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We Are Treaty People – a conference report by Sasha Kovacs

April 30, 2014

On March 1 2014 I chaired a panel as part of the Panamerican Routes Festival Conversatorio series about treaty number nine. This panel was titled “Restaging Treaty: Embodied Memories, Written Records and Living Archives.” It featured contributions from playwright Falen Johnson, lawyer Murray Klippenstein, author John Long, elder Grafton Antone, and the conversatorio audience. Here are some memories, thoughts, and further theorizations that emerge in the wake of that discussion.conf 3 - treaty9 talk1

Our conversation began with a performance—a staged reading of Falen Johnson’s Treaty Number Nine. In that play, Erika, the lead protagonist, takes the audience on a journey back in time to 1905. Here, she introduces us to her family and their negotiations with two treaty commissioners: Duncan Campbell Scott and George MacMartin. Scott seems to only want to make love to his canoe, and people are given British flags in exchange for their land. In this world, the absurdity of the treaty making process is revealed.

Interrupting this historical world are moments when Erika approaches the audience to speak with us in the present; in these encounters, the absurdities of Erika’s encounters with colonial history become decidedly urgent. In one of these audience ‘interventions,’ Erika is trying to interpret the treaty’s financial promises—to figure out what she’s owed. She quotes from the 1905 agreement to get the terms of her arithmetic correct:

[his Majesty] hereby, through His commissioners, agrees to make each Indian a present of eight dollars in cash. His Majesty also agrees that next year, and annually afterwards for ever, He will cause to be paid to the said Indians in cash, at suitable places and dates, of which the said Indians shall be duly notified, four dollars, the same, unless there be some exceptional reason, to be paid only to the heads of families for those belonging thereto.

She interprets the legalese, turns to us in the crowd, and asks for a calculator. She determines the amount. It’s certainly not much—she tells us that she’s not even counting inflation.

These interpolations with the audience move, as the play continues, beyond money talk. At one point, Erika speaks directly to us in Cree. Can the audience understand? She seems to expect that we’re (mostly) a settler crowd. Nevertheless, she continues. Soon, she seems to ask a question (I could tell only by an upward inflection). She entreats a response, and so, as a sign of respect, as a courtesy, I nod. Others do too. Erika turns away suddenly and I’m left to wonder, ‘What did I just agree to?’ In that moment, all of us there in the audience of the Daniels spectrum, we all were reminded: we are treaty people.

It seems to me that the complexity that is bound up in this theatrical moment is what we were grappling with during the conversation that followed with our distinguished panelists. What were the conditions under which the Cree and Ojibway people agreed to treaty number nine? What did they understand of the treaty, as it was interpreted, or “stated”? What understanding of sharing does that document authorize? How can MacMartin’s diaries ‘prove’ that what was agreed to isn’t necessarily what was written down? What will allow this source to function as ‘proof’ in the court of law? Why are government officials’ personal documents privileged over the oral histories and knowledges of elders and citizens within the Anishinaabe and Mushkegowuk communities?

While we contended with these questions, John Long made a significant point about how the First Nations communities would have understood the word ‘treaty’ in 1905. Would there have been a word in Cree or Ojibway that could translate the commissioner’s concepts of ‘treaty’? He thought perhaps not. This got me thinking about language, and about what ‘treaty’ means to us today. In Falen’s piece, the ‘treaty’ is read (in both Cree and English, as I recall). Of course this suggests that this treaty is a document—that when we say the words ‘treaty number nine’ we are referring to the written agreement. Indeed, the Canadian government tells us so. They list the treaty text here. It’s the words, for them, that are the treaty.

And yet, from an etymological perspective, ‘treaty’ emerges from the root word “treat” whose sense, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is as follows: “the action or an act of treating or discussing terms, parley, negotiation; agreement; treaty.” What’s decidedly significant here is the word “act.” In these terms, treaty involves performance and is not just about a signed document. This changes our understanding of treaty and ushers it into a new framework.

In this performative framework, when we say the words ‘treaty number nine’ we have to account for the material conditions and actions that occurred around that document in order to comprehend the agreement that was made between Canada and the First Nations people living in what we now term the James Bay region in 1905. In this context, we must consider all actions that are part of the Commissioners ‘treaty show.’ These include running time (the limited time-frame that the commissioners had in each location/post that might have made the word-by-word interpretation of the treaty’s stipulations impossible); the gifting and feasting rituals that were a formalized aspect of the treaty process; even the surrogative performance that occurred in the signing of the document itself (where Anishinaabe and Mushkegowuk peoples were asked to touch the pen being held and controlled by a government official in order to authorize their assent). If we consider treaty as action, or as a series of actions, then these aspects of the treaty making process become essential to understanding of what terms were being agreed to.

As Murray Klippenstein, lawyer for Mushkegowuk council, made us aware, there is a move, in the dramatic legal history of treaty number nine, to account for these kinds of material contingencies that shaped the signing of a document that led to the “surrendering” of many people’s lands. The success of this claim seems to depend though on developing an argument that will allow judges to consider those contingent factors as ‘legitimate’ aspects of the treaty process—a difficult enterprise in light of law’s valorization of text (law=lex=words).

I couldn’t help but wonder though if performance studies could help here. An unlikely field to turn to for legal counsel, but perhaps Murray could hear me out with this one: if we use a theatrical metaphor, what’s required is a consideration of the semiotic fields of this ‘performance’ that are not located in the ‘script.’ Performance is the site that teaches us that documents don’t really matter (in all cases). A script seems to only ever tease a reader. It screams that something’s missing: the lights, design, shape, size, smell. ‘embodiment!’ it cries, ‘that’s what this text is missing.’ In that space from the page to the stage, everything can change. The text gains, might I say, a texture. So it follows that performance theorists have come to appreciate, in our theatre world, that meaning for an audience is made not just from engaging with the scratches on a page, or the text that is said aloud, but through material conditions as well (I think of Ric Knowles’ materialist semiotics here, for instance). Historically, we’ve seen other treaties that have texture—the Six Nations, for example, inscribe their agreements into woven beads to create wampum belts. Forgive my attempt to play lawyer here (Murray), but I have to ask: Is there not “precedent” then, for considering the material aspects or ‘performances’ that surround an agreement like this? And I have to offer: can performance studies legitimize the semiotic space ‘around’ the document as an aspect that alters our understanding of this agreement? Can you take its theories, histories and ideas into the courtroom?

All of this brings me back to thinking about that moment I had in the theatre with the character Erika. She got my approval to her question that she was asking in a language I didn’t understand because she asked nicely. Her facial expression coupled with her tender approach, the safe space we inhabited, and the inflection of her voice—it made me think she was someone I could trust. I couldn’t understand her words, per se, but I understood an attitude; it was only the conditions around the words that allowed me to make meaning and got me to agree. This theatrical moment was so effective because it did precisely what the title of this conversatorio set out to do—it ‘staged’ treaty. In that staging, it was the actions that were most important. As I tell the students that I teach: how a script is approached is just as important as what or why. It was the modulations of voice, manners, position of bodies, dances—the treatment of the script that allowed Falen’s piece to mean something to me. What this conversatorio left me thinking was how, in our return to thinking about what happened during those days in 1905, we need to consider the treatment of the treaty.

Click here to go to the conference archive page for video of this performance and talk.

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