Editorial: Indigenous Methodologies/Settler Responsibilities

Canada is in a moment consumed by official and unofficial forms of reconciliation, by the “emerging and compelling desire to put the events of the past behind us so that we can work towards a stronger and healthier future” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission web page, qtd. by Garneau 31). Many scholars, according to Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, agree that as appealing as national discourses of reconciliation are to “a settler-colonial state hoping to put its genocidal past behind it,” the reconciliation process “is a virtual minefield of assimilative dangers” (6).

One reason why is that reconciliation is strange. Like performance, it relies on slippery relationships between past, present, and future; between self and other; between memory and history. Rebecca Thomas notes one danger of official reconciliation is to think that “as of 2015, / We are reconciled” (28); that the past is indeed past. David Garneau, one of the contributors to this issue’s Views and Reviews, points out that instead of attempting to put the past behind us, we must instead “recognize the fact that the need for conciliation” (31)—“the action of bringing into harmony” (30)—“is perpetual” (31). Reconciliation, in other words, is too often imagined as an act that can be completed, whereas the process of working through Canada’s colonial past must be ongoing.

For me, performance theory echoes Thomas’s and Garneau’s perspectives on the past and the future, on reconciliation and conciliation. Rebecca Schneider remarks that in performance, the past “can simultaneously be past—genuine pastness—and on the move, co-present, not ‘left behind’” (15). What is at work, in performances that re-enact the past and particularly in those that participate in efforts toward reconciliation, “is a battle concerning the future of the past” (4). Performance, like reconciliation, can be instrumentalized, employed for de-, anti-, or neo-colonial purposes, and can provide a vital link between pasts, presents, and new futurities.

The contributions to this issue’s Views and Reviews speak to and move beyond reconciliation, examining how performance might participate in resurgence, resistance, and the creation of responsible relationships. They connect how we do things, how we know things, and how we cope when we can’t know, considering the relationships between methodology and epistemology. Meditating on what we can do with the remains of the past, authors consider how one can be in relationship with the past and how performance can make the past sense-able. Contemplating relations with others, the essays and reviews also address responsibility: to ancestors, to oneself, to the experiences and voices of others, and to the future.

In the first essay, Jenn Cole examines how performance research methodologies can “undo our assumptions about what we know, about what constitutes knowledge, and about what constitutes good work.” She argues that “[a]dmitting that one does not know can be a strategy for resisting paradigms of expertise, which are so often part of the dismissive cultures of colonial, capitalist patriarchy,” and suggests that performative research methods can allow for an essential “situational and relational” recalibration of understandings of place and history. Responsible research relationships can lead to sustainable scholarship, slow work that can counter the academy’s desire to “ingest, integrate, and expel knowledge.”

Reflecting on his performance of Dear John; Louis David Riel, a site-specific performance in which he performed as Louis Riel before three statues of John A. MacDonald (in Regina, Kingston, and Ottawa), David Garneau describes how he turned to performance as “a public salve for a private itch” that his preferred mediums, as a painter and writer, “could not scratch.” Like Cole, Garneau discusses the affective and sensory power of performance, explaining that, “[s]tubbornly sensual,” performative intuitions are “only activated through participation, through sense-ability rather than conceptualization.” Performance functions as an epistemology, “exceed[ing] representation and explication to stimulate extra-rational sense,” and allowing Garneau to express intuitions that “demand extraverted expression.”

Questions about settler responsibility come to the fore in the third contribution, a transcript from a round table convened by Don Rubin which considered the ongoing legacy of George Ryga’s 1967 play The...