0004
November 2, 2018The Indian Act and The Filing Cabinet
Back to this archive. When I sorted through the two dozen archival images, newspaper clippings, and video links, I felt witness to a brief history of the brutal tensions between Indigenous people and the Canadian government.
After the fourth and fifth pass of the folder, I began seeing moments and geographies forming together–such as, residential schools, the erasure of their existence, and the resistance to this erasure. I could see the past and present in tension. It was as if the archive represented the collective action of living Indigenous people reclaiming their past and fighting for their future. Referencing Mbembe, I could see a people who had been negated from time, now pushing back, by saying: “We existed yesterday. We exist today. And we will exist tomorrow.”
When thinking of this process of decolonization, I think of the experience of seeing a photographic image form on gelatin silver paper in a chemical bath. Sitting in the pool of liquid, the paper is blank; the image that is embedded within the paper is absent. The image then begins to reveal itself, starting light and just barely visible. Then, suddenly, the image is deeply textured, fully formed, and powerful.
Punctuating the archive folder are reports from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). These documents, to me, seem to be the epicentre of what this archive is about: Indigenous decolonization. These reports are hefty in size and content. A significant component of the documents are a collection of residential school survivor testimonies, stories, and accounts of the horrors they experienced. And it is these voices that have begun to fill in the silences that have existed in the national archives and the Canadian narrative.
It is important, though, to recognize that the problem previous to the TRC is not that Indigenous voices were absent. They have been loud and active for a long time. The problem is that these voices have been delegitimized by the social, political, and legal structures that have oppressed them since the formation of the country. Documents established by the government, like the Indian Act, have been the bonafide references for First Nations and federal relations. Any comment or statement made outside of institutionally legitimized documents have little weight, in the eyes of the Canada. This is why the TRC records are so powerful. By compiling these voices into documents that the government deems significant and legitimate, the voices within them are significant and legitimate. These voices can then be referenced and researched by archivists, scholars, and activists, and then implemented as a powerful tool against colonial narratives.
In the same way that I see the TRC reports as an epicentre of Indigenous decolonization, I see the Indian Act as the epicentre of Canadian colonialism. This document, 31 pages long, produced the framework for the Canadian government to steal land, resources, and children from millions of Indigenous people, and beat, jail, or murder them if they disobeyed the laws laid out in the Act and did not fit within the “Canadian culture.”
As John Sheridan Milloy says, “[a]ssimilation became the enduring justification for federal colonialism.” (2) And the largest mechanism for assimilation was, without a doubt, the residential school system. With the Act in place, the state could legally justify taking children away from their families and placing them in boarding schools where they regularly punished them, tortured them, denied them of their heritage, and taught them to be “civilized” Canadians.
This video shows evidence of mass unmarked graves of children outside of The Mohawk Institute Residential School (commonly known as The Mush Hole, referencing the food the children were served). This video shows evidence of childrens’ bones that had been cut in half, indicating that the bodies of kids, some as young as two or three years, were chopped up and buried by the school officials on school grounds.
All of this was justified under the Indian Act. But that does not mean that the document is just a piece of history; its impacts are nowhere near finished. Michael Morden says, “the Indian Act failed the assimilation tasks imagined for it originally by the non-native fathers of Indian Affairs, preserving both positive and negative varieties of legal discrimination. Despite all this, the Indian Act remains in force today.” (117)
The implications today are largely felt in the national system of repression this document established. Control and containment seems to have been the primary intention: contain First Nations within their reserves and control those who want to leave. Allen Sekula talks about the filing cabinet as being the central unit within a state apparatus of control. He argues that it was the filing cabinet that first allowed for police records to be made, collected, and stored. These early filing cabinets then became the first archive of the criminal body. I believe that the Indian Act enabled the Indian Affairs filing cabinet to be establish. And this became the place where all repressive documents and records of Indigenous people were collected, categorized, stored, and retrieved when the state thought necessary.
For these reasons, I see the Indian Act as the spine of this archive. Every image, newspaper article, and video in my folder is formed around the Act, and cannot be supported without deeply considering this 1876 document.
0002 Conceptual and Practical Issues with the Archive