hyper-visible and this is why, Fanon notes, Algerian women (and the veils they

wore) played such important roles in the Algerian resistance against French rule. In his

insightful analysis of women and their marker, the veil, in the Algerian resistance, Fanon

notes that women acted as sovereign subjects in the decolonial movement by ferrying supplies

and information to men (1965). Because women did not register to the French imperial order

as political agents, women were able to exercise their agency through the use of their

signifier, the veil. Because woman and her signifier (the veil) receded from view, her role as

anti-colonial rebel was critical to the Algerian resistance.

Who was participating in the demonstrations and protests on the Day of Action? While

the media was primed to capture images of media warriors, it was women, children, Elders,

singers, drummers, community workers, Native and non-Native people who nationally

participated in a day of demonstrations and protests that, in spite of the serious concerns that

prompted the actions, was as celebratory as it was demonstrative. Many reports implied that

leaders and speakers attempted to agitate but the crowds remained largely impassive to the

stories of injustice and abuse. Still other reporters implied that the participants

philosophically, intellectually and sometimes physically strayed from incendiary speakers because of a lack of commitment or the temptation that ice cream confections presented on a hot day:

134 Still, the day being as gorgeous as it was, even as the rhetoric grew steamier, it was easy to be distracted. When [Lee] Maracle began a statistical analysis of population changes since 1492 in aboriginal [sic] and European populations, the applause grew polite and desultory enough to have been a Canada Day crowd listening to a premier at a weenie roast. Several demonstrators strolled away, lured by the Dairy Belle ice- cream truck on the street. (Coyle, 2007, p. A21)

Reporters and photographers were at the ready, as were police - on horseback, bicycle and motorcycle - to report disruptions and agitated people. Proven wrong by the absence of violence, the media focused instead on the crowds, who in many cases were described as disinterested, passive and indifferent, in short, profoundly incapable of any action, much less violent action.

Concerning women concerning violence

Representations of violence and victimhood speak to a pervasive and systemic indifference to Indigenous Peoples' suffering, not only through the containment of suffering within the representation (which provides moral distance between the witness and the suffering communities) but also by presenting victimhood as totalizing. In the foregoing, I have invoked Fanon's account of the ethical promise of love and the threat of its corruption in the colonial context. I have set this in relation to my subsequent analysis of Treaty and its corruption within colonial history, jurisprudence and representational politics in colonial culture. Yet, Fanon is a controversial analyst of the specific violence that women face in colonialism (to say nothing of the condition of First Nations women). Fanon remains a crucial figure to anti-colonial and anti-racist criticism, and his analysis of race as an effect of colonialism offers a cogent method of criticism of the ways that race is given meaning and

135 direction in a violent system of physical, psychological, cultural and epistemological dis- and relocation that characterize colonialism. However, he remains a controversial and contradictory figure as he argues for decolonization while appearing to endorse patriarchal

standards for community-formation and belonging, which would persecute women's sexuality and reproductivity. While Fanon can help us to articulate the longterm and systemic nature of the violence against Native women and communities, he cannot offer insights into the particularity of violence against Native women and communities on Native lands. Fanon's vision of the colonized community whose borders are constructed through women's bodies

and desires, simply cannot offer more than generalities on the deep significance of place (the land) and dislocation to these communities. In this section, I will offer an alternate reading of

Fanon's account of desire within colonization and I retrieve Fanon's account of love as action for decolonization because it demonstrates the power of retrieval of relations in spite of colonization. It also helpfully demonstrates that all relations in the colonial and decolonial contexts are marked by struggle. I will then outline Aboriginal women's criticism of colonial patriarchy, retrieval and struggle.

After describing love as an ethical orientation Fanon commits the apparently unthinkable masculinist crime by stating: "The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making super-structure on my whole vision of the world" (Fanon, 1967a, p.

41). His analysis of perverted love within colonialism compels him to enunciate the terms of sexualized and racialized violence that pervert love, and to do so, he invokes two cases: the 136 relationship of the woman of colour with the white man; and the man of colour with the white woman. What follows is an enumeration of desire, sex, reproduction and rape. He damns the woman of colour, whom he describes as duped, for seeking ascendancy through "that little bit of whiteness in her life" (that would be her sexual relationship with the white man) as he damns the "lactification of the race" (the woman of colour's attempt to whiten herself by producing a lighter, mixed-race child). The man of colour grasps whiteness by grasping white breasts (he is also duped) and his white, female sexual partner allegedly harbors an unspoken rape-wish. Of the woman of colour's internal life and desires: "I know nothing about her"

(1967a, p. 180).

Fanon's initial expression of "manhood," paired with his complete silence on the desire and love (much less the subjectivity) of women of colour has been the source of much scrutiny and scorn. Rey Chow offers a damning critique of what she sees to be Fanon's casting of women of colour as feckless violators of racial and sexual boundaries, whose only power is affected through their willingness to offer up themselves sexually:

For Fanon at the postcolonized moment of nation formation, female sexuality is a traumatic event because it poses the danger of a double transgression. What disturbs him is that the women of color [sic], instead of staying put in their traditional positions as "gifts," as the conduits and vehicles that facilitate social relations and enable group identity, actually give themselves. By giving themselves, such women enter social relationships as active partners in the production of meanings rather than simply as the bearers of those meanings. And, if such sexual giving constitutes a significant form of transgression, this transgression is made doubly transgressive when women of color give themselves to white men. In the latter case, the crossing of patriarchal sexual boundaries crosses another crossing, the crossing of racial boundaries. The women of color are, accordingly, the dire of supplementary danger - of the dangerous supplement [...]- par excellence, adding to the injustice of race and the revolt of sex (and vice versa), and substituting/transforming the meaning of both at once. (Chow, 1998, p. 70, original emphasis) 137 Chow says that in Fanon's analysis, the black woman is reduced to the vessel of the black

community and as such, she is fundamentally incapable of making meaning and exercising communicative agency. Chow accuses Fanon of expressing a proprietary claim over black

women's sexuality, desire and reproductive potential, which, when directed toward white

men, threatens blackness itself. In effect, she says, Fanon condemns the black woman as traitor of her race and nation, since her desire is a betrayal of her own. After all, her sexuality

is never hers, rather her community's (she is, first and foremost, a vessel for the next

generation). Chow rightly attributes sexual acts as acts of political and community-oriented

agency but misses the coercion inherent to colonial desire, as she reduces Fanon's notion of

the "gift of seif to the act of sex rather than the intersubjective recognition of selfhood. The result is that Chow interprets Fanon's lauding of the "gift of seif as the sexual objectification

of women of colour, the prerequisite of man's assumption of manhood. Denean Sharpley-

Whiting argues that Fanon's seemingly unfair treatment of women's desire is not a reflection on him and his analysis, but the vicissitudes of colonial power that operate among raced and

gendered desiring bodies (1997, pp. 41-42). She argues that Fanon's interpretation of sex and desire is determined by the antiblack and antifemale colonial world. To ask if Fanon holds the woman of colour to a different standard than the man of colour is misdirected, she says, because the woman of colour is already held to different standards which fundamentally erase her. The experience (which is as much embodied as it is socio-politico-psychologically

138 located) of being simultaneously racialized and sexualized is to live at the confluence of depraved conventions of living, loving, being and desiring.

Sekyi-Otu (1996) argues that black women and men are affectively identical in the colonial context; both are alienated from their own agency, as they are alienated from their own embodied experiences. Sekyi-Otu says this means that the gender of the colonized does not matter here (ibid). According to him, Fanon "argue[s] that in the affective relations of the colonized white world and the white Other, the gender of the subject is inconsequential. There is a certain equality of male and female in their interactions with the ruling race, both in the mode of alienation and in the project of disalienation" (1996, p. 216). An important clarification needs to be made: simply because gender affectively does not matter in the colonial context does not mean that sex or gender difference in the face of sexualized violence are somehow neutralized in Sekyi-Otu's analysis of sex and desire in Fanon. This "certain equality" of the colonized female and male, ensured through colonial violence, entrenches the patriarchal status of colonial culture. Through the psycho-sexual vehicles of the rape fantasy, the pathological fear of and desire for the all-consuming black phallus, the threat of miscegenation, women's sexuality and reproductive potential, the dominant fixations of the ruling race prefigure colonized subjects as sexual objects with discernibly little internal difference. These colonial sexual pathologies are writ within the same chapter of colonial violence against the individual and community. This is why, Sekyi-Otu argues, "woman the measure" must be the gauge of communicative agency in the decolonial society.

139 I must briefly linger here to clarify what Sekyi-Otu means by "woman the measure"

and point out what I see to be the implications of this in relation to colonial violence.

"Woman the measure" to Sekyi-Otu references the expansion of democratic entitlements and

the assumption of communicative agency amongst all within decolonizing communities. It

also references the displacement of "the masculine misappropriation of genene human

entitlements" (1996, p. 213) (that is, man the measure as determinant of democratic

entitlement, in the most crassly literal sense of man). This variant of humanism which equates

the masculine with the people (or more accurately, limits the definition of the generic people

to the specific men) directs colonialism and in the new, decolonizing era, a new humanism is

required.

Perhaps the founding act of the new humanism - one that takes its bearings from the gender neutrality or rather gender inclusiveness of the Akan nåme for the human being, onipa - is to take the condition of woman as a mark of the degree to which human beings in a determinate place and time have truly come into their own. Perhaps a propaedeutic to an authentic humanism is to make woman the measure. (Sekyi-Out, 1996, p. 214)

Women assuming their own seif sovereignty signals the profound change in political and

communicative agency and is nothing short of imperative to truly sustained decolonial action.

No longer the exclusive right of men, women act, women speak. Hence Sekyi-Otu's apt

placement of Fanon's words at the very start of his discussion, "The men's words were no longer law. The women were no longer silent" (Fanon quoted in Sekyi-Otu, 1996, p. 211). I

agree with Sekyi-Otu that woman is the measure of agency-in-community, but I believe that

this analysis needs to be extended to account for reactionary politics: it is precisely because of

140 this that she is the target of reactionary colonial violence. In this case, she is tåken from woman-the-measure-of-agency to woman-the-measure, that is, she becomes the stand-in for her community and so the target of colonial violence. This happens as decolonial action increases, and as communicative and political agency is tåken (not given or gifted) by those who before had no voice; that is, by women of colour. Moving from silence to speech, object to agent, woman also becomes target because in her agency she is emblematic of the profound threat to the colonial order.98 Here the term "woman the measure" turns, as it is this "certain equality" within the crushing patriarchy of colonial culture (within unchallenged colonialism and within colonial reactionism against decolonization) that determines the colonized woman as the substitute for her community and the measure her community's oppression. Woman- the-measure becomes woman-the-target.

This "certain equality" in the affective relations of women and men of colour with whiteness that Sekyi-Otu sees, I argue, masks the dissonance of affective relations of women and men of colour within colonization. This state of "certain equality" ensures the continuation of the profound inequalities inherent to patriarchal cultures and woman's added burden of representing not only herself, but her community also in this era of decolonial

The apparent irony of Algerian acting as political agents while being perceived as silenced objects demonstrates Sekyi-Otu's argument that the agency of a community is only realizable when agency is tåken by its broad constituents, and most notably, by those who before were dismissed as politically and culturally irrelevant. However, today's lessons about the veil and women's agency are alarming. Recently in Canada (for example, the Reasonable Accommodation debates in Québec and the national debates concerning a woman's right to vote while veiled), France and their insistence that non-secularism is visible sameness (the hajib, pugrhi - commonly called turban - and all other visible signifiers of faith are barred from public institutions such as schools), veiled women in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan are targeted. Women are recognized for their potential agency and insurgency. The result is that they and the veils they wear are the subject of reactionary violence (taking the form of incendiary discourse, physical acts and political decrees) which would aim to suppress women's self-sovereignty. 141 action and colonial reaction. As such, there is little equality evident in this "certain equality"

in fact, characterizing colonial gendered relations as a "certain equality" risks foreclosing any

meaningful diseussion of the inherently sexualized nature of colonial violence and the extent

to which racialized women are targeted as a result. This persistence of inequality with the

gloss of equality in relations with whiteness demands that violence against women in

colonialism not be subsumed by the generally objectified status of community, because even

while there is discernibly little internal difference between the plights of the colonized man

and woman, this crushing almost-sameness constitutes another manifestation of colonial

violence. Jenny Sharpe explains colonial violence as sexualized violence, fully anticipated

and endorsed by colonial structures (1991, p. 37). On this Fanon would surely agree: "when a

soldier of the conquering army went to bed with a young Malagasy girl, there was

undoubtedly no tendency on his part to respect her entity as another person. The racial conflicts did not come later, they coexisted" (Fanon, 1967a, p. 46). Colonial culture is patriarchal culture. This means that power and politics are matters of sex and gender from the

very outset and that the forms of violence that women of colour encounter widely vary. Little

wonder then that as threats to colonial normativity emerge, women-as-agents would come into the crosshairs.

There is no denying that the colonial perception of woman as embodiment of her community has been brought to bear in the most brutally material ways possible through the work of apparently objective and depersonalized colonial policies. The federal government of the Dominion of Canada, in its efforts to administer (and undermine) treaties with Indigenous 142 Nations, invoked the reproductive potential of Indigenous women in its long-standing efforts

to argue that Indigenous Nations were not nations, but disorganized and fast-disappearing

groups of people. If community could be unhinged from Indigenous Peoples, turning

sovereign nations into pliable subjects of the crown, the scope and depth of treaties could be

diminished. The invention of "Indian Status" (the legal invention which attempts to define who qualifies as an "Indian" and is as such entitled to rights under the Indian Act - the act which administers the treaties) provided the means for such unhinging. "Indian Status" is a powerful example of the systemic violence waged against Indigenous women's sexuality in the nåme of colonial community. "Indian status" ensured that Indian women who married non-Indian men, along with the children of such unions, were stripped of their status, thus depriving them of their treaty rights and forcing them from their communities, into white-

dominated rural and urban centres. The same rules did not apply to Indian men who married

and had children with non-Indian women. Until this policy was overturned in 198599, Native women's sexuality and sexual agency was commandeered by a culture that figures women as men's reproductive prerogative, where male-headed households are the norm and where women's bodies represent assimilatable-communities-in-waiting. Indian status extends this presumed prerogative into the settler national sphere by affixing women's reproductive potential to colonial treaty. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Aboriginal children were also targeted by assimilationist policies when they were seized from their hornes by social workers and RCMP officers and adopted out to non-Aboriginal families (see York, 1992). This

99 Bill C-31, an amendment to the Indian Act, was passed in 1985. 143 practice of cultural genocide came to be known as "The 60s Scoop" and many adoptees continue to reconnect with their families and communities.

Seen as the embodiment of powerlessness, the woman of colour's interactions with whiteness are directed, if not determined, by multiple alienations: coloured and female, she is the measure of her community and the target of specifically sexual-racialized violence. In other words, in colonial eyes the woman of colour is never herse//, never sovereign, never an agent of her own will. This is, in Kim Anderson's words, "the construction of a negative identity" (2000) whose roots are found within colonial representational strategies. With the forces of representation assuming community through suffering, the particular nature of her own suffering, even as it is inextricably connected to her community, is pushed from our field of vision. Thinking through the crushing generality imposed by colonial violence in Canada means confronting the representations of victimization as totalizing, of community as generic, of the violence committed against Native women as inevitable and of the construction of these women-victims as no one's business. The effects of these images, the policies they inform and are informed by, the assumptions and attitudes of Native womanhood are immediately and physically felt on the bodies of Aboriginal women (LaRocque, 1996, p. 12). Métis and Plains

Cree scholar Emma LaRocque demystifies the connections between colonial representational practices and violence against Aboriginal women: "The dehumanizing portrayal of the

'squaw' and the over-sexualization of Native females such as in Walt Disney's Pocohontas surely render all Native female persons vulnerable" (1996, p. 12, original italics). However, the representation of Aboriginal women as voiceless victims speaks more to racist 144 representational practices and a settler culture within which such images garner meaning and

"authenticity." LaRocque argues that her critical voice stands as a medium of textual

resistance (1996). Such resistance is needed as colonial culture presents white masculinity as

inherently good, desirable and fundamentally irresistible (1990). According to colonial patriarchy, LaRocque argues, Native women are not permitted to reject white masculinity, because this sexual power is "snakily connected to the male ego" (1990, p. 87) and therefore

must be protected at all costs.

Lee Maracle (1996) explains that women constitute the heart of Native communities,

and that patriarchy served colonial ends, by imposing and then enforcing a radically different

worldview, one where women were subservient, rather than partners to men (1996, especially pp. 62-70; 1993). The introduction of colonial patriarchy was, says Kim Anderson, the first

time in Native history that Native women were marginalized and excluded, their power and

knowledge ignored (2000, p. 70). As I have endeavored to explain, patriarchy, introduced and enforced through colonialism ensured the erasure of women's subjectivities from colonial

discourse, policies and action. Women actively resisted the imposition of patriarchy because they recognized its devastating effects on their cultures, societies, and communities, to say nothing of the way that patriarchy threatened women's very lives (Stevenson, 1999). The

application of feminist theory appears ideal here. However, its legacy of speaking/or women of colour, which was so crucial to early feminist movement's organizing100 threatens to

100 Vron Ware's Be vond the pale (1992) examines the construction of white femininity through colonialism and the involvement of European women in the disciplining of racial categories in the colonies through early feminist 145 alienate women of colour, particularly Aboriginal women from feminism. The first point of cleavage separating women of colour from early feminism can be found in its domination by middle-class, heterosexual, white women whose ideas of womanhood flåtten out women's difference, taking "womanhood" to mean women like them (heterosexual, middle-class white women). This universalism will not do:

While it is evident that many women suffer from sexist tyranny, there is little indication that this forges 'a common bond among all women' there is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share - differences which are rarely transcended. (hooks, 1984, p. 4).

The would-be helping acts of white women on behalf of their Othered sisters on one hand demonstrated the strategic use of "universal womanhood" that would protect women of colour from western patriarchy101, while on the other hand, erasing the colonial conditions within which women of colour lived and worked and, importantly, also erasing the power of Native women to resist (Carty, 1999).

This indicates another point of cleavage: because feminism is not reflexive of

Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing, its vision of justice and equality for women is non-

Aboriginal and as such, fails to recognize the power of Aboriginal spirituality, traditions and philosophies which place women at the centre of life (this includes political, cultural, economic, social and spiritual life). Monture-Angus explains the implications of the

organizing to end slavery and lynching. In these ostensibly helping acts, white women secured their position as morally, culturally and politically superior to people of colour in the colonies. 101 Kim Anderson (2000) notes that the notion of universal womanhood is deeply problematic, especially since it is often invoked in "feminist circles" (p. 274) that fail to actively query their organization on Aboriginal land and thereby their accountability to Aboriginal women specifically and communities generally. 146 imposition of a universal womanhood that fails to meaningfully root itself in Aboriginal tradition:

My ability to re-claim my position in the world as a Haudenosaunee woman is preconditioned on the ability of our men to remember the traditions that we have lost. These traditions are not found in the European roots of the feminist movement [...]. Involving myself deeply in the women' s movement, including locating my quest for identity there, means being willing to accept less than the position accorded to women of my nation historically. (Monture-Angus, 1995, p. 179)

That these facts remain marginal to non-Native academic discourse speaks to the nature of power in the systematic vanishment of Native women's power in non-Native critical work

(ibid). In an effort to mobilize intellectual and activist resources against colonial patriarchy, self-identified Aboriginal feminist Joyce Green (Ktunaxa, Cree-Scots Métis and English) expresses a distinctly Aboriginal feminism, which is centered by Aboriginal knowledges

(2007b). She maintains that feminism is essential if the patriarchal violence installed through colonialism is to be dismantled. Aboriginal feminism with the Third World women's movement has crafted powerful tools to challenge colonial power dynamics, envision emancipation and to return Aboriginal women to the centre through its focus on the intersectional nature of sexist and racist oppression and its critique of the invocation of women in colonial nation-claims (Green, 2007b; St. Denis, 2007, pp. 47-49). "The strength and tenacity of female resistance to colonial intrusion is well known among Aboriginal

Peoples - as the old Cheyenne proverb goes, 'A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground'" (Stevenson, 1999, p. 63; see also Brant, 1992, p. 102).

147 The hearts of women are not on the ground, says Emerance Baker (2005) who identifies the works of Native women's stories and writing as denaturalizing the ways that

Native women's bodies, subjectivities, laws, epistemologies are made to disappear (Baker,

2005, p. 2). The stories of Native women and scholars is a reassertion of power and a reclamation of academic spaces where Native women's stories have been actively marginalized and excluded (Baker, 2005). Baker also notes that Native women's storytelling is more than resistance, but rather a creativity at whose centre is Indigenous knowledge, rather than "mainstream critical thought, where our theorizing and action are far too often regarded as derivative and found lacking" (Baker, 2005, p. 9).

According to Amnesty International, over the past 20 years, approximately 500

Aboriginal women and girls have been reported missing or murdered across Canada. The stretch of Highway 16 that connects Prince George to Prince Rupert in British Columbia is known as The Highway of Tears because since 1990, nine women and girls have been reported missing or murdered there, eight of whom were Native. Until a white woman was reported missing in June 2002 the general public knew little or nothing of The Highway of

Tears. The estimated number of actual murdered and missing women and girls on that stretch of road is as high as 50. Highway 16 is only one location among many. Urban centres such as

Saskatoon, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Toronto are sites of missing and murdered

First Nations women and girls. Rural and remote areas have similar stories to tell. Sex workers in Vancouver's downtown east-side have lived with the fear of at least one serial killer since 1984. Robert William Picton has been tried for the murders of six women, Sereena 148 Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin and Brenda Wolfe.

Picton was found guilty of second degree murder in all six counts (he has since appealed his conviction) and faces at least one other trial for the murders of twenty more women.

Federal statistics report that women with Indian Status who are between 25 and 44 years old are five times more likely to die as a result of violence than non-Indian women of the same age range. Given that violence against women and girls is often dramatically under- reported and given the systemic violence that First Nations peoples face, these figures are very likely modest. According to Amnesty International's Stolen Sisters Report (2004), the perpetrators of fatal violence against Aboriginal women are "non-Aboriginal" men. The

Report goes on to indict the Canadian government and justice system and the broadly circulating stereotypes of First Nations women and girls. The report suggests that it is necessary to expand the popular definition of violence beyond the notion of apparently discreet instances of physical violence to the culture of violence that enables, even necessitates this physical violence. Physical violence, threats, intimidation, delays in the legal process, mishandled trials, light seritences to perpetrators of violence against First Nations women all constitute entries in the continuum of colonial violence.

Janice Acoose argues that is it not possible to seperate the image of the "easy squaw" and the "Indian Princess" from violence against First Nations women and girls (1995). Those images obscure our view of the systemic and historical nature of violence by attributing it to the internal desires of the victim; that she, in short, desires or deserves the violence she experiences. The Report of the Manitoba Justice Inquiry (1999) states that had Helen Betty 149 Osborne - a woman who was brutally sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered in 1971 - not been a First Nations woman, she would not have been killed. Police actively ignored the practice that many white men in The Pas, Manitoba had of "cruising" for Aboriginal women and when she was reported missing, they failed to act in a timely way, were dismissive and disrespectful to her family, and their investigation was deeply flawed. Further, the four drunk white men who killed her, in the words of the report, "seemed to be operating on the assumption that Aboriginal women were promiscuous and open to enticement through alcohol and violence. It is evident that the men who abducted Osborne believed that young Aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification" (Aboriginal Justice,

1999). Osborne died in 1971. In 2003, her cousin, Felicia Solomon was killed. Osborne was

19 at the time of her death; Solomon was 16. When Solomon's parents first went to the police to file a Missing Person's Report they were told that they would have to wait 48 hours:

Felicia's family says the Winnipeg police did not treat the case seriously when they first reported Felicia missing. A Winnipeg police spokesperson told Amnesty International that the force responds to missing persons reports based on an assessment of the likely risk to the missing person and does not have a policy of waiting 48 hours for the person to turn up, as many in the public believe. However, the family says that the officers who took the report said that they could not take action until another 48 hours had passed. The first posters seeking information on Felicia Solomon's disappearance were distributed by the family, not the police. A family member comments: "When something happens to someone else's child, whether they are white or from any other kind of race or culture, the police do everything. It' s completely different when an Indian person goes missing." In June 2003, body parts were found that were later identified as Felicia Solomon's. Her killer has not been found. (Amnesty International, 2004)

With the gruesome facts of colonial violence against First Nations women and girls, representations of and about them paradoxically appear to have little to do with them, rather,

150 they are connected to an ambiguously general image of a faceless and nameless collective of women-victims.

"What is it about numbers?" Christine Welsh wonders. In her documentary, Finding

Dawn (Eriksen, 2006), Welsh attempts to make the numbers of murdered and missing First

Nations women real by bringing to life the story of Dawn Crey, a woman who in 2000 went missing from Vancouver's downtown east-side. Crey was from the Storlo Nation (whose traditional territory encompasses what is now called the Fraser Valley in British Columbia), she was also a mother, a sister and in regular contact with her family. Like many of the women who have been reported missing from this neighborhood, Crey was a substance- addicted sex trade worker and was receiving regular methadone treatments. Above all, Crey was an active member of the community in the downtown east-side, and of her Sto:lo community. Crey's brother, Ernie, analyzes his sister's fate as the combination of a number of failures: of the Vancouver police, social apathy and Canadian policies of cultural genocide:

"Aboriginal women like my sister who grew up in foster hornes [Crey was tåken in the 60s

Scoop] and li ved down there [Vancover's downtown east-side] out of poverty and desperation didn't have a lot of choice about their pathway in life. It's still our responsibility as a society to care about them and do everything we can to find them" (More east-side, 2001). The systematic disappearance of dozens of women from this neighborhood since the 1980s had been the subject of a number of national and local news stories, even receiving pan- continental coverage thanks to the true-crime television show "America's Most Wanted." Yet in 2001 the police investigation was, in the words of Constable Anne Drennan, spokesperson 151 for Vancouver's police, pared down to "a skeleton staff (ibid). The numbers are

overwhelming. In spite of the many reports from government102, non-governmental

organizations103, universities and community outreach services104, and extensive media

coverage, inaction and what can only be described as carefully nurtured ignorance continue.105

In Sherene Razack's exhaustive analysis of the murder of Pamela George (a woman,

mother, citizen of the Saulteaux nation and occasional sex-worker) and the trial of her killers,

Alex Ternowetsky and Steven Kummerfield (both middle class, white university students),

she argues that violence is differently perceived on the basis of race and special belonging

(2002). This is to say that the physical space a potential victim of fatal violence inhabits (be it the street, the office or the home) is as racialized as the subject herself. The Stroll of Regina,

Saskatchewan, the area that Pamela George was working on the night of her murder, is

considered that kind ofplace where prostitution and violence occur. More specifically, it is considered the kind of place on which one might expect to find Aboriginal women working in the sex trade. And if in that kind of place, the logic goes, one can only expect to encounter violence. This racialized space coupled with the racialized body who inhabits it, pro vide an

alibi for potential violence. Why inhabit that space, then? Simplistic logic given the

102 See the Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission's Final Report of the Manitoba Justice Inquiry (1999). 103 For example, Amnesty International, 2004. 104 See Chanel Martin's "We are the missing" (2007), published in the report on the history of sex workers in the construction of Vancouver by Simon Fraser University. 105 Beverley Jacobs and Andrea Williams (2008) examine violence against Aboriginal women as a legacy of residential schooling which the Native Women's Association of Canada and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Indian Residential Schools continues to confront. 152 complicated nature of displacement and relocation in colonized society. Her relocations and dispossessions, as an Aboriginal woman in colonized space means that she is isolated and whether or not this is valid, she is considered cut off from her family and community:

"Ironically, it is their very dispossession that is held against them when Aboriginal women encounter violence on the streets" (Razack, 2002a, p. 136). Colonial violence visited upon

Aboriginal women declares: already alone and degenerate, these women devalue their own lives, and as such, the violence they experience is less serious, less repulsive, less affronting than if it had been visited upon another subject in another space.

The impulse to recite statistics concerning violence against First Nations women and girls invites a sense of connection to the matter at hand, which has been rendered abstract thanks to the abundance of numbers which are derived and analyzed. As with other forms of infra-knowledge, this obsession with numbers, with little desire for its assembled meanings and deep histories, provides the semblance of connection without the cost of commitment.

Even if the faces of the missing and murdered women and girls were to flood the media sphere, their seemingly permanent status as victims and their sheer numbers ensure that they remain in effect, faceless and generic. The apparent irony of violence against First Nations women and girls is that they are targeted because they stand in for their communities, and when they are targeted, they become isolated. Their deaths and disappearances become no one's responsibility or concern and they, in turn, become no one's women.

153 Chapter 5 Toward decolonization: Treaty and sovereignty in Canada

Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love, a gift of seif, the ultimate stage ofwhat by common accord is called ethical orientation. -Fanon, 1967a, p. 41

Within colonialism, treaties and images are both standardized and simplified; both

perversions of ethically just paths. This chapter traces the potential for settler and Native

agency in Indigenous understandings of Treaty. Locating settler and Native agency within

Indigenous political philosophies helps to dismantle the assumption that colonization brought

political philosophy to the Americas. Many critics of settler political philosophy will attest

that Indigenous political philosophies pre-existed contact and continue today, despite the

imposition of settler law which, if it does recognize its Indigenous counterpart, does so only

partially (see Adams, 1995; Deloria, 1993; Monture-Angus, 1999; Turner, 2006; Warrior,

1995). Negligence marks today's settler treatment of Treaties,106 which, over time have

become displaced from their specific political and spatial locations within Indigenous nations.

Through this displacement, Treaty has come to mean something altogether contrary to its

original meaning. I say that Treaty has come to mean to emphasize that its meanings and uses

have changed over time, and to indicate that its meanings and uses can yet change in the

service of decolonization. The meaning of Treaties has now become the subject of legal battles fought in the courts. This is a far cry from love. Yet I argue, following Henderson

1061 choose the words, "today's settler treatment" intentionally: I am referring to settler culture, governance and settlers as a collective. 154 (2002) and Turner (2006) that Treaty, as defined by Aboriginal political philosophies, has

always been a question of relations. Fanon's understanding of love helps us to understand the politics of misrecognition in the colonial state. Fanon cannot and should not replace Treaty as per Aboriginal political philosophy, his purpose here is to shed light on the settler

misrecognition of what Treaty is and should be. Glen Coulthard (2008) argues for a Fanonian understanding of misrecognition in the Canadian colonial context by placing Fanon in conversation with Charles Taylor who argues that that in pluralist societies such as Canada's,

the recognition of cultural difference is foundational to any expression of democracy and

universal humanity (Taylor, 1994). In short, according to Taylor, we must recognize Others

(ibid). This does not mean that the culture-to-be-recognized must mimic the dominant, but that it is the responsibility of the dominant culture to recognize its Other. In order for

citizenship to have substantive value in the society that balances the universal with the particular, differences between citizens must be respected. This recognition of difference, or the politics of recognition as Taylor calls it, is remarkably different from the political

imperative for social harmony by way of the refusal to recognize or weigh difference

differently.

Where the politics of universal dignity fought for forms of nondiscrimination that were quite 'blind' to the ways in which citizens differ, the politics of difference often redefines nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment. So members of aboriginal bands [sic] will get certain rights and powers not enjoyed by other Canadians, if the demands for native self-government are finally agreed on, and certain minorities will get the right to exclude others in order to preserve their cultural integrity. (Taylor, 1994, pp. 39-40)

155 This is a seemingly apt endorsement of the principle of equity in modern liberal societies: equality can only be achieved through the recognition of difference and the implementation of differential treatment when the need is apparent. It means that the relationship between the particular citizen and the nation (as well as its society) differs according to the citizen's difference. It also means that we must ensure the just distribution of material, cultural and political resources. In spite of his endorsement of plurality in the service of the singular nation and universalist principles of human rights, Taylor fails to recognize that the very same hands that open to embrace difference can close around the necks of Others. Ostensibly inclusive gestures amount to another exclusion, this version more insidious than explicit exclusion because it appears transformatively inclusive. However, Taylor fails to question the constitution of this we.

Coulthard argues that Fanon is important to understanding contemporary Canadian colonial politics because he recognizes the interplay between the subjective and objective in colonialism. In other words, yes, m/srecognition is vastly damaging to those misrecognized.

More than this, however, Fanon argues that this form of misrecognition must be met with more than a liberalist expansion of recognition which would focus attention on increased recognition rather than the social and political structures which secure the practice of colonial

(mis)recognition. It must rather be met with radical struggle for the reorganization of power.

Treaty must be understood to be a living feature of First Nations' sovereignty, if the lot of the settler is ever to move toward an ethical position in relation to First Nations. Treaty in relation to Indigenous political philosophies constitutes a form of recognition that is 156 dialogical, productive; this form of recognition is love as Fanon sees it. Treaty according to

settler law and political philosophy asphyxiates true recognition and fatally reduces

Indigenous sovereignty. Patricia Monture-Angus makes the case for full recognition by pointing to the failings of our current state of affairs, "Whites can accept that Aboriginal

people have politics (albeit not fully) but do not recognize that we equally have theologies, epistemologies, knowledge systems, pedagogy and history. These are all collapsed into mere

'perspective', thus making actual the white fallacy of Aboriginal inferiority" (2000, p. 28). In the classification of Aboriginal political and intellectual life as "perspective" (as in the

Aboriginal perspective), the image of the white settler as the bringer of knowledge is thus enforced.

Treaties are critically important methods of securing diplomatic relations in

Aboriginal political philosophies. These political and diplomatic methods predate contact with

Europeans by centuries and understanding them is central to understanding the treaties struck between Aboriginal and European nations, and this remains under-recognized by many non-

Aboriginal scholars, says Anishnaabe researcher, educator and negotiator Leanne Simpson

(2008, p. 31). Simpson explains that Treaties need to be understood in the context of

Aboriginal worldviews and knowledge systems, as such, Treaties are sacred texts, made between nations "in the presence of the spiritual world and solemnized in ceremony" (2008, p. 29). Treaty stories are told during these ceremonies. Robert A. Williams, Jr. (Lumbee) notes that Aboriginal stories provide a way of envisioning justice because they offer a means of imagining communities beyond the limits of our perception and experience (1997, p. 87). 157 They also offer lessons in diplomacy and treaty making (Williams, 1997). When Aboriginal peoples and European newcomers made Treaty, Williams explains, stories were told.

"Through their treaty stories, American Indian diplomats of the Encounter era sought to educate the strange and alien-seeming newcomers to their world as to what was meant by treaty partners behaving as relatives toward each other" (Williams, 1997, p. 89). European signatories of ten failed to grasp the importance of ceremony and stories, viewing both as unnecessary, rather than integral to Treaty (Williams, 1997).

Two treaties directly impact First Nations crossing borders at Niagara Falls: the Jay

Treaty of 1796 and the Treaty of Ghent of 1814. The Jay Treaty was agreed upon after the

American Revolution, in part to secure peace and trade relations between the nascent

American Republic and the British Empire (whose colonial interests were threatened by

France's growing influence in the "new world"). The treaty also formalized the borderlines between the British colony and American Republic. Indigenous peoples (the Six Nations

Confederacy in particular) had fought on the side of the Americans, and their territories spanned the newly formed colonial border - the Jay Treaty ensured that their territories remained intact and that they would be able to freely cross the colonial border. The Treaty of

Ghent, formed after the War of 1812, affirms the commitments made in Jay; it too was formed to secure peace and trade between the American Republic and the Empire of Britain.

There is a significant difference between agreeing upon Treaty and signing Treaty. The first references its consensus-based formation, the second, and in popular settler consciousness, indicates the closure of this formation. 158 These two documents, born of European legal traditions, form and inform local settler political culture.

There is no "happily ever after" in the understanding of Treaty as the cultivation and maintenance pf relationships; there is only hard and constant work, rewarding nonetheless.

The alternative is a treaty system that continues to alienate both Native and settler and the further reliance on a process of abrogation and derogation of rights, which displaces everyone from justice and place.

[T]he political culture of a place cannot be something apart from the place itself. The community which develops and depends upon that culture is also, in a fundamental way, a part of that place; and the ways in which a 'people' become 'public,' the ways in which they constitute themselves as a people, are determined by deep convictions about that participation in place, and the culture which is nourished by it. (Chamberlin, 1997, pp.13-14)

In short, the political affirmation of a "people" (a term which implies coherent cultural and political identification) occurs through Indigenous political cultures.

"Motion toward the world"

Thus Fanon sets out to examine the impact of colonization on love. This is where he admits to believing in the possibility of love, particularly in the face of colonization's crushing inhumanity. Love, he says can be "perverted," twisted from a "value-making superstructure" (ibid) to a method of enslavement. In Fanon's eyes, "authentic" love is a means of recognition, and this is critically important as he describes the psychic, social and moral wasteland wrought by colonization and the dislocation of the seif from selfhood. How then do the selves, rendered unrecognizable and dislocated, love? Fanon would likely have

159 responded to the tagline of the movie, "Love Story" with disgust; love is håving to say you

are sorry. In recognizing one's need to atone for a wrong done, and the other's need to hear

the apology, comes the "gift of seif - not only a gift from one's own seif (and never the

surrender of selfhood), but the recognition of the other's selfhood. Colonization prevents such

recognition. Because love can be "authentic" (a method of recognition) or "perverse" (a

method of oppression), it is not enough, he argues, to ask whom one loves. That question on

its own reveals little about the workings of power in colonialism because it says nothing about

the state of that love, its status as perverse or authentic. How and why one loves provides the

foundation upon which the analysis of ethical orientation within colonization and toward

decolonization can be structured. Love between colonizer and colonized is an impossibility

without the fundamental metamorphosis of both of them, beyond the confines of the colonial

order. Love demands the authentic seif. Love and its transformative powers as an "ethical

orientation," therefore, are to be believed in.

The following questions guide this chapter: How is Treaty to serve as the method by

which ethical orientation toward decolonization can be realized when its uses have been so

clearly corrupted? Given the obscurity of "us," how can we begin to think through the politics

of identification and identity in relation to Treaty in a way that would enable our moving forward? How can we think through Treaty and community in a way that would enable us to

acknowledge and act upon our responsibilities to decolonization? In short, are we to believe in the ethical potential of Treaty?

160 Beginning from the position that colonization fundamentally restructures all facets of life, I argue that we have confused injustice and the inversion of ethics with the ethical and just path. Confronted with injustice and inverted ethics, what would justice and ethics look like now? Better still, if we know only injustice and perverse ethics, how can we envision a better life? I argue that the answer to this question is found by returning to a system of ethics that colonial jurisprudence has relegated to the scrap bins of colonial history. Treaty, understood through Indigenous political philosophies, presents a way of reorienting justice and ethics. Once the colonial abuses of Treaty are identified and pulled apart from this fuller and more dynamic sense of Treaty, we are left to confront the challenge of moving forward through colonization' s complete disorder.

I follow Fanon in making language and love emblematic of the norms of communicative bodies and agency. And I follow him in tracing the vicissitudes of language and love in the context of colonial and racial subjugation. This chapter outlines the ethical premise of my dissertation by arguing that Treaty is the method by which the ethical orientation toward decolonization can be effected. An honest assessment of our cultural climate and the extremely limiting popular and governmental perceptions of and approaches to Treaty would reveal that the recognition of Treaty alone is not enough. By this I mean that it is not enough to reference the existence of Aboriginal Treaty, in particular the Covenant

Chain of Silver, what is required is the submission to Treaty and an direct reckoning with our inability or unwillingness to live by its terms, while expending with the assumption of the normativity of settler law. There appears to be something that blocks our movement from 161 where we stand today to the path of Treaty and this is rooted in the perception that Treaty is historically contained within colonial law. The paralysis that prevents us from moving forward comes from the conviction that our actions mean little, and that personal responsibility is irrelevant. This definition of Treaty reflects the supremacy of colonial jurisprudence, but does not and should not stunt what Treaty has meant and can yet again mean. This chapter understands Treaty from the standpoint of Indigenous sovereignty as an affirmation of relations. I will discuss Treaty's ethical potential in some detail in the pages to follow. For now, an important distinction must be made: Treaty (signified by the capital T) indicates the operation of Indigenous political philosophies and signals an ethic of relationality, while treaty (signified by the lowercase t) indicates the colonial juridical reduction of relations to the ceding of rights and responsibilities. Treaty has decolonial potential while treaty leads to stagnation and paralysis at best and violence at worst. Fanon describes colonialism as the profound restructuring of societies; the complete reorganization of people in space and time (1963). Colonialism is, in short, a profound and pervasive state of violence (Fanon, 1963). When violence structures all aspects of colonial life, how is paralysis to be overcome and how is the ethical promise of Treaty, like that of love, to be realized?

Where do we stand here and now, where is this place in which we are paralyzed? As I have earlier argued, we is no a priori fact here in the colonial context, separated as we are between colonizer and colonized, and by factors of history, location and conviction. The we for the purposes of this chapter exposes the ambiguity of shared identification in the colonial context. It also renders agency and responsibility, impossibly disembodied. Given this, where 162 do we stand? At the time of writing this, we stand at the centre of a powder keg. The media tell us that we face an immediate future of protests and roadblocks where the specter of violent confrontation looms large. Confrontations such as those at Caledonia and Ipperwash reveal a good deal about the routine inability to move forward in Canada today. Moving forward involves accepting the risk that one moves on possibly unstable ground, that the movement from paralysis to decolonization is arduous and not at all pretty. "Racism is the poison that crippled my tree. It also bent yours in all kinds of crazy directions. A talk, an intimate talk, between an ex-racist and an ex-victim of racism is not apt to be pretty," says

Lee Maracle (1996, p. 138). Continued inhumanity is the consequence of avoiding this intimate talk.

At the risk of courting circularity, I want to argue that colonial culture stands in the way of our recognizing Treaty as anything other than a product of colonial jurisprudence. This chapter is about the culture that produced the myth of the Maid of the Mist: not the culture of the 1850s, when she first appeared in print, but of today, the culture that keeps the Maid of the

Mist, if not alive and well, then on life-support. I argue that in spite of the wealth of work on colonial representational practices it is imperative to revisit this subject in the framework of moving toward decolonization by moving toward Treaty. I will argue that this understanding of Treaty must not be limited to the operation of colonial law. Rather it must be elicited from

108 In Aboriginal resistance to settler appropriations of land (as per the Caledonia reclamation, the Oka and Ipperwash resistances, and the Temagami blockades) both federal and provincial governments have been unwilling to treat Aboriginal land claims as living and Treaty rights as active. As McNab (2003) explains, the federal government remains woefully underprepared to deal with crises arising from land claim disputes, choosing instead to strike "a committee to respond to Aboriginal emergencies" (McNab, 2003, p. 47) which would respond to these disputes only after reaching crisis levels. 163 Indigenous philosophies of ethical relations, ethical relations which should direct perceptions and representations of community in colonialism in ways that affirm agency and responsibility to decolonization. The relationship between violence, representation and responsibility is central to understanding decolonial ethics in Canada, and it is critically important to moving toward Treaty because representations play an important part in the mystification of colonial culture, a culture of latent and manifest violence.

Media theorists have largely rejected the thesis that violent images beget violent acts, claiming that while representations may portray violence, they are not, of themselves, violent.

109 Yet, representations contribute to culture in of ten unexpected ways. Given the extent to which violent representations are invoked in relation to violence against First Nations people, particularly women and girls, this problem deserves another look. The connections between violence and representations, especially in relation to violence against First Nations women and girls, suggests that if the relationship between the two is not causal, at the very least, it exposes a cultural manifestation of the violence of colonialism. This colonial violence structures our commitment to (colonial) treaty. Representation is not separate from both colonial treaty and Indigenous Treaty; rather is a part of them. We have popularly considered treaty as a method of colonization and the skepticism treaty now garners is deserved. In the early days of treaty-formation, as the representatives of the Crown110 advanced westward, the treaty process became standardized, thus giving rise to numbered treaties that encompass

109 For an answer to an analogous objection to the argument that representation and violence are not directly connected, see Catharine MåcKinnon's Onlv words (1993). 110 The term "the crown" is the technical term for "government," which indicates the British common-law juridical tradition. In the settler nation, "the crown" takes on the added meaning of the symbol of imperial authority. 164 sometimes several different nations at once. It is commonly accepted that treaty agents promised much but delivered little, agreed to oral treaties but failed to record these oral treaties and thus, in the eyes of the Crown, validate them. This, I will argue, is one piece in the story of how Treaty has come to signify oppression in Canada, and it is a manifestation of colonial violence that spans representational and juridical spheres.

Complete disorder: From Treaty to treaty

Colonization is the profound reorganization of society and sense. Jonathan Lear's

(2006) analysis of the Crow Nation's epistemic struggles after the decimation of the buffalo, their relocation to gradually diminishing reservations and the imposition of the American

Republic's militaristic Indian policies111 demonstrates the impossibility of carrying forward what it meant to be Crow into this new colonial order. Everything that was Crow appeared, because of colonialism, to be sealed in the past, with no material referent. The Crow are then faced with the following question: åfter all you know has been tåken away, how will you no w move forward? Better still: how will you carry forward what you know now that making sense no longer makes sense? Similarly, as a child, Métis scholar and activist Howard Adams appreciated the moral significance of the poverty and powerlessness of his people: "I knew my shame by looking 'Indian,' by living in a log shack, by eating bannock and lard," (1995, p. 7). In short, being Métis was the embodiment of everything that the colonial order defined as inferior. The norms and standards of the colonial order are "automatically accepted as

111 See my chapters "Vanishing at the border" and "Home at the bridge" for more detailed discussions of the settler state's Indian policies. 165 politically and culturally correct. In this way, it has a moral value" (ibid, my emphasis).

Ascribing a negative moral value to being constitutes not only the inversion of an already established normative order, but also its mutilation, making it more reasonable to speak of a colonial disorder than a colonial order.

With considerable irony Fanon writes of decolonization as "a program of complete disorder" (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). In the death throes of the colonial order, the colonizer points out the gifts of the colonial language, religion and law. Decolonization, then, is seen as the rejection of reason, the breakdown of language, communication and morality; "the native is

[...] the negation of values" (Fanon, 1963, p. 41). "The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: 'This land was created by us'; he is the unceasing cause: 'If we leave, all this is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle

Ages'" (Fanon, 1963, p. 51). These are not two different ethical orders in tension. The struggle between colonizer and Native is not only a matter of jockeying for discursive supremacy; the struggle is total and for the Native, it is about survival (Fanon, 1963, p. 41).

Violence is never far behind as the ethics of the colonizer are enforced through institutional and military coercion. Every discussion of ethical orders in the colonial context must be infused with the understanding that recognition, colonial ethics (along with its accompanying violence) and the law are tightly intertwinéd.

As the operation of colonial ethics, treaties were the legal means by which Native lands were appropriated and they were indispensable in the drive to secure the west for the

Dominion of Canada, against the threat of the American Republic's encroachment. The Royal 166 Proclamation of 1763 obliged the Crown to enter into treaty with First Nations. According to the Proclamation, settlement on Native lands was not possible without first acquiring those lands (and by extension, extinguishing Native usufructuary rights) by way of treaty (Dickason

& McNab, 2009). From the Crown's perspective, Native rights were limited to usufructuary rights, or the right to use the land and harvest its surface resources. This right does not involve the recognition of sovereignty; it is strictly confined to the right to use the land. Once the

Crown acquired the land it could then, according to the Proclamation, parcel it out to settlers.

The remaining lands would be held in trust112 for Native Peoples. Numbered treaties are the heirs of the Royal Proclamation. In 1871 the first of what would become eleven treaties was signed. It is no accident that numbered treaties one through four as well as seven secured the lands immediately north of the present border, spanning the provinces of Ontario to Alberta

(Dickason & McNab, 2009).

Rather than attending to ethical relations between sovereign nations, from the Crown's perspective, treaties were about Canada's nation building and this was only possible once

Aboriginal rights were disassembled. Once a treaty was signed, the Crown viewed Aboriginal nation's rights to be permanently and completely abrogated or derogated (Dickason &

McNab, 2009). Because the goal was speedy land acquisition, treaties became standardized forms, rather than agreements negotiated in good faith. The existence of numbered treaties attests to this. Numbered treaties cover sweeping tracts of land and often, Indian Agents (the

112 The justification provided for this was that Native Peoples needed protection from unscrupulous settlers who would try to swindle lands from them. 167 representatives of the Crown who were charged with the duty of surveying First Nations and

ensuring that they signed on to treaties) sometimes failed to recognize the people living there

11-3

as a People, rather than an aimless and disordered group of wanderers. Many factors -

some intentional, some indirect - conspired to give the Crown considerable advantage when

negotiating treaties: pressure on resources from other displaced First Nations and encroaching

settlers, pressure from Indian Agents, the mounting military threat from the Northwest

Mounted Police, communities decimated by or suffering from epidemics. In some cases, the

Crown even drafted whole treaties without any consultation with First Nations (ibid). Today,

the Crown uses treaties to limit First People's ability to exercise even usufructuary rights.

Further, as Leanne Simpson explains, Treaties have come to be "entrenched in the European

legal system and the academy, and [...] there are few written records of treaty agreements

made in the early colonial period where Indigenous perspectives were most influential"

(Simpson, 2008, p. 31). First Nations' inherent rights have been, thanks to colonial jurisprudence and the inability (or unwillingness) to appreciate Treaty as a method of pre-

contact Aboriginal political philosophies, systematically chipped away for at least the past

150 years. One of the effects of these misuses has been to supplant the normativity of

Indigenous Treaty.

This was the case with the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation. Indian Agents did not travel to the Albertan interior, assuming that the climate and terrain were too inhospitable to support social organization. This assumption, of course, was categorically wrong. The consequences of this are visited upon the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation, which has been fighting for recognition as a First Nation, which is therefore entitled to Treaty, with all of the rights and responsibilities that accompany this recognition. See John Goddard's Last stand of the Lubicon Cree (1991) and Dawn Martin-Hill's The Lubicon Lake Cree Nation: Indigenous knowledge and power (2008). 168 Given these historical and contemporary misuses, the prospect of looking to Treaty as

a method to enable ethical orientation toward decolonization appears wildly misguided. Peter

Kulchyski criticizes today's treatment of Aboriginal rights as a struggle to secure "the remaining remainder" (Kulchyski, 1994, p. 2). This is to say that treaties, themselves the product of the Crown's effort to dismantle Aboriginal rights, amount to the continuation, at best, of political stagnation, and at worst, the further alienation of Aboriginal Peoples from a

system of law that determines them. According to the law:

the crown [sic] "owns" all the land; Aboriginal people merely have some undefined legal interest in it. This legal fiction becomes the ground of Aboriginal rights jurisprudence, the ground upon which legal struggles in the last few decades have been and continue to be fought. But the battle was already lost over a century ago. What is left but to further circumscribe the remaining remainder, parcel out a few partial victories, a salve for the conscience of the colonizers, and define these as Aboriginal rights. (Kulchyski, 1994, p. 2)

Aboriginal rights, left to the courts to define, appear more like a cruel joke than the operation of law and justice. Here then is a system of law that is worlds removed from justice, and this

system defines and administers rights that have nothing to do with truth. Aboriginal rights,

Kulchyski explains, often bear little resemblance to their legally defined avatars. Aboriginal rights come from the inalienable sovereignty of Aboriginal Peoples, yet defined by colonial jurisprudence, they are reduced to a matter of usufructuary rights. "Aboriginal peoples, of course, did not go around talking about their rights, mostly they spoke in a discourse of responsibility and respect" (Kulchyski, 1994, p. 7). Thus Kulchyski indicates the operation of a grammar far more complex than the written language of treaties, a grammar of relations which are enunciated and attended to. Treaties, as we think of them today, award usufructuary

169 rights to Aboriginal Peoples, and in so doing, cede the authority to define and set the limits of

those rights to the courts.

Treaties have been reduced to artifacts through static and rigid interpretations by the

courts, which privileged colonial jurisprudence over Aboriginal juridical agency. Aboriginal

people did not have the right to legal representation to contest treaties in the courts until 1951.

The constitution was amended in 1982, and this "has served as a springboard for the

expanding interpretation of Aboriginal and treaty rights that has occurred over the past two

decades through court rulings and through agreements with Aboriginal peoples" (Cassidy,

2005, p. 45). The result of historical and continued neglect of the relations inherent to the

treaties was that the written treaties eclipsed the oral treaties that were intended to amend and

customize the treaties-as-standardized-forms. Reduced to the written word alone, Treaties became confined to the written documents,114 what I call artifacts of relations. These artifacts

reference a more complicated process, a relation indicated though not contained by or confined to the words on paper, but which through neglect and disrespect for the relations

they indicate, are no w hollow.

KulchyskTs analysis of treaty is focused on the opportunism of the legal and nation- building traditions that rendered lists from Treaties and artifacts from the relations they reference. The materiality of treaties (that is, the artifact of paper or bead, whatever the case may be) does limit what they have become but need not limit what they were and can yet

This argument has also been made before the courts to argue for oral treaties. 170 be.1151 agree with Kulchyski's effort to resuscitate Aboriginal rights, permeated as his analysis is with the understanding that Aboriginal Peoples were and remain sovereign nations.

We share the conviction that Aboriginal sovereignty is intact, that the Canadian law and legal system is colonial, and that its interpretation of Aboriginal rights and treaty produces a legal fiction that has become fact in the lives of Aboriginal Peoples. Kulchyski implies that Treaty will remain subject to colonial interpretation. In keeping with his commitment to decolonial critical analysis of colonial treaties, I maintain that in order to move toward decolonization, we must move through Treaty - Treaty as determined by Indigenous sovereignty, not colonial jurisprudence. This requires working through and beyond stilted definitions of treaty that are the means by which Aboriginal rights are redefined as no more than squatter's rights. Moving toward Treaty (in this sense more a verb than a noun), involves creating and nurturing ethical relations. Treaty, thought beyond the courts, in its fuller and more difficult sense in

Indigenous political philosophies, impels us to treat Treaty as an ethical relationship and an affirmation of sovereignty made between not two parties but three (the Creator is involved in all Treaties). Considered in this way, the physical treaty is the artifact that documents the relationship between the two signatories; put another way, corrupted though it is, treaty points to something beyond itself, that is, Treaty. We must never mistake the artifact for Treaty itself

(but this is precisely what we have allowed the courts to do). The inalienable sovereignty of

115 The trajectory of treaties is plastic. Major gains have been won through the courts system where First Nations have impressed upon the crown its overwhelming bias against oral traditions and oral treaties. These wins have ensured that oral treaties are respected, and that the crown abide by the letter and the spirit of both oral and written treaties. See Kulchyski, 2007 for a cogent summary and explanation of historie significance of treaty in contemporary colonial politics. 171 First Nations guides my account of Treaty, where Treaty is understood as an affirmation and effect of sovereignty, and this is not out of step with Kulchyski's interpretation of Aboriginal rights. Appreciating Indigenous sovereignty helps to map our present state of affairs and ways of mo ving forward.

Before the standardization of the treaty process, Treaties made between Natives and non-Natives depended upon First Nations' political philosophies. Here, Treaty is not confined to the artifact, and signing on to Treaty is no end, but the beginning of an ethical relationship between the two parties. I have earlier explained the critical importance of the Covenant

Chain of Silver, which acknowledges the relationship between Aboriginal and newcomer nations. Further, as McNab (1999) explains, these relationships require reaffirmation, the

Treaty must be retold, the relationships acknowledged and strengthened. Gus Wen Tah or

Two Row Wampum embodies the Covenant Chain of Silver. Wampum is a form of recording and reaffirming relations between nations, it is critical to Haudenosaunee political philosophy, is centuries old, politically adaptive and foundational to contemporary Treaty. I refer to wampum here not because I wish to argue that Indigenous political philosophies are homogenous, or that the particularity of wampum stands in for the whole of Indigenous political philosophy. I reference it here for two reasons. First, wampum is a profoundly important political practice in the Niagara region. Second, the exchange of wampum between

Native and non-Native permitted the establishment of non-Native settlements in what would come to be called Canada and the United States. How this primary ethical relationship could become so clearly mutilated today indicates the extent to which Treaty was and is not 172 appreciated as a relationship, because it was reduced to its physicality, and the extent to which colonial jurisprudence began in synchronicity with its Indigenous counterpart but quickly transmogrified into a means of domination. Wampum illustrate the confluence of the material and the ethical, as wampum belts are meant to be exchanged not once, but continuously; returning to wampum entails retelling and reaffirming the commitment.

Physically wampum belts are coloured shells, strung together on rawhide.

Philosophically they are far more. Terne-Augama Anishnabai political philosopher Dale

Turner (2005) explains that the exchange of wampum is a moral act, grounded in the principles of "reciprocity and renewal [...] which meant that the normative terms of a political agreement were renewed in a context of peace, respect, and friendship" (p. 47). Wampum are not simply exchanged and abandoned, they are returned to and reaffirmed by both sides.

Without the shared understanding that the responsibility entailed in the exchange of wampum extends beyond that initial exchange, wampum has little meaning. In 1926 Tuscarora Chief

Clinton Rickard116 recovered two wampum that had been used to stop gaps in the walls of a drafty hunting cabin (Rickard, C, 1973, p. 74). The wampum were Algonquin, from Lake of

Two Mountains, Oka in Canada (1973, p. 73). Canadian Indian Agents had confiscated other communities' wampum belts and in order to protect them, some communities hid their wampum.117 Rickard reports that these two wampum were put away after the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876 because community leaders had decided that the Act made the

116 Clinton Rickard was chief of the Tuscarora Nation and founder of the Indian Defense League of America in 1925. The Tuscarora reservation at Niagara is on the U.S. side of the border.' 117 See the chapter "Home at the bridge" for a discussion of Indian Affairs' policies concerning Aboriginal self- government during the 1920s. 173 wampum redundant. The Indian Act was made to administer the treaties.118 Because of its

mandate, that being to attend to all matters related to the treaties, it is understandable that

leaders at Lake of Two Mountains would believe there was no longer any need for wampum -

after all, if the government had acted in good faith, it would have encompassed wampum's

principles. The next generation at Lake of Two Mountains, not håving been raised with the

knowledge of wampum, did not recognize that what was used to fill a hole in a wall was the

physical end of a vast political philosophy.119 Rickard was given custody of the wampum,

which he then used to educate non-Native people about the agreements into which their

representatives had entered.

The wampum that Haudenosaunee exchanged with Europeans is called Gus-wen-tah

or Two Row Wampum. It shows two white lines running lengthwise, three rows of purple

beads between the white rows and more purple rows still on the outside of either white row.

One white line signifies the European canoe and the path it is on, the other white line signifies

the Haudenosaunee canoe and its path. Turner is careful to point out that the two rows are not

separated by three rows of purple beads, they are bridged by the three rows. This bridge

which links the two paths is comprised of peace, respect and friendship. As Turner says, Two

Row granted recognition to the Europeans, and this recognition legitimated European jurisprudence in what would come to be known as Canadian and United States jurisprudence

118 It also contains the definition of Indian. The act has been amended many times, most notably in 1982 when Bill C-31 reinstated Aboriginal women and their children who had lost their Indian Status upon marrying non-Status men. 119 Rickard (1973, pp. 73-75) reports that this generation did not recognize the wampum or understand its significance. 174 (2005, pp. 48-49). Had the Europeans attempted to interfere with the sovereignty of the

Haudenosaunee, they would not have been permitted to remain on Haudenosaunee territory.

Haudenosaunee sovereignty was the normative, legitimating force in the European-Native ethical relationship.

The two rows of white (signifying the two canoes120 and their parallel trajectories) are not limited lengthwise. This indicates that the relationship must continue and be attended to into the undisclosed future. But the paths are laterally finite. They do not cross over, merge, narrow or widen. Riders in one canoe cannot lay claim to the content of the other canoe, likewise, they cannot commandeer the other's vessel or presume to command the other's people. There would be no relationship between these two canoes, whose paths never intersect, but for the peace, respect and friendship that bridges them. The type of connection, the bridge, is not physical (the paths never meet); it is a meeting through movement, a union in forward motion.

Treaty in the fuller Indigenous sense has two characteristics that will be carried forward in this chapter. The first characteristic concerns its intersubjectivity and the second concerns its status as work. As a means by which relations are established and affirmed, those called upon by Treaty are committed to one another and its process. This intersubjectivity demands a productive dialogism that responds to current political and cultural contexts (what

I have called forward motion). This productive dialogism does not obliterate difference

120 See McNab, Hodgins and Standen (2001) for an exhaustive analysis of the historical and spiritual significance of the canoe. 175 between agents by imposing a notion of unity through homogenizing universals. Treaty's status as work means that the relations enumerated and affirmed are maintained and re- narrativized. In this sense, Treaty is marked by an absence of teleological closure because the story must be continuously retold and the relationship reaffirmed. Because of Treaty's necessary incompletion, its semantic openness means that we can relearn our obligations to

Treaty and that our obligations and ethical relations are immanently adaptable to our contemporary context. Even if ostensibly lost, as with the case of the wampum from Lake of

Two Mountains, Treaty can and must be retrieved. While the notion of retrievalism is associated with ideas of authenticity and originalism, ideas that will invariably lead to paralysis rather than decolonial motion, Treaty's status as work and forward motion behooves us to think beyond the strictures of authenticity and originalism, toward the productivity of positive incompletion. J. Edward Chamberlin would concur:

But even when we remember that the treaties embodied storylines, we often forget something else. We should in fact remember this easily, for in the Aboriginal versions, the Aboriginal texts of treaties, the stories needed to be told. And retold. Retelling, of course, is a central constituent of all stories. Stories take on their character - their meaning - in the retelling as much as in the telling [...] The distinction between speech and narration, like that between showing and telling, is crucial here; for the heart of the treaties is in the telling, not the showing (1997, p. 18, original emphasis)

The idea of union through forward motion indicates that even if we are not all in the same boat, our forward motion presents an equivalence of motion and trajectory. This

We see examples of homogenizing universals in nationalist claims of the Thatcher and Reagan era, as well as by the Republican administration of the U.S.A. Under the claims that nationalism is a space that precludes dissent or difference, we are enjoined to shed our differences to come together under the flag. Perhaps the most cogent example of such prohibitive homogenization can be found in President George W. Bush's post-9/11 pronouncement: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" (Bush, 2001). 176 equivalence is potentially powerful because it references the kinetic rather than the subject,

leaving the distinction between the vessels and the subjectivity of those aboard altogether

intact. This equivalence which does not flåtten internal difference is critical, as the impulse to

equivalences can be used to defuse radical agency. The impulse toward equivalence, while

potentially useful in rallying support against a common wrong (what Spivak calls "strategic

essentialism" ) can only get us so far when the colonized are routinely represented as being

at one with and as one in their suffering. Those whose voices, experiences and histories are

afforded the least attention and respect risk too much in the imposition of these universalisms.

Because Aboriginal women and girls encounter colonial violence largely as sexualized

violence, in some form or another, the specific ways that their woman-ness and Native-ness

are represented cuts them off in the most gruesomely literal sense from their community and

agency, while at the same time, they come to represent their communities. By over-

determining victimhood (or, as is more often the case, by eclipsing agency and responsibility

in the face of colonial violence through victimhood), Native women and girls are subjectified

once again.

Treaty in the colonial sense obliterates Aboriginal sovereignty by perverting the potential to foster ethical relations between nations. Sequestering the agency of Aboriginal nations through dogged dedication to decpntextualized historical artifacts, rather than oral treaties or, better still, Treaties, the communicative agency of Aboriginal peoples is simply

122 Spivak argues that marginalized people must set aside their particular differences in the service of fostering a common identity for short-term political gain (1988). 177 pushed from the picture. Cultural representations can do likewise, operating, as they do, in

accordance with an ethic of representation, which can be perverted by their colonial contexts.

This perversion of representational ethics is analogous to the perversion of Treaty. Both are

similarly ethically oriented and both impose a narrative of inevitable and irreversible distance

between those represented and those viewing; both indicating and calling upon community.

Representational forms are not the way to recapture movement in forward motion, movement

which is made possible by Treaty.

Recovering the path to Treaty

The appropriation of communicative agency in the form of colonial representational

practices ensures the persistence of subject equivalences, rather than kinetic equivalences.

That is to say, the imposition of the generic and the homogenous overshadows the principle of

forward motion and self-sovereignty contained in Two Row Wampum and is another

disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. The persistence of subject equivalences in this colonial

political environment means that the specificity and sovereignty of Indigenous nations is

disregarded. In other words, the subjectivity of those aboard their canoes is entirely

supplanted.

Recentring Treaty and decentring colonial treaty means that the sovereignty of the

nations in their two separate canoes is integral to the path they journey together, and forms the

stuff of shared recognition while demanding the radical incompletion of Treaty. The dialectic

of sovereignty, recognition and difference fundamental to Treaty is fundamental also to

Fanon's understanding of love. Love is a decolonial ethic. As a decolonial ethic, love 178 demands that all subjects recognize that when their paths collide, the trajectory be reset, and when wrongs are committed, they be confronted. This means that the distinction between the

vessels and the subjectivity of those board altogether intact. The bridge of peace, respect and friendship that joins the European and Indigenous canoes ensures that they are united in their common movement together. This does not mean that they occupy a single vessel, but that they have chosen to travel together; internal differences remain intact. They are kinetically equivalent because they travel the same path, together but separate.

The path of supplanting Indigenous normativity and foreclosing Indigenous communicative agency, from the recognition of Indigenous political and communicative normativity is a meandering one. On this path, decolonial action is condemned as erratic disorder, women (in spite of the agency they may effect) wrested from their communities and reduced to hollowed out numbers. In striking contrast, Lelawala's path is direct: she mo ves forward only to fall. In the forgoing discussion, I have argued for holding up Treaty as a practice of reciprocity. This is a mode of political agency directly sourced from Indigenous political philosophies, which early colonial agents recognized as the political norm but which through the winding path of complex colonial practices, are reduced to historie artifacts with no practical relevance today. This narrative norm and historical reality, concretely manifested in representations of First Nations historical actions, in all their gendered ways, will inform the following account of not only Lelawala's representations, but of decolonial struggle at

Niagara Falls.

179 Chapter 6 Home at the bridge

Without our land, we are nothing. - Clinton Richard, 1973, p. 139

I was not aware when I first attempted to cross the border on foot in the summer of

2004 that I would need two quarters to leave Canada and enter the in-between space over the river, the Rainbow Bridge. A building blocked access to the bridge and inside was a room that

was so small and bleak that it indicated it was no place for lingering. Completely empty, we travelers were left to dutifully drop in two quarters a head to pass through the turnstile. Held back for want of fifty cents, I slipped behind my fellow travelers, temporarily out of the flow

of bodies and petty change. After what felt like a lifetime of rummaging through my bag, I finally found the necessary coins, dropped them into the slot, passed through the turnstile and out the doors, and began to walk out over the Niagara River.

Every third weekend of July since 1928, the Tuscarora Nation marches with the Indian

Defense League across the Niagara River, sometimes on the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, at other times, upstream on the Rainbow Bridge, to exercise their right to cross the colonial border. This right is formally recognized by the Jay Treaty of 1794 and is reaffirmed by the

Treaty of Ghent of 1814. These treaties acknowledge that the Six Nations Confederacy never

surrendered its sovereignty to France, Britain or the United States. The treaties also state that

Confederacy citizens have the right to pass the colonial border without restriction. In spite of this formal recognition, historically both Jay and Ghent have been ignored outright by settler law that would colonize bridge-crossing. The consequences of blocked access to the bridge 180 were dire. The policed colonial border cut people off from their families, places of work, friends, communities and territories. So serious was the situation that Six Nations chiefs began organizing around the right to cross the border. In 1925 Le vi General (Cayuga), for example, urged Chief Clinton Rickard to "fight for the line" (Rickard, 1973, p. 68), referring to the Confederacy's right, as sovereign nations, to cross a border which did not apply to them. The border crossing ceremony that takes place today is the culmination of the enormous political will of those wishing to inhabit, or re-home, their traditional territories, in spite of settler nationalisms. Crossing the bridge is another way of exercising sovereignty at the borderlands of two settler nations, and in this way, of disrupting the normativity of the settler state. By crossing the colonial bridge, Six Nations Confederacy citizens exercise authority that is rooted in their sovereignty as nations and this offers a challenge to the colonial organization (historical and contemporary) of political space. Crossing the bridge, in effect, demonstrates the Tuscarora Nation's ability to assert and re-assert their claim to belong on the land; it is another act of decolonial home and hope in a newly re-cast place of settler belonging.

I have raised the notion of unhoming the settler state by questioning the we of the settler nation. The central figure in that discussion was the border - both the national border and abstract borders where the limits of visibility and knowability are determined. Jody

Berland describes borders as unsuccessful binary oppositions where one is considered to be either in or out, while living at the border continuously fractures the binary (2001). Canadians live at the border where the overwhelming imperial power of the U.S. threatens to engulf as it 181 undeniably shapes our nation and national identity. Thus we live the border, as literature on

Canadian nationalism suggests. I argued that the border not only separates Canada from the

United States, but that in parceling out land among settler states, it also acts as a colonial border, a marker of the settler state's power and presumed entitlement to occupy and portion

out Native lands. This creates an environment for Indigenous Peoples in which basic

subsistence is possible where inhabitation is improbable. Put bluntly, the settler state is no

home for the Native. Challenging the settler we to become the decolonial we is intricately

connected to the ideas of home and belonging and this challenging, I have argued, comprises

an "act of hope" which could unsettle the normalcy of the settler's rightfulness to home and

nation on this land. Community, home and hope, these figures were latent in the previous chapter and are pulled out to be engaged directly here at the site of the bridge.

The bridge is central to this chapter because it is a signifier of hope as well as an effect

and affect of native and colonial home. Effect because the bridge is the consequence of inhabitation; affect because it embodies the desire for home. Like settler lands, bridges are

functional, proprietary, and unhomeable. They are a part of both intellectual and physical landscapes. Bridges signify hope because they enable access to disconnected spaces over otherwise inaccessible space (across a chasm or over a river, for instance).123 They have come

Joy Kogawa mobilizes this understanding of the bridge in her novel Itsuka (1992), which is about redress for the Japanese internment and cultural recognition. Kogawa's bridge operates as a metaphor and political platform; it is a magazine. The protagonist, Naomi witnesses heraunt work for redress: Aunt Emily is scribbling notes. She's writing an article for Bridge, "the multicultural voice from St. John's College." Bridge, according to Aunt Emily, is a verb, "taking you from one side to otherness." 182 to embody what they enable: the act of crossing. The Native's crossing a bridge on the colonial landscape amounts to a confrontation with colonial proprietary claims to and ontological supremacy over home. In this context, the bridge is at once an effect and affect of

Indigenous home and belonging in the face of colonialism's impossible home because it is an inescapable necessity. In the colonial case, the bridge is never a stable structure and while the journey appears simple, linear and assured, the bridge bears the potential to collapse as it carries those who cross.

However, not all bridges are equal. Horni Bhabha (1994) uses the metaphor of the bridge to describe the hybrid subjecfs perpetual embarkation on new territories, where the bounds of time and space are reformulated and differently lived. Bhabha's metaphor, in spite of his many qualifiers, does not help us to think through the displacements that make bridge- crossing a necessity in the first place. On the other hand, Gloria Anzaldua's use of the bridge metaphor is decidedly gruesome in comparison to Bhabha's, writing pain, violence and the threat of its insecurity into the bridge's very structure (Anzaldua 2002; 1999; Moraga and

Anzaldua, 1983). Not only does the bridge span borders, it also connects the edges of political action and cultural recognition. The bridge, as Anzaldua theorizes it, then becomes a kind of suspended borderland, or a liminal pathway whose purpose it is to span an incommensurate breach. The bridge is liminal because the crosser is surrounded with its absence, and with the knowledge that liminality is necessary for any sort of political or cultural connection. The

"We were flung to the winds, not to disappear, but to learn about injustice," she says. "Injustice is the chasm Bridge has to cross." (Kogawa, p. 78, 1992) 183 bridge is gruesome because it is the backs of those who are liminal and so implicates the

crossers in the pain of those who are crossed upon.

For First Nations to exercise their sovereignty and right to home at Niagara Falls, they

have had to cross bridges. These bridges are slung over an international border which has been historically inaccessible to First Peoples, even by bridge. The bridges at Niagara Falls

then serve three purposes: to join two otherwise unjoined parcels of land that are bisected by

the river, to serve as pathways across the U.S.-Canada border, to serve as pathways through

(though not necessarily the destabilization of) colonial law. In the case of the Tuscarora

Nation's Border Crossing Ceremony, the bridge is no metaphor. But bridge crossing should

not be thought of in the material sense to the exclusion of the metaphysical. Asserting home in

the face of settler proprietary claims marks the crossing of a different kind of bridge, one built

of decolonial hope. This bridge was visible during the Tuscarora Nation's fight to preserve their land from the New York State Power Authority. But bridges and crossing them do not

necessarily signal decolonial hope. Crossing the bridges threatens to work away at Indigenous

sovereignty because it implies submission to colonial law. The anecdote of my interrupted crossing at the Rainbow Bridge and the triviality of what (physically) blocked my access - the two quarters - presents an image of arrested movement in a place of movement at the precarious and unhomeable space of the bridge. It also points to fundamental differences in who is permitted to cross, and under what circumstances. Hope only figures into the bridge metaphor when faced with the profound threat of blocked access (certainly limited access due to my inability to pay fifty cents does not constitute a profound threat) br of the bridge's 184 collapse. The bridge is not a universal metaphor. This means that while crossing a bridge

might, to some, amount to a challenge to legal strictures, to others it might simply serve as a

platform for a spectacular view, as a means to safely and quickly access different tourist

attractions, or as a way of crossing international borderlines. For Lelawala, who is consigned

to the waters below, the bridge is inaccessible. This is to say that the figure of the woman, the boat named after her, and the myth which structures settler perceptions of First Nations at border places do not and cannot access the bridge.

Although one's relationship to the bridges at Niagara is directed by one's relationship to land and others there, it is not a place where one is encouraged to stay. The movements of

tourists are organized so they might experience all Niagara has to offer without being compelled to meaningfully linger. In order to do Niagara, tourists are corralled on and off

walkways, staircases, tunnels, boats and bridges. What seems to be missing in these

movements is the awareness that this is a place to be lived rather than done,124 that Niagara is

a home, rather than a throughway. But where there are tourists, home is nowhere to be found.

Who, after all, would want to live amongst the wax museums and neon signs at Clifton Hill?

This means more than the simple observation that for the tourist, home is some place else.

Rather, when Niagara Falls is transformed into a "useful," "industrious," "attractive" and

"worthy" place, it ceases to be a home. The obvious point to make is that the settler state has reorganized Native spaces and has made itself at home at the expense of Native home-ness.

124 The division of the Falls into "attractions" enabled the systematic consumption of Niagara, writes John F. Sears (1989). 185 But this assessment is overly-general and does not consider the ways in which Niagara Falls is encountered and lived daily as home and not-home, that is, as settler, Indigenous and tourist

spaces. While the term "settler" implies stability (at least for the time being), Niagara Falls is far from settled. This space is also split between tourists and residents, most of whom work or have worked in the tourist industry. The flagging tourist and manufacturing sectors - the economic lifeblood of the region - make it decreasingly viable to remain in the area, especially when larger and more economically viable urban centres beckon. What kind of home has the settler made of Niagara?125 Who inhabits Niagara and who simply passes through? Niagara has become a place of movement, in which people might linger for a moment, but then move on. It is a place of movement also because it is wholly dependant on tourist movement. In this movement, Niagara matters less and less to become a vehicle for

tourist experience. Likewise, the bridge is a space one does not inhabit, though its structure is

assumed to be as permanent as our right to cross. To First Peoples, there was a time when the bridge was as good as gone because they were routinely denied access to the other side. But

for all the similarities between Niagara Falls and bridges, settlers do not make hornes on bridges; settlers make hornes in Niagara Falls. While, as the Tuscarora Nation's home was threatened, the nation moved to the metaphysical bridge and so confronted colonial law. What is at stake in making a home in an unhomeable space? What is involved in imposing permanence on the impermanent? What might lingering at the bridge, the place of movement

125 The Aboriginal stand-up comic Don Kelly plays on the irony of settler hornes in places of Native belonging in ways that provoke, tease and unsettle: "I'm an Aboriginal citizen living in Canada. And I just want to say to you, on behalf of all of us: We love what you've done with the place" (2005, p. 54, original italics). 186 and precariousness (real or imagined), offer to our perception of home, belonging and community?

Homeless, radically and otherwise

"The land is what holds us together; without our land we are nothing" (Rickard, 1973, p. 138). Chief Clinton Rickard's (Tuscarora) explanation of the bonds between his community and the land (land in the local sense; he is specifically referring to the lands constituting the

Tuscarora reservation) would be decidedly out of place in much of today's political thought.

Community belonging, or to put it more specifically, the belonging of particular ethnic, cultural or racial groups to specific places - that is, the validity of homeland - has been roundly condemned amongst postmodernist critics. After all, the examples of the Nazi volksgemeinschaft (meaning "people's community" or "national community"), Afrikaner volkstaat (meaning "people's state"), and United States' homeland all deliver powerful lessons about the potential to alienate and persecute that rests in the invocation of homeland.

In all cases, homeland is predicated on the belief in the people's exclusive right to it, but the association of homeland with right does not end at the right to a space, rather, it necessarily encompasses the right, perhaps the imperative, to determine what constitutes the community that inhabits space. Who are the people who will dwell in the homeland, or more accurately, who are the people worthy enough for the homeland? In his attempt to understand the nature of community through the extreme example of Nazi Germany, Jean Lue Nancy begins from the position that communities are based upon loss, which is not an actual, material loss, but the notion that the people have lost something they never had in the first place. This sense of 187 loss invokes the relationship between community and its Other. Nazi Germany's sense of the loss of ancient Greece had the Deutschland looking back to another time and place in order to move forward. The Other for the Reich was not the Other as defined by postcolonial theory

(the abject or subaltern), but an equal, perhaps even a superior Other, who can never co-exist with us, but remain available to us through our feeling of håving just missed them. The Nazi's

Other is not the Jew, queer or Roma, but rather the ancient Greek. Spatial and temporal distarice matters little here: "the T and the 'other' do not live in the same time, are never together (synchronously), can therefore not be contemporary, but separated (even when united) by a 'not yet' which goes hand in hand with an 'already no longer'" (Nancy quoted in

Bernasconi, 1993, p. 8; Nancy, 1991, p. 42). Thus the myth of origins is interrupted from the outset, indeed cannot operate as a myth were it anything but fundamentally interrupted. The yearning for the unrealizable communion with the Other is what structures the definition and direction of community, which in this case is the imperative to restore Nazi Germany to its rightful place alongside ancient Greece. In this nostalgia for a community that never was and will never be lies the threat of totalitarianism that can be brought to the surface through attempts to redeem community from its apparently wayward path. Nazi policies of segregation, persecution and genocide were justified as ensuring the purity of the Aryan race and the volksgemeinschaft from racial and moral pollution. This looking back to move forward, this "inoperative community" based on the "interrupted myth" of an original, pure, innocent, intact and simpler time must be the focus of our suspicion, Nancy says (1991, p.

10). How the vicissitudes of western community formation and identification have come to 188 stand in for community globally has in turn become the focus of considerable suspicion. lan

Angus's work on radical homelessness is useful in thinking through the potential for philosophies that speak to the universal without homogenizing the specific.

In the previous chapter I broached the notion of radical homelessness, lan Angus's notion of building English Canadian philosophy beyond the impulse to seek out, invent, or impose origins and completion. Radical homelessness, as Angus envisions it, is a forward movement, a "struggling on" in spite of its "radical incompletion" (1997, p. 126). It is, in other words, purposeful work. Angus argues that in order to build a philosophy that is reflexive and diverse, we must abandon the notions of origins, so that we may struggle on, taking up homelessness as a foundation for our thinking and action. This philosophical imperative of struggling on is the only reasonable way to live and be in the settler nation in a way that does not write over First People's philosophical, national or li ved belongings.

Abandoning the notion of epistemic origins releases us from the temptations of claiming truth or knowledge that is exclusively, narrowly determined.

Angus describes radical homelessness as integral to Canadian (and by way of generalization, settler) philosophy and nation-building. But in the settler state homelessness must first be understood as dispossession and injustice, rather than as a general metapolitical and epistemic necessity. I want to suggest that there are different ontologies of home and that radical homelessness needs to be a response to a particular politico-historical situation: that of

126 Criticizing the impulse to universalize western experience, this time in relation to the Caribbean, Édouard Glissant identifies the filial characterization of Caribbean community (by western intellectuals) as "ethnocentric and frequently naive projections of Western thought" (2000, p. 59), and in doing so, reverses the western practice of infantilizing its Other. 189 the settler. English Canadian philosophies must embark on the stated task of radical

homelessness, which is not the abandonment of rootedness or home generally, but of the

philosophical rootedness and home of western knowledge. It is, to repurpose the words of

Taiaike Alfred, an ethic of struggle.127 Of Nancy's work on community and its other,

Bernasconi says, "[focus] has fallen [...] on the margins of Western philosophy, but not, for the most part, on the philosophies that have been consigned to the margins or have been

denied the nåme of philosophy altogether, for no better reason than that the identity of

philosophy has been decided in advance" (1993, p. 15). The universalization of western experience in Nancy, Bernasconi says, occurs at the expense of the colonized world.128 This is

no incidental criticism, rather it points to the growing skepticism about western philosophy's place within colonial domination. Indigenous philosophies, to say nothing of Indigenous

ontologies, have been pulled from their place as central to the understanding of home, land

and community through colonization. This is why, at first glance, Angus's argument might

arouse considerable suspicion: Indigenous philosophies already are in a state of homelessness, made so by aggressively universalizing notions of western experience at the expense of those made marginal. Take Patricia Monture-Angus's experience of academic homelessness; she writes that because Indigenous epistemologies are considered to be peripheral to so-called legitimate academic pursuits, within the university she has experienced

127 Alfred defines the warrior ethic as an ethic of struggle and that a warrior is anyone who espouses this ethic (see Alfred, 2005). 128 Ali Rattansi makes a similar argument in his writing on postmodernity, arguing that western philosophies of postmodernity universalize western experience, and in doing so, neglect the manifestations of power on the lives of Others upon which western postmodernity utterly depended (1994). 190 a profound and alienating homelessness (see 2002; 1995, pp. 53-73). Understood as another engine of colonial displacement, this homelessness cannot be redeemed.

Homelessness, this time meant to dislodge western philosophy from pride of place as the unqualified philosophy, offers the promise of radical displacement in the service of those philosophies that Bernasconi rightly acknowledges are confined to the margins of knowability. lan Angus's work on the place of western philosophy, specifically on the need to

'take on radical homelessness as an organizing principle, is critical to understanding the colonizing potential of normative philosophy which Angus wishes to unsettle. Radical homelessness acknowledges how western philosophies rely on the epistemological homelessness of the marginalized and disenfranchised. Rather than creating a philosophical tradition based on the fundamental and silenced upheaval of Indigenous philosophies, radical homelessness takes on this displacement, and in so doing, creates room for Indigenous epistemological re-homing, which is the enactment of Treaty.

Contemporary minking about community, home and roots is far from the seemingly decontextualized state of affairs Angus indicates (and never endorses). Reversing Nancy's arguments that spectral loss is community-forming, scholars such as Horni Bhabha and Paul

Gilroy re-articulate loss as yearning or nostalgia for home and purity, the result of which is

129 Monture-Angus's (2002) arguments that colonial homelessness continues within the walls of the academy requires much further investigation into justice-oriented pedagogy, recruitment and retention rates of Aboriginal students (including graduate students) and faculty. On the organized dismemberment of Indigenous knowledge by school systems Lee Maracle writes, "The desire of our people to gain a foothold in this society is arrogantly interpreted as a desire to be like Europeans. We have never feared or rejected new things, new knowledge. But quite frankly, we do not respect the ways of European CanAmerica [sic]. We seek knowledge that we may turn it to our own use. Do not be surprised when I tell you that your knowledge is not the only knowledge we seek" (1996, p. 87). 191 cultural stagnation, intolerance and ultimately, oppression. They write of home and movement

as intermingling; more than a necessity of global politics, home and movement are traits of cultural and political advancement. Skepticism about community origins and homeland

inf orms Bhabha's writings on the nature of culture in postcolonial and postmodern times (the

"new" internationalism, as he wryly refers to it). These are times which are marked by

displacements and relocations that accompany the often violent reorganization of state borders resulting from wars and the spasms of empire. The "new" internationalism is anything but;

Bhabha indicates that the Middle Passage130 operates as the metaphor for postmodern-

postcolonial diasporas, and as du Bois (1896), Cox (1959) and Gilroy (1993) have

demonstrated, the Middle Passage was critical to the formation of European modernity,

nationalisms in the Americas and western economic supremacy over the globe.131 Movement

compels community to rethink its relationship to spatial belonging and cultural practice, both historically and in the future. How culture comes to signify across these differences of place,

time and often conflicting notions of national belonging becomes Bhabha's chief concern in

Location of Culture.

This was called the Middle Passage because trade ships from the "new" world would leave for Britain, carrying raw materials, in Britain they would exchange this cargo for trade goods and set sail for the north-west African coast. There they would exchange trade goods for slaves and other goods and return to the "new" world where the grim cycle would begin again. 131 Stuart Hall (Grossberg & Hall, 1996) argues against the notion of "postmodernity" as a global phenomenon. According to him, postmodernism is, "in my view, being deployed in an essentialist and uncritical way. And it is irrevocably Euro- or western-centric in its whole episteme" (cited in Grossberg & Hall, 1996, p. 132).

192 "New" intemationalism (our present context of rhizomatic movement132) was enabled by the massive dis- and relocations of the slave trade. Cultures on the move come to occupy spaces and times "in-between" physical space and linear time, indicated by the shorthand,

"new": "The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of the continuum of past and present. [...] the 'past-present' becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living" (1994, p. 7). In other words, global movements have radically reorganized what it is to live in and create culture. This means that we can no longer locate our notion of rootedness or home in the past or the future; "newness" as a necessity of living,

Bhabha suggests, cannot afford the nostalgic attachments of rootedness. Rather, we live in the past as we live in the present as we live between home and the reality of global belonging.

This in-betweenness is born of necessity, not desire, and our understanding of time and place becomes indistinct as we no longer live at home, but are "at home in the world" (1994). In the face of this, calls to return home appear facile and out of place. We cannot go back home because our movement has formed us and challenged what it means to belong. Now that we are at home in our movement, belonging in movement, there is no longer any home to return to. In Bhabha's writing, the bridge figures as the emblem of movement, rootlessness (a more neutral designation than uprootedness) and cultural liminality that brings forth creativity and forward motion that is otherwise not realizable: "the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent

132 Many thinkers on diaspora use the image of the rhizome to describe complex transnational movements. For example, Gilroy (1993, p. 4) calls the diaspora and its relationship with nationalisms "rhizomorphic." 193 articulation of the beyond" (1994, p. 5, original emphasis). Home without movement (or,

situated and material home) is now unfathomable except as nostalgia and regression.

Rending peoples from their hornes has formed the basis of contemporary nations, and

now those made homeless shake up contemporary nationalisms by moving to imperial

centres. The "new" subject raises a mocking eyebrow to the racist taunt, "go back to where

you came from," knowing, to borrow from Stuart Hall, that "we are here because you were

there." As nationalisms are radically reconsidered, nations demand that their "new" citizens

demonstrate their belongingness in ways that the "old" citizens never had to. These demands have become far more strident, reactionary, divisive and are expressed through a civic panic

concerning how prepared immigrants are to be full citizens.

Quebec has long been the centre of such controversies. Nationally we are reminded of

Quebec's long-standing efforts to retain the uniqueness of francophone culture within a

largely anglophone confederacy while the emphasis on the particularity of the debate at

Quebec deflects attention from national policies that anticipate and mirror the debates in

Quebec. Debates concerning the "reasonable accommodation" of immigrant differences takes

on added significance with reminders of race-exclusionist notions of "pur laine" (or "pure wool" indicating the purity of Quebecer's linguistic and cultural heritage - while this notion is rejected by many Quebecers, it continues to resurface in these debates as evidence of intolerance) and the sharply declining birth rates among white francophone women. In the

meantime, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has vocally supported his government's mo ve to draft a policy obliging veiled Muslim women to show their faces 194 before they vote. Many Muslim organizations across the country have expressed bewilderment at this policy as the majority of voting Muslim women already do literally show their faces at the polls, leaving community leaders and political commentators to wonder at this recent and fundamentally irrelevant politicization of the veil (see Mennie, 2007, 8

September). This is only the latest entry in the long chronicle of the national inclusion of difference by way of homogeneous inclusion.

Thatcher's demand that "new" British citizens demonstrate their Britishness at the expense of all other allegiances (made evident in her query to Britons: "Are you one of us?") is met with Hall's observation: "Hardly anybody is one of us any longer" (1997, p. 26). The idea of the true blue-blooded British subject and the accompanying idea of the purity of

British belonging, Hall says and Bhabha would agree, is and has always been a powerful and formative myth: powerful because it justifies violence and formative because it structures belonging. But it is a myth nonetheless. It is this confluence of racism and nationalism that incites Bhabha's position that the intersections of home and nation are not places where difference will be countenanced. For Bhabha, diasporic cultures emerge as the protagonists of this international drama, and the central problem of this drama arises when diasporic cultures relocate to specific nations where their difference and in-betweenness are not only considered strange but treacherous.133

133 This is precisely the kind of problem that is central to Paul Gilroy's analysis of racism in Thatcherite Britain, There ain't no black in the Union Jack (1991). Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994) examines the influence of Thatcherism on black cultural politics in Britain. More locally, Sunera Thobani's (2000) work on policies of exclusion of women of colour from immigration into Canada demystifies the image of the welcoming nation, while Sherene Razack's Dark threats and white knights (2004) casts doubt on the validity of the myth of 195 Are all expressions of home and rootedness in this "new" internationalism the thin edge of the fascist wedge? Bhabha and Gilroy think so. Both see these expressions of rooted belonging as symptomatic of the desire for cultural and racial purity. To Gilroy (2000), movement is not only inevitable, it is laudable, while rootedness is stagnation and nostalgia.

Positioning the question of roots and home as the source of the problem of racist violence,

Gilroy condemns what he sees as a "sedentary poetics of [...] blood [and] soil" in favor of

"movement" which "asks [us] to consider what might be gained if the powerful claims of soil, roots, and territory could be set aside" (2000, p. 111). Who, according to Gilroy, is guilty of fencing in cultural and social potential by forcing community into the enclosure of rooted belonging? Even Nelson Mandela, who after being elected the first president of post-apartheid

South Africa spoke of the nation moving into the post-apartheid future, renewed by their

"intimate attachment" to the soil and united in their collective homeland: "That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict" (Mandela cited in Gilroy, 2000, p. 111). Gilroy argues that Mandela's expression of national belonging is essentialist, that it fuses the notions of community (a cultural phenomenon) and land (a natural phenomenon as he understands it) while confusing constructions for what lies beyond the reach of human influence. Gilroy condemns Mandela' s words for what he sees to be a national essentialism, fascism's kissing cousin. Mandela's vision of national belonging, of

Canadian peacekeeping. These works map the contours of differenee and conflict that make and mark western postmodernity. 196 rootedness in the context of a nation whose Indigenous Peoples were rendered homeless in profound and violent ways, is truly a vision of struggle, and of overcoming a historical practice of enforced national alienation. Yet, says Gilroy, roots essentialize. About Mandela's invocation of soil and homeland Gilroy muses:

in assessing the power of roots and rootedness to ground identity, we encountered [in Mandela] invocations of organicity that forged an uncomfortable connection between the warring domains of nature and culture. They made nation and citizenship appear to be natural rather than social phenomena - spontaneous expressions of a distinctiveness that was palpable in deep inner harmony between people and their dwelling places. Diaspora is a useful means to reassess the idea of essential and absolute identity precisely because it is incompatible with that type of nationalist and raciologist thinking. [...] Is it possible to imagine how a more complex, ecologically sophisticated sense of interaction between organisms and environments might become an asset in thinking critically about identity? (2000, p. 125)

Is it possible to set aside the notion of roots, soil and territory? Is it possible to imagine a more complex and sophisticated way of thinking through people's relation with each other on the land? Ask Chrystos, who aptly declared (as I have shown in previous chapters),

"vanishing is no metaphor." Like vanishing, home is no metaphor. If we are to accept that movement is fundamental to diasporic subjectivities because it radically reformulates our relationships with space and time as both Bhabha and Gilroy wish us to, surely we must also accept that the notions of soil, roots and territory are also formative. If formative, they are also potentially transformative.134 Practically and ethically, how then can these formative and essential (not, by default, essentializing) factors be set aside? Conflating the very specific conditions of fascism and apartheid with rootedness means that any and all articulations of

134 People's reaction to devastating natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami of 2005 are instructive here. 197 roots become both the originator and the symptom of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism and fascism, then, simply appear. Such assumptions prevent Gilroy from acknowledging the

validity of soil, roots and territory for anti-colonial movements. He is also prevented from recognizing the difference in colonial invocations of soil, roots and territory for the purposes of colonial expansion and subjugation.

What is the value of Bhabha's "in-between" and Gilroy's exuberant diaspora? If one is

'in-between', embarking on 'new' territories that trouble normative understandings of our relationship with space and time, how does 'in-betweeness' retain its 'in-betweenness', the zone that is allegedly safe from threats of fascist decay? (Or if not "safe," at least the liminal zone where creative politics are reformulated.) When does 'in-between' become a destination, and so vulnerable to the intertwined evils of roots, nostalgia and purity? If we now belong in movement, rather than the land, it would seem that Bhabha and Gilroy locate the evils of racism and fascism in the land itself, rather than in specific historical, economic and political conditions and articulations of belonging. In the effort to theorize the creative potential afforded by diaspora, another hierarchy has been reinforced, one that associates movement with the natural evolution of culture and people.

Hybridity, in-betweenness and diaspora - all of these are synonyms for inherently painful processes of dislocation and relocation, yet Gilroy and Bhabha present these as states of being or destinations at which to arrive. The modern sojourner who can pick up and make home anew is an ideal-type, embodied for Bhabha in the form of Salman Rushdie, who is iconic because he is in-between nationalisms, ethnicities, languages and literary traditions. 198 Yet Rushdie as the icon of diaspora is disingenuous. He is, after all, a celebrated author, educated in western and eastern literary traditions and in spite of the fatwa that was on his life, Rushdie enjoyed the security of the British police and mo ves between nations in airplanes. The modern diasporic subject, were Bhabha faithful to his original invocation of the

Middle Passage, is unnameable, not because this subject has no nåme, but because this nåme has been east aside.135 She does not cross nations in planes or by Bhabha's celebrated bridge

(for him, the emblem of creative motion) but in the "tween" decks136, tight or loose packed137, shackled and bound.138 In the Middle Passage she is made chattel and her humanity, sovereignty and community are left behind at the vanishing shores. This reality of enforced movement in modernity demands justice, rather than the jettisoning of the notions of home and roots. But once roots are east aside because they are thought to be the source of

stagnation, what place is there for justice? Bhabha's attempt to find redemption for the diasporic subject in her new location, in an idea of a metaphysical home (because she likely cannot, as Bob Marley would have liked, return to Africa), results in his also jettisoning the immediacy of the need and demand for justice in spite of historical distance. He need and

135 Not all expressions of diaspora from the Middle Passage are as celebratory as Bhabha's becomes. Glissant considers the Middle Passage as exile (into plantation slavery), and exile as constraint, and this radically recasts relationality in ways that force a reckoning with justice and universalism: "For three centuries of constraint had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it gre w for everyone. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out" (2000, p. 74). 136 Trading ships transported slaves in the decks between the upper deck and the lower deck, where cargo was stored. These decks were known as the "tween decks." 137 Slaves were arranged lying on their backs for a "loose pack" or on their sides for a "tight pack." Either way, conditions were abysmal, mortality rates were extremely high and disease was rampant. 138 Slaves remained shackled throughout their journey to North America. The men were, for the most part, bound to one another in the tween decks. 199 should not. Movement does not break the links between roots and home. Diaspora does not make justice vanish. Demanding justice does not block movement forward. Justice is forward movement.

The idealization of the diasporic subject at the expense of grounded or rooted treatment of home and justice suggests that contemporary struggles for justice on the basis of displacement are out of time and place. But roots do matter and they can provide the grounds for radical action. It is precisely because land and belonging on it matter that Indigenous communities in the colonized world were and are displaced and it is the way that roots matter that matters here. Not a question of culture's ability to adapt to rhizomatic movement, this is a question of ontological difference and supremacy on colonized lands. This problem of the displacement of Indigenous ontologies and its effects on our conceptions and misconceptions about what it might mean to belong to particular places is central to the question of justice in settler societies. We, Native and settler (newcomer and new-newcomer) must accept the gravity of the offence of colonialism, we must believe in the possibility of restorative justice and in our agency to effect this.

The question of home and roots become increasing complex in the case of Indigenous

Nations which have been displaced not once, but multiple times. The Neutral Confederacy, as

I have outlined in previous chapters, was displaced, and its members adopted by surrounding nations. The Tuscarora Nation, originally from what is today called the Carolinas in the

United States, was pushed northward; today part of the nation occupies Seneca territory with the consent of the Seneca. Many First Nations have survived multiple displacements. These 200 multiple displacements of Indigenous Peoples casts home, roots and belonging in a new light.

How does home still matter to the dispossessed?

Fighting for home

In the 1950s, the New York State Power Authority (SPA), under the chairmanship of

Robert Moses, proposed to build a hydroelectric power plant that would take 550 acres of

Tuscarora land to house its reservoir. Chief Rickard called this "[t]he greatest threat to my

Tuscarora people since the days of the North Carolina wars and the removal to Kansas"

(1973, p. 138). As I have already shown, the Tuscarora Nation was dispossessed of their lands

in the present-day Carolinas and pushed northward from the 1710s to the 1720s. They continued to be faced with the threat of further displacement in the 1800s, when they had to

demonstrate economic self-sufficiency or be relocated to Oklahoma. In this more recent

struggle, the leadership of the Tuscarora nation understood the SPA's actions as another

attempt to further displace the nation. This confrontation embodies the struggle between

Indigenous and settler ontologies, and I will elaborate on this presently. While the Tuscarora

did not succeed in rescuing their land from the reach of the SPA, it would be hasty to dismiss

this as a failed battle. The confrontation, characterized by Laurence Hauptman as "the second great Tuscarora war" (1986, p. 160), brings to the surface two points that remain latent in the observation that this conflict was ontological. The first is that roots still matter even after multiple displacements and the second is that home is worth fighting for. The question to ask before developing these two points is, what did hydroelectric damming mean for the settler?

201 The enormous amount of electricity that the river could generate through hydroelectric damming would, in theory, allow New Yorkers to further develop the Niagara region, supplying, in the words of Robert Moses, the "opportunity of developing to its fullest the most significant recreational area in the East, if not the entire country" (Moses cited in

Hauptman, 1986, p. 151-2). This was not the first time that Niagara's hydroelectric potential captivated industrialists and entrepreneurs. William Irwin (1996) plots the development of technological utopianism at Niagara Falls in the 1800s and identifies the fascination with the size and force of the waterfalls as the nexus of imagination, science and capital necessary for technological innovation. Technological utopianism was a belief in the potential of technology to help produce a utopian society. This belief in a technology-enabled social ideal was pervasive in the Americas during the 1800s and it ushered in many inventions and innovations such as Ford's assembly line, Bell's telephone and Tesla's alternating current.

This period is characterized by faith in "man's" ability to innovate for the better and emerged during the great social and economic changes of industrial capitalism. In these utopian visions, Niagara Falls was seen as a great centre of economic and social development (Irwin,

1996, p. 136). In the words of Clemons Herschel, a hydraulic engineer, "The future development of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls district, as a manufacturing center [sic], no less than a place of residence, cannot fail to be one of the marvels of the fast approaching twentieth century" (Herschel cited in Irwin, 1996, p. 137). While technological utopianism was not a coherent movement, the notion that technology should and could preserve and exploit Niagara

Falls, what before had been seen as the exclusive dominion of nature, gained in popularity 202 (Irwin, 1996, p. 139). Knowing that the river could reliably generate enormous amounts of power if only the means to harness it existed, scientists and entrepreneurs hurried to Niagara, where the race was run to "discover" ways of transmitting electricity across great distances.

When Tesla developed a method of transmitting electricity kilometers from the generating point - the alternating current - he sparked the interest of entrepreneurs who would come to develop the region's electricity infrastructure.

Popular history represents this period as frenzied, exciting and whimsical by foregrounding the dreams and desires of those tåken with the enormous potential of this vast and apparently inexhaustible source of energy. For example, King Camp Gillette, the inventor of the disposable razor which bears his nåme, built his first factory at Niagara Falls because the river provided reliable and sufficient energy to efficiently produce razors. This allowed him to generate enough profit to pay his workers fairly, one step in his dream of creating a worker-oriented metropolis at Niagara Falls. Gillette was a utopian socialist and dreamed that the Niagara River would fuel the continent and universalize the living wage. He was one of many such men enamored with Niagara. In spite of the rhetoric of harnessing hydroelectric energy to supply a better life to the workers, the citizens and the people, the use of universalisms entrenches the hidden economy of the political invocation of community. Those who stood to gain from these technological innovations gained because Indigenous Peoples stood to lose in very significant ways. Further to this, constructing a hydroelectric dam in a sacred place flew in the face of the Covenant Chain of Silver, the principle directive of

Aboriginal - non-Aboriginal relations, not only because this construction occurred against the 203 wishes of the Tuscarora, but also because it reduced the space to an exploitable resource.

What should be a determining specificity, in short, loses out to the disingenuous invocation of

the universal.

The SPA's move to repurpose Tuscarora land for the sake of hydroelectric

development, while a century out of step with the impulse of technological utopianism, moves

in a similar direction by claiming that its benefits will be universally reaped while ignoring

the enormous costs imposed on the Tuscarora nation. Physical remnants of this impulse are captured in stone at the site of the now-dismantled Adams Power Station.139 The medallion embedded in the archway of the station's original gate now stands at this memorial to

technological innovation (figure 4.1). It features the image of an Indian140 man, paddling a

canoe and wearing the iconic and now cliché headdress that is characteristic of nations from

the Great Plains (figure 4.2). Beyond this restored archway, the plaque inside memorializes the power plant by communicating the now latent but formerly explicit belief that Indigenous

Peoples are less advanced. The plaque shows the sketch-like image of Indians in canoes,141

who transform into power lines and pine trees, through a series of turns and twists which perhaps signify the current of the water as well as the passage of time (figure 4.3). The text describing the history of the station is overshadowed by this image etched into its background, just as the Indian man frozen in the stone medallion enjoys pride of place over the entrance to the tribute to settler technology. As the only figure of difference in the place, it appears that

139 This station was located upstream from the cataract on the American side. 140 Following from the first chapter, I will contihue to use the word "Indian" to signify the body of colonial representations. 141 See my earlier chapter "Magic in the myth" for a detailed discussion of national myths and the myth of the canoe. 204 Indigenous Peoples had little to do with hydroelectric power stations other than serving as a historical reference point in the record of human progress.

The impulse to "improve" the natural landscape through the addition of environment- exploiting technologies was not exclusive to Niagara Falls and the appearance of "advanced" technologies was seen by European newcomers as a gauge of "civilization." The improvement impulse is characteristic of the settler desire to represent and refashion the landscape as well as the perception of control over the natural world.142 Joyce Chaplin (2001) argues that settler approaches to Indigenous populations' use of technology gradually shifted over time. Often woefully equipped, ill or malnourished, "explorers" and early colonists heavily relied on Indigenous Peoples' knowledge of the environment and how to live in it.143

This relationship began with the mutual exchange of knowledge (particularly instrumental to the newcomers were ecological and geographical knowledges), to a state of imposing and withholding technologies.144 At this point, Chaplin argues, it was assumed that Indigenous

McGregor (1985), McKinsey (1985) and Revie (2003) all write that representation, particularly portraiture, often precedes intellectual, emotional and experiential encounters with the landscape, thus indicating that cultural imagining is foundational to experience. 143 Jack Weatherford's remarkable book, Indian givers (1988) plots the technological, scientific and cultural contributions of First Peoples to the lives of these early colonists. 144 There are many such examples across settler states and at Niagara they can be gleaned from texts that purport to relay historical facts to tourist manuals. One tourist manual describes the reaction of Red Jacket - an important Seneca chief and orator - to American settlers' successful construction of a bridge joining the mainland to Goat Island: "His mind seemed to be busy both with the past and the present, reflecting upon the vast territory his race once possessed, and intensely conscious of the fact that is was theirs no longer. Apparently mortified, and vexed that its paleface owners should so successfully develop and improve it he rose from his seat, and, uttering the well- known Indian guttural 'Ugh, ugh!' he exclaimed: 'D—n Yankee! d—n Yankee'! Then, gathering his blanket-cloak around him, with his usual dignity and downcast eyes, he slowly walked away, and never returned to the spot" (in Holley, 1883, p. 77). This report differs slightly from John Niles Hubbard's historical report (1886) who writes: "After its [the bridge's] completion, Red Jacket, in company with General Porter, was passing over it one day, when the chief, whose curiosity was excited, examined minutely every part of its construction, evidently regarding it, as a great wonder. At 205 Peoples had no more knowledge to offer Europeans. "Innovation" in the form of technology was conflated with human progress, and European technology was tightly policed. At no point, Chaplin says, should we assume that the exchange of technology on the part of

"explorers" and early colonists was a sign of benevolence or of the recognition of mutual equality and innate dignity.

English views of hybridity were always instrumental, motivated to derive benefits for the colonizing project. However much they were willing to share their technology with Indians, colonists wanted to control native adaptation. Specifically, they wanted to monitor the entryways of English skills and tools into native societies, and demanded loyalty of the natives who entered English society or created what appeared to be versions of it. (2001, pp. 203-204)

Chaplin's analysis is focused on technology during contact and in the early colonies, but these notions that technology is an indicator of human progress (that is, the siipremacy of European ideas of progress) are stubbornly persistent. With this understanding of how human progress was perceived and measured by colonists and settlers, we can come to understand this war between the Tuscarora Nation and the SPA of the 1950s.

When on 7 June 1956, a massive rock fall caused the Schoellkopf power station to collapse into the gorge below, the security of the New York State's power supply was threatened.145 Moses and the SPA were thus able to win congressional approval to construct a

length discovering the secret, he exclaimed, "Ugh! still water!" and immediately added, "d—n Yankee" (1886, pp 328-9). Botn examples demonstrate the settler's keen interest in native reception of their technologies, and by extension, their presumed superiority. Holley's account highlights the significance of the "achievement" of the bridge as a marker of colonial superiority and as a point of tourist interest. Hubbard's, on the other hand, purports to chronicle the Noble Savagery of Red Jacket as he confronted his culture's and his people's inevitable destruction. 145 One worker inside the plant, Richard Draper, was killed while forty others managed to escape. "Once again, man's handiwork had been victim of the same erosive process that created Niagara Falls" (1993, p. 140) said Pierre Berton. In this one line, Berton manages to express the chiasm that is settlement at Niagara Falls: we construct to be near the falls and the falls tear apart what we construct. 206 larger hydroelectric power station. In order to build the proposed larger station near the site of

Schoellkopf, the SPA claimed that it needed Tuscarora lands. This meant that the Tuscarora would have to be convinced to seil the land in question. Laurence Hauptman (1986) notes that anthropological study of the Tuscarora at Niagara Falls in the 1940s observed that their definitions and measures of progress and success were radically different from those of the

settlers. The settler's priorities were socio-economic in nature and privileged quantifiable indicators such as the accumulation of capital wealth, and the construction of bridges, factories and houses (1986, pp. 155-6). Anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace observed that

"The reserve [...] always remains 'home'" (cited in Hauptman, 1986, p. 155). For the

Tuscarora, leaving the reserve to find work or earn a formal education was a fact, but this did not loosen their relationship to that land or their community. This is significant for a nation which had been dispossessed. In Hauptman's words, "the battle over the Tuscarora reservoir was not simply a fight between two strong-willed leaders, Robert Moses and Elton Greene

[the Tuscarora chief at that time], but in vol ved two definitions of land and the meaning of progress" (Hauptman, p. 156). More than a matter of competing definitions, this was a

struggle between incommensurate ontologies.

Chief Rickard explains the ontological difference involved in radically different relationships between community, land and belonging:

The land holds us together; it makes our community. Without our land, we are nothing. The white man can make his community anywhere. Wherever he goes across this continent, he can buy a house and lot or rent an apartment and melt into the neighborhood. When the Indian moves from his reservation, he leaves his community behind and becomes an outsider in the white man's land - a land that was once his

207 own. To us, the earth is sacred. Only through our closeness to the earth can our spirit survive. (1973, pp. 138-9)

As if to endorse RickarcTs assessment of the newcomer's understanding of the land, Moses attempted to convince the Tuscarora to seil, arguing the money they could secure might be used to "improve" the community through buildings and scholarships. After all, he said, the

Tuscarora had allowed that tract of land to remain largely "uncultivated and unused" (cited in

Hauptman, 1986, p. 162). According to this logic, the money they could gain through the sale of the land would be worth more than land left "undeveloped." At any rate, the Tuscarora would not be seriously inconvenienced because there were only a few houses on that tract,

Moses assumed.

Nonetheless, the Tuscarora would not seil. "We won't seil for 5 million, 10 million or

15 million. If we let any of our lands go, in a few years the Tuscaroras will be standing in the road," said Chief Greene (cited in Hauptman, 1986, p.163). The Tuscarora turned to the

Treaties they had signed, arguing that congress had no authority to grant the Federal Power

Authority, much less the SPA the right to survey or build on their land. They were, after all, a sovereign nation. Moses replied saying that the treaties had nothing to do with the Tuscarora's reservation in Niagara County. Construction on the plant began and many Tuscarora citizens peacefully blocked workers' access to the construction site and prevented surveyors from collecting data on their lands, eliciting the support of the non-Native residents,14 while

Moses attempted to draw support away from the Tuscarora by arguing that the power plant

1461 do not wish to imply that Tuscarora citizens were of a single mind on how to proceed. A number of strategies were proposed and used. 208 would provide jobs. Tuscarora citizens staged demonstrations, erected signs and were joined by their non-Native neighbors. Whether Moses did not understand that the Tuscarora were

asserting their rights as a sovereign nation, or he simply refused to accept that they constituted

one, his racist attitudes won him few advocates; the Tuscarora leadership did not believe that

he was truly interested in ensuring the nation would be fairly compensated even if they did

agree to seil.147 To be left "standing in the road" indicates another dispossession and forced relocation, another colonial rending of a nation from their lands and another blow to their

sovereignty.

I would like to stay with the argument that the Tuscarora would be better off seiling their land and that their connection to this land must be loosened with time. I have already

argued that the difference between settler and Native understandings of their connections with

the land is ontological, but the settler's resistance to this ontological distinction, instead classifying it as a sign of "savagery," points to the settler's conviction that the difference is trivial and easily leveled through the passage of time or eased with the exchange of money.

Conventional historical narratives of the Americas begin with theories that Indigenous

Peoples are descendants of prehistoric intercontinental migrants. Such a position causes great offence to a people who are of the land, whether "people of the land" references humans

Hauptman cites a memorandum Moses sent to an assistant on 19 May 1958 concerning a community house the SPA proposed to construct for the Tuscarora: "No use giving the redskins something they won't take care of (1986, p. 167). Chief Rickard wrote that Moses could not be trusted because of his racist attitudes. 209 formed from the soil , or the community-forming power of the land, it matters little when the assumption that Indigenous Peoples are stateless wanderers dominates historical records and modern conviction. Tom Flanagan, whose scholarly contribution to Native and Canadian histories and political thought is hotly debated,149 nevertheless gives voice to this still- operative position when he says:

Why not consider the coming of Europeans as [the latest in a series of] migration[s], a new set of tribes pushing others in front of them? Should we hesitate to do so because the European colonists had lighter-coloured skin, hair, and eyes than the older inhabitants? At bottom, the assertion of an inherent right of aboriginal [sic] self- government is a kind of racism. It contends that the only legitimate inhabitants of the Americas have been the Indians and Inuit. According to this view, they had the right to drive each other from different territories as much as they liked, even to the point of destroying whole peoples and taking over their land, but Europeans had no similar right to push their way in. (Flanagan, 2000, p. 25)

The temptation to scoff at the claim of reverse-racism against the backdrop of colonial invasion should not detract from the importance of what Flanagan is arguing: colonialism is just another migration and there is no significant difference between European and Indigenous movements (and atrocities) save phenotype and time. For Flanagan the settler, to modify the words of Mahmood Mandani, has become native.150 The doctrine of the statute of limitations on Indigeneity is clearly visible throughout Flanagan's work151 and was fully operative in the

Tuscarora-SPA confrontation. In other words, Flanagan believes, as did Robert Moses, that

Many First Nations' oral traditions trace the people's origins to the soil itself. See Monet and Skanu'u (1992) for a critical and creative analysis of the treatment of these oral traditions of the origins of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Nations in the courts. 149 See Rotman 2001 for a critical review of Flanagan's First Nations? Second thoughts, where Rotman not only critiques the book but also the assumptions and fallades that undergird the body of Flanagan's work. 150 See Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and subiect: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (1996) for a compelling analysis of the settler-native dynamic in colonial and decolonizing states. 151 Flanagan's work extends into the political sphere. He is associated with the Conservative Party, most recently working as the senior communications advisor for the party during the 2006 winter election campaign. 210 given enough time, Indigenous People's Indigeneity, along with their connections to their often resource-rich lands, will invariably fade away. In this line of thinking, time is the determining factor and any consideration of Indigenous People's preexisting rights is a symptom of reverse-racism.

The United States and Canada, like other former colonies turned settler states, are characterized by what Pal Ahluwalia calls "settler independence" (2001). Unlike former colonies that experienced a period of decolonization, where the place of colonizers and settlers within the decolonizing nation was (variously) precarious, settler states have had no such decolonizing moment. Ahluwalia says that place of birth becomes the occasion of settler native-ness as settler law determines belonging within its nascent borders on the basis of conquest. Here, the confusion between race and belonging to the land is demonstrated in full colour. The United States revolted against Britain's imperial chokehold, only to continue to dispossess and oppress Indigenous Nations inside its still-forming borders. That the Boston

Tea Party (a protest against the British that is widely acknowledged as the first major act of

American revolution) was instigated by men "playing Indian"153 (dressed in feathers, dancing and "war whooping") is no coincidence; Nakota historian Philip Deloria (1998) argues that in these early days of American nationalism, settlers sought and found credibility for their revolutionary aspirations by dressing up and acting out as "Indians." Of course, the "Indians"

152 "Reverse racism" is a prosperous claim that relies on the assumption that all social actors are equal. Racism never occurs on an equal social plane, rather is dependent on structural inequalities that manifest in systemic violence against the racialized. See Sehdev 2002 for a detailed analysis of how the reverse racism claim gained considerable ground in Canadian arts funding structures. 153 See Cherokee and German writer, curator and scolar Rayna Green who writes about "playing Indian" (1988) and settler "wannabes" (1994) as appropriative and racist cultural forms in North America and Europe. 211 they played were stereotypes in the most crassly literal sense, but this turn to Indianness,

stereotypic as it surely was, demonstrated a deep need to gain legitimacy through this Other.

This act of settler revolt drew the proverbial line, this time at the Boston Harbor, beyond

which British imperial law would not be allowed to pass. Settler law transforms into colonial

law when it assumes the subjugating role of colonial law. After 9/11 newspapers were ablaze with the slogan, "We are all Americans now." Far from a rallying cry, this daunting message threatened Indigenous nations centuries ago.154

During its confrontation with the SPA in the 1950s, the Tuscarora Nation continued to

assert its sovereignty and demand that settler law be put in its place. When Tuscarora Chief

Elton Greene and Seneca Chief Harry Patterson stated that their Treaty relationship was with the federal government and that New York State and the SPA had no rights in the matter

(Hauptman, 1986), they were declaring that they were both leaders of free nations. With this

as the starting point, it is unfathomable that seiling the land to build a reservoir should be thought of as "freeing" the land (the terminology used in land seizures for settler

"development") because it would bind the Tuscarora to colonial law. The Tuscarora did not

seil their lands to the SPA. When it was clear that the SPA would surely take the land with or without the nation's consent, some Tuscarora citizens did seil their individual plots. The

154 The Syracuse Cultural Workers play on the connections between the rhetoric of today's War on Terror and North America's colonial history. They have produced the popular t-shirt/poster/postcard/bumper sticker featuring an image of Geronimo and three of his warriors posing with their rifles, the words, "HOMELAND SECURITY" and "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492" frame the image. The back of the postcard reads: "Broken treaties, forced relocation, massacres, cultural destruction. Sounds like genocide AND terrorism." This image is humorous and offensive because it begs the question: whose homeland is defended and whose security is ensured? at a time when such questions are considered inappropriate, misplaced, offensive or treasonous. 212 nation was awarded damages for the seizure but Chiefs Greene and Rickard and those to

follow continued to refer to the SPA's actions as land theft. Rickard's words, repeated and

completed here, encapsulate the significance of home on the land and the need to fight in its

defense:

When the Indian moves from his reservation, he leaves his community behind and becomes an outsider in the white man's land - a land that was once his own. To us, the earth is sacred. Only through our closeness to the earth can our spirit survive. This is why we were determined to fight to protect our land. (Rickard, C, 1973, pp. 138-9, emphasis mine)

Homecoming at the Bridge Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it's become a sort of 'home.' Gloria Anzaldua, 2002, p. 1

A confluence of political and intellectual factors enable bridge crossing. While the

newcomer reaffirms their colonial political location through bridge crossing, the Tuscarora

Nation's bridge crossing is an act of creative visioning and action in spite of physical and

political limitations. In crossing Niagara's bridges in the 1920s, the Tuscarora Nation

confronted settler nationalisms without submitting to them. Crossing the bridge can become a

sort of home. Anzaldua writes that Nepantla has become a home. Nepantla is the Nehuatl155

word that Gloria Anzaldua gives to liminality, it is what some twenty years earlier she called

the borderlands (see 1999). Reflecting on the meaning of nepantla and employing her use of

the bridge as an image of potential action, Anzaldua explains, "[it] is a space between two bodies of water, the space between two worlds. It is a limited space, a space where you are not this or that but where you are changing. [...] It is very awkward, uncomfortable and

155 Nehuatl is the language of the Nehua. This is the Indigenous culture encompassing the Aztec Empire in what is now called Mexico. 213 frustrating to be in that Nepantla because you are in the midst of transformation" (1999, p.

237). To Anzaldua, bridges are always preceded by the fundamental un-homeability of the shores, and they are bracketed by the potential of collapse. Bridge-crossers cannot afford permanence because bridges span the borders they breach and occupy three spaces at once: here, there, and the space between. This bridge is significantly different from Bhabha's;

Anzaldua and Moraga write of the bridge in its most grotesque and political form where the body is reduced to its most functional and objectifiable state, to serve as the bridge upon which we may cross (1983). Cherrie Moraga voices the reluctance and fear involved: "How can we - this time - not use our bodies to be thrown over a river oftormented history to bridge the gap? Barbara [Smith] says last night: 'A bridge gets walked over.' Yes, over and over and over again. [...] I have felt so very dark: dark with anger, with silence, with the feeling of being walked over" (1983, p. xv, original emphasis). The threat that one will be expected to offer up oneself to stretch across the shores of understanding and so be "walked over," abused or tåken for granted is a haunting threat and yet, this liminal and impossible space is the only space where meeting in spite of impossibility can occur. The bridge as home does not signal spatial permanence; rather it becomes a sort of home in the way that stretching and strategizing can beeome familiar. The bridge is a "promise" (Sandoval 2002, p. 22), an attempt at community as Anzaldua says (2002, p. 3), and a matter of hope as much as it is potentially brutal. It is the promise of community and of recognition (the crossed will provide the means, the crosser will walk carefully) that outshines this threat of brutality. In a similar way, Ernst Bloch (1986) writes of hope as anticipatory consciousness. Bloch teaches us that 214 hope underlies the most oppressive of regimes. Bloch sees utopian possibilities in the most unlikely of places; even advertised cornmodities bear magical potential. This magical potential involves our wishing, dreaming and desiring to become better. To have whiter teeth, a cleaner floor, slimmer hips, all these point to the utopian visions of our sel ves, our lives and our surroundings because these dream scenarios provoke questions about our happiness and our desires. What makes us happy? Where does our hope lie? Happiness and desire are not far removed from hope. Hope is not wish; while wishing is wistful and disconnected from action, hope anticipates that our actions will result in some happy end. Dreaming of the "if only" scenario even through capital cornmodities and within the confines of the market, reveals our abilities to dream beyond the crushing limitations of our material present. For Bloch, dreaming is potentially subversive because it is creative and purposeful and as such, it can be directed and focused.

I must step back from Bloch's vision of utopia here to return to John Mohawk (2000) who argued that utopia is born of the modernist notion of linear progress and evolution, notions that go hand-in-hand with colonialism. In this capacity, hope is a modernist tool.

Rather than permitting hope and dreaming to fall into the exclusive domain of modernism, hope can operate as a means of visioning return or retrieval from colonialism. Like love, hope does not arrive complete, but is messy, must be pieced together and demands we live in three places at once: to envision and strategize the past, present and future. Similarly, First

Nations' crossing the bridges over the Niagara River has demanded such challenging

215 creativity, and enables community that extends well beyond reach of the physical bridges they cross.

What follows is a discussion of the attempted imposition of colonial law on the

Tuscarora Nation in the 1920s and it implicates the United States and Canada in its use of the bridge/border in defense of the settler nation. The site of the bridges at Niagara, bridges which straddle Canada and the U.S.A., became places where colonial law was brought to bear, and subsequently, became the nexus point of decolonial action. Through the imposition of immigration quotas, the Johnson Act of 1924 barred Indigenous Peoples from freely entering the U.S.A. from Canada.156 A week after the act was passed, Indigenous Peoples in the U.S.A. were patriated under the Indian Citizenship Act of June 2, 1924, and this was seen as an aggressive act that threatened the sovereign status of Indigenous nations. These acts served as a way of solidifying the U.S.A.'s national borders and making Indigenous Peoples part of the settler state by restricting their physical and political mobility. On the Canadian side of the settler border, Indigenous sovereignty was threatened in another way. As I have outlined in the previous chapter, in Canada Native Peoples could be forcibly enfranchised if they were deemed to have met various criteria of "civilization" (for example, serving in the military or earning a university education), but during the 1920s, the Canadian settler state also sought to neutralize Indigeneity by suppressing traditional forms of governance. Under the leadership of

Duncan Campbell Scott (head of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932), Indian Affairs wished to

156 For a detailed analysis of the American Citizenship Act, see Bruyneel, 2004. Hauptman and Campisi (1998) offer an exhaustive historical account of the American Indian Chicago Conference, which helped to galvanize pan- American Indian response to the U.S.A.'s anti-American Indian political and cultural climate. 216 dismantle Six Nations' governance at Grand River, which had asserted its sovereignty as a nation. Six Nations at Grand River had sought the Crown's recognition of its Treaty responsibilities to ensure that Haudenosaunee lands remained in Haudenosaunee hands, out of the reach of fast-encroaching settlers. To this end, Six Nations attempted to appeal to the

Supreme Court. The Privy Council blocked this appeal. Six Nations responded by appealing to the Governor General (the Crown's representative) to protect their rights from the settlers

and the settler government. Levi General, a Cayuga chief with the title of Deskaheh (to this day, Levi General is commonly called by this chiefly title Deskaheh), was charged with the responsibility of arguing for Six Nations' rights. When it became apparent that the Governor

General would not hear him, he wrote to England. Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill directed him back to the Canadian government, saying that this was a dominion matter.

In 1923, Deskaheh and his followers, using Six Nations passports, traveled to Geneva

(Switzerland was the only European nation to acknowledge the passports) to appeal to the

League of Nations.157 Winston Churchill, who had before been eager to lay responsibility at the distant feet of the Canadian dominion government, blocked Deskaheh's appeal by claiming this was an internal (that is, British imperial) matter. He condemned Persia, Panama,

Ireland and Estonia's support of Deskaheh as "impertinent interference in the internal affairs of the British Empire" (cited in Wright, R., 1992, p. 324). In one final attempt to appeal to reason, Deskaheh wrote directly to King George V, reminding him of his Treaty commitment

157 See Wright, R., 1993 or Dickason & McNab, 2009 for excellent descriptions of the following attacks on Indigenous political systems. 217 to the Haudenosaunee and of their service to the Crown during its many wars. On 7 October

1924, while Deskaheh was still in Europe, RCMP officers raided the council house at Six

Nations, dissolved the parliament by dominion decree, confiscated a number of documents that were germane to the sovereignty claim, and seized wampum from the hornes of wampum keepers. After this coup, Deskaheh risked arrest and so he elected to stay with his friend,

Chief Rickard, on Tuscarora territory (at Niagara Falls, New York). Fatally ill, Deskaheh asked Chief Rickard to send for medicine men from Grand River. They were turned away at the border thanks to the border guard's fastidious application of the Johnson Act. Not long before Deskaheh died he urged Rickard to "fight for the line" (Rickard, 1973, p. 68), meaning the settler border and the Haudenosaunee's right to cross it as a sovereign people.

Rickard, along with other influential neighboring chiefs and supporters formed the

Indian Defense League in 1926 with the aim of securing the border crossing rights of all

Native Peoples on both sides of the colonial border. Both Deskaheh and Rickard held firm to the commitment to affirm Indigenous sovereignty in spite of the demands that the border crossing process placed on Native Peoples. Rickard reports advocating for Job Henry, a

Native man, and his right to cross into the United States:

I took up the case of Job Henry immediately. I wrote letters to Senator Wadsworth and to the Immigration Bureau in Washington. Senator Wadsworth gave us much assistance in supporting our right to cross the border at will. I myself went to the main office of the district director of immigration in Buffalo to protest this unjust exclusion and to plead the case of our Indian people who wished to cross the border. I had told the immigration officials that Job Henry was a native [sic] American whose ancestors had been here for centuries and who had been unjustly stopped at the border and separated from his wife and children. I did not consider that there was any such thing as "Canadian Indian" or "United States Indian." All Indians are one people. We were

218 here long before there was any border to make an artificial division of our people. (1973, p. 72)

In 1927, Rickard appeared before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalizatioh in

Washington to defend the rights of First Peoples generally to border-crossing, even while the right had been recognized for his own nation: "The congressmen [...] asked me what the Jay

Treaty said, and I told them that it referred to Indians in general but not specifically to any tribe or tribes. I added that I was working to restore the Jay Treaty as read" (p. 81). Rickard reports that he appealed to Niagara tourists for support. Wearing the Algonquin traditional dress and carrying the wampum from Lake of Two Mountains, Oka, Rickard would walk through the tourist area (return to figure 1.1). In this way, Rickard became a very visible

spokesperson for Indigenous sovereignty in an area whose occupants typically did not encounter the difference they consumed. Rickard reports that tourist reaction was overwhelmingly favorable; it also had the added benefit of mobilizing public sentiment against the New York State Power Authority and the dam project. On April 2, 1928, the right to cross into the United States without restriction was won, and the Border Crossing

Ceremony in July acknowledges this affirmed right (figure 4.4). These images capture the triumphant nature of this border crossing and many appeared in local newspapers in their coverage of the event as spectacle and celebration.

The significance of this bridge crossing extends well beyond the circumstances of

Niagara Falls and serves as a lesson in decolonial action and hope. As a reporter for Indian

Country Today declared, the event "could very well be the oldest continuous Native protest

219 movement in northern America" (Adams, 2004, 23 My). The very real threat that colonial law would subsume Indigenous law and its citizens through coercive belonging meant that crossing and not crossing were equally fraught. Both the crosser and the one who remained on the shore wére subjected to the same colonial assumption: that Indigenous Peoples' sovereignty was irrelevant when put up against the settler nation. Bridge crossing as a political strategy confronted the settler assumption that their grip on Indigenous spaces meant that they (settlers) held the exclusive right to home on that land. This conflict over the imposition of citizenship has not been settled. The Border Crossing Ceremony is billed differently: a "walk" to placate the bridge commission in the post 9/11 era; a "celebration" on the American side because the U.S.A. recognizes its responsibilities under the Jay Treaty; a

"commemoration" because Canada does not. Nonetheless, the event is a critical assertion of

Indigenous sovereignty in settler states that would use settler nationalism to suppress its

Indigenous counterpart. The same event, reported in the Niagara Falls Review simply as a

"protest" with more logistical information (for example, the starting location and time) than substantive detail, is reported as a politically meaningful act in the Hamilton Spectator, though both articles report the Jay Treaty as though it is frozen in the distant past, and so they both miss the contemporary significance of bridge crossing. These reports of critical action at the bridge, blanched as they are, pale in comparison to the dramatic account of the failed bridge, the case of the fallen Honeymoon Bridge. This fallen settler bridge demonstrates the fundamental difference in political necessity and hope between the settler and the Tuscarora bridge. 220 The collapsed bridge at Niagara Falls is literal: the Honeymoon, formally called the

Falls View Bridge. A settler construction that demonstrated the instability of settler-ness in continued colonial spaces, even in its collapse, this tourist feature was considered worthy of the hundreds of spectators it attracted on that eventful morning of 27 January, 1938 when it fell into the river below. Of course, structural failures at Niagara Falls did not begin and end with the collapse of the Honeymoon Bridge; the Schoellkopf power station (1956), Prospect

Point (1954), Table Rock (1850), early bridges to Goat Island, and countless staircases, ladders and.platforms have given way to erosion. What is significant about the Honeymoon's demise is that it encapsulates the notion of arrested movement, or more specifieally, everyone 's arrested movement: Native, settler and tourist alike and in this rare, equalizing moment, the national borders that the bridge spanned became uncrossable. Built on the site of the Honeymoon is the Rainbow Bridge, the place of my unintended sojourn, and at bottom, little separates my experience of lingering at the edge of the nation from the spectator's gathering at either side of the river. I was stranded, as were the spectators on the shores, but this was not a fixed state, and both were easily overcome (people could still cross the river on another bridge, and I managed to find the toll money). The cost of the replacement Rainbow

Bridge was certainly more than the cost of the toll I paid, but both were paid, and in the end, the crossing was completed. Though inconvenienced, we all made it to the other side.

When the Honeymoon Bridge fell down, no one was killed or injured, but the prospect of a romantic stroll over the Niagara collapsed along with the apparently structurally unsound bridge. Oscar Wilde, who wrote in 1882 of Niagara Falls, "Every American bride is tåken 221 there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life," (cited in Dubinsky, 1999, n.p.) would likely have found the collapse of the Honeymoon Bridge strangely fitting. The day the bridge fell, CBC journalist John Kannawin reported that an ice jam in the river had caused the bridge's supports to twist in their place and suddenly give way. The bridge went down, shooting snbw and ice into the air, yet in spite of the dramatic collapse, there were no injuries or loss of life.

In keeping with the popular discourse of scientific mastery over nature, Kannawin ends his report of the wrecked bridge with musings on the symbol of the Honeymoon and the promise of modern science:

Niagara Falls, one of the wonders of the world, and here we have disaster penetrating that which in itself is a super-colossal example of nature' s great work. Niagara Falls in the summertime, a glorious resort. Niagara Falls in the wintertime, an awe-inspiring sight of just what King Winter can do to nature's fortress. Man has spanned Niagara Falls and now one of those spans has gone down. But then, civilization goes on. Nature itself will go on. Another bridge will be built. And people will travel across from the United States where we're all brothers on this great continent, and all proud of our associations with one another. The Falls View Bridge during this great number of years has represented something a great deal more than just a point of entry from one country to another. It's been a sort of scientific hand-clasp from one nation to another, and it can't be allowed to remain down there at the bottom of the gorge. Another bridge must rise to take its place. (Kannawin, January 27, 1938)

According to historian Sherman Zavitz, the ice jam formed two days before the bridge collapsed and it crushed the docking area for the Maid of the Mist, pushing two of the tour boats from their wintertime berths and knocking the caretaker's home off its foundation.

Maintenance crews were sent out at 4:oo on the morning of 26 January to clear the ice from the bridge's supports, but there was little the crews could do as ice continued to flow over the waterfalls and compact at the bridge's base. Word quickly spread through the community that 222 the bridge would surely collapse. Zavitz (1999, p. 57) and Seibel (1991, p. 156) report that a

"death watch" began at 9:15 that morning and crowds began to collect at both sides of the shore to witness the inevitable spectacle (figure 4.5). When the bridge did fall, the media described it as a death and disaster, Kannawin's description of what the Honeymoon meant and why a new bridge should replace it, hyperbolic though it is, reflects the general faith in technology that was characteristic of the time. More than this, the call to rebuild reflects an unwavering faith in the settler's right to rebuild, as well as the natural connection between bridge-building and civilization. Rather than being seen as a technological failure, the fallen

Honeymoon became emblematic of the imperative to innovate, to connect two nations, and to express the manifest destiny of "civilization" over nature. In Kannawin's own words, this event was about more than the collapse of a bridge, it was about an unshaken technological imperative in which we, as citizens of civilized nations, must place our faith. The structural failure of a single bridge then becomes the rallying point of renewed effort and faith in this

"scientific hand-clasp" between settler nations at a time when Canadian nationalism was as yet forming, and the independent settler state still demonstrating its own viability.

The Rainbow Bridge was completed in 1941. It is the closest bridge to the waterfalls and serves as an access point to various tourist attractions on both sides of the border. It is considered a part of the complete tourist experience and the only pedestrian walkway on that bridge is positioned falls side. In other words, the Rainbow Bridge is the Falls View's copy, and it was constructed the very moment the Falls gave way. The Falls View's death watch is remarkable in its passivity; onlookers amassed at the same shores that, for the Tuscarora, 223 serve as a site of struggle, where the creative act of bridging (an act infused with decolonial hope), was absolutely critical to their assertions of sovereignty and home on the land. The collapse of the Rainbow's predecessor reminds us of the precariousness of seemingly permanent structures in an area where impermanence is an inevitability. In spite of this persistent precariousness and the attention that the collapsed Falls View attracted, the construction of the replacement bridge was inevitable and less significant to this discussion of home at the bridge than the creative powers upon which it depended. Indeed, the specter of the Rainbow Bridge surfaced even as the broken Falls View lay at the bottom of the frozen gorge. Prefigured as its image was, the Rainbow as the symbol of settler belonging directed the understanding of the collapsed bridge as an opportunity to simply build again. This is a creativity that settles settlement, and so normalizes colonialism, but this is a creativity that can be worked with.

Dreaming of the "if only" scenario and the better life that might accompany its realization, means that the dull imagining of a replacement Falls View - the act of merging the "if only" future-mindedness with the "not yet" present - represents a potential creativity that if acknowledged, could be transformative. To turn anticipatory consciousness into a revolutionary practice requires a future-mindedness that would focus the eyes beyond the building of a single bridge, to bridging, that is, to minking through and beyond the physical bridge while anticipating the consequences of joining distant shores. Anzaldua's words, tåken from a context of reflecting on the significance of This bridge for radical action and writing

224 beyond the Third World womerfs movement, bring out the importance of imagination to bridging, home and belonging:

Imagination, a function of the soul, has the capacity to extend us beyond the confines of our skin, situation, and condition so we can choose our responses. It enables us to reimagine our lives, rewrite the seif, and create guiding myths for our times. As I walk back home along the cliffs, a westerly wind buffeting my back, the crashing breakers scour the shoulders of the bluffs, slowly hewing out the keyholes, fledgling bridges in the making. (2002, p. 5)

Here the bridge would not be a destination, rather a place for meetings and community in spite of settler limitations. This is no small task for the settler, whose right to home is highly questionable (normalized though it remains) in this colonial space.

225 Chapter 7 Conclusion

Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sighfor the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare. - W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Afterthought.

Myths like the Maid of the Mist are never neutral in settler spaces. Indeed they are opportunistically mobilized to present the semblance of uncontested settler belonging by

attempting to obscure the settler's Treaty relations with First Nations. In my analysis of the work representation does in relation to the idea of community and justice, I have critiqued the notion that representations of pain and suffering can inspire helpful action for social change.

Because suffering carries considerable cultural purchase, these representations present the

semblance of community united in shared suffering. This is deeply problematic. This representational strategy preserves the viewer's distance, and the structures of power enabling this distance, from those represented. In short, the structures of dominance remain intact. In

image-saturated contemporary settler culture, the settler's image of the Maid of the Mist,

which at one point held such purchase as a spatial and national icon, is displaced by the

settler's impulse to know or connect with those shown to suffer. I ask that our analyses of visual representations learn from the strategies of Aboriginal historiography and more actively

and consciously consider representational absences and silences. Violence and representational politics, which include vanishment as a settler representational practice, are co-productive.

226 Public acts of apology in recent months potentially signal the beginning of a change in these representational politics. I am compelled to address the politics of shame here because

apologies and shame are lauded as steps on a bridge or understanding and reconciliation,

markers of a "new relationship." I argue that rather than challenging settler colonialism, the

impulse to claim that communities cohere through suffering is extended as the settler claims a place in the picture as a fellow shameful subject, thereby preserving the settler's "innocence" from colonial violence.

Shame politics in ashamed nations

Fanon presents the possibility of the return to love, which by his account is the ethic of

decolonization, through the recognition of wrongs done. Inevitably, with such recognition,

shame is sure to follow. Indeed, Jean Paul Sartre encourages French nationals to read Fanon's

Wretched of the earth in the hopes that the reading will lead to the recognition of wrongs and then to shame. Will shame lead to progressive action against colonialism? Anti-colonial

scholars (Ahmed, 2005; Probyn, 2004) have engaged shame based on its potential to spark transformative action, debating. Apologies are tåken as a signpost for shameful recognition

and action, but in spite of their appearances to the contrary, they do not do mark progressive change in the making. Declarations of apology have not been offered at Niagara Falls; much less the recognition of settler wrongdoing, so eclipsed by tourism is the region. In spite of this, the figure of apology lingers at the river's shores, and because of this, apologies are necessarily suspect. Many have pointed to the positive potential that guilt and shame can open, and none uncritically endorse shame and guilt as the panacea for racism and 227 colonization (Ahmed, 2005; Faflak, 2006; Probyn, 2004). Is the settler's shame the hope for the decolonial nation, or does it displace other guilty acts?

"Shame is the loss of indifference," writes Sara Ahmed (2005, p. 76). After all, we cannot feel ashamed if we are indifferent to the wronged Other. The absence, or more accurately, the abandonment of indifference suggests a potential for recognition of the Other on the grounds of guilt (Ahmed, 2005). This is an intimate and raw encounter, because in shame, there is no cover from the Other and the wrong done. This balance between exposure and emotional immediacy is what lends validity to the association between shame and love

(ibid). To overcome shame means working through, rather than evading both shame and the

Other. This working through shame is an apparently loving act (ibid). Briefly put, shame demands laboring toward the Other, argues Ahmed. This feeling of obligation to the Other and the need to labor to realize it is what Ahmed calls "solidarity", and as she aptly notes, it is easier to feel bad than to feel solidarity (p. 81). Shame can signal the failure of love, which in the case of national difference indicates the failure in the ideal of the multiculturalist nation

(Ahmed, 2005). Rather than cleaving a space in colonial culture for decolonial recognition, shame can indicate the complete failure of recognition.

As with homelessness, shame and guilt are read and experienced differently within the settler state, making the invocation of the settler's shame and guilt suspect. Deena Rhyms's analysis of the settler's appropriation of guilt identifies opportunistic invocations of shame

(2006). In Canada shame and guilt emerge in the context of the overwhelming statistics concerning incarceration rates and wrongful convictions of Aboriginal people throughout the 228 country (Rhyms, 2006). The case of Donald Marshall Jr. who was accused of murder in 1971,

served eleven years on his sentence and was acquitted in 1983 is one such example (ibid). A review of Howard Adams's description of colonial shame - "I knew my shame by looking

'Indian'" (1995, p. 7) - shows a decidedly different variant of shame than that of the settler.

These concerns that the settler has appropriated shame to avoid responsibility are understandable. To be sure as the presentation of the settler nation as the ashamed nation can be mobilized in the international political arena to its advantage. Such are the benefits of the self-perception of goodness and the display of Otherness as a symbol of multiculturalist national ethics. This is the paradox of shame: it only has cultural and political value when witnessed. "The shameful white subject expresses its shame, it 'shows' that it is not racist; if we are shamed, then we mean well. The white subject that is shamed by its racism is hence

also a white subject that is proud about its shame. The very claim to feel bad (about this or that) also involves a self-perception of 'being good'" (Ahmed, 2005, p. 81, emphasis original). Perhaps guilt and shame are methods of ensuring distance between action and responsibility. Into this situation arrives the "good" activist or scholar who, through the desire to be enlightened or well intentioned, enacts and thereby entrenches her power rather than identifying and challenging it.158

Razack offers a thoughtful analysis of the "good activist" by framing it as a question to structure action and analysis: "The challenge in radical education becomes how to build a critical consciousness about how we, as subjects, position ourselves as innocent through the use of such markers of identity as the good activist" (1998, p. 18).

229 At the inaugural AFN Day of Action, representations of the desperate warrior and

Third World victim saturated public discourse. These representations revealed another in negative: that of the victimized settler community in dire need of defense. Meanwhile, the articulation of Indigeneity continued (and continues) to cut across the bodies of First Nations women and sovereignty. I have argued that this need not be the case; colonial normative treaty can be abandoned, Indigenous political norms can re-connect settler actions and representations to an ethical and decolonial path. The settler has "not yet rooted themselves and been transformed into real people of this homeland" (Alfred 2005, p. 38). Once colonial treaty is recognized as the abandonment of ethical possibilities that Treaty affords, the hard work involved in Treaty's retrieval can come into view.

Within Canada, the dearth of inquiries and Royal Commissions pursuing systemic and historical injustices faced by First Nations suggests that apologies are imminent. After all, if wrongdoings are on the nation's mind, surely the matter of national culpability has inspired the government to offer an apology as a step toward restorative justice. In 2005, the Canadian government committed itself to the Reconciliation and Compensation Agreement for the survivors of the residential schooling system (Assembly of First, 2005). In June 2008, the first of a series of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for residential schools was launched.

The question of a governmental apology for residential schools has been evaded until recently. Even the statement of regret that the former Liberal government issued in 1998 fails

230 to connect the wrong of residential schools with the actions of the government159 in a practice that can only be described as liability-limitation.160 AFN Chief Fontaine announced that if the government did not offer a dignified apology in Parliament, he would refuse to accept it: "The worst thing that could happen is if the apology came and we rejected the apology" (Fontaine threatens, 2008).

Unlike the apology issued ten years earlier,161 the Prime Minister delivered this one in the House of Commons and with First Nations, Inuit and Métis leaders and residential school survivors not only in attendance, but also on the floor. In Canada, this was unprecedented.

The apology was the result of collaboration and consultation with effected communities. In

Canada, this too was remarkable. According to Harper, the apology and the work which enabled it constituted a "new beginning and an opportunity to move forward together in partnership" (2008). Phil Fontaine, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations offered a

This is Wendy Cox's (1998) argument, based on her investigative report into government reports on the legal impact of reconciliation and apology. According to Cox, it was the government's calculated decision to not use the word "apology" and opt instead for more ambiguous statements of regret to avoid liability and lawsuits, all of which would be more costly than the compensation package of $350 million (ibid). 160 Bob Lovelace, retired chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation and chief negotiator on behalf of the First Nation with federal and provincial governments on the matter of uranium mining on traditional territories, reflects on the actions of the governments: "it irks me that really great minds of this generation have been wasted and just squandered on a relationship where colonialism runs the show. We can't have real good negotiations to settle issues because the government of Ontario and the government of Canada simply want to limit their liability. They don't want to respect aboriginal [sic] rights; the government of Ontario hires hundreds of lawyers and academics to discredit aboriginal [sic] claims" (Lovelace in Harries, 2008). He is serving a six-month jail sentence for peacefully opposing uranium exploration and mining in North Frontenac. 161 Jane Stewart, Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs for Jean Chrétien's Liberal government delivered her "Statement of reconciliation: Learning from the past" to Aboriginal peoples on January 7, 1998 (Stewart, 1998). Because the statement was delivered in a meeting room on Parliament Hill, it was not read into the government record and the Prime Minister did not attend. Stewart's statement failed to identify government policies and actions that were directly responsible for residential schools, it did not identify the government's intentions for such action, and it did not acknowledge the long-term and systemic impact of residential school violence (see James, 2008, pp. 140-141).

231 similar vision of hope: "What happened today signifies a new dawn in the relationship between us and the rest of Canada" (2008).

Surely, the government's recognition that its genocidal policies were categorically wrong should be commended. Nevertheless, given the historically overwhelming resistance to deliver the apology in the first place, and the readiness of political parties to assume credit and recognition for moral astuteness for this apology's delivery, critics of the apology may be forgiven. If the impetuous for the apology is the settler's self-aggrandizement, then it is also a betrayal. In the hours preceding the Prime Minister's apology, residential school survivor Ted

Quewezance noted, "when you're actually sorry, you have to do something about it" (in

Peesker, 2008). We are now to grapple with the question of our responsibilities after the apology. This grappling involves rethinking who we are as an apologetic settler nation and how apologies are shaped by the rush to be seen as the sorrowful and thereby good settler.

The sorrowful governmental speakers have alluded to a bridge between the settler nation and

First Nations, and the apology as a first step on this bridge. Will this bridge-in-development honor the principles of peace, respect and friendship? Will we remain committed to the endless relay from the edge of recognition to the safety of its denial, as the Maid of the Mist endlessly circles from the shore's edge to the cataract's base?

Concluding remarks

The invocation of the language of a "new relationship" should raise eyebrows. The relationships between newcomers and First Nations have been enshrined in Aboriginal

Treaties; new ones are not needed and these foundational ones need to be respected (McNab, 232 2004b; 1999; Monture-Angus, 1995; Turner, 2006). The colonial relationship within which

we appear to be locked demands a confrontation with the structures and cultures of violence

that fuel it. Further, the effectiveness of shame politics as a decolonial strategy must likewise be questioned. The feelings of obligation above feelings of solidarity with the Other (Ahmed,

2005) only reinforce the violence of settlerhood. Shame does expand recognition, but the expansion of recognition, as I have endeavored to explain, means little if the terms of recognition and the power structures implicit to them are not challenged. Once again borrowing from and modifying the words of Seminole historian Susan Miller, settler culture must be recognized as "currently colonial" (2008, p. 14) and apparently sincere declarations

of shame can colonize. Fanon's understanding of ethical relations in spite of colonization

(which he defines as relations formed through struggle) suggest that shamefulness and its

resulting form of recognition is not sustainable because it does nothing to challenge the

organization of power.

Aboriginal peoples' relationship to the land is spiritual as it is cultural and political.

This means that colonial dispossession of traditional land (as Fred Kelly, 2008 has said) is

devastating at the level of a people's very being. This also means that the settler's reduction of

Aboriginal sovereignty to Eurocentric rights and recognition discourses misses the mark in profound ways. Aboriginal sovereignty and Treaty concern settler society and failing to grasp the significance of the Treaty does violence to the relationship that links settlers and First

Nations (and without which there would be no settler nation).

233 Postmodera theories of diaspora that jettison the significance of rootedness impoverish

the study of diaspora, since many Aboriginal nations are forced to move from while others are

forced to fight for their hornes. Race politics in Canada must be understood as another device

in the preservation of settler culture in its attempt to fix difference on the body. By fixing

difference on the body through the intersecting discourses of race and gender the fundamental

question of home finds a convenient bodily home in which to channel anxieties of not belonging. The image of the "militant" demonstrates strategies of white settler exclusion

from the settler nation. Racialized diasporic subjects are caught between a national claim that

would exclude people of colour from this nation, and the violence directed against Aboriginal people on their own land. My use of the Third World Women's movemenfs notion of bridge

crossing as an alternative to postmodern theories of diaspora is important here because it

recognizes the struggle that movement requires. It also importantly establishes a provisional

grounds (the bridge) for cooperative action between racialized and Aboriginal peoples. The histories of racialization and displacement that people of colour can share with Aboriginal people can provide common ground for collective action against oppression. Bridge crossing

also lays the groundwork for the racialized subjecfs reckoning with her own precarious and complicit location within the settler nation, however racially and sexually marked she may be; her connection to this land is not spiritual. In this regard, bridge crossing is a powerful tool for challenging settlerhood amongst all settlers.

The terms of settler belonging on the land must include the recognition of the limits of

settler's entitlement to home on the land and the acknowledgement that settler subjectivity is 234 fatally incomplete without meaningfully engaging Treaty, Indigenous sovereignty and settler responsibility. Rather than tearing down settler bridges or awaiting their inevitable and dramatic collapse, settler home needs to be grounded in the stories, lived experiences and ontologies of Aboriginal home and this demands a demonstrable commitment to Aboriginal sovereignty and Treaty. This is to say that Aboriginal home is the normative, determining factor to settler belonging. This dissertation offers insight into the settler's production and use of visual imagery, which feeds modernist fantasies of land, place and knowledge. This aspect of my dissertation confronts the role of vanishing as a strategy of vanishment and of rendering people, knowledge and experience unknowable. Only through the study of the appearance and vanishment of settler imagery and myths can an understanding of the unsettled nature of settler culture be achieved. Understanding the instability, or the unsettledness of settler culture is one step toward decolonization.

235 Figures

Magic in the myth: The mystification of colonial power

Figure 1.1

Silk Hat Ceremony for the return of the Maid of the Mist boats to the United States side May 25, 1961 Niagara Falls New York Public Library Photographer unknown

Left to right: Joseph Davis, President, Niagara Frontier State Park Commission; Caroline Castrignono, reigning Maid of the Mist; Captain Clifford Keech, Maid of the Mist Steamboat Company, Limited

236 Figure 1.2

Roger Woodward with Captain Clifford Keech

Niagara Falls, Ontario Public Library Photographer unknown

237 Vanishing at the border

Figure 2.1

Maid of the Mist Marketplace, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. June, 2004 Photograph by author

238 Figure 2.2

m

¥'-

m

^mm y

Legend of the White Canoe postcard (1907) Based on The Maid of the Mist of Indian Legend (1891) by James Francis Brown. Niagara Falls Public Library

239 Figure 2.3

Evelyn Rumsey Cary's promotional poster, Spirit of Niagara (1901) for the 1901 Pan- American Exposition. Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

240 Figure 2.4

1953 Hollywood movie Niagara, which casts Marilyn Munroe as the sexually charged and murderous adulteress, Rose. 20th Century Fox.

241 Toward decolonization: Treaty and sovereignty in Canada

Figure3.1

Chief Clinton Rickard (Tuscarora Nation) Niagara Falls, New York, Public Library, Local History Department c. 1924 Photographer unknown

Chief Clinton Rickard carrying a placard to educate settlers about the rights of all First Nations' to cross the colonial border. The buckskin dress he is wearing came from the Algonquin community at Lake-of-Two-Mountains, Oka, Canada, the same community that 242 passed custodianship of their wampum to Rickard for this cause. The wampum he carries in this photograph is one of these.

Home at the bridge

Figure 4.1

Archway and medallion, Adams Power Station Niagara Falls, New York April 2007 Photograph by author

243 Figure 4.2

Medallion detail, Adams Power Station Niagara Falls, New York April 2007 Photograph by author

The generic "Indian." Note the shell and whale detail that frames the figure.

244 Figures 4.3

Memorial plague, Adams Power Station Niagara Falls, New York April 2007 Photograph by author

"Indians" in canoes turning into power lines.

245 Figure 4.4

Indian Defense League's Border Crossing Ceremony My 19, 1980 Photograph by Bill Dyviniak Buffalo Evening News Niagara Falls, New York, Public Library, Local History Department

246 Figure 4.5

Collapsed Fallsview Bridge 1938 Niagara Falls Public Library, Niagara Falls, Ontario Francis J. Petrie Collection Photographer unknown

Note the crowds gathered at the foreground and background on the right.

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