Week 4
The Cover-Up and the Spin
The Cover-Up and the Spin
I am focusing on The Return of the Lost Imperial Child: Trauma, Childhood Innocence, and Settler Ignorance in The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada By Neil T. Ramjewan. Though short, this was a dense read for me. I am unfamiliar with the psychoanalytic notion of the “lost child within”, or with Lacan and Freud beyond what I’ve absorbed through popular culture and intro undergrad courses at art school. The focus on the child here is really interesting to me however. Ramjewan talks about the place of children at the centre in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, particularly the trauma inflicted on stolen Indigenous children in residential schools.
The first “ah-ha” moment for me in this text was considering my own education on Indigenous history. I had very little. All I remember from school in the 90’s was that the “Native Canadians” were of the past, and they made lots of neat crafts and grew corn and made teepees. I absolutely know I was never spoken to about residential schools, even though the last of which would have still been operating while I was in kindergarten. It took me stumbling upon a graveyard in an abandoned town near the Attawapiskat First Nation reserve while at summer camp that I would get a small window into the horror experienced by so many Indigenous children. In this tiny town, me and my fellow teenage canoe-trippers were reading the dates on the tombstones in the small graveyard. One year olds, two year olds, some babies as young as a month, all laid to rest, gone before they could grow up. I had never seen anything like it, and this encounter rocked me as an uneducated (by design) Canadian teenager. Like Ramjewan presents in this text, the figure of the lost child was at the centre of my settler awakening.
The second “ah-ha” for me is regarding Oka. I recently moved back to Toronto after living in Montreal for 5 years. I’ve been to Oka a couple of times, once with my partner to go bike camping, another time with friends to stop at the Indigenous-run dispensaries. I had heard of the “Oka Crisis”, but it was literally today, reading this article, that I understood what actually happened to the Mohawk people there and why. Living in Canada and learning dribs and drabs about Indigenous history is so bizarre! There's the actual story and then there's the cover-up and the spin, an alternate history of Canada I am still piecing together.
The last “ah-ha” moment, or learning, is a reinforcement and a reminder. Ramjewan talks about the centering of white settler guilt, sadness and anguish at the “discovery” of residential schools, of children who lost their lives and survivors who lost their childhoods. We should be critical of this narrative. Yes, it’s important for settlers to be aware of the traumatic history, but this awareness should not take precedence over Indigenous people’s actual, tangible needs: a return of the land that was taken from them.
References:
Ramjewan, N. T. (2024). Introduction. In The Return of the Lost Imperial Child: Trauma, Childhood Innocence, and Settler Ignorance in The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. essay.