Now seriously, what kind of people would give up those
things? There are five thousand Indigenous people
camped at Fort Carlton. There are thirty non-Indigenous
people sitting at the table in their red uniforms saying,
“You put your pen to paper and you give up everything.”
Be logical: does that make any sense?1
In “Treaties Made in Good Faith,” Sharon Venne, Cree scholar and lawyer, rejects the Government version of Treaty Six:2 the Indigenous Nations of that territory never surrendered their land, their governments, their legal systems, their children, or their lives. Venne’s understanding of Treaty Six comes from her Elders, who have spoken to Venne, and who have cited the Elders who negotiated with the Commissioners at the signing of the Treaty, in 1876:3 “We are not selling our land. We cannot sell our land . . . We have a relationship with the land. The Creation4 placed us here on Great Turtle Island and this is our land. However, we will let you live on our land.”5 That is, as the Elders explain it, the only way non-Indigenous people and their communities can inhabit Indigenous land is through the Treaty agreements. Which is not to say that non-Indigenous people (Canadians) don’t belong here, rather that we are here because of agreements that bind us (inexorably) to the Indigenous Nations and to the land, and that all Canadians are required (by law) to honour those agreements as they were originally intended, to know their Treaty rights and responsibilities:6 “to live in peace, to share resources: some of the land, some of the wood, some of the ground so that they can live on and respect the land.”7 As I understand it, in territories where there are no Treaties, it is our role to understand what negotiations are in place and to ensure that sound agreements and good relations are made and upheld so that we can fulfill our historic commitments to the Indigenous Nations.
Under the bridge — the Mill Creek Bridge, at 82nd Ave, between the streets of 95A and 93 — is Treaty Six land. Under the bridge there are sleepers, and ravens, thick dust and oil slick, river rock and shopping-cart, brown creek and the steam of sewage. Sometimes a coyote sings with the sirens on the road above. It is pastoral, apocalyptic, and Canadian. Often the sleepers are Indigenous, often Cree — on their traditional territory, home and homeless, living in a continual state of emergency and crisis. For those who seek the pastoral, who jog, dog walk, cycle under the bridge and into the ravine, this apocalypse is normal.
the underbridge
The underbridge at Mill Creek is an exposed edge, scarred by the extraction of resources, development, and the displacement of people. Its dynamics and devastations, its sleepers, reveal the Treaty violations and the government’s continued bio-control of Indigenous peoples and their land — all that remains at the heart of Edmonton, and of Canada. There are hundreds of underbridges in this country — colonized places, debris fields,8 wounded, appropriated earth, displaced Indigenous communities.
How to heal this wound, how to honour the treaties, the obligations of sharing Indigenous land? How to be here? As a non-Indigenous person embedded and implicated in white settler ideology, who is that I that I am? What forces have formed me, my sense of land entitlement, and this gaze? That I, here, settled and settling, unsettled and unsettling, born in a country that is a collective and purposeful creation of forgetting, oblivescent, obliterating; not a place of limitless potential, but a nation that demands a baseline of deprivation and suffering. There is always someone sleeping under the bridge. There is always an Attawapiskat. There is no post-colonial, but there is capitalism, and these are these conditions that constitute Canada: land and resource theft, the enforced dislocation of communities, genocidal administrative systems,9 and government-sanctioned amnesia.
Under the bridge at Mill Creek, composer Jacquie Leggatt and I listen, gathering rhythms and vibrations that are material and specific to the stream, to the ravine, to the river valley and to the river. Next to the huge cement piers, to the thin trees and the creek, under the bridge, noise envelops us. Wearing Jacquie’s earphones, holding the Sony recorder, we encounter layers of sound, meetings of lives; dog, jogger, stone, water, car, bird, two men (yelling from the bridge deck above). Noise swarms the listening body — from behind, from above, from below. The eyes close; the I shifts and is shaken. In its immediate proximity (surrounded) with the materiality of sound, the body encounters the permeability of its own matter. The ears can’t and won’t block the siren, the car alarm, booming truck, ragged breath, coughing body; each noise enters, moves through. The underbridge: kâhasinîskâk,10 place of stones, and stories, buffalo trail,11 a dense growth of trees and brush,12 remnants of a shanty town,13 holes from the coal mines, cow bones from the abattoir,14 inhabited coyote den, defunct railway: the resonant matter of this place.
aisthetikos audibilis
Erín Moure considers how the word “æsthetic” — “(from the Greek aisthetikos — of sense perception)” — is linked to the word “audible,” and how we have “lost the sense of sound in the word ‘aesthetic.’ [. . .] If we are not perceiving the audible [. . .] we are anæsthetized; we become citizens of the Republic.”15 For Moure, listening allows for slippage, and creates resistance to the centrifugal pull of the centre; our attentiveness to sound in language breaks the gaze, shatters the specular, and contests the bogus solidity of the subject and the nation.16 Sound artist Salomé Voegelin also notes the effect of the audible on the listening subject. She claims that “[s]eeing always happens in a meta-position, [enabling] a detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth,” but that in hearing, there is doubt and no place where “I am not simultaneously with the heard.”17
listening
In hearing, we experience and embody the extent of our entanglement. In listening to what we hear, can we sit in the din of the audible, break the gaze, and shatter the specular?
In 1997, in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada rules that oral histories are as important as written testimony.18
In Yellowknife, June 2012, at a workshop in Dettah, on Treaty Eight territory, working with the Weledeh Yellow Knives Dene community, we meet on the edge of the Great Slave Lake, Tinde’e. The roundtable discussions are simultaneously translated into either Dene or English, depending on the speaker’s language, and we are asked to always listen to both languages at once, using earphones. It is difficult, even painful, but also somehow comforting. Outside, there is the sound of wind, lake, and raven. The Elders ask that we take care to listen to the land and to the stories of the people from that land. This is our obligation to our hosts.
In Edmonton, January 2013, amiskwaciy waskahigan19 (Beaver Hill House), on Treaty Six land, walking by the North Saskatchewan River, kisiskāciwani-sīpiy, just below the University of Alberta, on the unceded reserve land of the Papaschase people, Dwayne Donald, Papaschase scholar, asks us to listen for the Cree names of the places, the stories, the stones, to develop a practice of “listening to” that seeks a history, a relationship that acknowledges the binding agreement of Treaty.20 He explains that the land here can’t hear English as well as it can Cree, and that as inhabitants of Treaty Six territory, we are required to acknowledge the Sioux, Cree, Blackfoot, and Metis, and that our Treaty obligations extend across Canada, across Turtle Island, to other Indigenous communities, to their lands, languages, and to the resources that come from the land. The range of audibility originates from specific topologies; it requires our attention, as we are bound by the historical and material consequences of this place and its names.
In September, 2013, Donald writes, “You cannot understand the spirit and intent of the treaties or what it means to be a treaty person unless you understand the treaty sensibilities that the people brought to those talks.”21 He explains that the Cree concept of miyo wichitowin refers to human-to-human relations, and miyo wakohtowin to the way humans live in relation to a broad set of kinship connections, including those with plants, animals, and rocks;22 miyo wakohtowin and miyo wichitowin are at the heart of the treaty sensibility that existed prior to contact, and informed how Indigenous communities understood the first treaty talks with the Crown.
On the Musqueam Reserve, January 27, 2014, Terry Point, member of the Musqueam Band, tells us that since they restored the Musqueam Creek, the creek bed has had an acoustics that attracts the returning salmon.23
hearing
To hear might be to see with an ear turned and tuned to the telling of material resonances. To listen might mean to locate the hum of reciprocations, to locate the relations that bind us, like the compelling acoustics of a creek bed that we could return to.
At the Interventions Conference in Banff in 2010, working as The Institute for Domestic Research, Catriona Strang, Jacquie Leggatt, and I proposed listening as a poetics of intervention.24 But, what if, as non-Indigenous inhabitants of this place, baffled by our participation in the ongoing violence of colonization, we constitute the very condition that requires the radical intervention? How can we hear and be here, locating historic and present-day relationships, and their necessary acoustics? How can we remember when we have been formed by forgetting?
From this compromised and conflicted position, to hear and to actually be here seems an almost inconceivable effort.
But from under the bridge at Mill Creek, on Treaty Six territory, it is also inconceivable that we would not make that effort, and begin to practice a poetics of listening as listening — in the dark and in our unknowing, humbly and actively attentive to the land, to the work and words of Indigenous individuals, communities, and nations, across Canada, across Turtle Island, respectfully acknowledging our relations and working to fulfill our obligations: miyo wakohtowin and miyo wichitowin.
On December 12, 2013, blogger and educator, Delvin Kanewiyakiho posted his Cree phrase of the day:
mah!
kikwaya ekwa e petaman?
Listen!
What are you hearing?25
1 Sharon Venne, “Treaties Made in Good Faith,” in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 34.1 (2007), 7.
2 The total area of the Treaty stretches from western Alberta, through Saskatchewan, and into Manitoba; it includes 50 First Nations. See The Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations at http://www.treatysix.org.
3 The meaning of the Treaty was told to her by her Elders from memory, and expresses the “rich and vibrant life” of the Cree people (“Treaties,” 1). See also, Venne’s “Understanding Treaty 6: An Indigenous Perspective,” in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada, ed. M. Asch (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2002), 173–207.
4 Venne uses the term Creation instead of Creator because she has been taught by her Elders that it is “more reflective of an Indigenous worldview” (“Treaties Made in Good Faith,” note 2, 14).
5 “Treaties,” 7. According to the Elders, Treaty Six will last “as long as the sun shines, the water flows, and the grass grows,” and is a Nation-to-Nation agreement between the Indigenous Nations and the Crown (1). Venne also points out that Indigenous Nations have had treaties for thousands of years — treaties to share land, rivers, etc.; that reserve lands were to be determined by the Indigenous peoples (1) and were not to be shared with the white settlers; and that this land was never empty nor wild nor wanting — “there was no terra nullius” (3).
6 Indigenous scholar and educator Tamara Starblanket writes, “Treaty is the legal framework that Indigenous Peoples operate from. The Elders’ understandings of Treaty are peace and friendship agreements, not land surrender agreements. These peace and friendship agreements provide for two parallel legal systems that were intended to co-exist, each party respecting the authority of the other” (81). See “Treaties: Negotiations and Rights,” Our Legacy (2008) http://scaa.sk.ca/ourlegacy/essays_ebook. Anishinaabe scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson considers the treaty-making process for the Cree and the Mississauga Nishnaabeg Nation as akin to an adoption process; that is, it is an extension and creation of familial relationships. All Treaty relationships between First Nations and Metis hearken back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that recognizes Indigenous rights and title. See John Borrows, “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government” in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada, 155–172.
7 “Treaties,” 7.
8 Les Danyluk’s term for the swaths of debris that can be found under the bridge. Personal conversation.
9 See the Indian Act, for example. It was unilaterally ratified by the Government on April 12th, 1876, and remains in effect today. As Indigenous scholar Erin Hanson writes, the Act “authorizes the Canadian federal government to regulate and administer in the affairs and day-to-day lives of registered Indians and reserve communities. This authority has ranged from overarching political control, such as imposing governing structures on Aboriginal communities in the form of band councils, to control over the rights of Indians to practice their culture and traditions. The Indian Act has also enabled the government to determine the land base of these groups in the form of reserves, and even to define who qualifies as Indian in the form of Indian status. While the Indian Act has undergone numerous amendments since it was first passed in 1876, today it largely retains its original form.” Erin Hanson, “The Indian Act,” Indigenous Foundations (UBC, 2009), http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/?id=1053. The fact that the Indian Act was ratified before the Treaty process also strongly suggests that the Treaty negotiations on the side of the Crown were not conducted in good faith. See The Indian Act, Government of Canada, Justice Laws Website, http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-5/, last amended April 1, 2013.
10 kâhasinîskâk (place of stones) is cited here as the original Cree name of Mill Creek Ravine. “Edmonton Newsbriefs,” Aboriginal MultiMedia Society, December, 2013, http://www.ammsa.com/publications/alberta-sweetgrass/edmonton-news-briefs-december-2013.
11 It is believed that the migrating buffalo used the Mill Creek Ravine as they approached to cross the North Saskatchewan before heading back up to the plains. Personal correspondence with Lewis Cardinal, November 17, 2013.
12 “[Th]e Overlanders, gold-seekers on their way to the Cariboo Gold Rush of the1860s, crossed the ravine . . . The travellers had to cut a path through the dense growth of trees and brush, then use ropes to lower each wagon one at a time and to pull each one up the far bank.” From “Notes from a Walk in Mill Creek, Conducted by David Borgstrom and Tom Monto, September 2010,” Old Alberta, March 19, 2013, http://oldalberta.blogspot.ca/2013/03/historic-tour-of-mill-creek-ravine.html.
13 Dwayne Donald, personal correspondence, November 1, 2012.
14 “Notes from a Walk in Mill Creek.”
15 Erín Moure, “The Anti-Æsthetic,” in My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (Edmonton: NeWest, 2009), 29.
16 Ibid.
17 Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2010), xii.
18 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, [1997] 3 S.C.R. 1010, http://scc-csc.lexum.com/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1569/index.do. Also see Val Napoleon’s strong critique of this ruling in “Delgamuukw: A Legal Straightjacket for Oral Histories?” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 20.2 (2005): 123–155.
19 Please note, in the Cree language, or nēhiyawēwin, there are usually no capitals. In addition, the Cree words in this piece are not italicized because nēhiyawēwin is not a foreign language.
20 River walk with Dwayne Donald, January, 2013.
21 Personal correspondence.
22 Sylvia McAdam, co-founder of Idle No More, writes, “[t]here is a difference between talking Treaty and LIVING Treaty in the spirit and intent that it was meant to be. Nations have laws; laws that are unwritten in the European writing are called customary laws. Indigenous nehiyaw laws are “written” in the landscapes of the hills, the rocks, the waters, everything in the land tells of our history and our laws.” In “Idle No More — I hear many people talk about Treaty, far too many of us do,” NetNewsLedger, December 15, 2012, http://www.netnewsledger.com/2012/12/15/idle-no-more-i-hear-many-people-talk-about-treaty-far-too-many-of-us-do/.
23 “Engaging with the Values, Vision, History and Culture of the Musqueam Nation” session as part of the CTLT (Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, UBC) Classroom Climate Series.
24 The Institute of Domestic Research is a collective of artists and writers.
25 tanisi, Dec. 13, 2013, http://kanewiyakiho.blogspot.ca/2013_12_01_archive.html.