Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada

Breaking the Framework of Representational Violence: Testimonial Publics, Memorial Arts, and a Critique of Postcolonial Violence (the Pickton Trial)

65 IT’S ALL ABOUT WHITE MEN in december 2007, canadian newspapers were full of the Pickton trial. Robert William Pickton, arrested in February 2002, was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder. He is a white man often referred to derisively in the media as the “greasy-haired pig farmer” because his victims, all women, were murdered on his pig farm. The women he “killed and dismembered ” occupied, at one time or another, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a poverty-stricken area known for its “drugs and prostitution” (Mickleburgh A16). Thus, newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun indiscriminately refer to the murdered women as “drug-addicted prostitutes” (Matas A1). The name and the location are irrevocably tied together in media representation of these women, who were also, in some cases, Indigenous, poor, mothers, sisters, and daughters. The news coverage of the Pickton trial brought to national attention the violence Indigenous women face in Canada. Major newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun supplemented the coverage of this event with Internet websites.1 From these websites emerge a series of testimonial practices that I will discuss in this chapter. One site includes a photographic slide show of the evidence found on Pickton’s farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, and used in the trial (see The Globe and Mail’s “Slideshow: The Trouble with DNA”). Another space of testimonial significance includes “victim-impact statements” made by family members of the murdered women, transcribed and published on the news media websites for The Globe and Mail and The Vancouver Sun. The third site can be found in a small unassuming Breaking the Framework of Representational Violence Testimonial Publics, Memorial Arts, and a Critique of Postcolonial Violence (the Pickton Trial) Julia Emberley 66 julia emberley garden created close to the courthouse by and for Indigenous women. This space was mentioned in various news articles, but was neither photographed nor its precise location revealed. Journalists were asked to respect this space for use by the Indigenous women who were attending the trial. It was understood that the garden provided a space of healing from the trauma of the trial itself. A fourth testimonial site consists of two letters written by Pickton in prison and sent to a pen pal that reveal his identification with the Christian figure of Jesus. I have located these testimonial sites in order to analyze the ways in which they disclose the violence directed specifically toward Indigenous women, but I am also interested in how testimonial practices might contribute to a fundamental transformation in how Indigenous women’s bodies are viewed as objects of violence. How, in other words, can testimonial practices decolonize the perception that sexual difference, aboriginality, and violence are so inexplicitly intertwined that their interconnections appear inevitable and unchangeable? To answer this question it is necessary, I argue, to trace the circulation of cultural economies of affect in testimonial practices; to attend, for example, to how feelings of racial hatred, love, benevolence, and empathy emerge in these testimonial sites. The production of cultural economies of affect within testimonial practices can tell us something about how categories of human and non-human are made and unmade, and furthermore, how such identitarian processes are constitutive to forms of cultural, biological, and human genocides. Today, we might view the making and unmaking of human and nonhuman categories in terms of the larger field of bio-capital productivity. Consider , for example, what happens when associations between humans and animals emerge as forces of dehumanization. In her diary, written when she was in hiding from the Nazis in the occupied city of Amsterdam during the Second World War, Anne Frank observed such a process: Rauter, some German bigwig, recently gave a speech. “All Jews must be out of the German-occupied territories before July 1. The province of Utrecht will be cleansed of Jews [as if they were cockroaches] between April 1 and May 1, and the provinces of North and South Holland between May 1 and June 1.” These poor people are being shipped off to filthy slaughterhouses like a herd of sick and neglected cattle. But I’ll say no more of the subject. My own thoughts give me nightmares! (134) breaking the framework of representational violence 67 In Pickton’s trial, the pig farm inevitably reinforced the connection between the murders of these women and the...