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Part 1
Building relationships
Proceed with respect and patience
The first step to any collaborative partnership is to focus on building a strong relationship between partners. However, this can be a daunting task for those unfamiliar with collaboration. There may be an initial mistrust from communities towards researchers, given that universities, museums, and governmental institutions have all been complicit in the colonial enterprise. Histories of collecting, contributing to racist science, and participating in assimilationist projects need to be meaningfully acknowledged for a truly equitable relationship to be built. The chapters of Part 1 focus on this relationship building process.
Projects in this section exist across the collaborative continuum. Some are deeply rooted in communities, while others stem from external initiatives. However, all strive to work for and with descendant communities. Authors cover a range of topics here as well. Contributors report on the early steps of collaborative projects, reflecting on the ways to approach communities, where to find community contacts and advisers, and ways to learn your way through this process. Others reflect on larger scale governmental systems that have been built through progressive and long-term relationship building.
Collectively, the chapters in this section emphasize humility, respect, and trust-building as key components of a successful collaboration. Authors emphasize that redressing past wrongs is work that too often falls to communities to undertake. This work is time-consuming and mentally draining for community members who may already have many other obligations. Recognizing this, many authors approach their project and collaboration from a perspective of minimizing harm. However, several authors also acknowledge complicated emotions when initially approaching communities. They meditate on their roles as “outsiders” and emphasize their desire to do work in a good way while critically reflecting on their practice. All of the authors in Part 1 also reflect on their double roles as both partners to communities and, simultaneously, as researchers, academicians, or government employees. They each offer advice and lessons they have learned to researchers new to collaborative work.
As a whole, contributions in this section highlight the difficult but rewarding nature of collaborative projects. There are complex networks of people and often many organizations involved in various parts of the project. This complexity of interactions means that collaborative work is never quick. Trust and relationship building take time and cannot be rushed. However, an important message raised in this section and across the volume is that taking the time to build relationships ensures that the work is done in a way that is fulfilling and respectful for everyone.
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1 Bearing witness
What can archaeology contribute in an Indian Residential School context?
Eric Simons, Andrew Martindale, and Alison Wylie
The Penelakut are a Coast Salish people whose traditional territory is centred on the Southern Gulf Islands, on British Columbia’s south coast. Penelakut Island is the present-day centre of the community, but for 85 years (1890–1975) it was also the location of a notorious Catholic-run1 Indian Residential School (IRS), the Kuper Island Industrial School. While the school buildings have been removed, there remain on the grounds – now the village centre – the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the school. The Penelakut know that these graves exist, but not how many or where they are located. This is a source of ongoing emotional and spiritual trauma that poses a formidable challenge to those living in and developing the community. The Penelakut are undertaking a constructive process of community healing that is centrally a matter of memorialization and spiritual work. Locating the unmarked graves, we are told, could aid in this process, vulnerable as “these burials” are to disturbance or destruction.
In 2018, University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers Andrew Martindale, Alison Wylie, and Eric Simons met with the Penelakut Tribe’s Chief and Council and Elders’ Committee to discuss the possibility of working together on the legacy of the Kuper Industrial School. The point of departure for this conversation was a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey that Martindale had been asked to conduct on known cemeteries in 2014 and 2016 (Harris, Maass, and Martindale 2017). This had demonstrated the potential of GPR as a non-destructive method for locating graves. We asked if the community would be interested in continuing the work Martindale had begun. At the request and direction of Penelakut leadership we are now conducting additional GPR surveys with a focus on assessing the likelihood of burials within areas designated for future community construction projects.
Our relationship with Penelakut is, by any measure, new. We are outsiders to the Penelakut community, settler Canadian scholars based at a colonial institution,2 who are acutely aware that the Penelakut have every reason to mistrust us. We have not yet established formal working protocols with the community, but we think that we are beginning to understand how we can respond to the foundational question put to us by the representatives of the community: what positive vision could we have to work together? In this chapter we explore our role as researchers and witnesses, our understanding of the trust that underpins this relationship, and the interactional expertise needed to work in a cross-cultural context.
What we’ve heard: principles for working together
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) aimed to bring all Canadians into a process of education and to initiate action. Its Final Report sets out 94 “Calls to Action,” including a number relating to missing children and burials (TRC 2015a, 333–335; see also TRC 2015b). These call upon governmental and other institutions to work with Indigenous communities to identify, document, maintain, commemorate, and protect sites at which residential school children were buried. The TRC also emphasizes the importance of ensuring that Indigenous communities take the lead in developing strategies to meet these goals and in establishing protocols for conducting this work appropriately (TRC 2015a, 333 [#76]).
In offering our service to the Penelakut we were motivated by these Calls to Action, specifically the call for non-Indigenous Canadians to seek equitable, respectful, thoughtful, and transparent partnerships with Indigenous peoples as the primary means through which reconciliation may be advanced (TRC 2015b, 20, 126, 206). This mandate to move beyond the recognition of wrongs done is clear enough, but we grapple with how best to respond. What happens next, now that the realities of the IRS system have been documented and put on record in the TRC report? How do we, as researchers and as non-Indigenous Canadians, move beyond a rhetoric of recognition (sensu Coulthard 2014; Jung 2010) that relegates this brutal history to the past, and take action to change systems of oppression that continue to dispossess and marginalize Indigenous peoples in Canada?
Penelakut elders and IRS survivors have been forthright, in public testimony going back at least two decades (Campbell and Welsh 1997) and in multiple discussions with us, about the profound impact of the Kuper IRS – not only for those who attended the school but intergenerationally and for their community as a whole. They give searing accounts of casual and calculated cruelty, abandonment by authorities, perverse settlement incentives, and the persistent failure of governmental agencies and church representatives to respond to their demands for meaningful restitution with concrete action. They speak particularly of the distress caused by knowing that there are unmarked burials on their land in need of protection, spiritual work, and memorialization. There is a strong desire to ameliorate this ongoing suffering, but also concern that this work could “reopen old wounds,” and about being let down again. What if, like so many others from outside the community who have preceded us, we don’t follow through or, worse, do the work in a way that causes further harm?
In Chief and Council and Elders’ Committee meetings, we were asked what stake we researchers have in this work: were we, who were not well known in the community, doing this for our own ends? Would we fulfil our promises, and would we understand and respect the cultural and spiritual significance of the work? In short, could we be trusted to find the missing children, trusted to follow through, trusted to work in a good way? Community members, elders, and leaders, in formal meetings and informal conversation, have voiced their concerns and expectations to us. Here is a paraphrase of some of what we have heard and have come to understand:
The community has told their truths, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and others, but have not seen enough real action in return. Is talk of reconciliation sincere? What does “reconciliation” mean, and what does it look like in practice?
We researchers must be transparent about who we are, what motivates us, and how we will handle the information and knowledge we gather.
Community members know what’s needed; we must seek cultural and spiritual guidance from them and follow their lead. We must do this work together, in a good way, with a good heart.
If we begin this work, we must stay with it until it is finished. Outside researchers routinely appear, do a bit – as much as serves their interests – and then never come back.
The legacy of the residential school must be resolved now, for the sake of younger generations and while the generation of survivors is still with us.
Witnessing
We have begun to think of our work with the Penelakut in terms of witnessing – as an act of bearing witness. We recognize that this word has complex meanings in Indigenous and Western cultures. The Final Report of the TRC makes many references to witnessing, both as part of the Commission’s own mandate (TRC 2015a, Appendix 5: Honorary Witnesses) and as an imperative for all Canadians. The practice of “witnessing,” the report states, “refers to the traditional and continuing Aboriginal practice of calling forth witnesses to validate moments of great historic significance” (397).
The role of the witness is fundamental to many Indigenous legal systems across Canada and is formally recognized as an essential component of Coast Salish ceremonies and systems of law (Hill-Tout 1978, 131; Kew 1970; Miller 2001, 2006). Traditionally, and to this day, Salishan hosts “call witnesses” to observe the work done at a significant event; to approve its social, spiritual, and legal legitimacy; and to carry news of the proceedings to those who could not attend. Witnesses are expected to stand ready to testify to the specifics of how the event was conducted and what it signified should it later come into question (Carlson 2010, 203). As the TRC states (TRC 2015a, 397), witnessing means carrying what you have seen back home and carrying that knowledge into the future.
We have not been formally called by the Penelakut to serve as witnesses in the traditional Coast Salish sense, but we find Salish practices of “bearing witness” helpful for understanding the variety of experiences and expectations involved in our work. What we help produce is a record of one aspect of the abuse that took place at the IRS – an indirect form of witnessing of the history of violence perpetrated against Indigenous youth and children at this particular residential school. We are also asked to bear witness in ways that go well beyond the remit of our radar machinery and academic expertise. Many of the elders who guide our work are survivors of the Kuper Island IRS, and everyone in the Penelakut community is related to or knows someone who attended the school. At formal meetings and in roadside conversations we are told about what went on...
