Finding Dawn very powerfully illustrated the deep impact colonialism has had in condoning and legitimizing violence against aboriginal women in Canada. The film reveals how aboriginal women have been dehumanized, racialized as ‘others’ and have faced systemic violence. The film makes it clear that Canada’s institutions, social environments, and colonial history have perpetuated the belief that “aboriginal women are no good, and are only good for prostitutes”. This devaluation of aboriginal women has been internalized by indigenous women, for instance, as Janice recalls about being raped as a young women, “I didn’t call it rape. I used to think that was normal, that was how you treated Indian women”. By creating a dialogue surrounding the systemic racism that legitimizes violence against aboriginal women, this film gives visibility to the issue. It humanizes aboriginal women, offering a space for their voices and the voices of their communities to be heard.
Razack’s article “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George”, provided me with a valuable theoretical avenue to unpack Finding Dawn. Razack makes it clear that systemic discrimination, devaluation and the legitimizing of sexual violence against indigenous women does not exist in a vacuum, and must be acknowledged as an expression of white settler colonialism. Razack reminds us, that as an aboriginal woman who was working as a prostitute, Pamela George “represented a body that could be violated with impunity” (130). She was seen as existing in a racialized “zone of degeneracy” (130), outside civilized society, a space where universal justice is not seen to operate in and where violence is normalized. For Razack, the murder of Pamela George was an event which reflected and sustained a colonial order, a act of domination, an expression of the “making of the white, masculine self as dominant, through practices of violence directed at a colonized women” (130).
Razack very clearly reveals how white setter racism continues to uphold sexualized racism against aboriginal women. It seems to me that she created a colonial genealogy, a way for us to think about the sexual violence that aboriginal women face that acknowledges Canada’s colonial history, and ongoing social, cultural and political expressions of colonialism and white settler racism. As Razack argues, white male privilege has been produced and engrained through colonialism, and is linked to a binary that condones sexual violence against aboriginal women: white colonized/colonized other. We cannot unpack the legitimizing of systematic violence against Aboriginal women without acknowledging historical and contemporary colonialism in Canada and its role in maintaining discourses which stigmatize, invisibilize, and racialize aboriginal women Dawn Crey and Pamela George.
The first time I watched Finding Dawn Métis artist Jaime Black’s REDdress project was being displayed throughout our university campus. It used 600 red dresses to visually represent the 600 missing indigenous women in Canada. The display, both beautiful and eerie, materializes the statistics, creates dialogue and most importantly generates awareness of this issue. The first place I remember seeing the dresses was along Saskatchewan Drive where they were all blowing in the wind. I knew the meaning behind the dresses, which alone is very powerful, but paired with viewing Finding Dawn the installation became more palpable, shocking and human.
ReplyDeleteRe-thinking Black’s installation in conjunction with Razack’s piece adds an entirely new dimension to how I now understand it. I had not previously thought about the placement of the dresses, but the decision to install them around the university was quite interesting. The university is a white space, yet became populated with the hauntings of the lost women through the placement of the red dresses. The ghostly traces of the missing and murdered women are not confined to their ‘zone of degeneracy,’ but rather inhabit spacial white-ness. To me, this speaks to the inseparability of colonial affective relationships; we reconstitute colonialism in the way we move through spaces, sometime inconsequentially, without acknowledging it, but the effects of our doing so persist. Like you, I think Razack clearly maps the relevance of colonial pasts in relation to the present violence against Indigenous women. And I too would argue that the violence of the past is inseparable from the violence of the present. Questioning the production settler and indigenous subjects--both historiographically and geographically--is critical to understanding contemporary violence.
Upon watching Finding Dawn I was reminded of Leslie Feinberg’s “Transgender Warriors: Making History.” In particular, Feinberg’s article deals with the modern Two-Spirit movement through the investigation of personal narratives. The article begins with Feinberg describing hir own personal experience with discovering Two-Spirited people. The article goes on to describe historical accounts of Two-Spirited people and the violence that was inflicted upon them and their way of life. Not only were the actual events transphobic, but so were the resulting narratives. In particular, Feinberg’s intense focus on personal narratives as a way of understanding both the historical and the current positions of Two-Spirit traditions within Aboriginal cultures puts emphasis that the real system oppressing Two-Spirit people is that of systemic colonialism. I find that this directly relates to Razack’s text and how you state that it “very clearly reveals how white settler racism continues to uphold sexualized racism against aboriginal women.”
ReplyDeleteFurther, you argue that “We cannot unpack the legitimatizing of systematic violence against Aboriginal women without acknowledging historical and contemporary colonialism in Canada and its role in maintaining discourses which stigmatize, invisibilize, and racialize aboriginal women Dawn Crey and Pamela George.” Similarily, in Feinberg’s article, I, too, found it particularly interesting to look into the contemporary instances of censorship and omission of Two-Spirit traditions. In relation to Finding Dawn, I think it is interesting to place an emphasis on the role of colonialism and how it has impacted both Two-Spirit traditions as well as the ongoing sexualized racism aboriginal women are facing in contemporary Western society. Interestingly enough, both narratives have been suppressed from dominant Western discourse(s).
The term suppression, in particular, emphasizes the censorship and “gaps” of historical representations of Two-Spiritedness in contemporary Western discourse. I think it is also valuable to note what the term suppression connotes: as it oscillates both oppression (which can be seen as a dehumanizing act of exerting authority and power over others) and censorship (which omits the public communication and circulation of representations that those with authority and power deem as “obscene”). In terms of this suppression changing the nature of Two-Spirit traditions today, then, I think that perhaps we can analyze the omission of this past history in such a way that shows and “uncovers” the fact that colonization continues on today, albeit in a new way. The omission and censorship of these spiritual traditions from public Western discourse presently, like the violence of past colonial genocide, marks the cultural continuation of violence against Two-Spirit traditions. Today these Two-Spirit traditions are impacted from the past and the violence today is the reverberation of systemic violence against Aboriginal people in contemporary Western society, the present struggle to “uncover” and recognize past and present colonial atrocities.