Marie Wilson Interview

This came up on the news feed and I thought I would draw closer attention to it, given the relevance to our course content.

There are a couple of questions coming out of this interview that intersect with what appears to be my approach to the material encountered through this class: to what purpose do we conflate place and identity? How do we reconcile our upbringing with our shifting environments? Perhaps most relevant to the navigation of this material for me is a question of negotiating interior and exterior, how to reconcile the fragmentation of my research process (communicated brilliantly by the fragmentation of the course material and its presentation) with a coherent identity that can be communicated externally. I'll speak a bit more to that in class tomorrow.

In the Marie Wilson interview we meet one of the three current commissioners of Canada's TRC, the only non-native member, though she currently hails from Yellowknife and married a residential school survivor. Originally hailing from Ontario she represents a northern native perspective in the hearings, though an Inuit subcommittee has apparently also been appointed (CBC1 2009). Do we read her as a white body stealing the pain of others, to use Razack's term? The filters we encounter her through make her even more problematic: she comes to us in this interview as a representative of the United Church, she states that after a lapse, she returns to the United Church to return "to a place of nostalgic safety [that] made me feel tied to my family in a spiritual way". She returns to her upbringing in the church to ground her while she negotiates the pain that residential school abuses (some perpetrated by representatives of the United Church) have caused her chosen family and environment.
Wilson clearly identifies as a member of the northern native community, though she still requires some framework from her original environment to stabilize her in what appears to remain, to some degree, an alien environment. In this interview she is presented to readers by the United Church Observer - a p.r. tool belonging to one of the organizations fully implicated in the abuses Wilson has been appointed (by another institutional abuser, the Canadian government) to help reconcile. Further, her career as a veteran reporter for the CBC, the national broadcaster, further undermines her experiential authority as a representative member of the northern native communities. In her body we see an increasingly fragmented series of identities: mother and wife and co-sufferer of residential school abuses, northern representative, United Church sop, government insider and expert spin artist, experienced researcher and story teller...how do we find a coherent figure who can adequately pursue a mandate of truth and reconciliation in an institutional enterprise funded by a government that created the atmosphere of abuse requiring this mandate as a healing agent. Meanwhile, the CBC describes the commission as: "the panel that will gather anecdotes from former students of residential schools" (CBC 2009). They appear not to give particular weight (read: anecdotes) to the commission or its mandate, even when one of the commissioners is one of their own. Perhaps in this response, we can find the trust and faith in Marie Wilson that we need: were she taken seriously by the media and not constantly augmented by mention of her husband or her career, she might be seen as too representative of power interests. Their dismissal of her worth might be just the proof we need that her body may adequately aid the communication of the suffering of so many native bodies at the hand of Canada's power structures.
I follow these stories one to another to another, sometimes getting knocked off track, sometimes watching the videos, sometimes reading the books (though less so, the medium of a computer screen makes prolonged reading of black text on white background very abusive to my brain and vision), sometimes distilling a line or two into a paper journal or notebook to fuel the creative project that i hope comes out of this research. I hope these many fragments take on a coherent identity, I think they will - without many facets, many taps by external devices at variant angles, no diamond gleams.