in this region succumbed to British conquest in 1760, and the desire to assimilate the French-speaking population quickly followed (Dumont 1996, 123). This intent became manifest after the repression of the Patriotes Rebellions of 1837–38 calling for more democratic representation. Lord Durham’s infamous 1839 report on the causes of these uprisings described French Canadians as ‘an uneducated and unprogressive people’, asserted the anachronistic character and inevitable doom of their culture, and recommended they be assimilated into English society so as to ‘elevate
5
Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia
Kester Dyer
Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia
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them from that inferiority’ (Durham et al. 2001, 94). This complex settler colonial history places Indigenous peoples living in what is now known as Québec in a distinctive situation, while instilling Québécois society with an ambivalent sense of being at once colonizer and colonized. In light of this ambivalence, I contend that Québécois melancholia is attrib-utable not simply to the damaging effects of conquest, assimilation and failed attempts to achieve sovereignty, but also in considerable measure to repressed anxieties surrounding the legitimacy of constructing an independent settler state on traditional Indigenous territory.
My reading of Mesnak aims to elucidate the performative (and in this instance cross-cultural) function of haunting, a phenomenon important to both Indigenous epistemologies and Québécois melancholia, and one that the film deploys in opposition to the global hegemony of Western culture and world-views, which tend to overshadow and appropriate other cultural symbols and histories. Indeed, haunting has specifically Indigenous functions, notably in the potential for prophecy outlined by Michelle H. Raheja (2010, 145–89), who demonstrates that images of ghosts portrayed by Indigenous film-makers act not only as reminders of a history of colonial brutality, but also ‘as a means of drawing attention to the embodied present and future’ (2010, 146). At the same time, haunting is associated with the Western notion of melancholia. This condition, famously pathologized by Freud in opposition to the healthy process of mourning, results from a failure to assimilate loss, causing the ego to identify narcissistically with the idealized lost object. The melancholic subject reacts to this loss by turning from admiration to uninhibited criticism of the lost object, now identified as the self, thus giving rise to overt expressions of self-reproach.
Postcolonial scholar Ranjana Khanna understands haunting as emanating from melancholia and, contra Freud, seizes this latter concept as a positive condition that triggers ethical self-reflection. While critiquing the colonial underpinnings of psychoanalysis, Khanna acknowledges its potential anti-colonial applications and reassigns value to melancholia over the assimilative tendency of mourning (2003, 23). Haunting, she argues, emerges from melancholia in formerly colonized societies that adopt the nation-state framework they had previously experienced as oppressive.
These insights are particularly useful for grasping the predominance of melancholia in Québécois cinema, given Québec’s strong self-perception as a colonized society and as a region of Canada that has ambiguously moved towards nation-statehood. In this respect, the Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred notes a historical convergence between Indigenous and Québécois nationalisms, which he understands as ‘two parallel reactions to the nationalism of the Canadian state, that is to say to Anglo-European
Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia
hegemony’. In spite of this overlap, however, Alfred stresses the divergence of Québécois nationalism from its decolonizing impulse following concessions on linguistic and cultural autonomy accorded to Québec by the federal government since the 1960s. These gains, according to Alfred, render untenable the rationale linking sovereignty to cultural survival (1995, 13). A significant flashpoint that illustrates both the shifting alignments of Canadian and Québécois colonialisms and their common denial of First Nations’ rights was the 1990 Oka crisis, which saw Mohawk protestors stand fast against municipal plans to expand a luxury golf course on to their cemetery. With non-Indigenous interests ostensibly backed by the Québec provincial police and then the Canadian army, this violent, highly mediatized land dispute shattered Québec’s self-perception as the victim of colonization (Kalant 2004, 16). In light of such divisions, we can posit haunting in Indigenous films as prompting separate, but synergetic experiences. On the one hand, for Indigenous viewers, it invites recognition of ongoing Indigenous presence as well as past colonial injustices, both of which have been suppressed in settler texts by what Raheja describes as ‘historical uses of the ghostly effect’ (2010, 146). On the other hand, for non-Indigenous Quebecers, haunting works to trouble a framework for national liberation that excludes Indigenous peoples’
unconditional independence and territorial rights through a privileging of Québec’s own colonized status. Ultimately then, Indigenous haunting in Québec provokes a latent melancholia that acts not to inspire guilt, but rather, as Khanna would have it, to foster an ethical imperative towards the future (2003, 23).
In this essay, I place Raheja’s understanding of haunting in conversation with Khanna’s to show how Mesnak defiantly and effectively deploys this powerful trope. Whereas Indigenous ghosts have been used for centuries in literature and decades in film to conceptually bolster settler dominance, Sioui Durand, like other Indigenous performance makers, harnesses ghostly images for anti-colonial resistance. By appropriating a key European symbol of haunting and containing it within Indigenous epistemologies, the film demonstrates how a living Indigenous spiritual tradition can ‘swallow up’ within the conditions of its own system an emblematic Western text such as Hamlet, hailed for capturing the dilemmas of Europe’s passage into the early modern period and its concurrent transition towards the nation-state as the unit of political organization. This filmic challenge to the global hegemony of the Western canon overturns the purported limits of indigeneity, intuitively perceived by settler populations worldwide as confined within nation-statehood, and instead engulfs the nation-state within indigeneity. Mesnak thus helps to ‘undermin[e] the premise of the state as the highest and most
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liberating form of human association’, a process already catalysed in the era of globalization by the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Anaya 2007, 9). Certainly, Hamlet’s global resonance signals the broad interconnecting ambitions of the film, but Sioui Durand’s most striking innovation, which gives the film its title, transposes the ghost of Hamlet’s father into the figure of Mesnak, an Innu animal spirit represented as a snapping turtle.2 Through Mesnak, ‘an intermediary between material and spiritual worlds […] that reminds men and women that they must live in harmony with nature’ (‘Mesnak: Dossier de presse’ 2011, 13),3 the film foregrounds haunting, suggests the ongoing presence of an embattled Indigenous spiritual tradition, and highlights the ethical imperative that should underlie mainstream Québécois society’s necessary revision of its own political choices.
Indigenous Cinema in Québec
Although Mesnak represents his first foray into cinema, Sioui Durand has worked in theatre since 1985, as co-founder of the first profes-sional First Nations company in Québec, Ondinnok, which, tellingly, was ‘born of the urgency to repatriate a cultural world that has been swallowed up’.4 Much of this company’s work exhibits the desire to repurpose Indigenous performance traditions from across the Americas for contemporary audiences. By contrast, the play on which Mesnak is based, Hamlet-le-Malécite, explicitly broaches the immediate context of reserve life via a non-Indigenous source text.5 While carving out a space for resolutely Indigenous drama, Sioui Durand has collaborated with luminary settler figures in Québec theatre, including Robert Lepage and the late Jean-Pierre Ronfard, who directed Sioui Durand’s La conquête de Mexico in 1991. This play constitutes a particularly powerful example of Sioui Durand’s endeavour to ‘re-emphasize the Amerindian narrative over the Euro-American one, to reinsert Euro-American history inside Amerindian continentality and temporality’ (L’Hérault 2005, 117). One year after his collaboration with Ronfard, Sioui Durand appeared in Robert Lepage and Marianne Ackerman’s Alanienouidet, based on the exile from London of controversial Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, who was honoured by the Huron-Wendat nation with the name that gives the play its title. Alanienouidet mixes dramatized historical material with references to Hamlet and highlights the cultural encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous characters. Sioui Durand also acted as the production’s consultant on Huron-Wendat culture and history (Lafon 1992, 166). His more recent collaboration to write the screenplay for Mesnak, working with celebrated Québec independent film-maker Robert
Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia
Morin and award-winning novelist Louis Hamelin, continued to trace a path for uniquely Indigenous expression amid Québec’s dramatic, literary and cinematic traditions.
Mesnak was developed alongside other significant Indigenous cinematic initiatives in Québec. Indeed, the film’s conception coincided with the launch in 2004 of the Wapikoni Mobile project (‘Mesnak: Dossier de presse’ 2011, 2), co-founded by documentary film-maker Manon Barbeau, the Council of the Atikamekw First Nation, and the First Nations of Québec and Labrador Youth Network. Initially using two camper vans converted into mobile film-making studios, staff working on this project travelled to Indigenous communities across Québec, providing youth with film-making tools and training. Within its first ten years, Wapikoni Mobile had produced over 600 short films, expanded to four camper vans, and multiplied the variety and scope of its activities, offering exchange and training opportunities worldwide and contributing to the development of transnational Indigenous media networks. Scholarship on this pioneering project has considered its social impact as intra- and intercultural mediation (Sédillot 2010), its distribution as alternative media practice (Serpereau 2011), its effects on notions of citizenship (Marceau 2013), and its participation in the renewal of the sacred through First Nations cinema (Bertrand 2013). Karine Bertrand suggests that the success of Wapikoni Mobile favoured Sioui Durand’s efforts to secure funding for his feature project (2013, 229). Conversely, Barbeau herself speculates that the success of Wapikoni in Québec may be attributable to the convergence of multiple factors, and cites the completion of Mesnak as an important milestone (Barbeau 2014, n.p.).
In this context, the parallel development of Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) by Jeff Barnaby (Mi’kmaq) as an English-language feature constitutes another important iteration of Indigenous cinema in Québec. Such breakthroughs inevitably look back to celebrated documentary film-maker Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki), whose Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) works to archive melancholia through an affective evocation of deceased Mohawk leaders and images of a cemetery under threat from commercial development during the Oka crisis. This documentary provides an audiovisual foundation which subsequent Indigenous films build upon to periodically incite Québec’s engagement with the haunting effects of loss. Barnaby in particular has expressed his debt to Obomsawin in spite of his vastly different style, which favours horror and science fiction.6 In this respect, Rhymes for Young Ghouls tackles the pernicious abuses of colonialism allegorically as it tells the story of a strong, independent and resourceful teenage girl’s battle with the nearby residential school and a sadistic Indian agent. The film focuses particularly on the protagonist’s
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bonds with her dead mother and an inspiring grandmother-figure. Just as a deceased female character haunts Barnaby’s story, the untimely death and emblematic memorialization of Wapikoni Awashish, a vibrant 20-year-old woman and community role model, prompted the Wapikoni Mobile project’s creation and conceptually focuses its objectives. The ghosts in Sioui Durand’s film, with its evocation of melancholia, also parallel the haunting figures stimulating this sentiment in Obomsawin’s account of the Oka crisis.
Indigenizing Hamlet
Mesnak tells the story of Dave Brodeur, adopted into a Québécois family at the age of three after his father’s murder and his mother’s descent into alcoholism. Though Dave is cut off from Innu culture, sepia-toned flashbacks suggest the resurgence of incomplete but traumatic memories, which remain cryptic until the final dénouement. When Dave receives a photograph of his biological mother, Gertrude McKenzie, he travels to the (fictitious) reserve of Kinogamish to shed light on his past. Meanwhile, Gertrude is engaged to Claude St-Onge, suspected of killing Dave’s father during a hunting trip twenty years earlier. Claude is now Chief of the community and advocates an unsavoury collaboration with a logging company seeking to exploit the land around the economically deprived reserve. In parallel, Dave begins an affair with Osalic, a young woman interested in reconnecting with Indigenous traditions, as evidenced by her photographs of ancestors, her respect for Mesnak, her burning of sacred herbs as a purification ceremony, and her desire to discover Innu traditional territory. However, Osalic remains caught in an incestuous relationship with her half-brother and is ultimately incapable of mitigating the damage caused to her family and community. While the film offers a bleak view of First Nations society, and while Dave resembles Hamlet, a quintessentially Western figure, Sioui Durand indigenizes the ghost of Hamlet’s father, representing him as Mesnak, the master spirit of aquatic animals and one of the most important in Innu taxonomy (Bouchard and Mailhot 1973, 64; Armitage 1992, 8). Thus, the film weaves the theme of First Nations acculturation into a powerful Indigenous counter-narrative that dismantles the authority of the canonical text.
Sioui Durand establishes this interlocking structure by enclosing the main plot within poetic wide shots of an imposing river and extradiegetic close-ups of the snapping turtle. After the title credit, the camera pushes in towards the open mouth of the turtle as it hisses, announcing a transition to the first sepia-toned flashback of Dave’s original trauma.
This image shows the young Dave on the fateful hunting trip with his
Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia
father, accompanied by Claude and his blind uncle Sapatesh, the only other witness to his father’s death. Since we have yet to encounter the adult Dave, the turtle spirit seen previously appears to actively summon the memory-image that holds the key to his childhood trauma. As these ghostly characters fade from view, we first meet the adult Dave mid-rehearsal, delivering a speech from Hamlet. A play within a film, this excerpt evokes Shakespeare’s own use of the device whereby Hamlet attempts to ‘catch the conscience of the King’. Indeed, in Sioui Durand and Messier’s earlier stage adaptation, Dave exposes the theatre-going audience to ghostly video images of the American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, whom he associates with his father, as he delivers Hamlet’s speech describing the ruse to provoke Claudius. In Mesnak, the scene of Dave’s rehearsal commandeers Hamlet as a device to ‘entrap’
the film’s (non-Indigenous) spectators as we are lured into a familiar dramatic structure that ultimately forces a recognition of settler privilege and its consequences for Indigenous communities. Among its multiple functions in Sioui Durand’s film, then, Hamlet fulfils a metatheatrical role analogous to The Murder of Gonzago in Shakespeare’s drama, but instead of provoking fictional characters as it does in Shakespeare, the embedded play here acts directly on the film’s audience. Just as memory is configured as not fully controlled by human will but rather deliberately governed by a spiritual entity, so the provocation Mesnak orchestrates Fig. 1 Ghostly flashback of Dave’s childhood hunting trip with his father and
uncles. Screen still from Mesnak (2011), dir. Yves Sioui Durand.
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through Hamlet intimates the working presence of elements, including film images, deployed to haunt the viewer’s psyche.
At the film’s outset, Dave’s drama teacher critiques his performance as one-dimensional, driven only by vengeance, and adds that Hamlet is stirred by ‘a quest for redemption roused by pain’. This premise then underpins Dave’s journey to expose his father’s murderer and recover his own lost identity, but also nuances the principles that guide a parallel non-Indigenous journey. While Dave’s character is aligned with Indigenous people forcibly alienated from their cultures, non-Indigenous viewers are implicated in his dilemma, thereby encouraging a difficult interrogation of national identity and memory. Thus, Dave’s narrative recounts a turbulent reconnection with indigeneity, but leaves room for analogous reflection on Québec’s as yet oversimplified search for political redress following a history of colonial subjugation. By accentuating Dave’s non-Indigenous upbringing and situating the plot within a Western dramatic structure, Sioui Durand disarms mainstream spectators and leads them on a journey that unsettles received notions about Québec’s decolonizing objectives.
The construction of Dave’s character (an Innu actor, played by Peruvian-Québécois actor Victor Andrés Trelles Turgeon, who then plays a Danish prince) works to trouble ethnic categories, and simultaneously allows Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers to follow mutually enriching yet distinct narrative arcs with distinct, but interrelated goals.
In spite of Québec’s still incomplete struggle for political autonomy, Khanna’s notion of a haunting proper to decolonized nations finds appropriate instance here. Khanna argues that in ‘the context of new formerly colonized nation-states, the critical response to nation-statehood arises from the secret embedded in nation-state formation: that the concept of nation-statehood was constituted through the colonial relation, and needs to be radically re-shaped if it is to survive without colonies, or without a concealed (colonial) other’ (2003, 25). During the 1960s, Québécois nationalism adopted the discourse of left-wing struggles and worldwide decolonization movements, but failed to apply its principles in solidarity with First Nations. Decades later, although political independence remains unrealized, Québec enjoys a degree of autonomy similar to other post-colonial nations, and nationalist discourse has progressively shifted towards the consolidation of Québec state authority. This proximity to nation-statehood therefore complicates Heinz Weinmann’s attribution of Québécois melancholia to ‘post-referendum syndrome’, or the loss endured by the failure to achieve independence (1997, 36). In its drive towards independence, Québec failed to radically reshape the concept of nation-statehood or to fully address the fundamental contradictions this model poses. As Daniel Salée notes, Québec’s 1985 legislation on
Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet and Québécois Melancholia
the distinct character of Indigenous peoples goes further than any other Canadian jurisdiction in recognizing Indigenous identity or endorsing self-determination, but such recognitions seem ‘more rhetorical than authentic’ when confronted with Québec’s uncompromising affirmation of territorial integrity (2013, 331). This position is inevitably tethered to the goal of nation-statehood and consequent refusal to unconditionally recognize Indigenous sovereignty. Although it is tempting to attribute melancholia simply to the incompleteness of the nation-statehood that has eluded Québec, more profoundly Québécois melancholia points to the incompleteness of the social aims of 1960s nationalism, the unwitting loss of its decolonizing ideals and the demotion of the parallel aspirations of Indigenous peoples, which together provoke melancholic self-criticism in Québec cinema. As Dave’s drama teacher points out, Hamlet’s quest is a complex one. Thus, the fragmentary nature of Dave’s identity, and of the character he seeks to construct, also echoes, for the non-Indigenous viewer, the deficiency of Québec’s political identity as a decolonized nation.
Raheja connects Indigenous haunting to prophecy and an apocalyptic vision that predicts not only the coming of colonizers but also the end of Western domination and the survival of Indigenous world-views (2010, 182–84). Certainly, the stark portrayal of reserve life in Sioui Durand’s film reads as apocalyptic, and a regenerative dimension surfaces through Dave’s
Raheja connects Indigenous haunting to prophecy and an apocalyptic vision that predicts not only the coming of colonizers but also the end of Western domination and the survival of Indigenous world-views (2010, 182–84). Certainly, the stark portrayal of reserve life in Sioui Durand’s film reads as apocalyptic, and a regenerative dimension surfaces through Dave’s