Prof. Jennifer Henderson (cross-appointed to the Department of English Language and Literature and the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies) has recently published an article in The Conversation about how settler Canada is processing the ‘news’ of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of former Indian residential schools (IRS).
In “After findings at Indian Residential Schools, settler Canadians shouldn’t hide behind the Gothic narrative,” Prof. Henderson observes that the figure of the Catholic perpetrator has moved to the foreground of public discussion in the weeks following the first announcement that ground-penetrating radar had located the remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in June 2020.
In order to understand what this focus on the Catholic Church is doing for settler Canada’s understanding of its responsibilities, Prof. Henderson argues, we need to look to the mediating work of narrative genre and specifically to some of the projecting and distancing functions built into the genre of the Gothic. The tropes of villainous monks and secret catacombs have a long history in in Anglo-Protestant and secular culture and the activation of these tropes serves to over-specify the agents, sites, modalities, and duration of colonial violence in Canada.
The Catholic Church played a key role in the operation of these genocidal institutions and has failed spectacularly in its legal and financial obligations related to truth and reconciliation. But the churches were tools of the state in the IRS system and that state-designed, -directed, and -funded system was about clearing the land of Indigenous peoples.
In a previous article, “Residential School Gothic and Red Power: Genre Friction in Rhymes for Young Ghouls,” published in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Professor Henderson elaborated this critique of what she calls ‘Residential School Gothic’ in settler-public discourse through a reading of Mi’gmaq filmmaker, Jeff Barnaby’s, genre-blending film. The film disrupts the attempt to project the violence of settler colonialism into a distant past and onto specific religious actors, remote from modern Canada and its (our) material investment in ongoing forms of Indigenous dispossession.
A fire burns a Catholic Church as shown in this handout image provided by Tracy Dalzell-Heise in Morinville, Alta., on Wednesday, June 30, 2021. RCMP say in a release that officers were called to the blaze at St. John Baptiste Parish in Morinville, about 40 kilometres north of Edmonton, just after 3 a.m. They are calling the fire suspicious. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Communications and Legislative Services-Tracy Dalzell-Heise