Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec (Performance Works) - Softcover

Julie Burelle (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810138964 ISBN 13: 9780810138964

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

In Encounters on Contested Lands, Julie Burelle employs a performance studies lens to examine how instances of Indigenous self-representation in Québec challenge the national and identity discourses of the French Québécois de souche—the French-speaking descendants of white European settlers who understand themselves to be settlers no more but rather colonized and rightfully belonging to the territory of Québec.

Analyzing a wide variety of performances, Burelle brings together the theater of Alexis Martin and the film L'Empreinte, which repositions the French Québécois de souche as métis, with protest marches led by Innu activists; the Indigenous company Ondinnok's theater of repatriation; the films of Yves Sioui Durand, Alanis Obomsawin, and the Wapikoni Mobile project; and the visual work of Nadia Myre. These performances, Burelle argues, challenge received definitions of sovereignty and articulate new ones while proposing to the province and, more specifically, to the French Québécois de souche, that there are alternative ways to imagine Québec's future and remember its past.

The performances insist on Québec's contested nature and reframe it as animated by competing sovereignties. Together they reveal how the ""colonial present tense"" and ""tense colonial present"" operate in conjunction as they work to imagine an alternative future predicated on decolonization. Encounters on Contested Lands engages with theater and performance studies while making unique and needed contributions to Québec and Canadian studies, as well as to Indigenous and settler-colonial studies.

About this title

About the Author

Julie Burelle is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California San Diego.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Encounters on Contested Lands

Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec

By Julie Burelle

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2019 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3896-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Nation, Spectacle, and Colliding Narratives, 
Chapter 1. Neptune Redux: The (First) Nation(s) Enacted in Alexis Martin's Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France, 
Chapter 2. Les Racines Imaginaires/Mythical Métissages: Québec and the Ruse of the Métis Turn, 
Chapter 3. Cinematic Encounters on the Reserve, 
Chapter 4. Endurance/Enduring Performance: Nadia Myre, La Marche Amun, and the Indian Act's Tumultuous Geographies, 
Chapter 5. Theater in Contested Lands: Repatriating Ancestors amid Violence, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Neptune Redux

The (First) Nation(s) Enacted in Alexis Martin's Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France

Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France (Invention of Central Heating in New France) is the first of a trio of plays penned by Alexis Martin as part of his project entitled Histoire révélée du Canada français 1608–1998 (A Revealed History of French Canada 1608–1998). A prolific and beloved actor, director, and playwright, Alexis Martin has been a central figure of Québec's theater scene since the early 1990s. While he works regularly in film and television, he is closely associated with Montréal's Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental (NTE) and with its founders Jean-Pierre Ronfard and Robert Gravel. Martin has been the artistic codirector of the company since 1999, a role he now shares with his close collaborator Daniel Brière (the two were at the helm of the Histoire révélée trilogy produced by the NTE between 2012 and 2014). As a playwright, Martin often investigates the centrality of language in Québec, creating existential encounters between colorful characters from various socioeconomic, linguistic, and even temporal strata. His eclectic theatrical world is thus composed of past productions in which Mafiosi and intellectuals, Hitler and God, priests and waitresses uncomfortably and often hilariously rub elbows. Unsurprisingly, Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France features encounters between Samuel de Champlain, Jesuits, an Innu spiritual leader, and a group of aficionados of historical "cosplay" (costume play as a hobby).

In a 2012 interview, Martin mused on what he perceived as the relative absence of historical dramas in Québec's theatrical canon. Noting the scarcity of texts dramatizing the early days of Nouvelle-France, the defeat of the French forces on the Abraham Plains, or the lives of historical figures such as Marc Lescarbot or the Comte de Frontenac, for example, Martin asked whether this silence, this form of cultural forgetting, was "the lot of the defeated." The title of Martin's ambitious trilogy — A Revealed History of French Canada 1608–1998 — clearly positions the plays as a corrective gesture to Québec's so-called cultural and historical forgetting and announces the author's desire to illuminate what he sees as Québec's obscured past. If Martin is quick to point out that he is not a historian and that his plays do not pretend to show the truth about the past, the trilogy's website and Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France's program nevertheless feature an exhaustive bibliography of the scholarly and historical texts Martin consulted to pen his plays, giving the whole project the seal of legitimacy that comes with archival research.

As its title suggests, Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France (hereafter Invention) explores history through the theme of cold and positions frigid temperatures and harsh weather conditions as central driving forces in the formation of Québécitude (which I use here to denote the French Québécois de souche identity). Explaining this dramaturgical choice, Martin notes in an interview published in the major newspaper Le Devoir: "Cold has really forged our identity. And it still does. From the beginning, cold, for example, has made us create alliances with Aboriginal people, if only so that we could survive the first winters." In each of Invention's interwoven storylines Québécitude thus emerges from the thermal shock of winter, from unlikely alliances devised in times of need, and from the ingenuity required to survive the long winters' extreme cold. The action of the play jumps from the winter of 1606, which led to the formation of L'Ordre de Bon Temps (the Order of Good Cheer) in the colonial outpost of Port Royal, to the "Storm of the Century" in 1971 during which more than eighteen inches of snow fell on Montréal in less than twenty-four hours, burying the city under a thick white blanket. Bookending the play is the ice storm that paralyzed the southern part of the province (including Montréal) in 1998, leaving thousands without heat for weeks in the dead of winter.

According to Martin, the structure of the play and of the trilogy as a whole emulates the geometrical structure of a snowflake:

The play comports 6 branches that each constitutes a condensed scenario, the temporality of which is reversible. This dramatic structure is diachronic-hexagonal and evokes the shape of a snowflake. Thus, 6 sequences of events (or scenes) converge to a center, which is the temporal space that structures the trilogy as a whole. This center, always the year 1998, is the neutral space that allows the transit from one era to the next, from one theme to the next.

The notion of reversible temporality is important here, since it allows Martin to jump back and forth in time and to revisit and establish resonance between disparate historical and fictive events. Through these episodes of extreme winter weather, Martin imagines, often with poetic humor, a genealogy for the French Québécois de souche in which survival and adaptation, colonial alienation and a desire for liberation, and ultimately nationhood produce a narrative of resilient presence on a harsh landscape.

In conversation with Martin's Invention and its articulation of Québécitude, this chapter first meditates on theater's intimate role in shaping national memory and a community's sense of self. As Alan Filewod argues, "theatre models the society in the process of enactment ... transform[ing] experience into a community narrative and ... materially construct[ing] in the audience the community it addresses in its texts." The nation and theater produce and legitimize each other in "the elation of spectacle." Through the process of bringing people together to witness storytelling, theater (the space and the performance) solidifies a community's sense of self in a process that simultaneously erases that (bodies, events, etc.) which threatens its narrative's coherence. In this sense, theater participates in what Ernest Renan qualified as a form of necessary forgetting in this oft-cited passage of Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?

Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. ... All French citizens must forget the Saint-Barthélemy, the massacres in the South of France during the XIIIth century.

Renan, who wrote a century before Filewod, illuminates here how nations obtain and maintain their cohesion in the tense balance between shared remembrance and collective forgetting.

What is this past that Alexis Martin wants us, "the defeated," to remember? Invention makes it clear it is the memory of the French Québécois de souche that Martin wants to jolt back to life. It is Québécitude that is at stake. The defeated here are not the Indigenous people whose expropriation and erasure constituted the conditions of possibility of Nouvelle-France and, later on, of Québec. As for remembering, Martin is selective. A thick description of his play reveals that the playwright certainly "remembers" the crucial role played by Indigenous people in the creation of Québécitude in North America. This is laudable in a context where Indigenous characters and stories are all but absent from mainstream media in Québec (save for the occasional images of devastation or conflicts on reserves). To its credit, the play features a large cast of Indigenous characters. But, as I argue in this chapter, their presence is always in service of a stable Québécitude. If, as Martin argues, Invention's hexagonal dramaturgical structure allows temporality to be reversed, echoed in the present, and revisited, then his Indigenous and French Québécois de souche characters are not afforded the same temporal mobility. Indigenous characters, though celebrated in the past, are portrayed as vanishing and are only imagined as "providing the conditions of possibility" for Nouvelle-France/Québec "to manifest its intent." After having disappeared Indigenous characters from Québec's trajectory after the era of Nouvelle-France, Invention ends with a group of Indigenous workers from Mexico vanishing in a fire in a sewing plant in Montréal. Martin, it seems, can only imagine Indigenous people as spectral figures.

In imagining Indigenous people as mere conditions of possibility, Alexis Martin reproduces the well-worn scenario that organized the very first Western play written and performed in what is now Canada: Marc Lescarbot's 1606 Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, a redface performance that features a group of French men dressed as "Sauvages" who willingly surrender their land to the King of France in a choreographed nautical masque that was performed on the waters of the Annapolis Basin (in what is now Nova Scotia). Provoking an encounter between these two plays, I examine in this chapter how French settler, French-Canadian, and later on French Québécois de souche identities have always been performed in what I call a parasitic relationship with Indigeneity. This relationship, in which the parasite draws from its host in a nonreciprocal relationship, extends of course from the stage to everyday life. My analysis of Neptune is indebted to Alan Filewod and Jerry Wasserman. Both have written at length on Neptune as a colonial spectacle, and they locate in its 1606 performance the genesis of Canadian theater, the initial moment in which Canada as a nation is articulated on stage through the simultaneous presence and erasure of Indigenous bodies. A close examination of Martin's play (which incidentally features the characters of Marc Lescarbot and of the historical figures that performed Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France in 1606) demonstrates that Lescarbot's gesture of erasure still permeates French Québécois de souche's identity narrative.

Finally, in tracing Martin's ambivalent intervention, this chapter explores how Invention struggles with the notion of reconciliation with Indigenous people in the wake of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) mandated by the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Reconciliation begins with an encounter of the other's pain, with a seeing and a hearing of their story. Martin seems well aware of this necessity for encounters, but he falls short of creating them in any meaningful way. Indeed, Martin's play was written in 2011 and performed in 2012: this was a period that coincided with the public audiences conducted by the TRC, which began in 2010. Invention labors to imagine and stage reconciliation, but does so while sidestepping an admission of the province's complicity in the oppression of Indigenous peoples. The play both renders Indigenous peoples visible and reconsolidates their erasure. Focusing on a scene between Takraliq, an Inuk Residential School survivor, and a young French Québécoise de souche who witnesses her disheveled testimonial in a bar in Montréal, I reflect on this missed encounter as reflective of the as-of-now impossible path to reconciliation between the French Québécois de souche community and Indigenous people. As I argue, Québec's narrative of itself currently forecloses the very first step in the process of reconciliation, which is to recognize the province's own role in the violent oppression of Indigenous peoples. Invention's struggle to name Québec's complicity in the administration of the Residential School system (one arm of Canada's genocidal project) marks a moment of overture in Martin's play. However, given that the play was mostly performed by non-Indigenous actors in theaters led by French Québécois de souche and far removed from Indigenous populations, the reconciliation and absolution imagined and performed in absentia of Indigenous peoples in Invention falls short of its reconciliatory endeavor and echoes in disturbing ways the willful offering of the land performed by the "Savages" of Lescarbot's 1606 Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France.

Je Me Souviens? Exploring Québec's Will to Forget

Martin's diagnosis of Québec's cultural amnesia may come as a surprise to many. After all, remembrance is Québec's official motto, replicated on every automobile license plate in the province with the phrase Je me souviens (I remember). Québec's cultural industry has been, and still is, heavily invested in affirming Québec's distinct culture through a celebration of a certain version of its past. If Alexis Martin posits that theater is exempt from this memorializing trend, Québécois cinema, on the contrary, has consistently mined and dramatized Québec's terroir (agrarian past) in films like Séraphin: Un homme et son péché (2002) and Le Survenant (2005), among others. Television series like Les Belles Histoires des pays d'en haut (1956–70), which is currently being given a remake on the Radio-Canada television channel; Le Temps d'une paix (1980–86); Les Filles de Caleb (1990–91); and countless others have celebrated Québec's Everyman and -woman, those folks nés pour un petit pain (born to be poor, of inconsequential birth) under the dominion of the Catholic Church and the rich Anglais (British and, later on, American). The province's friction with Canada also constitutes a rich source of inspiration for films such as Octobre (1994), 15 Février 1839 (2001), and Le Déserteur (2008) that dramatize important conflicts between Québec and Canada. The film scholar Bruno Cornellier relates these commemorating gestures to Québec's "will to remember as a political imperative." Indeed, Québec's cultural institutions and governments (separatist or not) have wielded and continue to deploy the concept of collective memory, an investment in commemorating the province's wounded attachments and its history of suffering, as a weapon against assimilation into the Anglo-American sea that surrounds the province.

To be fair, Québec's recent cultural productions have also explored the province's turn toward cosmopolitanism and dramatized its contemporary urban reality. Movies like Ricardo Trogi's Québec-Montréal (2002) and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette's Le Ring (2007), as well as Xavier Dolan's entire filmography, mark a sharp turn from the theme of the terroir. They remain however, resolutely white, and the films or television shows that center on non-French Québécois de souche are few and far between. According to recent statistics provided by the Union des Artistes (the francophone actors' union in Canada), the most popular shows on Québécois television in 2014–15 counted less than 5 percent of their casts as actors of color. Theater boasts the same pitiful numbers, and the province's cultural industry has been remarkably tone-deaf when it comes to racist practices surrounding the representation of racialized bodies. When a non-Québécois de souche does appear on screen, he or she often occupies the periphery or "serves to participate in and reflect the stabilization of an identity and a memory from which he or she is nonetheless excluded, like an external witness." Importantly for this project, these two historicizing currents in Québécois cinema — terroir and cosmopolitanism — have in common the near-complete erasure of Indigenous characters who are, if rendered visible, reduced to the roles of one-dimensional artifacts of the past.

Martin claims that Québécois theater is uninterested in history, and he is both right and wrong. I would contend instead that history is remembered selectively in Québec's public sphere. This can be explained by Québec's aforementioned complex and contradictory status as a colonized/colonizer minority. Only certain parts of Québec's history — those that stabilize Québécitude as an oppressed and colonized minority identity — are remembered and mythologized. The Québécois de souche cultivate a certain cognitive dissonance when it comes to their genesis as settlers and their subsequent complicity in Canada's settler-colonial project. This is what Mark Rifkin calls "settler common sense," which he describes as "the ways the legal and political structures that enable non-Native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood." In other words, Québec's remembered narrative never questions the very foundation and questionable legitimacy of the de souche's national project.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810138964
• ISBN 13: 9780810138964
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224