Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture

10. FAS and Cultural Discourse: Who Speaks for Native Women?

10 FAS and Cultural Discourse: Who Speaks for Native Women? Cheryl Suzack On 6 August 1996, Justice Perry Schulman of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench ordered a twenty-two-yearold Native woman from Winnipeg’s inner city to enter a drug treatment program for substance addiction. The woman, who was five months pregnant at the time and who had three children in the care of child welfare agencies, was brought to court by the Manitoba Department of Child and Family Services when she refused to enter a treatment program of her own volition. A spokesperson for the department asked, ‘‘how many badly damaged children does a person have a right to bring into this world? It seemed to us that this was such an extreme case that we had to do something’’ (Mitchell 1996:7). In handing down his decision, Justice Schulman enforced an obscure section of penal law known as parens patriae which enables a superior court judge to restrict the rights of persons who are in danger of harming themselves (Mitchell 1996:7). Justice Schulman stated that since the woman was incapable of looking after herself, ‘‘he was ordering her into a drug treatment centre for her own protection’’ (Mitchell 1996:7). While Justice Schulman’s ruling was overturned on the grounds that the woman was ‘‘mentally competent’’ to stand trial, the court case remains as a problematic reminder of the implications of imperial governance. For inasmuch as it consolidates and constructs Notes to chapter 10 are on pp. 152-53. 145 the subject of legal discourse, the legal institution represents the ultimate form of subject constitution: as a form of representational discourse that enables a person to be spoken for politically and as a tropological narrative that enables a person to be represented symbolically (Spivak 1988:276). In the interplay between these two forms of subject-constitution, the woman could neither self-represent as the autonomous subject of Western humanism nor self-efface to avoid emerging as the object of imperial law. Forced to inhabit the space of this double displacement of her subjective reality, the woman was effectively silenced by the imposition of imperial law. Justice Schulman ’s decision to incarcerate the woman thus enacted a form of symbolic violence that enabled the woman to be identified as a pregnant addict through the disavowal of the material conditions that constituted her social subjectivity.1 In the immediate aftermath of the trial, media representations focused on the question of the moral and political implications of the Justice’s decision. Pro-life advocates argued on behalf of the rights of the fetus, claiming that the ruling highlighted the ‘‘absurdity of current Canadian law, which countenances the killing of the unborn but disallows less grievous injury’’ (British Columbia Report 1996:32). Prochoice activists maintained that the decision threatened the rights of women ‘‘to dispose of their unborn children as they see fit’’ (British Columbia Report 1996:32). The President of the Winnipeg-based Prairie Centre for Innovation in Government and Economy argued on behalf of the nation, claiming that responsibility for the woman’s behaviour had become the problem of the ‘‘modern welfare state’’ at the expense of the woman’s family and community (Western Report 1996:20-21). No one thought to protest the representation of the woman as a ‘‘glue-sniffing addict.’’ Shuttled between the moral high ground of interest groups and the punitive measures of the legal system , the woman came to occupy the space of the ‘‘objectified other,’’ where neither interest groups committed to social change nor government institutions acting on behalf of the rights of citizens could represent the problematics of her social situation. Insofar as neither interest groups nor government institutions thought to investigate the social realities of the woman’s life, the court case exposes the dissimulated interests of both the legal system and family services in disavowing these conditions. To legitimate the intervention of these institutions in the woman’s life, the court required a vision of the woman as incompetent that would warrant the infringe146 Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture ment of her rights by the penal system and that would explain the behaviour of family services in removing three children from her care. The stereotype of the pregnant addict provides this legitimacy, for it identifies the paradox that Cynthia Daniels describes as ‘‘a woman simultaneously engaged in the destruction of life (addiction...