The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Gillian Whitlock

In 2010 there was a striking visual representation of transactions of Australian indigenous testimony beyond the nation at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. As part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in Canada, the gallery featured Cathy Busby’s installation WE ARE SORRY, which presented the text of the apology of the Australian prime minister to the Stolen Generations in Australia alongside the apology to the First Nations on the issue of the Residential Schools in Canada, both offered in 2008. The installation mirrored an earlier synchronic display at the Laneways Commissions project in Melbourne in 2009, where WE ARE SORRY was projected onto the exterior of a power substation. This graphic statement of the proximity of testimonial cultures across two settler nations in the recent past maps ideoscapes and mediascapes that connect testimonial narratives beyond the nation – Busby’s artwork literally projects a response to indigenous testimony onto these geographically remote public spaces to signify a shared history of racialized child removal and founding violence. In this way, it creates a transnational site of witness and an imaginative reconceptualization of space that projects an ethics of witness into the public spaces of very different kinds.

Late last century in South Africa, Australia, and Canada, discourses of truth and reconciliation produced a powerful infrastructure for the production and dissemination of testimony that engaged with the specific legacies of settler colonialism, where invasion was an ongoing process, “both an event and a structure” (Wolfe 1999: 2; Veracini 2010: 10). Contiguous testimonial cultures of truth and reconciliation across settler cultures – in South Africa, Canada, and Australia – draw attention to settler colonial imaginaries and discourses of reconciliation in these geographically remote yet historically proximate spaces. WE ARE SORRY is a powerful installation that suggests the force of indigenous testimony on child removal – its capacity to transform familiar histories and sites with a haunting knowledge of indigenous dispossession and suffering. At the same time, the transience of the projection is a reminder of what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “the cunning of recognition” (Povinelli 2002): the symbolic force of discourses of reconciliation and processes of transitional justice that produce limited and symbolic outcomes rather than social justice and effective social, political, and economic change.

An infrastructure of “human rights” and “narrated lives” carries Stolen Generations testimony offshore into these networks of testimony and witness. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith suggest, since late last century, life narratives have become one of the most powerful vehicles for advancing human rights claims and campaigns. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (1948) is fundamental to this collective moral commitment to the right to live in dignity, equality, safety, and freedom, which provides mechanisms or redress for those whose rights have been denied. Human rights platforms and mechanisms “make possible a legitimating process of telling and listening that demands accountability on the part of states and international organisations” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 3). Testimony is vital to this: for rights discourse to be activated, victims need to come forward and testify to their experience, bearing witness through acts of remembering elicited by rights activists and coded to rights instruments. “Narratability” is required by human rights norms, discourses, and instruments, and by testifying before national inquiries and official or quasi-official tribunals, or telling stories to human rights advocates working for NGOs, individuals can use the UDHR to mobilize action and demand accountability on the part of states and international organizations. An “ethics of recognition” is attached to this association of human rights and narrated lives, as Schaffer and Smith suggest. Testimony stakes an ethical claim that demands individuals, communities, and institutions respond to the story, recognize the humanity of the witness, the justice of the claim, and the responsibility to ameliorate suffering and historical injustice. To gain recognition and to mobilize an appropriate affective, political, and ethical response – e.g., the apologetic “We are Sorry” of Busby’s installation – testimony must connect with human rights discourses, platforms, and campaigns.

In both Australia and Canada it is indigenous testimony to child removal that has mobilized recognition and apology most powerfully in the recent past. The indigenous child was from the beginnings of white colonization a subject of humanitarian concern, and this justified the removal of children of mixed descent in particular. State intervention into parenting and child welfare policy facilitated assimilation and compliance through the violent dispossession and dispersal of indigenous kinship networks. In Australia the first recorded child removal was in 1789 (the First Fleet arrived in 1788), and the early colonists persisted in taking children from their families “for their own good,” institutionalizing the practice in residential schools and missions. Aboriginal peoples’ accounts of settlers taking their children were transmitted orally within indigenous communities from early colonial times, and the suffering of Aboriginal mothers separated from their children is evident in the letters and telegrams they sent to government officials in the 1880s (Van Toorn 1999: 257; 2006: 29). The use of the word “stolen” for indigenous child removal occurs in archival records as early as the 1920s (Casey 2008: 27). There is, then, a long history of indigenous testimony and white denial and amnesia in response to child removal. This practice of child removal in order to change a people and culture was classified as genocide by the United Nations in 1948, although it was not until the late 1990s that indigenous testimony and demands for recognition and reparation for the systematic removal of indigenous children from their families made an impact on white public culture: the significance of stolen generations as a testimonial cycle is not that it testified to child removal for the first time, but that it captured and sustained the interest of the mainstream settler community (Butler 2013: 51). The UDHR and platforms for human rights activism were instrumental to this mobilization of testimony: the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families produced the Bringing Them Home Report (1997), where testimonial narrative is catalytic and “Stolen Generations” becomes a recognizable and audible indigenous narrative that impacts upon nation and narration. The Report is deliberately framed to elicit an empathic response, a communal listening “with an open heart and mind to the stories of what has happened in the past and, having listened and understood, commits itself to reconciliation” (Wilkie 1997: 3). Most controversially, the inquiry found that the forced removal of children with the objective of assimilating them into white settler culture constituted genocide and a breach of human rights, and this determination was justified in terms of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, a transnational infrastructure that could call the nation to account.

How does indigenous experience, knowledge, and resistance become “narratable” as a testimonial discourse and accrue value, demanding the formal apology offered in 2008 that is now projected into public spaces in Winnipeg and Melbourne? A number of features generate the transformative force of this indigenous testimonial cycle, and this coalescence occurred in both Australia and Canada in ways that suggest generic similarities. First, ideoscapes of truth and reconciliation, human rights activism, and indigenous social activism that assert the unique prior claims of first peoples are transnational movements that contributed to the rhetorical force of child removal narrative. This is the infrastructure of “human rights and narrated lives” that connects testimonial narrative to human rights platforms, discourses, and campaigns. Second, in both Australia and Canada testimony to child removal gathered force across various contexts and venues (judicial, political, cultural, literary), and these incubated a powerful narrative of systemic indigenous possession and founding violence. Third, national inquiries and hearings that solicited indigenous and First Nations testimony on child removal were instrumental, and they witnessed graphic testimonies of child removal, which continues as a specific focus of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Fourth, the production of authoritative academic histories of child removal that draw deeply on indigenous testimony and life history as well as more traditional archives of historical evidence appeared in both Australia and Canada between 1996 and 2000 (Haebich 2000; Miller 1996; Milloy 1999). The histories detail how the policy of child removal was implemented across the various jurisdictions of colonies and what would later become the provinces, states, and territories of these settler nations. Although these histories draw on testimonial narrative, they also provided irrefutable empirical data and archival evidence that verified personal storytelling. Fifth, in Australia the term “Stolen Generations” was symbolic and catalytic. Its force emerged from social activism, particularly the “Link Up” campaigns to reunite indigenous children with their birth families, decades before the Bringing Them Home report. All of this leads to the “narratability” of child removal as an authoritative testimonial cycle that demands witness to the “lost” and “stolen” generations of indigenous and First Nations children. These indigenous testimonies are specific in place and time, indicating how the policies of assimilation were effective because they were precisely keyed to local jurisdictions and institutions. Yet collectively this testimonial literature maps out a shared imaginative geography of an architecture of incarceration that extends from Cootamundra to Shubenacadie, a policy that sustained state intervention, surveillance, and control and undermined an indigenous sense of self to install a reformed and disciplined sense of space, time, social relationships, and the body that were to be absorbed into the self (Haebich 2000: 379). The publication of iconic testimonial accounts has played an important role in disseminating this story through secondary and tertiary curricula. Australian examples, including Margaret Tucker’s If Everyone Cared (1983), Labumore Elsie Roughsey’s An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New (1984), Jack Davis’ A Boy’s Life ([1991] 2000), Albert Holt’s Forcibly Removed (2001), Glenyse Ward’s Wandering Girl (1988), and fictions such as Anita Heiss’ Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 (2001), all feature Stolen Generations testimonial narrative. Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) and Doris Pilkington/Nugi Garimara’s autobiographical Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence ([1996] 2002), her family story of three girls absconding from Moore River Native Settlement and walking back to the Pilbara in 1931, are widely used as teaching texts with study notes readily available, and there are versions of My Place adapted for young readers. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) was remediated into a film directed by Phillip Noyce (2002), a graphic presentation of indigenous child removal that accelerated and extended the reach of the Stolen Generations story. Edited collections (Bird 1998; Mellor and Haebich 2002) disseminated strategic selections of testimonial narrative.

Testimonial cultures have transformative force, and testimony can accrue value and cross a discursive threshold to become a powerful and transformative speech act that connects human rights and narrated lives. The idea of narrative accrual indicates how stories are both prompted and shaped by earlier ones, under conditions where there is an appropriate social and cultural milieu (Attwood 2001: 196). The concept of “accrual” has been controversial, suggesting the emergence of a master narrative that diminishes indigenous agency and authority (Casey 2008), and Attwood is concerned about the status of testimony and collective memory as opposed to factually authoritative empirical accounts. However, the related histories of child removal testimonial narrative in Australia and Canada suggest how a generic testimonial cycle emerges across different settings and frameworks, and is keyed to various interpretive frameworks, of which rights discourse is a preeminent example. Testimonial cycles such as Stolen Generations are both resilient and fragile, hostage to changing currencies in campaigns for human rights and social justice, and the volatility of compassionate and humanitarian emotions that move a witnessing public to feel sorry. Testimony to a greater extent than any other kind of autobiographical narrative emerges out of a political context, in response to a particular set of political circumstances and rhetorical conditions (Brodzki 2001: 870). Political circumstances and rhetorical conditions continuously reshape the discursive networks and jurisdictions of testimonial narrative, which in turn becomes an agent for recognition and social justice in particular ideological and political circumstances that shape its audibility and appropriate ethical responsiveness. This coalescence of testimonial forms and the obligations of witnessing constitute the dynamism and agency of testimonial transactions, where testimony accrues value and crosses a discursive threshold to become a transformative speech act that connects human rights and narrated lives, touches hearts and changes minds, and demands an affective and political response. In these circumstances, testimonial narrative assumes a force and a life of its own, and this has occurred in both Australia and Canada as child removal testimony commands witness and circulates in multiple mediations: in fiction and life writing, film, music, art museums, and live performance, as well as quasi-judicial inquiries and commissions.

However, testimony also constrains speech: it elicits certain acts of cultural memory and forms of testimony while it denies others – policies of child removal were, after all, well known even as they remained unspoken and unrecognized until late last century, and indigenous resistance was always present. Graham Huggan argues that indigenous people “run the risk of being stolen all over again” (2007: 101) as reconciliation discourse assimilates Stolen Generations testimony into nation and narration. Testimony manages subaltern speech even as it creates conditions for its audibility and recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli argues that we should pause and ask what we are disseminating as late liberal ideology works through “the cunning of recognition” that talks of reconciliation and yet continues to marginalize restitution, compensation, and indigenous sovereignty:

I ask how national pageants of shameful repentance and celebrations of a new recognition of subaltern worth remain inflected by the conditional (as long as they are not repugnant; that is, as long as they are not, at heart, not-us and as long as real economic resources are not at stake).

(2002: 17)

All of this raises questions about the agency of indigenous testimony as it circulates in discourses of truth and reconciliation, and the ethics of recognition that drives apology and contrition in response. In Australia, to date there has been little by way of reparation or restitution to the Stolen Generations following the Bringing Them Home report, although this was a priority of the HREOC inquiry, and indigenous sovereignty remains a matter of debate rather than constitutional reform. Although Stolen Generations testimony has become visible and audible in the cultural sphere, it has not fared well in the courts.

We can return to the graphic mobilization of the formal apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Busby’s WE ARE SORRY to reflect on the cultural politics of emotion that circulate around and through Stolen Generations testimony, which hinge on the word “sorry.” The text of the Australian apology that Busby remediates in her artwork openly acknowledges the power of indigenous testimony, and responds with open heart and mind to one particular indigenous account of removal. At the same time, however, it performs what Povinelli refers to as the “cunning of recognition”: it is an apology that presents empathic witness as an act of ethical citizenship, as an “Australian” thing to do. Circling back to mythographies of nation and narration, it reaffirms core values of national identity that then authorize the apology. This is symptomatic of witnessing testimony as a form of nation building; validating the truth and authority of indigenous testimonial narratives of dispossession and loss reaffirms the privilege of settler subjects and their enduring affective ties to foundational myths of national identity – such as egalitarianism. Elsewhere the association between testimony and witness, nation and narration was framed differently, as a process of healing for both individuals and the nation. For example, in its “Australian Declaration towards Reconciliation,” the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation characterized the exchange between indigenous testifier and settler witness as “one part of the nation apologizes and expresses its sorrow and sincere regret for the injustices of the past, so the other part accepts the apology and forgives” (quoted in Butler 2013: 44). Both ways, the issue of child removal is recognized as a shameful national past with a legacy that is central to a public discourse on national reconciliation and renewal. Released beyond indigenous networks and histories, Stolen Generations testimony circulates to produce witness as “a shame that felt like an exposure”:

[s]hame “makes” the nation in the witnessing of past injustice, a witnessing that involves feeling shame, as it exposes the failure of the nation to live up to its ideals. But this exposure is temporary, and becomes the ground for a national recovery. By witnessing what is shameful about the past, the nation can “live up to” the ideals that secure its identity or being in the present.

(Ahmed 2004: 109)

As Ahmed and Stacey emphasize, testimonial cultures do not reflect some already existent truth, politics, or ethics, they create the conditions for their existence and reception by constituting different configurations of self, space, and community (2001: 5). Stolen Generations testimony has been creative in this way. As a tactical device, it has enabled indigenous Australians to stake a claim – for recognition, compensation, and social justice. Indigenous experiences of child removal became audible, and the long history of forcible removal and social suffering could no longer be denied or strategically forgotten. It became a national shame and inheritance in Australian public culture, and evidence of ongoing invasion. Stolen Generations also created practices of witnessing and ethical response that find one articulation in that formal apology that is projected alongside the apology to the First Nations onto the walls of a power substation in Melbourne and the art gallery in Winnipeg. WE ARE SORRY travels on ideoscapes of truth and reconciliation as a reminder of the power of testimonial cultures to reconfigure national subjects, spaces, and communities, mobilizing new attachments and imaginative geographies beyond the nation. At the same time, the transience of this transformation and defamiliarization of public space also suggests the instability of testimonial cultures and the ethical response they demand.

In Sorry (2007), her novel that engages with the ethics of reconciliation and reflects on discourses of apology in Australia, Gail Jones reflects not only on the voices of the Stolen Generations that remain unheard or forgotten but also how equivocal the word “sorry” can be by way of response: apology remains silenced or stifled by stutter in the novel. This returns to her earlier writing on Stolen Generations, and in particular her essay “Sorry-In-the-Sky” (Jones 2004). This essay is inspired by a small photograph of the word “sorry” written in the sky by a sky-writing plane:

The image is wobbly and the skywriting touchingly awkward; moreover the word is clearly dissolving even as it appears. There is a magnificently blue sky, with the enameled and glittering qualities of a high-summer day, and there, the faint, contingent, blurred by invisible wind, is the suspended word “sorry.” My attachment to this photograph is due in part to its exquisite ephemerality … but also to its evidence of what seems to me to be an incipient communal ethics.

(Jones 2004: 169)

This word was inscribed in the sky above a “Walk for Reconciliation” in 2000 and in response to the testimonies of the Stolen Generations. In traditional Aboriginal cultures, Jones explains, “sorry business” refers to the work of mourning, and with ceremonial grief, that is implicitly and explicitly shared. She reads sorry-in-the-sky in this way, as a frail yet insistent communication, an entanglement of apology and mourning. This resonates with Busby’s installation, also a suspended projection of apology that is emblematic of the speech act which it betokens. Sue Kossew (2014) suggests that Jones’s novel, Sorry, imagines a way forward from an impossible situation, a moment of ephemeral engagement; and Tony Hughes-D’Aeth reads Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance in this way, with its assertion of moments of fragile reciprocity and cross-cultural exchange (2014). Art works to suspend “sorry” – on the page, in the sky, and in public spaces – in the conflicted and ephemeral space of apology and witness.