Last week, Prof. Stuart Murray and a doctoral candidate in English he is supervising, Tad Lemieux, travelled together to Minneapolis to present papers at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference.
Prof. Murray’s paper, “Necessaries of Life: The Rhetorics of Medico-Legal Time and Indigenous Life-Times,” reads a Canadian legal case concerning a biomedically “preventable” and “untimely” death. In April 2016, David and Collet Stephan were found guilty in the death of their 18-month-old son who died from bacterial meningitis while being treated “naturopathically.” As U.S. anti-vaxxer groups surrounded the courthouse, the jury found the Stephans guilty, in the language of the Criminal Code, of “failing to provide necessaries of life.” Significantly, the provisioning of biomedical and pharmacological care is here implicit as a parent’s legal duty, advancing the terms in and by which life and its “necessaries” are linked through the framework of criminalization, where biomedicine and law act in concert to morally regulate what life and its possible preservation might mean morally and materially. He reads this case against another ostensibly preventable death: Makayla Sault, an 11-year-old Indigenous girl whose death followed her refusal of chemotherapy treatment. Her oncologists brought her case to the local Children’s Aid Society, which deemed, in the terms of the law, that she was “capable” of consenting to refuse treatment. She was treated with traditional Indigenous therapies until her death. Her parents were not charged. Indeed, as in Indigenous person, this was her right under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Since May 2016, Canada has said it will fully implement the UN Declaration, though how Indigenous claims of this sort can be integrated into Canadian law remains to be seen. This paper argues that there are perhaps irreconcilable differences in the time of law, between medico-legal rhetorics and the rhetorics of Indigenous life-time.
Tad Lemieux’s paper, “Care/takers of the Earth: The Rhetoric of Futurity in the Duty to Consult,” begins by considering the fact that, in May 2016, Canada removed its objector status to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and received a standing ovation at the United Nations. Meanwhile in Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Inuit communities continued their five-year long opposition to a seismic survey proposal after the Federal Court of Appeal rejected community bids to block the proposal in August 2015. At issue is a disagreement over whether Canada’s duty to consult, specified in the Constitution (§35), and variously in the UN Declaration, was “meaningful.” In Justice Eleanor Dawson’s ruling, consultation was meaningful based on the timelines of community engagement, project interruptions, and the “forward-looking” conditions “ameliorat[ing] uncertainties” by “allowing future input as scientific knowledge may be acquired.” But care for the future in consultation is in tension. Experiences shared by Inuit about deaf seals and changed migration patterns, lying and uncaring state representatives, and incompatible tempos in consultation procedures were, in Justice Dawson’s decision, insufficient against the future announced by the intentions of the project. Pairing the rhetorics of Inuit community meetings and court decisions around the Baffin Bay seismic survey case, this paper asks in what ways futurity surrounds the “meaning” of consultation processes with Indigenous peoples in Canada. How does the legal-administrative duty to consult encounter the life-times of Inuit and their relations to the future(s), and how is that future to be decided? Moreover, how might the spirit of liberal humanitarianism delimit the potential for Inuit “caretaking” of the land, authoring the “when” of its meaning and claims?
Find out more about the conference here.