Postface | Leaders’ interiority as a public issue
Like other First Peoples in Canada, the Essipiunnuat have experienced the collective and intergenerational casualties of genocidal policies and of a regime that aims to eradicate them. Other policies, some of which are still in place today, have been successful in producing ‘oblivion’. This must be stated upfront: the Essipiunnuat are collectively survivors of a genocide and, to varying degrees, are heirs to oblivion. This experience demands a fearless critique of power, and of the internal reproduction of colonialism, especially in its psychological forms, through external definitions and forced forgetting.
To what extent those policies of erasure and the command to forget have been internalised and become a desire to forget and make forget, remains a question that is as necessary as it is cruel. Here, as a corollary to the earlier discussion in this book, I present briefly, for pedagogical purposes, my experience as a researcher investigating psychological colonialism and forgetfulness within my own community over more than a decade.
Investigating one’s own group and family requires a level of reflection that can be stretched to its limit at times. The issue of maintaining a distance, which preoccupied me at the beginning, was progressively replaced by a concern with maintaining proximity to people’s words and thoughts, and to my own integrity as a truth-hunter. Without such strict ethics applied to all circumstances, I could not have persevered. It’s the stories of people and their need to speak and listen that have carried me through. As a member of the community, it was neither possible, nor even desirable, to be objective. It was wiser to recognise my own bias and give it space and visibility in order to work on and with it, and ensure it overshadowed as little as possible other people’s stories.
In the process of conducting this research I met a number of obstacles, a major one being people’s fear of speaking their mind freely due to the consequences, sometimes immense, that might accompany the articulation of their truth. It led some of those I approached to decline my invitation to talk, or pretend they were unable to attend the meeting’. Those who accepted and who were employees of the administration (or their close relatives), chose their words carefully and often preferred to speak off the record. They would then be more critical and sometimes express dissent. Only a few dared to criticise the council, its former general manager and the current internal social order, directly. I found that the Elders, without whom this research could not have been completed, were the bravest. Their conviction was a source of motivation and inspiration to persevere, even during the most difficult moments. But given the circumstances of the community, and the potential consequences for those who spoke out, it was decided that anonymity ought to be preserved. But the price of this anonymity, unfortunately, is to sacrifice the recognition of the remarkable contribution of each individual.
As in other research conducted on contended political terrain, I was perceived at first either as an agent of the regime or as a potential dissident, which reduced the possibilities for communication and exchange and impacted upon the research. Let’s be unequivocal: investigating oblivion and ‘things we want to forget’ is challenging, especially in a community that has experienced many kinds of trauma over centuries and where mnemophobia is a constant presence. I learned the hard way that we do not connect with the truths of the past, the treasures of memory and its sources, without facing the barriers that were erected to separate us from them. And these barriers can seem impenetrable. As I tell my students, half seriously: ‘Don’t try this at home without adult supervision’. Studying forgetting can be highly dangerous; it’s like putting one’s hand down a hole without knowing what is inside, but in the knowledge that it is the hiding place of something which is hidden for specific reasons, rarely for joyful ones. But it is precisely why research on memory is so interesting because it poses with such force, and sometimes with indecency, our relationship with the truth.
Inward as well as outward forms of hostility towards this research, and its explicit attempts from the very beginning to democratise the production of Essipiunnuat memory became crucial material towards gaining an understanding of an overreaching unified dimension which happened to be broadly shaped by the Band Council leadership. The notion of the predominant role of leaders in shaping the community’s relationship with the past only came to me late, around 2011. This was presumably because I identified too much, as a young researcher returning to his community, with this power and with those who exercised it. Reflection on my own indoctrination and blindness, these ‘psychological barbells’, have also become central to my research. The attempt to give marginalised members a voice, allow multiple interpretations and search for the ‘hard truths’ behind oblivion, attracted hostility in the form of attempts to control my research and the parameters of its public reception, and prevent potential dissidence. In the words of a community adviser, my research became a ‘risk prevention’ issue, one of reducing in advance a potential threat.
Choosing to tell the leaders some home truths is certainly noble but not without consequences. I had to expect some spokes in my wheels. Indeed, a researcher can hardly escape the modalities of his agency and its epistemological foundations, especially when investigating his own social settings. After all, the researcher is related to the regimes of power, especially when studying a group to which he belongs and where he lives with his relatives, as well as within generally dense, extensive and complex family networks. The particular value of such research probably lies in the process by which, because of the very nature of the investigation, it becomes increasingly perceived as a threat, an approach that, because it goes against the grain, can give access to data about power that can only be assessed when in opposition to it. Faced with insecurity and lateral violence, the best a researcher can do is perhaps to recognise his limits and shed light on his own programming by being mindful to turn the gaze on himself. By this means he can foster his reflexivity, go deeper into himself, and avoid being betrayed by his own blind spots, staying true to the stories shared with him and continuing to honour the truths they contain. Experience of the field, and life experience, give keys to understanding his own indoctrination and intention, which can help in accessing a deeper reading of stories.
The fact of seeing oneself at times overwhelmed by the phenomenon one is studying (for example, finding oneself in thrall to the very ‘oblivion‘ under scrutiny, and living with its effects), can be tackled by a strict ethic of honesty. This means being faithful to people’s views and interpretations and presenting their stories as they are to the best of one’s knowledge, and not in order to please the people in charge or through fear of being excluded or stigmatised. Such intellectual integrity is made harder by the fact of living in the community; the possible impact on relatives; the potential for blackmail; and being confronted daily with familial realities and the concrete social problems under investigation including deeply entrenched misogyny and internalized racism. If a researcher is not sufficiently grounded and surrounded by mentors, the work can be psychologically destabilising; the desire to please can make us overlook what motivated the investigation in the first place.
Oddly, I’ve learned that it is subjectivity that can save the researcher, allowing him or her to pursue the original vision and research objectives to their conclusion, and trust that the aims of the research have authentic value, not only for the researcher, but for the group. That said, it has never been easy for the intellectual to question colonial authorities and their heirs – leaders well-versed in sophisticated techniques of psychological control. But again the history of the intellectual’s travails provides key data.
Only the passing of time has brought me insight into what I have experienced in the field of investigation. Even if the equation at stake is real and rooted in an enigmatic and shared phenomenon, the research will at some point be limited by my self-ignorance, prejudice, suffering and relationship with the group and its regime of power; relations being indeed impacted upon and transformed by the fact of looking for truth, thus producing uncertainty.
If the research pertains to elements of the group experience that tend to fall into oblivion, the researcher will naturally face the forces determining and producing the forgetting. In such cases, the researcher may be trapped in a posture of criticising those who exercise power, while in some cases remaining dependent upon them. This is far from easy. It leads to intense pressure, especially if the researcher lives in the community in question. The stakes become very high. If the experience of the researcher becomes richer, the psychological pressure also rises. This is perhaps when one’s ability to interpret other people’s testimonies reaches its peak; one’s own unfolding life-experience can easily thereafter, especially if forms of suffering are being experienced, overshadow other people’s stories.
At what moment should a researcher investigating his or her own community withdraw in order to make sense of his or her life and feelings, which form part of the results of the investigation? Shedding light on one’s own experience will provide the key to what couldn’t be perceived because of a lack of first-hand experience, particularly in regards to power and the leaders. It can also provide insights that will bring deeper understanding of peoples’ stories and more accurate interpretations of their testimonies. Altogether, this new source of knowledge lays renewed epistemological foundations, including the cultural empowerment inherent in digging into one’s own group and listening to Elders. Silences and abstentions are particularly difficult to decipher, and experience of living in the community itself and taking the time to listen carefully is the key to doing so.
A researcher who identifies as indigenous can be unpleasantly surprised by the reactions of the people in power, especially if the prior expectation had been that reclaiming ancestral culture would bring the group and its leaders closer together. Finding oneself confronted by internal racism and being branded the ‘bad Indian’ can cause a brutal awakening. This is again when one’s own experience becomes central to an understanding of one’s own group. It allows one to realise, among other things, how much the need to belong to one’s group of origin, despite its cultural ‘disconnects’, can make one easy to indoctrinate and vulnerable to manipulation. Understanding our own process of and reasons for psychological indoctrination, as heirs of oblivion, is immensely important. Is it not the storm that shapes the captain?
Group internal tyrannies, as a deep legacy of colonialism, have their foundations in a web of omissions, silences, absences and complex emotions, such as suffering, shame and fear, that are not easily readable at first. An autocrat is generally a dissembler. By a progressive process of substitution the relationship a tyrant entertains with his own past, once projected on the group, becomes, as time goes by, the relationship the group entertains with itself. Through a complex chain of muteness and deafness, intergenerational ruptures and discontinuities – not foreign to deep traumas and rewriting – the leader’s desire to forget his own past mutates into a desire to make everyone forget everything about the group memory; a command to forget, this time destined for the whole group, is then put into operation. It can lead to complete control of the parameters of a group’s collective identity, and shape and normalise a shared desire to forget. Such a situation generates, among other things, the ongoing legitimation of power, the collective absorption of a new mythology articulated around the leader’s role and chronologies in generating the group itself, and, more importantly, the strong belief in the absence of history and of a collective self before the domination of the group by the one in charge. His actions and realisations are represented as generating the very being of the group; any opposition to his authority is countered with the threat that the people will fall back into the nothingness of what they were before he ‘gave birth’ to them. History has unfortunately, and often tragically, produced a panoply of these ‘fathers of the people’.
Whether it be on the scale of a small minority group or of an empire, the relationship practitioners of monocracy entertain towards their past and childhood should be at the heart of the public gaze. Their obsession with controlling their image, often hiding past humiliation and deep shame, and with acquiring the power to erase, in order to fulfil their desire to forget, may soon cast a heavy shadow on the public realm. Such a will to make people forget everything in order to ease the production of new myths to feed their glory, buries even further their deepest memories of their most secret vulnerability. Through an incessant quest for truth, the researcher runs the risk of subjecting the tyrant to an intolerable torment, the threat of showing his weaknesses, and how his thirst for power may in fact be based on a terrible affective deficit.
These are some of the reasons why investigating forgetfulness can be dangerous, in particular where colonialism has left open wounds. Once he has seen or heard the secrets concealed in the corpses, it is the researcher as truth holder that the leader may want to bury, in order to ensure that these burning truths are carried as far away as possible. It is crucial for the leader that the foundational silences on which his empire is erected remain strong.
The researcher, for his part, may learn from tyrants how power is intimately intertwined with the production of ignorance and oblivion, and how reflectiveness, honesty and care remain the last borders preventing the projection of their own interiority. The integrity of a researcher (especially when that person is operating under the shadows of colonialism) demands that he never lets his desire to be loved outweigh his desire for truth, regardless of the personal cost.