Arts of Engagement by Dylan Robinson

Author:Dylan Robinson [Robinson Dylan, Martin Keavy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Note

This interview took place on September 11, 2015, and was subsequently revised and expanded.

CHAPTER 8

“pain, pleasure, shame. Shame”: Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization

Sam McKegney

In October 2011, during a survivors’ sharing circle at the Atlantic National Event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a Cree woman recalled in eloquent and shattering testimony her forced separation from the younger brother for whom she had cared prior to residential school incarceration. Seeing her brother alone and despondent on the boys’ side of the playground, the survivor recounted waving to him in hopes of raising his spirits, if only for a moment. A nun in the courtyard, however, spied this forbidden gesture of empathy and kinship, and immediately hauled the young boy away. To punish him for having acknowledged his sister’s love, the nun dressed the boy in girls’ clothes and paraded him in front of the other boys, whom she encouraged to mock and deride his caricatured effeminacy.1 In her testimony, the survivor recalled the hatred in her brother’s eyes as he was thus shamed—hatred not for his punisher, but for her, his sister, whose affection had been deemed transgressive by the surveillance systems of residential school acculturation.

What became clear to me as I witnessed the woman’s testimony was that this punishment performed intricate political work designed to instruct boys to despise both girls and “girly” boys and to disavow bonds of kinship. The punishment’s dramatization of gender opposition, its construction of the feminine as shameful, and its performative severing of intergender sibling relationships informed the type of masculine subjects those involved in administering residential school policies were invested in creating. Furthermore, it became clear that these punitive pedagogies of gender cannot be disentangled from the years of rape the survivor went on to describe enduring from a priest at the same institution. Nor can the gender dynamics of these impositions be extricated from the survivor’s expressed vexation that she still refers to the baby she later birthed in the residential school at age twelve as “him,” even though the child was torn from her before she could discern the biological sex. These acts of psychological, spiritual, and physical trauma constitute embroiled elements of the same genocidal program, one that has sought not only to denigrate and torment Indigenous women, but also to manufacture hatred toward Indigenous women in shamed and disempowered Indigenous men.2

This chapter focuses on the coerced alienation of Indigenous men from their own bodies by colonial technologies such as residential schooling. I argue that the gender segregation and the derogation of the feminine and the body that occurred systematically within residential schools were not merely by-products of Euro-Christian patriarchy; they were not just collateral damage from aggressive evangelization by decidedly patriarchal religious bodies. Rather, this nexus of coercive alienations lay at the very core of the Canadian nation-building project that motivated the residential school system. The systemic manufacturing of Indigenous disavowals of the body served—and serves—the goal of colonial dispossession by troubling lived experiences of ecosystemic territoriality and effacing kinship relations that constitute lived forms of governance.

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