UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Encounters on Contested
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Encounters on Contested Lands: First Nations Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre by Julie Sara Véronique Burelle Committee in charge: University of California, San Diego Professor Emily Roxworthy, Chair Professor Patrick Anderson Professor Ross Frank Professor Simon Harel University of California, Irvine Professor Ketu Katrak Professor Frank B. Wilderson III 2014 The Dissertation of Julie Sara Véronique Burelle is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2014 iii EPIGRAPH Je me suis faite belle pour qu’on remarque la moelle de mes os, survivante d’un récit qu’on ne raconte pas. Joséphine Bacon The very notion of indigenous nationhood, which demarcates identity and seizes tradition in ways that may be antagonistic to the encompassing frame of the state, may be simply unintelligible to the western and/or imperial ear. Audra Simpson iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………. iii Epigraph………………………………………………………………………... iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………… v Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………….. vi Vita……………………………………………………………………………. viii Abstract……………………………………………………………………….. ix Introduction: Nation, Spectacle, and Colliding Narratives …………………... 1 Chapter 1: Neptune Redux: The (First) Nation(s) enacted in Alexis Martin’s Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France.………………………..................... 17 Chapter 2: Encounters on the Reserve: Yves Sioui Durand’s Mesnak and Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance.…….………………… 59 Chapter 3: Endurance/ Enduring Performance: First Nations Women, Diplomacy, and Sovereign Re-mappings. ……………………………………………………… 102 Chapter 4: Theatre in Contested Lands: Repatriating Indigenous Remains..… 148 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………. 182 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………… 192 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the scholars, artists, mentors, and friends I have met on this journey that started in Montreal and led me to San Diego via Vancouver, Boston, and Toronto. I owe to Christine Heitzmann and to our students in Boston my rekindled love for theatre’s power to speak. In Toronto, Antje Budde ignited my interest in theory, and inspired me to become a scholar. I have had the utmost privilege of working with outstanding committee members in San Diego, Irvine, and Montreal. Emily Roxworthy has been an inspiring mentor, and her generosity and intellectual rigor have been instrumental in bringing this project to fruition and in shaping who I am as an academic. Thank you to Patrick Anderson, Ross Frank, Ketu Katrak, and Frank Wilderson for taking me under their respective wings and for teaching life-altering seminars. Finally, thank you to Simon Harel who kindly came on board my dissertation committee despite the distance. I want to thank the wonderful professors and staff at UCSD for their outstanding and caring professionalism. My colleagues in the department have played a large part in bringing this project to life, and I thank in particular Matt Chapman, Jason Dorwart, Janet Hayatshahi, Sonia Fernandez, Raimondo Genna, Lily Kelting, Melissa Minnifee, Sam Mitchell, Naysan Mojgani, Jade Power Sotomayor, and Heather Ramey. Erin Hurley, Yumi Pak, Pierrot Ross-Tremblay, and Selamawit Terrefe have all helped me find my way out of what seemed like insurmountable writing impasses: I have learned so much from their guidance and generosity. Thank you also to Mélanie vi Carrier, Olivier Higgins, José Mailhot, Alexi Marchel, Ghislain Picard, and to Eddy Malenfant, Philippe McKenzie, Anne-Marie St-Onge André, Évelyne St-Onge, and Fernande St-Onge for the hospitality and conversations in Mani-Utenam. Thank you to my family in Montréal for their love and encouragement: my father André, my two brothers Yan and Mathieu and their respective families, my sister Pascale Boyer and her family, and my aunt Marie-Thérèse, and the entire Proulx clan. Thank you also to Lorraine Barner and the Barner family, to Ivano Caponigro, Daniel Kane, Nancy Baird, and David Baillot. I am truly blessed to have David Barner in my life and I am grateful for the supportive and loving space we give each other to pursue our dreams. The incessant questions and avid curiosity of our daughter Anouk who was born as I began this PhD, have been a source of inspiration for me these last 5 years, and I owe her the courage to question even what is uncomfortable. My mother Nicole Proulx passed away as I was starting my PhD. She was a luminous soul, a wonderful parent and friend, and a profoundly just being. She is present in this work. Lastly, I gratefully acknowledge that the bulk of my research was conducted on Kumeyaay, Haudenosaunee, and Innu territories. It is not lost on me that so much of the privilege of writing this dissertation stems from my belonging to the very settler colonial structures that I critique in this book. This is my attempt to participate in a conversation about change, justice, and redress. vii VITA 2009 Honors Bachelor of Art, Drama Specialist, University of Toronto, Canada. 2009-2014 Teaching Assistant, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, San Diego 2014 Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre, University of California San Diego PUBLICATIONS “Theatre in Contested Lands: Repatriating Indigenous Remains” (under review) “Staging Empathy’s Limit Point: First Nations Theatre and the Challenges of Self- Representation on a Settler-State Stage” in Theatres of Affect; New Essays on Canadian Theatre, Vol. 4, edited by Erin Hurley. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, (Spring 2014) "Ondinnok's Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi: Re-membering Fragmented Lineages" in TheatreForum, Spring 2011 issue. CONFERENCE PAPERS “Endurance/Enduring Performances: First Nations Women’s Embodied Challenges to Canada’s Indian Act.” In The Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization Conference, 2013 “Cooking Up a Storm: Pots and Pans and Other Playful Protest During Quebec’s Maple Spring”. Presented as part of panel “The Performative Promise: Liberation, Coercion and the Modality of Play”, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Orlando, Florida, 2013. “Self-Consuming Body Politic(s): On Colonial Violence and Chief Theresa Spence’s Hunger Strike”. Presented as part of Uproot-Downroot: Performance Art as Positioning (Antje Budde and Elin Diamond, chairs). American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, 2013. “Reclaiming an Unmarked Body: Representations of Indigenous Trauma in Ondinnok’s Transnational Adaptation of Rabinal Achi”, Traumatic Structures Working group (Mary Karen Dahl and Katherine Nigh, chairs) American Society for Theatre Research, Montreal, 2010. viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Encounters on Contested Lands: First Nations Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec by Julie Sara Véronique Burelle Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre University of California, San Diego, 2014 Professor Emily Roxworthy, Chair Public spectacles, as many scholars argue, perform, shape and solidify a given nation’s imagined community, celebrating its perceived commonality, while obscuring elements that might threaten its cohesiveness. For settler communities that are predicated on the erasure of indigeneity and its replacement with settlers, spectacles of nation-ness often coalesce in performances that (re)erase the indigenous “other” whose presence challenges settler legitimacy. Encounters on Contested Lands focuses on spectacles of First Nations cultural identity, sovereignty, and nationhood in the ix particular context of Quebec, a settler community whose own minority discourse and national aspirations vis-à-vis Canada have monopolized center stage. Encounters examines how Quebec’s imagined community relies on what Tuck and Yang call “settler’s moves to innocence”, that is on the province deploying its status as a cultural and linguistic minority within Canada in order to obscure its own ongoing settler colonial relationship with the eleven First Nations whose sovereignty predates that of Quebec and threatens the coherence of its national narrative. Quebec has analogized its minority status with the oppression of First Nations peoples, problematically positioning the Quebecois as allies in a common decolonization struggle against Canada. This dissertation’s intervention is two-fold: First, Encounters examines performances stemming from the francophone community that actively imagine and stage the nation of Quebec, tracing how these works reify Quebec’s moves to innocence, and erase the contradictions within its minority discourse. Secondly, Encounters focuses on performances by First Nations artists and activists that interrupt, subvert, and critique spectacles of erasure in Quebec’s public sphere, and thus, challenge the settler colonialism that subtends the province’s national project. Examining these missed, colliding, or violent encounters between Quebec and First Nations’