This site of memory is walking distance from the MLA Conference, in Stanley Park, founded in 1886. City officials evicted those who lived there to fulfill the fantasy that it was pristine wilderness. Then markers of “proper” Indigeneity were imported, such as totem poles from Northern nations. The memorial to E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake (1861-1914), the “Iroquois poet-reciter,” served the same purpose of colonial appropriation. However, many colonial memorials have been reappropriated as sites of cultural and political renewal. Some were contested from the start. For example, Johnson’s poems written for the reinterment of Red Jacket in 1884 and the unveiling of the Joseph Brant memorial in 1886 complicate the dispossession the ceremonies were intended to enact.
Johnson’s celebration of Red Jacket is such a powerful demonstration of her own eloquence and “mental sight”–the reappropriation appears multiple and rich.
Margery’s description of Johnson’s reappropriation of Red Jacket’s interment reminds me of the Kar?úk rites of the Quechan Nation. The Kar?úk was traditionally a mourning ceremony performed at death of leaders—its ritual cremations serving as a reaffirmation of Quechan cosmology, whose creation story centered on the cremation of the creator, Kukumat. Outlawed in first decades of 1900s, the Kar?úk reappeared when the Quechan petitioned the government for its reinstatement after the WWI deaths Quechan warriors. Memorial Day became a time when the nation once again honored its dead, in the morning following US practices, and in the evening, those of traditional Quechan ways.
Thanks, Philip. I have just been reading Ely S. Parker’s speech at the ceremony to reinter Red Jacket, whose body was removed from its original (neglected) grave at the urging of another Canadian-born author, George Copway. Parker said “They once owned much, but now have hardly anything they can call their own. While living they are not let alone—when dead they are not left unmolested.” Johnson did not want a monument, but to have her ashes scattered. I’m also reminded of Laura-Lynn’s comment about “vampiric” collection practices, whereby museums filled up with Indigenous human remains. The Haida, among others, have worked hard to repatriate their people and to memorialize them properly.