There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek truth.
Floyd Red Crow Westerman
It is in societies where social memory is primarily oral, or where they are in the process of collating a collective written memory, that the struggle for the control of recollection and tradition, effectively a manipulation of memory, can best be understood.
Jacques LeGoff (1986)
Over the past century, the Essipiunnuat have experienced a series of events, from genocide to permanent colonisation. This has produced intergenerational wounds and resulted in cultural disconnections, large-scale marginalisation and the obliteration of core features of the cultural heritage. Over many generations, and intensifying in the last decade, large portions of the Essipiunnuat collective cultural memory has not been transmitted. Today, the current youngest generation is widely unaware of a pivotal event in their parents’ lives that happened just three decades ago: the Salmon War. People aged under 35 at the time of the war were never told about the episode and those who participated in it had never talked about it; the younger generations knew that something significant had happened but had no idea of the details. The stories weren’t told, but why?
This book is the result of a decade-long investigation, tracing back the genealogy of cultural oblivion as experienced by the author’s family and community, and identifying the lineage of an intergenerational silence about a historic event in order to determine the factors that have led to the contemporary outcome. For this researcher, going up the river of memory would result in having to face the complex dams of silence that had formed over the centuries – obstacles preventing the group from accessing deep and sometimes erased or mutilated sources of knowledge and alternative perspectives on ‘truth’.
What we heard and saw
Stories of the Salmon War suggest at first a clear demarcation between external determinants (colonialism, Québec politics, Euroquébécois representations, anti-Indian militancy) and internal ones; the latter showing, by contrast, the importance that those involved in the project attach to their own subjectivity and that of their group, and the predominant role leaders play in using contentious issues for strategic reasons. The rationale for this seminal collective agency is based on explicit descriptions of mnemonic practices and references to a common inventory of experience on the eve of war, and on the emergence of a sovereignty movement born from the womb of the group, as well as shared objectives operationalised mutually through specific and chosen strategies.
Representations of this agency in the course of war, through images arising from the stories, offer glimpses of the community’s past self. Self-portraits are characterised by defined roles in war articulated around commitment as an emergent norm. The background to these self-portraits, used by participants in the war to contextualise their actions, illustrates the group’s identification with dual, and often antinomian reference points, as well as its advanced economic marginalisation, dependence on external subsidies and the heavy burden placed upon it by material and psychological colonialism. Frequent depictions of emotions reveal shared pleasures associated with commitment and participation in the rebellion, as well as the most commonly distributed feelings of suffering and pain linked with the subsequent reaction to and aftermath of war.
Representations of others in autobiographical memories gave access to the group’s past-self in war. They contain images dominated by an aesthetic of revolt and common descriptions of idols or specific actors, mostly represented in heroic postures with common ethical attributes placed in contrast with images of transgressions. Overall, the images confirm features of a group past-self whose aesthetics display all the characteristics of strength, revolt and an irrepressible rebelliousness – yet also the danger of a nihilistic self-giving attitude being used by leaders and diverted for the purpose of strengthening internal power. These representations of a past-self suggest a powerful normative charge specific to the Salmon War and its connection with wider indigenous worldviews and the conception of life, sovereignty and self-determination it carries within itself.
Testimonies relating to the outbreak of war centred on themes of change: the remodelling of people’s relational system, deep alterations in their self-identity, collective empowerment, and the establishment of new forms of in-group management characterised by a metaphysic of domination, and a progressive insertion of a monocratic chronology in public discourse, with lasting consequences for mnemonic practices to the present day.
Presented as a major event that marked profoundly the group’s memory and generated forms of collective revival and empowerment, participants testified to a subsequent growing remoteness from the normative model connected with their experience of the war. The events of the war culminated in the establishment of a regime which reproduced the useful imagery of the ‘Indian-as-object’ to conform to the Crown representation, which legitimated a monocracy. Furthermore, in an advanced stage of recolonisation, using this simulated-Indian imagery for the purposes of legitimation and marketing, a new collective narrative was generated by a tiny leading unit, increasingly eclipsing the contribution of everyone who took part to enhance the reputation of but a few. The predominance of a paradoxical public discourse about the absence of the Essipiunnuat before the war, added to representations of Essipiunnuat produced through a Euroquébécois lens, reveals erasures that have benefited the dominant internal actors and resulted in a significant historical reinterpretation of the group experience.
Mnemonic practices contained in the testimonies reflect the times and the group’s cultural condition. Forces favouring the oblivion of the Salmon War, and the general tendency towards forgetting and disconnecting from cultural memory, were described with astonishing precision as ‘dams’ preventing remembrance. These ‘dams’ included subsequent events that interfered with remembrance and social phenomena that countered rememoration and reinforced a logic of forgetting and cultural oblivion. They comprised the multiple traumas participants experienced, which they associated with the course of the war and which they were afraid to relive; ‘truth’, having a deep effect on community relations; the destabilising and unpredictable power of past narratives; and the constellation of interests favouring denial and erasure within the group, including the omnipresence of Québec’s selective memory, partially absorbed by the Essipiunnuat. The dynamics of internal psychological erasure and recolonisation were also linked, among other things, to the dual logic of monocratisation-bureaucratisation of political power, accompanied by the reiteration of Innu symbolism for the purposes of marketing and legitimation. Reminiscences and elements of resistance to the vectors of oblivion, such as emotional reflux and the normative charge contained in memories linked to people’s cultural identity, were also recognised. Not envisaged when the research began more than a decade ago, the current social order was reported as the most important element determining oblivion, as well as the interiority of leaders who tended to project their relationship with the past on to the whole group.
Ultimately, remembrance of the Salmon War is highly controversial due to its normative charge which offers standards for evaluating the current social order and its modes of control, countering the unified front shaped by the post-war regime over four decades as a continuation of colonial definitions and institutions. The study of mnemonic practices revealed nostalgia, articulated social criticism and participants’ views on the current cultural condition. The concerns of different respondents coincided in terms of their views on cultural continuity and specific contents and means of intergenerational transmission. The group is presented as being on the brink; in spite of its material achievements and economic self-reliance, its continuity can only be ensured by a radical epistemological shift aiming to revitalise its self-knowledge. Specifically, a reinstatement of Innu ethics, laws and modes of governance is seen as needed to form the foundation of a self-defined social order in opposition to racist and colonial definitions, essentialised concepts that can bring short-term political and financial gains but that favour assimilation, cultural discontinuity and decreased self-referentiality in the long run.
This challenge of self-definition is faced by all First Peoples living under the Canadian constitutional regime of Article 91(24) and the Indian Act. In the long term, complying with exogenous categories favours the absorption of the representations at its roots. Cultural oblivion, as a complex phenomenon produced from specific determinants, is not irremediable if its manufacture is understood and the major mechanism and devices of its production are disclosed and uprooted.
What we learned
Memories of the Salmon War are emblematic of a genuine subjectivity – a collective agency favouring resistance in response to multilateral efforts to undermine the normative foundations of a micro-group. Interviewees report acts of sovereignty, self-determination and resistance based on a historical consciousness and endogenously defined notions of Innu laws (including obligations of guardianship to Assi and future generations), that have survived colonialism in its advanced forms.
The normative charge of respondents recalling their stories during the war reveals the cultural identity of the group and the fundamental ways people relate to the Earth. Remembrance of the event thus reactivates these standards, often highlighting their antinomies with the established orders and their essentialised representations of the Indian as object. The struggle to counter this colonial logic, especially in its psychological forms, is played out primarily within the group itself, where the Eurocanadian and Euroquébécois colonial myths and representations, progressively reabsorbed and internalised after the war, clashed with the ancestral Essipiunnuat definitions revived by the actualisation of memory in the present.
The command to forget that the Crown imposed on First Peoples remains the key to understanding the architecture of cultural oblivion afflicting Canada. The Canadian Crown’s objective, for its part, from the very beginning and through its Indian policies for the last 150 years, has been to establish its absolute supremacy over Innu ancestral territories and people, to ensure ease of access to them, and to exploit them. The preferred way to achieve this, as expressed in the official commissions from the mid 19th century, was through a material and cultural deterritorialisation: to disconnect the ‘ Indians’ physically from their ancestral lands and way of life (and symbolically from their own cultural referential), in order to foster their complete assimilation and drain them of their symbolic resources. As it was for other First Peoples in Canada, this systemic and implacable approach appears to be a central cause of Essipiunnuat cultural disempowerment.
When people are categorised along racial lines by colonial powers, it can result in them perceiving themselves as deficient and decadent. This sense of inferiority tends to legitimate submissiveness and auto-repression, and quash any form of resurgent subjectivity. The ‘Indian-as-object’, a representation which is rooted in the Canadian constitution itself, became the ‘simulated-Indian’ over time. It is, above all, the corollary of a policy designed to obtain absolute domination over indigenous ancestral territories and their wealth. In this sense, cultural oblivion is the ultimate means of achieving total domination and appropriation, of eradicating Innu stories and laws, and of getting people to consent to the surrender of Assi and to abandoning their inherent ancestral sovereignty – this act of cession being explicitly represented by the Crown as the core of their contemporary approach to reconciliation.1 Once erased from memory, Essipiunnuat treasure can be traded for crumbs and people may still perceive that they have gained something.
As policies of oblivion underlie all the structures imposed on First Peoples in Canada over time, the role of memory remains crucial in the construction of individual and collective identity; cultural oblivion reduces capacity for self-definition, generates anomie, opens doors for all possible self-mutilations and ensures docility and loss of imagination. In its latter stages, internalised negative representations of indigeneity constitute a standard of the group’s sense of self, or ‘identity polysemism’. A politics of the collective self that does not involve an increased rooting in cultural resources is flawed, as it leads to anomie and forms of nihilism that favour the instrumentalisation of wills and self-serving tendencies and the reproduction of categories that were initially contested. Once voided of its own normativity and epistemological foundations, and the sense of what is sacred, the group more easily absorbs exogenous definitions, until auto-referentiality is definitively altered.
The experience of the Essipiunnuat demonstrates the ultimate logic of the constitutional regime of Article 91(24) of the Constitution of 1867 and the Indian Act, and how the doctrine of terra nullius becomes, once internalised, the phenomenon of sui nullius. This supremacist and racist Crown definition of the ‘Indian’ has another characteristic: it is based on underestimating real people’s capacity for agency, resilience, cultural continuity and their own definition of civilisation and progress. This fundamental blindness at the heart of colonial institutions, imbued with 19th-century representations, explains the architecture of colonial structures. This is best symbolised by the continued existence of the Department of Indian Affairs, which was supposed to be temporary, only set up to put the ‘reserve’ system into operation. In this context, collective efforts aiming at self-determination – which does not engender the replacement of the imposed structure of governance and its founding definitions – entail the gradual absorption of colonial imagery of indigenous citizenship (status, racial fiction), conceptions of the earth and the ancestral domain (the reserve, borders, alienability of lands), self-determination, decision-making and diplomacy (the band council, authority, obedience) as well as the relationship with the past and truth (command to forget, sui nullius).
The investigation presented in this book found evidence of a dominant in-group ideology displaying a mix of absolutism and racism. These elements are necessary to a system designed for the purpose of producing auto-genocide, as they generate a will (in particular through the residential school system) to replace the ‘bad Indian’ with a good one, following the logic deeply ingrained in the constitutional regime that indigeneity is an ‘illness that needs to be cured’. Canadian colonialism added up to a partly interiorised Québec nationalist soaked with discourses of race and genetics. The experience of the Essipiunnuat should inform other indigenous groups in Canada and elsewhere about what awaits them if they rely on a system designed to assimilate them entirely, and also what happens when nationalist ideology (Québec nationalism, in the case of Essipiunnuat) becomes predominant among the leaders. In the words of a young Essipiunnuat interviewee who shared his vision of the group’s current condition: ‘It changes or we die’ (personal communication, May 2010). This sounds similar to what was heard in Essipit almost 40 years ago, on the eve of the Salmon War.
If cultural oblivion generates anomie, it also produces inertia and the idea that things have always been this way and always will be: it paralyses and numbs. Forgetting paves the way for the absorption of negative representations, surplus powerlessness and renunciation if not self-abandonment. In contrast, cultural memory and stories are the basis of cultural identity, the capacity for self-definition and access to humanity – as a core source of the ‘self ’ – in accordance with ancient philosophy.2 A group’s knowledge of its own history is unavoidably dependent on intergenerational exchanges, sharing and reciprocity. Cultural memory and the referential it carries remain, after all, the material from which imagination is exercised. Past experiences bestow the ability to judge and a capacity for evaluation, but also increase the capability of anticipating the future and carving out a collective self, culturally deep-rooted, with the symbolic resources to avoid the pitfalls of internal recolonisation.
How the past illuminates the present
In a country intoxicated with discourses on reconciliation, inseparable from underlying interests such as industrial developments on ancestral territories, extractive projects, pipelines and the formatting of collective consent to modern treaties, the Essipiunnuat memory of the Salmon War remains highly seditious and a threat to all those actors, whether external or internal, wanting to increase their control over the First Peoples and their ancestral domains. In this context of a programmed extinguishment – or what Russell Diabo has called the ‘termination plan’ – the control over cultural memories, interpretations and references to inherent sovereignty and the exercise of self-determination, but also of an inventory of experience containing resistance and rebellious stances, is of utmost importance to local, provincial and federal authorities. The legitimation of these agents’ endeavours depends greatly on their capacity to influence what should be remembered and forgotten. Cultural oblivion is, then, key to forging consent and getting people to surrender as they start to believe that what is on offer is a gain, mainly because the treasure they are asked to trade has become invisible to them over time.
However, the widespread assumption that forgetfulness, as silence, is absolute and can be produced indefinitely is inaccurate; it can, in fact, be undermined at any time by dreams, a confessional voice, reminiscences or an unexplained desire to go up the river of memory to the place of one’s own birth, resulting in a kind of rebirth, breaching the dams of silence in one’s own story. The power of a deep desire to know should not be underestimated. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we ultimately remain connected to the circumstances of our own birth, as individuals and as part of a group. The ‘New France’ and the ‘Canadian confederation’ are founded on the weak belief and imperial fantasy that previous civilisations did not exist or will soon vanish. Thus what has been ‘forgotten’ will one day be of interest to those who choose to go back up stream, swimming against the current of silence and the forces seeking oblivion.
Katshikauashtet: gazing into the abyss of oblivion
For vulnerable microgroups, especially First Peoples, a clear need for further academic research exists, involving their members in every way possible, and resulting in concrete solutions being put into practice to benefit those who need it most: an indigenous public that the academic world in Canada and Québec often pretends to serve. Listening to people carefully remains a prerequisite for relevant research. Elders should be listened to particularly closely since they are the fount of knowledge, an invaluable source for younger indigenous researchers to draw on and bring out into the open. As the stories have shown, the constant questioning about the authority and legitimacy of those who claim to embody it remains at the heart of Innu political culture. We should also look at those in charge and other representatives, in parallel with criticising colonial institutions, in order to operate a radical cultural critique of the views they espouse; the more power they have, the more their blind spots threaten the group they lead. Studies of amnesia, forgetfulness and oblivion have a great future in Canada; the spectre of what we try to forget often remains closer to us than we tend to believe.
Analysis of the remembrance and forgetting of the Salmon War crystallises around what ‘should’ be transmitted to coming generations. When individuals or groups choose to forget, this constitutes a judgement over their own experiences, the ambiguous emotions associated with asserting indigeneity, and rebelling against authority and questioning the dominant culture into which they have at times integrated. It also testifies to the absence of transmission, the reasons people fell silent, and the strength of their feelings about what happened three decades earlier.
Indeed, the assertion of indigeneity, often in racialist terms, also engendered profound individual and group antinomies and internal toxicities. This is highly complex, yet their evaluation of what should be known about this event becomes more than a consideration of the intrinsic moral value of their experience. There is an echo of their grandparents’ dilemma in their wondering whether or not to speak Innu-aimun to their children, embodying an appraisal of whether or not it is beneficial to reproduce such radical postures in the society their children inhabit. They understand that the actualisation of norms in the stories of the Salmon War is not without consequences; it has the potential to activate historical consciousness, anger and rebellion, but also to be a benchmark for assessing, and eventually contesting, the current institutions that they are destined to face and on which they often depend.
More than ever, and beyond the ‘status card’, Essipiunnuat heritage is heavy to bear and assume responsibility for. Memories of the Salmon War tie in with a wider indigenous historical consciousness and a range of ethics. This provides an insight into the benefits of defending one’s group’s collective dignity but also the pitfalls of radical movements and the risk that they be appropriated by those who might not have the group’s original interests at heart. ‘Remembering’ can come to be perceived as a challenge to authority, or a dangerous ‘contamination’ of the present with the past, so that the young people who assert their indigeneity can become marginalised within their own community. This suppression of dissent within reserves has a long history that deserves special attention; being stigmatised as the ‘bad Indian’ has had, and can still have, serious consequences.
This part of the story, one that often eludes academics, is perhaps best investigated by indigenous researchers themselves. It is a task that requires great caution; among other things it demands the capacity to face one’s demons without being consumed by them and having the strength to delve deeper to uncover what produced them. This book provides evidence that revolutionaries – if not ‘faithful to [their] first noble promise’, to use Camus’ warning – can become oppressors, a fact that has been observed in various decolonisation processes around the world. The weapons that enable liberation can be turned against those they once liberated. The struggle for decolonisation, especially in its psychological dimensions, is never entirely won.
Intergenerational healing and transmission
How can the existing yet fragile will to transmit cultural knowledge and the memories of the Elders meet the will of the young to know and learn about the stories of the Salmon War? This is what I set out to investigate by starting a community project aimed at increasing the opportunities for the young to learn from the best of the groups’ cultural inventory of experiences, and, through this, to enrich or reactivate their cultural identity (for it was clear that the latter was perceived as being in decline and fragile, if not entirely buried). My intention was to use oral history as a way of freeing people’s voices to recreate a community of memory and words; to produce a common narrative that would counter the monopolisation of memory by public discourse, both externally and inside the reserve.
However, few people, especially those who were older, seemed to believe in the possibility of cultural renewal among the Essipiunnuat. For them, such a revolution in self-knowledge, and the willingness to take an Innu referential as a valuable model for the group, would imply the overthrow of the constitutional regime. It would imply its uprooting after having reached the heart of communities. The Essipiunnuat experience therefore, illustrates how potent political memory is, and how excavating memories and looking deep into oblivion can destabilise the status quo; it paradoxically shows how much what is ‘remembered’ can be inseparable from a deeper will to forget in monocratic regimes soaked with coloniality.
This research demonstrates how the memory of the Salmon War played a specific role in legitimising the ‘communitarian system’ and the regime established in the decades that followed. It reveals a prevailing narrative about the war, and representations correlated with identifiable in-group modes of control. By investigating the relationship between the group and its past, this research absorbed as primary data the obstacles it met and the barriers to remembrance.
Cultural oblivion as a human rights issue
Forgetting and the production of cultural oblivion has been a central mode of domination over First Peoples in Canada from the very beginning, and of a long-term strategy of permanent dispossession. The power to define access to cultural memory – what is remembered or forgotten – brings with it the capacity to control modalities of collective identity and provides access to its sources. The ‘command to forget’ remains a powerful determinant of ‘cultural oblivion’. The widely absorbed mantra in Essipit that the group has ‘no past’ and ‘was nothing’ before the war resulted, for example, in asserting that the current internal regime was the only possible and legitimate model – a fascinating absorption of the ‘reserve’ concept. Beyond the official discourse and the voices which conformed to the social order, existed voices of a past, and of tradition and cultural continuity, that were silenced after the war. There were discrepancies between the individual stories and the monolithic script that had been written over four decades.
A few actors increasingly monopolised public speech until they became the only valued source of knowledge and reason. The cultural continuity of the group became almost entirely coupled with the conservation of the local ‘system’. It was also linked to the crucial loyalty given to its designers and managers; actors who also have control over financial resources and transfers from colonial institutions as well as a monopoly on asserting collective consent. The will to remember, to give voice to interpretations of the past and to empower the willingness to know, directly attacks the foundations of the regime and the monopoly on collective identity that is held by a tiny minority and legitimated by colonial institutions. The multiplicity of voices and of memories relativises a unified dimension, questions monocratic rule and allows for more critiques of power. This is one of the greatest strengths of people’s stories and Essipiunnuat epistemologies, oral history, microsociology and mnemohistory.
This research studies the group’s relationship with its past, bringing to a wider audience internal perspectives on the challenges to Innu cultural continuity. By questioning dominant discourses pertaining to the past, and investigating the patent oblivion of current generations while reinterpreting the stories of the Salmon War, this book offers new tools with which to tackle the narratives of colonial rule and its imaginary, and links with local despotism and abuses of power. It shows the power and value of Innu storytelling and the stories’ normative charge as cultural resources for increased self-referentiality and democratisation in the production of memory as an antidote to psychological colonialism. Research can provide the knowledge for resistance as well as for healing.
The project modestly contributes to reestablishing the value of people’s stories, voices and experiences in order to offer alternative perspectives on Essipiunnuat self-knowledge and what it could become. Such endeavours give a sense of the importance of academic freedom by opening up spaces where the dogma that legitimises power can be fiercely questioned and deconstructed. The researcher’s subjectivity is a limited but useful device for questioning the objectivity and ‘superior rationality’ associated with the monopoly of speech that representatives of the established order enjoy, and the rejection of such investigations only reinforces the conviction that it is vital. The concern of conventional researchers to maintain a distance from their object of research has been replaced here by a constant preoccupation with remaining ‘close’ to the stories shared by participants. This research has allowed for the confluence of individual stories (including my own), family and community, uniting them in a new collective framework. This may be somewhat expected, but it has allowed us to know ourselves better, and to understand more clearly what we collectively wish to avoid and reproduce.
The cultural oblivion experienced by the Essipiunnuat, even if modest and on a micro scale, expresses a fundamental similarity with the experience of physical and cultural deterritorialisation of other First Peoples in the Americas and elsewhere. Their common subjection to imposed standards and ways of life to which they never consented, now some 500 years later, has resulted in the dramatic invalidation of their own ancient conceptions and normative order.
These common and tragic experiences of genocide, even if not well documented, and when not silenced due to their painful nature, remain more than ever relevant and real. This is about the marginalisation of an ancient wisdom and alternative conception of freedom in ‘America’, its continuation today, and the possibility it will be reactivated as a heritage of humanity to counter planned ‘nothingness’.
The desire to forget, subjective amnesia and the tendency to bury our own truths, deserves further study. Elders repeatedly affirm, in Essipit and elsewhere, how truth-telling and a strict ethic of honesty are the guarantors of healing, justice, greater collective intelligence, powerful intergenerational relations and a healthier political life. The ways in which we invalidate ourselves, and contribute to our own annihilation as a result of psychological colonialism and the belief that we do not exist, cannot be silenced any more. At some point, it becomes necessary to change the system imposed on you, or submit and disappear through having relied on the hands that strangle you. The choice of obedience or resistance will determine your life and the lives of those who follow as well as the ancestral domain for which you are responsible. Ultimately, a group which loses sight of the great treasure of its cultural memory and heritage finds its ability to see what is at stake in terms of its ancestral territories and human dignity jeopardised. It thus directly affects the permission it gave to alienate what was never alienable and to trade untradable obligations to the Earth and future generations. In this sense cultural oblivion, and its invalidating effects in the wake of genocide, on both capacities for collective consent and resistance, becomes a major human rights issue.
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1 A group of Innu hunters sent a letter to Carolyn Bennett, the minister of indigenous affairs, to denounce the land claims negotiation process and the extinguishment of their sovereignty. In her response, the minister states that this process and the ‘modern treaties’ aim to generate an important step towards reconciliation (Ministère des affaires Autochtones et du Nord Canada, 2017).
2 As an example, former grand chief Derek Nepiak says regarding the definition of belonging to the group: ‘I’ve been to kinship and adoption ceremonies in our Anishinabek tradition. I’ve seen the power of our ceremonies and it has nothing to do with blood quantum or being “white” or the Indian Act. The Elders say we will move to a nationhood of humanity. In time, this will be more common. I only hope that the Anishinabekweg [women] and grandmothers take this responsibility back because it is beyond the political/spokesperson roles of chiefs and councils to perform this task.’