Truth and Reconciliation in Canada: Indigenous Peoples as Modern Subjects

• In Event: Complacency Unsettled: Sebaldian Approaches to Injustice

Abstract

The novel, Austerlitz, is W. G. Sebald’s (2002) compelling project for speaking about the unspeakable wherein an unknown narrator re-tells of his coincidental encounters and life story of the main character Austerlitz: his efforts to know his history and therefore his identity (McColloh, 2003, p. 130). Sebald’s project emphasizes themes of memory, identity, history, trauma, space, repression, and repetition. Such themes also emerge from the personal narratives of Indian residential school survivors, offering points of comparison for considering the genres authors choose to carry the memories of a traumatic past to a wider audience.
Similar to Sebald’s other works of fiction, Austerlitz is accompanied by photographs. Although the photographs can serve the function of re-enforcing the narrative, Sebald’s photographs are not accompanied by captions. J.J. Long (2007) argued that the themes in Sebald’s novels relate to colonial power and are typically displayed in his work through archives: zoos, collections and photographs. Serving an archival function, they depict the state’s increasing intervention into the lives of individual subjects. Likewise, photographs of Indian residential school students lined up in front of the Indian residential school buildings present the children as a collection that displays the power of the Canadian state. Long (2007) recognized that Sebald’s preoccupation with archives and photographs highlight their function as they relate to subjectivity in modernity. He argued that the character of Austerlitz is depicted as an archival, and therefore a very modern, subject in terms of the research he has to engage in to learn of his own history and identity.
When Austerlitz is reunited with his former nanny, she furnishes photographs of his parents and himself as a child. This scene illustrates Hirsch’s (2009) notion of postmemory, wherein second generation survivors of the Shoah attempt to resolve the previous generations’ traumatic history. Vera asks, “What do we know of ourselves? How do we remember? And, what is it we find in the end?” (Sebald, 2001, p. 204). These questions are particularly significant for intergenerational survivors of the Indian residential schools, like myself, and the ways in which we make sense of this traumatic history given by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2009). The TRC’s plans for the collection of this history, in terms of the testimony of survivors, includes a national archive to be housed at the University of Manitoba. Similarly, the newly revised British Columbia curriculum, by including this history, is currently being lauded as responding to the TRC’s Calls to Action. These moves re-appropriate the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada, thereby placing it in the hands of state controlled institutions. Sebald and Long might see these moves as renewed attempts to institutionalize Indigenous peoples as modern subjects.

Author

• Denise Lyn Daniels, University of Calgary