Revisiting the Atopoi Place of the Indian Residential School
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Atopoi of the Modern:Modern: RevisitingRevisiting the Place of the Indian Residential School Geoffrey Carr University of British Columbia ,, off ered a formal Oapology to the Indigenous peoples of Canada for the federal government’s imposition of the Indian Residential School () system. is long-awaited gesture of contrition was proff ered in the wake of a multibillion dollar reparation package and the inception of a fi ve-year Truth and Reconcili- ation Commission (). Increasingly, governments across the globe are partaking in the politics of regret, and as a consequence more scrutiny has fallen on the form and content of what are now called symbolic reparations: off ering public apologies; expunging off ensive names attached to institu- tions, buildings, and streets; constructing commemorative museums; and commissioning memorials. One of the more persistent critiques of such symbolic reparations is the way in which they sublimate and compartmentalize the pain of mass social trauma.¹ is tendency appears in postapology sound bites circulating in For the scope and implications of symbolic reparations see Ana Cutter Patel, Pablo de Greiff , and Lars Waldorf, eds., Disarming the Past ()() and Bran- don Hamber and Ingrid Palmary, “Gender, Memorialization, and Symbolic Reparations” in Ruth Rubio-Martin, ed., e Gender of Reparations (). For critiques see John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed () and Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts (). ESC .. (March(March ):): –– the Canadian media, encouraging the nation to “turn the page on this pain- ful history.” In this way, the offi cial politics of regret in Canada produces a disquieting sense that the teleological ends of the democratic nation- G C is a state may yet be realized. is offi cial narrative suggests that although doctoral candidate in founded on colonial violence, the nation is at last moving to its logical the Department of Art conclusion—a fair, open, and tolerant society. To date, however, most talk History, Visual Art, and of reconciliation, from church and state, has shied away from the more eory at the University burning questions raised by the spectre of the schools: how to prosecute of British Columbia. His off enders, determine if crimes against humanity have occurred, or reas- research interests include sess how this history impacts the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty. is art and architecture general silence stands in sharp contrast to the objections raised by critics, of the nineteen and many of them Indigenous, who ask these same diffi cult questions. In this twentieth centuries, way, the narrative structure of “turning the page” threatens to foreclose memorialization, an unfl inching struggle with our colonial past and present. heritage, and the In this article, I will attempt to complicate such facile reconciliatory discourses of social narratives by examining the design and construction of Indian Residential reconciliation. His Schools to outline this architecture’s function in the application of the dissertation examines so-called civilizing process and in the disruption of the political, social, the architectural history and cultural life of Canada’s Indigenous populations. My analysis focuses of the Indian residential in particular on the historical and present-day operation of St Eugene, school system in British the once–Indian Residential School now luxury resort, located in Cran- 2 Columbia. brook, British Columbia (fi gures and ). I contend that the study of the Figure 1. Architectural plan: St Eugene Indian Residential School, 1911, Allan Keefer, architect. Façade elevation. © Indian and Northern Aff airs. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2009). Source: Library and Archives Canada / Indian and Northern Aff airs / RG22M 77803 / 111 Item 1067. St Eugene, designed by the prominent architect Allan Keefer, was erected be- tween and . Its doors closed in . | Carr | Figure . Architectural plan: St Eugene Indian Residential School, , Allan Keefer, architect. Ground fl oor. © Indian and Northern Aff airs. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (). Source: Library and Archives Canada / Indian and Northern Aff airs / RGM / Item . building’s design, siting, and program, the policies guiding its operation, as well as the present repurposing of this institution, reveal much about the governmental rationality that informed the construction of a second generation of residential schools—focussed on segregating the unassimi- lable—and much about the profoundly complicated reconciliation process now underway in Canada as well.³ Dakota historian Waziyatawin has suggested that “no one will be committed to righting the wrongs if they cannot recognize and name those wrongs” (). I contend that part of this recognition and naming requires a rethinking of the specifi c material and spatial operation of this architecture, to understand the particular and localized means of enacting policy. I argue further that thinking through the buildings of the residential school system, a project toward Day schools and industrial schools could be described as belonging to the fi rst generation of Indian schools, designed to hasten full assimilation, whereas the second generation residential schools, built between the s and the early s, served a segregationist program. See John S. Milloy’s A National Crime (). | Atopoi of the Modern | which this paper only makes an initial gesture, comprises an important part of the truth telling process and, by default, any eff ectual expression of contrition. To date there have been no scholarly studies of the design, siting, scale, and programmatic use of the built fabric of the residential school system nor of the relations between this infrastructure and the policies and prac- tices guiding their operation. I argue that these institutions were not mere containers in which the policies and practices of Indian education were enacted but, rather, that their designs helped to produce spatialities that disrupted Indigenous senses of place and identity. is spatial theorization, despite its debt to Henri Lefebvre, is informed mainly by Michel Foucault’s thought on governmentality and Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics, the citizen, and those others reduced to “bare life,” to the margins of “legitimate” society. Agamben’s notion of exception, of the displacement of subjects beyond the margins of the law and, thus, the threshold of meaningful sociality, becomes spatialized through study of the form and structure of the Indian Residential School. Referring to these carceral spaces as “schools” fl attens the particular nature of these institutions by applying a euphemism that often implies salubrity and self-improvement. Instead I propose alternate terminology that self-consciously intervenes into the received nomenclature and social memory of this violent colonial past. rough this analysis, I suggest that these structures should not be considered schools per se but, rather, engines or factories of modern colonialism, whose walls bounded an atopos, a non-place. ese atopoi of the modern—a play on Agamben’s “nomos of the modern”—comprise places without place, places without memory, (non)places both outside yet implicated in the juridical order of the state and the sociocultural bounds of Indigenous communities. Whereas Agamben theorizes how sovereign states generally require the power to enact exceptions to nomos (law) in order to maintain integrity, I argue that the Canadian state required the production of spatial exceptions to the perceived, bounded integrity of the “civilized” nation and that these exceptions (atopoi) required the con- struction of a particular architectural form. In Mark Rifkin’s examination of the relation between U.S. Indian Policy, reservations, and American sovereignty, he critiques Agamben’s tendency to attend to biopolitics “at the expense of a discussion of geopolitics, [so that] the production of race supplant[s] the production of space as a way of envisioning sovereignty” (). is article extends the critique of Agamben’s model of sovereign exception to consider in particular the geopolitical implications of institu- tional structures of Indigenous education in Canada. at said, this paper | Carr | does not comprise a straightforward architectural analysis of St Eugene. Rather, it traces a discursive path from general to specifi c and back, the building providing a means to instantiate more general concerns of policy and practice and, at the same time, the details of its construction and design that off er a view on the materiality of this institution and its particular part in the exercise of governmentality. e subsequent aim of this diachronic study is to question to what degree the material remnants of these former institutions (at St Eugene and elsewhere) will alter the telling of Canada’s colonial past. How, if at all, will this built fabric be incorporated into the canon of national heritage or historic sites?⁴ To this end, I highlight the uncomfortable fi t between those mnemonic bureaucracies charged with preserving national memory (such as Parks Canada or the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board) and the “diffi cult heritage” presented by the detritus of the Indian Residential School system. Heritage preservation remains especially diffi cult with such unreconciled pasts, especially as a wide variety of social actors (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) hold diff ering