…in memoriam: The Sonority, the Together Sound, Outside of Time
On what was maybe an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in 1885 on land newly minted as Treaty 6 territory in St-Paul-de-Métis (in what is now Alberta), Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau calmly went to the kitchen cupboard where her husband, Laurent, who was in league with the Métis resistance, had stashed a letter written by Louis Riel. The buffalo were disappearing, the treaty-promised medicine chest proved insufficient in the face of settler- introduced small pox and English colonial forces were defaulting on all manner of promised land. The treaty was broken, is broken. When a sergeant and four constables from the North-West Mounted Police, clad in Imperial red, self-righteousness and inane waxed moustaches, barged through the Garneaus’ doors to take away Laurent, Eleanor took the incriminating pages and softly, carefully submerged them in the hot, soapy water of her wash basin, where they were subsequently scrubbed until all but disintegrated. Drip, drip. What letter? Eleanor was leading the Quiet Resistance.
[spoken out loud] [Ell. enn. or. Ell. enn. Taw. muss. Gar. no.] [drip drip]
Many years later, Eleanor’s name would be conjured in our present. Her story, along with those of Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt) and Mary Cecil, became the basis for Postcommodity and Alex Waterman’s …in memoriam project. What follows, is a story about remembering.
[drip]
A page is a fragile thing. Paper: a vulnerable surface. To employ it for the task of memorializing is a rather radical gesture. Stone and bronze are the typical, hardy materials used to memorialize. Statues of genocidal generals and tender epitaphs on gravestones. The rationale is simple enough: the heavy, dense meat of
