Reiterating the Canadian West

In a slightly disheveled shirt and tie, Canadian artist Terrance Houle entered the classroom smoking a cigarette. Not with the furtive pleasure of an office worker huddled at a building entrance, Houle inhaled with fervor filling his body to its furthest corpuscle, exhaling as gift. Noses around me wrinkled. One or two audience members started noisily lifting windows, murmuring something ironic about smoking indoors being really transgressive.

Houle moved to the room’s center where the audience sitting on the floor encircled a miscellany of objects. At the circle’s perimeter, others stood along the walls and near the windows. Houle’s performance, Friend or Foe #7 (Toronto): iisistsikóówa, was part of the 7a*11D International Festival of Performance Art. Still with a prominent blackboard, the former Shaw Street School classroom was now a renovated studio in Artscape Youngplace (n.d.), a “community cultural hub” for artists and arts organizations. Houle tried to engage the audience using traditional Plains sign language. He repeated the gestures turning to each direction. The audience responded sporadically as if invited to play charades.

Showing the weariness the performance’s Blackfoot title suggested, Houle sat on a chair in the middle of the space. He pulled a mickey of Canadian Club whiskey from a paper bag on the floor, and as it reached his lips, four figures wearing Ninja ski masks pounded on the classroom door and entered. They pushed aggressively toward Houle. Dressed in black with convocation hoods over their shoulders, three began beating Houle with sheets of paper rolled into truncheons. The fourth presided over the action as if reading a conference paper or issuing a decree but singing the text in a shrill, incomprehensible tenor. The beating was relentless. Houle was jerked off his chair and splayed on the floor. He was dragged through the audience and pressed against the blackboard as one assailant drew a chalk circle to pin Houle’s body within its perimeter. The beating and singing continued, though for audience members neither made sense. Houle was dragged back to the middle of the room. The truncheon blows reddened his skin as the assailants stripped him of all clothing.

The incessant, unhesitating, inexplicable excess of the beating and its distorted, operatic commentary crossed a threshold that distinguishes performance from the performative, the representational from the constitutive. Exceeding any duration needed to realize a theatrical metaphor, Friend or Foe #7 did not represent a metaphor of physical and intellectual violence toward First Nations people. It was that violence. We were implicated as witnesses by our passive appreciation . Those at the front of the circle became visibly concerned about Houle’s welfare and intervened to shield Houle’s body from further violence. The assailants completed their incomprehensible diatribe, dropped their paper truncheons, and left, hurling beaded artifacts at Houle’s naked body.

Houle struggles to bring himself upright and sweep the remnants of his street clothes beyond arm’s reach. He throws sheets of paper and truncheons further into the audience. His assailants had left him a beaded breastplate, breechcloth, and rattle. Visibly exhausted from the ordeal, he clothes himself, resumes smoking, and then drags four bags of soil from each corner of the room. He empties them to form a small island at the room’s center. He tries again to engage the audience with sign language. There is a greater sense of urgency, but we are no more successful at guessing what he is trying to convey. With each failure in communication, Houle pulls the earth into a smaller island. As if in response to these failures and the diminishing place where he kneels, Houle retrieves red and black paint from among the objects on the floor. He rubs himself with soil and makes palm prints with the paint on his body; an ominous, silencing, black palm print over his mouth. He takes a knife, hacks off the braids on either side of his head, and concludes chanting a translation of what he had tried to convey in signs. I hear his Blackfoot name, Buffalo Herder, and an invitation: “ . . . Come ride with me; come pray with me.” As I leave the classroom, I retrieve one of the rolled paper truncheons, a book chapter by Roland Barthes.

Houle constructed the Friend or Foe performances around Fronval and Dubois’s (1985) Indian Signals and Sign Language. Starting with the first in the series (Houle, 2011), these performances often turn on failures of communication and the juxtaposition of Houle dressed in breechcloth in front of a movie theater, an urban park, a supermarket, or an art gallery. Critics and reviewers frequently comment on the fleshy presence of Houle’s body (Portis, 2015). David Garneau (2013) noted his exposed body puts colonial “attempts to control Aboriginal flesh into question” though for Houle, such performances may be “a form of purification” (p. 21). Friend or Foe #7 does not unsettle by Houle’s bodily presence, or even by the “allegory” (Cooley, 2014a) of colonial violence on a First Nations’ body. Settlers witnessing Houle’s bodily struggle with the real and symbolic violence of academic analysis may enable purification and may even feel implicated in the cathartic “conflict and struggle” that Glen Coulthard (2013) describes as necessarily “a central feature of the decolonization movement” (p. 7). Despite taking place in a classroom, it is not pedagogical. Despite being framed as performance art, it is not representational. Friend or Foe #7 unsettles because it is performative; it does something that exceeds purification, allegorical struggle, pedagogy, or representation. As Garneau phrases it, Houle’s creative work is “fuelled by an extra-rational aesthetic that endeavours through visceral and intuitive means to provoke change in other bodies” (p. 15). For Cooley (2014b), this piece embodies the trauma, “inflicted by complicity, by the academy and by arts institutions.”

Perhaps this is too long and too oblique an introduction to an issue on the Canadian West, but the “extra-rational aesthetic” of Houle’s work bears on the academic analysis of a place inhabited by settler and indigenous bodies. Friend or Foe #7 references Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle: Houle’s assailants wear black, heavy metal t-shirts suggestive of Brecht’s Ironshirts; Houle’s body is contained by a chalk circle; legalistic proclamations divide his body between indigenous and non-indigenous ways of speaking; and the performance is grounded literally in gestures that contain and diminish indigenous knowledges of place. These references recognize settler practices of place: the construction of place as property through categorization and classification (Hogue, 2015), the domination of bodies within place through representation (Carter, 1997), and their control through discursive frames of interaction (Coulthard, 2013).

Western historian Brian Dippie (2000) once suggested that for artist Charlie Russell, “The cowboy on either side of the 49th parallel was interchangeable” (p. 22). Despite this perennial observation, contemporary discussions of the Canadian West often try to differentiate it as a geographic space from American practices south of the border, or from popular Hollywood imaginaries. Such discussions are developed through comparison: in terms of demography (Jordan-Bychkov, 2000), representation (Dippie, 2006), class (Jameson, 2010), and political economy (Francis, 2006), or they conclude like Russell that there are no cultural differences despite national boundaries (Elofson, 2000). Increasingly, research on the Canadian West troubles geographic understanding of place (Jones, Perry, & Morton, 2013) and the naturalized imposition of settler classifications that make place (Evans, 2008). The articles in this issue advance this arc to engage sensory, embodied, and more-than-representational experiences (Carolan, 2008; Lorimer, 2005) in multiple Wests. Through critically engaged methods of writing about archival ephemera, literary narratives and song, festive and tourist experiences, and popular media and illustration, these articles contribute to understanding a Canadian West as “an embodied relationship with the world” performed through reiterative social practices (Cresswell, 2015, pp. 69-70).

Susan Joudrey’s article “What a Man: Portrayals of Masculinity and Race in Calgary Stampede Ephemera” considers the reiteration of the settlers’ gaze. Her focus is on archival ephemera and promotional material, specifically items that circulated representations of First Nations peoples. Although Treaty 7 nations have participated in the Stampede since its inception in 1912, the imagery on stationary, postcards, posters, pins, and calendars conveys settler or non-aboriginal constructions of indigenous others. Joudrey argues this material culture perpetuates the identification of Treaty 7 peoples with nature and with a static, pre-modern identity.

Heather Davis-Fisch also works with archival material though with an emphasis on the west of the Pacific slope. “Enacting Civility Through Comic Opera; Or, Nation, Race, and Ned McGowan’s War” develops a theatrical metaphor used to describe events of the mid-19th century gold rush along the Fraser Valley. She reviews popular and legal accounts of the events to focus on the performance of civility at a time when the region was dominated by transient, American miners. Expecting such a constitutive performance to be inscribed on the landscape, her attention is drawn to the omission of both national and racial tensions from commemorative place names.

The Calgary Stampede also enters into Vanja Polić’s article, “Performing the Canadian West: Chuckwagons, Cowgirls and New Westerns.” She looks at literary iterations of the mythic West to establish a context for two performance texts by Aritha Van Herk. One of these has a focus on chuckwagon racing, an event associated with the Stampede since 1923, while the other gives voice to the West through the persona of a schoolteacher. Polić identifies how Van Herk’s characters re-write the Western myth through ironic and negotiated relationships with the West’s own history as performance. Neither myth nor reality, the West of these characters is a fluid place that eludes definition, a reading that is always a misreading.

Gillian Turnbull also engages questions of authorship and the mythic West, but her research involves published collections of traditional cowboy songs and their significance for contemporary composition. “Authorship and nostalgia in contemporary cowboy repertoire” considers the living tradition of Canadian cowboy singers. They negotiate the changing nature and experience of the West in compositions that are informed by and creatively rework this cowboy repertoire. The article’s emphasis on Ian Tyson brings this negotiation into sharp focus as his music balances popular success and the West’s mythic qualities with his experiences of traditional music and life on the range.

Aritha van Herk describes her article as an intertextual work of fictocriticism that assesses the Canadian West’s decorum against popular representations of life on the American side of the border. Viewing George Roy Hill’s 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from the vantage of a summer job saturated with the butter and syrup of an Edmonton movie theater, she traces the legendary and archival trail of the Sundance Kid’s bodily presence in the province’s ranching history. Along the way, the reader encounters film analysis, a reflection on government census practices, and glimpses eastern slope ranching seen through the textual vestiges of Harry Longabough.

“The Calgary Stampede Through a Cultural Studies Perspective” recounts the pedagogical experiences of German students completing a cultural studies course that included a field trip to the Stampede. Co-authored by instructors Caroline Rosenthal and Stefanie Schaefer, the course emphasized the cultural and discursive construction of the West through regional, literary texts, carnivalesque aspects rodeo, and other Western performances. In addition to using literary analysis to read texts, students produced media, documentary, and soundscape pieces for a German audience. The immersive, sensory experience of developing this work during the Calgary Stampede situated their critical analysis in reflexive accounts of lived practices.

A similar embodied engagement with place informs Tobias Sperlich and Lace Marie Brogden’s “‘Finding’ Payepot’s Moccasins: Disrupting Colonial Narratives of Place.” The encounter in a small regional museum with a material instance of the West opens their reflexive interrogation about settler privilege and archival practices that embed objects within legitimating colonial narratives of place. Their reading of these objects and their critically positioned writing move from engagements with colonial discourses to the contemporary museum practices that enable alternate and disruptive readings of the moccasins’ relation to provenance and place.

Kara Granzow and Amber Dean draw the literary together with their embodied experience in considering a 19th case of a murdered Cree woman. “Ghosts and Their Analysts: Writing and Reading Toward Something Like Justice for Murdered or Missing Indigenous Women” challenges reflexive attempts to understand the invisibility of these women and the presence of Canada’s colonial/settler past. They discover that their preoccupation with this murder has been anticipated in a 1987 novel that featured a historian protagonist researching the same case. The article’s methodological motivation turns on considering the differences in knowledge claims of social science and fiction and their complicity in maintaining a settler imaginary as past.

Bryanne Young’s “Intimacies of Rock: Ethnographic Consideration of Posthuman Performativity in Canada’s Rocky Mountains” is a precarious article. It clings to the Rockies’ wall of rock with the tenacity of lichen, the indeterminate yet intimate responsiveness of scree. Framing her writing as both ethnographic and performative, Young develops a posthuman engagement with place through a philosophical and physical experience. The result is both a theoretically informed and an embodied demonstration of arche-writing that is purposefully vertiginous, a writing-of-stone that returns nature and the body to an ethical encounter with the West.

The storied, the sensory, the archival, the represented, the embodied, the settled, and the unsettled, these articles criss-cross each others’ trails as to reiterate various experiences and practices in the Canadian West. Their West is “a traveling concept…an interactive process of constituitive contacts” (Campbell, 2008, p.4). The authors are not external or outside this West observing it and working to construct it through detached analysis. This is an extra-rational West that calls to them; it inhabits them. Like Houle’s performance, they unsettle the colonial violence of intellectual work with the West’s fleshy presence. They struggle to inhabit a “relational West,” one “contingent on what we do, on how we perceive each other and the land” (White, 1991, p. 39).