Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art

By Danielle Taschereau Mamers

An innovative analysis of Indigenous strategies for overcoming the settler state.

How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused?

Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Danielle Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialize identity categories in the service of colonial governance. Her analysis of bureaucratic artifacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined.

By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. More importantly, she provides us with an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorizing decolonial political relations. This is a crucial book for any reader interested in the intersection of state archives, settler colonial studies, and visual culture in the context of Canada’s complex and violent relationship with Indigenous peoples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781531505219

Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Danielle Taschereau Mamers writes about art, documents, and visual politics. Her research has been published in CR: New Centennial Review, Settler Colonial Studies, Photography & Culture, and other academic and popular journals. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario.

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Cover: Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing, Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art by Danielle Taschereau Mamers

SETTLER COLONIAL

WAYS OF SEEING

Documentation, Administration,

and the Interventions of Indigenous Art

DANIELLE TASCHEREAU MAMERS

Fordham University Press

NEW YORK 2024

Copyright © 2024 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

CONTENTS

Introduction

1The Acts

2The Register

3The Cards

4Seeing the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women Crisis

Conclusion: Displacing Settler Vision

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

This is a book about documents. Specifically, it is about how states use documents to see and to transform the worlds they seek to govern. However, this book about state documents begins in an art gallery, with a painting.

I begin with Saulteaux artist Robert Houle’s Premises for Self-Rule: The Indian Act, 1876 (1996). This work guides my analysis of state documents as media and as techniques of vision (Figure I.1). I first encountered the painting alongside three other works in the Premises for Self-Rule series in autumn 2016 at the University of Toronto Art Museum. The works—each 3m wide and 1.5m tall—are large rectangular diptychs, divided into two symmetrical squares. The left half of each work is canvas, painted in an abstract expressionist style. On the right half, a square of plexiglass is affixed with vinyl letters that form extracts from Canadian legal texts: the Royal Proclamation 1763, the British North America Act 1867, the Indian Act 1876, and the Constitution Act 1982.¹ In each work, the symmetry of the two panels is disturbed by a black-and-white photograph that is enlarged, transferred to canvas, and affixed to the right half of the work, interrupting the extracted legal texts. The photographs feature landscapes dotted with tipis and scenes of men in headdresses and other regalia, seated and on horseback.

As I stood in front of Premises for Self-Rule: The Indian Act, 1876, I found myself looking at the Indian Act for the first time. In this first encounter with Houle’s diptychs, I was midway through writing a dissertation about the Canadian state’s documentation of status Indians,² a legal category the settler colonial state had established over time through legislative acts, pay-lists, registration lists and forms, identity cards, and databases. I had learned about the shifting definitions of Indian first written into 1860s and 1870s legislation, which later narrowed and became more fixed and binary in the mid-twentieth century. Along with shifting legal language, I had been tracing the documentation practices involved in making some Indigenous people visible through the restrictive category of status and making others invisible through assimilationist exclusions. But I was not accustomed to seeing the law designed to make Indigenous peoples visible to the state. To borrow Ben Kafka’s words, I had been "looking through paperwork, but seldom paused to look at it."³ Houle’s Premises for Self-Rule series insists viewers look at state paperwork, laying bare the legal premises of claimed Canadian authority, but also the worlds that these laws seek to eliminate.

A large rectangular diptych divided into two symmetrical squares of the Premises for Self-Rule by Saulteauxby Robert Houle. On the left of this bilaterally symmetrical work is a redcolor fieldpainted in an abstract expressionist style. On the right is a field of legal text in vinyl lettersappropriated from the Indian Act 1876,upon a portion of which is superimposed an archival photographinterrupting the extracted legal texts. The photographs feature landscapes dotted with tipis and scenes of men in headdresses and other regalia.

FIGURE I.1. Robert Houle, Premises of Self-Rule: Indian Act, 1876. 1994. Courtesy: Robert Houle.

The evocative juxtaposition of the vibrancy of land and life in the photographs with the abstracting legislation is both an artistic strategy and an analysis of the relations between vision, documentation, and power in settler colonial contexts. In placing the Indian Act and other state legislation on display, Houle asks audiences to look at law. That is, his works ask viewers to look at one of the mediums (legislative paperwork) that state agents use to make the peoples and places they seek to govern more legible and, to borrow James Scott’s words, more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation.⁴ The documents Houle appropriates and remediates in his diptychs each aimed to remake the complex political and social realities, imposing settler visions for a new world on Indigenous lands and lives. In this series of works, Houle brings law out of legislative chambers and politicians’ offices and into the public space of the art gallery. Asking viewers to look at law and its documents in new ways is an intervention into the politics that attempt to arrange the field of the perceptible and to present such arrangements as neutral. In his influential theory of the politics of aesthetics, Jacques Rancière argues that the political power to shape what can be seen is distilled in the experience of a police officer ushering a crowd of onlookers away from a scene, insisting there’s nothing to see and nothing to do but move along.⁵ Banal and embedded in bureaucratic processes, legislative text and other techniques of state paperwork similarly suggest there is nothing to see and no need to linger.

Houle’s works maintain that there is, in fact, much to see. Hanging on the gallery wall, the Indian Act becomes less an episode of colonial political history and more an open question about working with and against the documents through which the Canadian state attempts to see the world. Houle’s artistic strategy and critical inquiry demonstrate possibilities for materializing decolonial worlds amid state efforts to contain Indigenous land and life and against the partiality of state visions.

Beginning this book about documents in an art gallery, with a media theorist standing in front of a painting invites thinking about settler colonial ways of seeing in three ways: with art, with media theory, and with documents.

Rooted in my experiences with Houle’s artwork, this book investigates how ways of seeing and sovereignty converge in official documentary procedure. I use the term settler colonial ways of seeing to refer to how states use documents to make visible the lands and lives they wish to govern and to naturalize that visibility through the banality of paperwork processes. My sense of how settler colonial ways of seeing structure the possibilities of representing land, lives, and relations is grounded in the insights of Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson. Simpson has argued that early-colonial documents, like reports written by Captain James Cook and other representatives of acquisitive empires, rendered Indigenous peoples visible in ways that diminished their claims to sovereignty.⁶ Cook’s writings were instances of what Simpson describes as

the differential power of one account over another in defining not only difference but establishing presence, by establishing the terms of even being seen: an historical perceptibility that empowered possibilities of self- and territorial possession in the present.⁷

Imposing terms of even being seen rendered Indigenous people as absent—or as not present in a way that established meaningful claims in British eyes; this was a crucial aspect of justifying colonial presence and ongoing settler invasion. The terms of even being seen that Simpson describes establish a baseline legibility, one that allows for the possibility of not being seen at all. Continuing the practice of asserting terms of even being seen, the Canadian state has used documents as a technique for defining and seeing Indians since 1876. Canadian efforts to define and ultimately assimilate Indigenous difference is a key part of a broader state fantasy of unifying a population through the management of diversity. As Richard Day summarizes, such efforts have always involved state-sponsored attempts to define, know, and structure the actions of a field of problematic Others (Savages, Quebecois, Half-breeds, Immigrants) who have been distinguished from unproblematic Selves (French, British, British-Canadian, European) through a variety of means (civilization, humanity, race, culture, ethnicity, ethnocultural origin).⁸ Efforts in the 1870s to define Indians are, in some ways, part of the same politics of managing difference in Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism, which emerged in the 1970s. Though separated by a century and enacted via different bureaucratic tactics, these policies have always been met with resistance.

The documents that made Indigenous lives visible to Canadian state agents were part of state efforts to define, know, and manage Indigenous peoples. They were also used to target individuals and communities for erasure via assimilation and elimination. Distributed rather than panoptic, the visual politics that emerged from this nexus of power, documents, and mediation is a context in which, to use Michel Foucault’s words, visibility is a trap.⁹ And yet this trap is not one that Indigenous peoples have wandered into. It has been challenged through diverse tactics—including national and international legal challenges mounted by Indigenous women and counter-policies like the 1970 Red Paper. In the next chapter, I discuss landmark court cases opposing sex discrimination in the 1951 Indian Act filed by Mary Two-Axe Earley (Kahnawá:ke), Jeanette Lavell (Anishinaabe from Wikwemikong), Yvonne Bedard’s (Six Nations), and Sandra Lovelace (Maliseet from Tobique), as well as Cree political leader Howard Cardinal’s Red Paper—a powerful riposte to a federal proposal to dissolve status. The final chapter of the book examines how Indigenous women have used databases and statistics to document the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, using the state’s own documentary techniques and logics to analyze the colonial structures that have made women and girls vulnerable to violence. Such tactics demonstrate how settler colonial ways of seeing are always partial and contested. Alongside these political practices, artistic praxis also engages and evades state gazes in ways that contribute to a critical analysis of how documents are techniques of seeing and governing.

The modes of documentation that seek to attach Indian status to some individual (and individualized) bodies is less a tightly integrated system and more a set of overlapping state practices that Indigenous peoples have engaged and frequently disputed. In addition to Audra Simpson’s foundational work, my analysis of settler colonial ways of seeing builds on James Scott’s argument that states see the worlds they seek to govern with a limited mode of vision aided by bureaucratic techniques (discussed in detail in Chapter 1), and on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s analysis of the politics of visuality. Mirzoeff’s analysis suggests that the authority to see and record is naturalized in those agents invested with enacting the state’s gaze, while those who are overseen have little power to engage in self-determined practices of seeing and representation.¹⁰ To these three different literatures—Indigenous studies, political theory, and visual studies—this book contributes a media history of how power, documents, and mediation converge in the specificities of settler colonial archives, as well as an analysis of the partiality of a scopic field that is continuously exceeded by both Indigenous refusals and the failures of colonial classification. The hope of this book is not to correct or reform settler colonial seeing, but to cultivate strategies of looking and thinking disobediently, in ways that challenge state authority and denaturalize its classifications. To this end, artworks and the strategies of artists guide these ways of thinking and seeing differently.

To examine how documents are techniques of settler colonial ways of seeing, I deploy a pair of analytical approaches throughout this book: art and media theory. Through media theory, I trace the contours of the trap of colonial visibility, connecting policy ideals to the paperwork applied to Indigenous peoples and examining the circuits of authority that imbue the recording, circulation, and archiving of paperwork with political power. The critical dimensions of artworks demonstrate the logics and effects of bureaucratic rationality, attending to the specific impacts of status documents on Indigenous lives. By bringing state documents into public spaces, these artworks denaturalize the banality of bureaucratic process and claims to authority.

Art can guide us into other ways of knowing. By critically assessing settler colonial documentary practices, while also enacting ways of seeing and knowing otherwise, the artworks I analyze are expressions of what Cree political theorist Matthew Wildcat and his collaborator Justin de Leon describe as "the in-between space of Indigenous sovereignties."¹¹ That is, they occupy "a space between what is and what is possible." Both grappling with and exceeding the structures of reason at the heart of colonial bureaucracy, these artworks generate critical frames for analyzing the visual techniques of state-authored documents and, more broadly, the settler colonial ways of seeing that they mediate.

In addition to Houle’s Premises of Self-Rule, works by Nadia Myre (Algonquin/Quebecois), Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Métis), Howard Adler (Anishinaabe/Jewish), TJ Cuthand (Plains Cree/Scottish/Irish), Christi Belcourt (Métis), Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), and Tania Willard (Secwe᾽pemc) each activate methods for approaching state documents as media—and as sites of mediated and contested relations. Through strategies of appropriation, remediation, and visual sovereignty, these works ask viewers to look at state documents anew. They offer a nuanced critique of Indian status and of how settler colonial ways of seeing have affected the lives of individuals and communities. Critique is entangled with creation. These works generate decolonial worlds of self-determination where ways of seeing proliferate beyond the narrow vision of the state. To this end, each artwork offers strategies for destabilizing authority structures and disrupting settler colonial visual habits. These disturbances create opportunities for seeing differently and have taught me—as a settler scholar of visual and media studies—how to look to artistic strategies for challenging the rationalities embedded in state documentation and imaginatively exceeding their bounds.

Indian status affects both individuals who receive it and those who have had status rescinded. Yet the system of Indian status and the documents that materialize it have not been the subject of sustained analysis within media studies or settler colonial studies. Though documents are politically powerful—functioning as a point of material contact between the abstractions of law and the lives of individuals subjected to law—they can also disappear into their banality, as fleeting residues of interactions. Although at times an ad hoc and inconsistent practice, paperwork and the state practices that it indexes can have profound effects on life trajectories and, as this book argues, form a surface upon which settler colonial reimaginings of the world are rendered. For those subjected to them, circuits of paperwork can be a frustrating enclosure in which documents beget more documents—a trap that requires imaginative escape hatches. Art is one of those hatches, a means for asserting one’s desires and refusing the restrictive terms of being seen demanded by pro forma documents. Art can be an interventionist strategy, where possibilities for subjectivities and relations that exceed state-defined categories are materialized.¹² This book examines bureaucratic documents and the worlds they make visible through media theory and the artistic strategies of contemporary Indigenous artists. Together, these paired approaches demonstrate how documents both materialize status as a settler colonial way of seeing and are met with disobedient gazes that envision decolonial futures. Through archival research and visual and material analysis of the Indian Act and status documents, this book demonstrates how paperwork mediates settler colonial politics. Further, I center art as a mode of critical and creative thought, introducing a method for substantively thinking with art in media studies, political theory, and settler colonial studies. Documents, I argue, play a central yet under-analyzed role in mediating state power, and art contributes to this analysis by activating documents as media.

To introduce my method of analysis, I return to Premises for Self-Rule: The Indian Act, 1876 and its invitation to look at the documents that form the contested foundation of Canada. An act of visual sovereignty, Houle’s work wrests control of the terms of visibility asserted by state legislation to foreground Indigenous lifeworlds and self-determination. The tense grid of painting and legislation shows how both art and documents are ways of thinking about the politics of seeing and being seen. Through my engagement with Houle, I will introduce the core concepts and methods of the book, as well as key elements of the artistic strategies activated by the artists whose work frames my analysis of documents and their visual politics.

Thinking with Art

When standing in front of Houle’s Premises for Self-Rule series, it is difficult to settle my eyes. The diptych format that sutures painted canvas to plexiglass creates a tension that holds together two different ways of seeing along with the two expansive square panels. The tense pairing does not ask me to read the work from left to right or use perspective to draw me in. Instead, my vision is pulled back and forth across the two halves of the work, unsettled. The rich, red ochre of the left panel of Premises for Self-Rule: Indian Act, 1876 engages with Saulteaux land and life. The paint is applied in different intensities and opacities with loose brush-strokes. Broad diagonal strokes in heavily pigmented paint fill the top and right corner of the panel, from which drips of paint sink down into the brighter red center and rounded, looping strokes along the bottom edge. Three gestural squiggles—Houle’s signature marks—skip down the thickly painted right side of the panel. Houle has described these markings as the moment of introspection, when after praying and the offering of tobacco …, the self becomes spiritually activated.¹³ Layered paint evokes the interplay of textural shadows and light, earthiness and flesh. Standing before the painting, I felt invited into the field of red, but without a familiar horizon of orientation. Houle’s expressive strokes create a sense of land and the bodies that are of that land, while refusing to offer a standpoint from which to survey territory.

The abstract ochre color-field diverges from most landscape paintings collected by art institutions in Canada. Rendering land as unpopulated and pristine, the most celebrated painterly documents of Canadian art transform Indigenous lands into open coastlines, woodlands, prairies, and mountain ranges—unclaimed and thus available as property. Empty landscapes, however, do not reveal the ways in which land has been emptied and often rendered without reference to the conditions of invasion or the continued presence of Indigenous nations in these spaces. Houle’s paintings do not offer a separated perspective from which viewers might preside over the land. Instead, Houle articulates a sensibility that is a part of and immersed in it.¹⁴ Pairing abstract, embodied landscapes with the language of settler legislation offers a method for looking at settler techniques as entangled with the land and life they seek to dispossess.

The lush vibrancy of the ochre landscape abuts with text. Extracted from the first six sections of the 1876 Act to Amend and Consolidate the Laws Respecting Indians—legislation colloquially called the Indian Act. Orderly, evenly spaced lines of words stretch horizontally across the square of plexiglass. Rendered in vinyl Times New Roman letters, the text announces the consolidation of previous legislation pertaining to Indians and asserts definitions of Band and Reserve—collectivities created by the Crown and the small tracts of land where they were to be restricted. The Indian Act of 1876 consolidated preceding efforts of settler state agents to address the Indian problem, that is, the original and ongoing problem of Indigenous presence on the land the British Crown desired to possess and settle under the Dominion of Canada. The hunger for land, Audra Simpson observes, produces ‘the problem’ of Indigenous life that is already living on that land.¹⁵ A vision based on elimination, the Indian Act asserted the Crown’s ability to define lives (Indians and Bands) and land (Reserves) and to determine how they may be seen. Houle’s artistic strategy of appropriating and remediating the law echoes the flattening, abstracting effects of the quoted legislation. Products of petrocapitalist extraction, the vinyl and plexiglass reflect light and lack the depth of the painted canvas. The conjoined panels bring the lively, gestural world of the painting in contact with the austere letters of colonial law. The conjoined panels evoke modernist grid systems¹⁶—a visual distillation of colonial methods for enclosing space into calculable parcels that might be controlled and contained. Houle’s grid holds two visions in tension: where the ferric pigments evoke the land and life of Saulteaux prairie worlds, the vinyl reproduction of the Indian Act depicts a tool designed to contain and eventually displace that world.

A black-and-white photograph disrupts this tense balance. An image of ten Indigenous men in regalia—seven standing, three seated—is reproduced on canvas and affixed to the right panel of the artwork. The original image was from a collection of