“This Story Needs a Witness”: The Imbrication of Witnessing, Storytelling, and Resilience in Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song

Soul-shaking stories of violence brought on by the Indian residential school system have increasingly been told through testimony at Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, life narratives by residential school survivors, and the artwork of Kent Monkman, Rebecca Belmore, and others who challenge the dominant narratives of the country currently called Canada. Stó:lō author Lee Maracle’s novel Celia’s Song (2014) is a powerful contribution to this ongoing discussion as a literary exploration of the continuing effects of the residential school system, the resilience and endurance of the Stó:lō people and culture, and the problem of the exhausted witness at this particular moment in Canada. Maracle’s compelling storyworld is a potent medium through which to explore these critical issues because, as she boldly states in My Conversations with Canadians (2017), “Fiction is powerful truth” (82).

Celia’s Song was published within a political context in which witnessing is key. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) have completed their mandates, with thousands of hours of audio and video recordings of testimonies from the regional and national hearings held at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba; the TRC has released its final report, which includes ninety-four Calls to Action; the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls continues its painful work among struggles and controversies. The court cases stemming from the deaths of Coulten Boushie and Tina Fontaine, which failed to hold anyone responsible for their deaths, have left many people in Canada exhausted from witnessing a system in which court verdicts like these are “yet another link in a centuries-long colonial chain of injustices that Indigenous peoples” know all too well: “[F]rom the official starvation policies, territorial dispossessions, the hangings following the 1885 resistance and residential school origins of the nineteenth century, to the current overrepresentation of our people in Canada’s child welfare system, jails and prisons, as well as the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Indigenous peoples continue to carry the weight and suffer the effects of these intergenerational policies and the traumas they produced” (Andersen et al.). Part of the weight is that of witnessing through exhaustion and pain, continually witnessing the ways in which colonial structures in Canada constrict possibilities for justice.

Maracle’s novel, with its unremitting attention to witnessing and storytelling, models the power of witnessing—faithful witnessing, ethical witnessing, exhausted witnessing, sustained witnessing, and embodied witnessing. As readers, we are challenged to serve as witnesses to what is happening both in the narrative and across Canada and to allow our-selves to become imbricated in the stories so that we take up the responsibilities of respect, reciprocity, and obligation in relation to the stories we witness.

The exhausted but faithful witness

The novel’s first sentence, “There is something helpless in being a witness” (Maracle, Celia’s Song 1), sets up the interrelated themes of testimony, trauma, storytelling, and witnessing that run throughout the gripping narrative by this prolific Canadian author. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue that in “relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference” (5). Testimony organizes the fragments of memory that traumatic historical events leave in their wake (Emberley 1). Within many Indigenous communities, memories overwhelmed by occurrences of trauma brought on not only by the Indian residential school system but also by decades of other colonizing practices struggle to come to terms with those traumatic events.

For the Indigenous children sent to residential schools in Canada from the 1830s through the 1990s, the residential school experience was indeed an experience of crisis, a shattering experience of physical, cultural, and spiritual dislocation. Contemporary narratives that engage with the continuing reverberations...