Justice Sang the Adaawk: Repairing Terrible Colonial Pasts Through Oral History

• In Event: Storying Historical Consciousness in Times of Reconciliation: Oral History, Public Education, and Cultures of Redress

Abstract

This presentation will discuss the role of oral history in psychosocial acts of witness that are potentially educative and socially reparative. Rereading Leslie Hall Pinder’s (1999) personal account of the legal proceedings in the land claims case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, I exam the subversive role of Mary Johnson’s adaawk in intervening in colonial discourse and history as put forth by the Judge in the case. I argue that the force of Aboriginal witness of oral history in claims over land and the right to existence disturbs our understanding of language, knowledge and history and compels a just redress of the colonial and violating record. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic constructs I suggest that we read this case not only as a claim over land, but a claim over the forms that knowledge, history and justice take in postcolonial and multicultural nations (Lear, 2008). Following Shoshana Felman’s (2002) psychoanalytic method of reading accounts of traumatic witness as an occasion for pedagogy, I suggest that land claim proceedings can arrest legitimized histories and open up new ways of reclaiming knowledge, history and strained relations produced from a terrible colonial past. My presentation will contribute a view of the ‘terrible gift’ of oral history and its reception as a form of pedagogy that might set the stage for reparative curriculum between Aboriginal people and multiple waves of settler Canadians (Simon, 2004).

References

Felman, S. (2002). The juridical unconscious. Trials and traumas in the twentieth century. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press

Hall Pinder, L. (1999). The carrier of no. Index on Censorship, 28(4): 65-75.

Lear, J. (2008). Radical hope. Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Simon, R. (2006). The terrible gift. The museum and the possibility of hope without consolation. Museum management and curatorship, 21(3): 187-204.

Author

• Aparna Rita Mishra Tarc, York University