Violence Against Indigenous Women by Allison Hargreaves

Author:Allison Hargreaves [Allison Hargreaves]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Recognition, Remembrance, and Redress: The Politics of Memorialization in the Cases of Helen Betty Osborne and Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash

This chapter returns our attention to storytelling as a means of remembrance, as a consciousness-raising tool, and as a catalyst toward action. However, while I formerly explored the possibilities and limits of storytelling the “human terms” of violence against Indigenous women,1 I now turn to the related question of how some anti-violence initiatives, in their work to grant a “human face to the mounting number of victims,”2 have gravitated toward certain “faces” in particular. Storytelling has emerged as an inveterate strategy of anti-violence campaigns; what, then, of those recurring figures whose individual stories are told and retold? While the telling of individual women’s stories is often imagined as a way to both “raise awareness” and promote “recommendations to influence positive change,”3 I want to explore how certain exemplary cases seem to have circulated more readily as appropriate ambassadors for the cause. In this discussion, I am curious about the intersection between selective memorial practices, and the educative as well as “reparative” functions they ostensibly serve.4 In exploring the performative links between commemoration, consciousness raising, and the move toward reparation or redress, I hope to trouble what is often assumed to be the unmediated relation between these practices and to question the ironic capacity of these practices to enact the very hierarchization of human life they protest against. And it is precisely because of (rather than in spite of) the urgency and necessity of combating indifference, raising awareness, and promoting social change that I want to unpack the sometimes unforeseen and unintended consequences implied in the valuing of some victims of violence as more illustrative, more affecting, or more instructive than others.

Many anti-violence critics have pointed to the “overexposure to violence and abuse” that results from the systemic marginalization of Indigenous women in the “areas of social engagement, education and economic opportunities, cultural practices, political action, and civil/human rights.”5 Others have critiqued delayed or inadequate media coverage as itself a discursive form of violence. As Laurie McNeill observes, material and discursive forms of marginalization are connected, with many Indigenous women’s cases garnering scant attention in the public eye: “As in life, some dead continue to be marginalized.”6 Specifically, McNeill highlights, via Judith Butler’s notion of “grievability,” the racialized hierarchy of human loss legible in the “gap between official and marginalized” victims of violence.7 For McNeill, commemoration itself constitutes a particular rhetorical practice in which one can read—in the precise presences and absences it marks—a discerning of just “whose lives count” in so-called “collective memory.”8 Not surprisingly, in these kinds of reckonings, Indigenous women’s lives have decidedly counted less.

In resistance to a dominant public discourse characterized by apathetic, indifferent, or even incredulous responses to the social reality of missing and murdered women, various anti-violence campaigns have fashioned for public consumption the stories of certain emblematic figures of victimry—figures who, from the frequency with which they circulate, seem especially capable of revealing “the truth of society’s treatment of aboriginal people.

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