Ghosts and Their Analysts

You’ll tread anywhere, over graves, to gain your ends . . .

We’re all curious. We all want to know and understand. But you hide out in the past, maundering around in the dark for your answers.

We arrived late. We were doctoral students who took up as our separate dissertation projects the “public secret” (Taussig, 1999, p. 2) ¹ of the contemporary violent disappearance of a number of Indigenous women from the midst of the Western Canadian cities in which they, and we, were living.

Suzanne Vail arrived before us. She was there in 1987, the protagonist of Katherine Govier’s novel Between Men, a young assistant professor of Western Canadian History haunted by and obsessively researching the brutal murder of a Cree girl known as Rosalie in Calgary, Alberta, on February 28th, 1889.

Suzanne Vail is fiction. Rosalie is not, and nor was her murder. ² The violence that culminated in the murder of Rosalie in 1889 is today, in 2015, widely acknowledged and documented as a form of violence that is inflicted disproportionately on Indigenous women and girls in Canada. ³ But despite all of the empirical evidence documenting extremely high rates of violence against Indigenous women—evidence amassed by NGOs and scholars as well as by the state’s own fact-finding apparatuses—the relationship of this violence to Canada’s colonial history is rarely, if ever, addressed or rendered factual within the “common sense” frameworks of contemporary colonial power. In this article, we seek to contemplate the ways that modern distinctions between fiction and fact, dead and living, past and present, all seem to render some forms of violence more factual than others. We consider whether this distinction (fact and fiction), rather than protecting the veracity of what really happened to women like Rosalie, instead ensures that some truths never come to light, that some knowledge remains secret by near consensus.

Ours is a dangerous pursuit, we realize, one that aims to further unsettle conventional methods for producing knowledge—finding fact—in much contemporary social science research. ⁴ But it is also a pursuit that we see as necessary, given that it appears to be something other than a securable degree of factness that gives some forms of violence an overt social importance, and makes others apparently secret or invisible. Facts are made, like fictions, and not all generate attention. In this article, we use our readings of the story of Suzanne and Rosalie in Between Men to argue that the maintenance of modern Eurocentric ontological dichotomies is of central importance to contemporary state regimes in which selective and targeted forms of violence seem more fostered and maintained than they are anomalous. We insist that such boundary maintenance indexes a refusal to understand how the past presses on and in the present, how fiction presses in and on fact, and how dead presses in and on life. And so, Suzanne Vail became our invited collaborator, with whom we attempt to bring the violence of 1889 into the violence of 1987 and into its shocking repetitions in the present by animating a number of disturbing parallels across more than a century. We convene with Suzanne in our obsession and in our rebuttal to history, to fact, to dead, and to Eurocentric rationality. We write against dominant modes of knowledge production, against the production of an Other that such knowledge has and will always require (da Silva, 2007; A. Smith, 2014). Shaken and inspired by the limits of representation (Phelan, 1993; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), we write against a Canadian national history, place, and imaginary that repeatedly renders dead and past the traumas of colonization, which we argue are still very much inscribed in everyday subjectivities, practices, socialities, and bodies, including our own.

Suzanne Vail necessarily became our interlocutor in this venture, because upon reading about her in Govier’s (1987) novel for the first time in 2010, we walked through what Avery Gordon describes as “a different door, the door of the uncanny, the door of the fragment, the door of the shocking parallel” (1997, p. 66), finding ourselves anticipated in form and obsession. In Between Men, historian Suzanne Vail is rewriting the violent death of Rosalie. She struggles for much of the novel with how to know and write what happened to Rosalie when the historical record of Rosalie’s death is so partial, so biased, so patriarchal, and so thoroughly colonial (although colonialism is frustratingly only a shadowy presence for Suzanne). We began to locate ourselves as written, in 1987, into our own future readings of Suzanne’s struggles. Our late arrival is anticipated. Not because we relate to Suzanne in any intimate way but because the coarse outlines of our three figures and of our pursuits bear some striking resemblance—a resemblance that in fact helps secure our recognition as selves. Like Suzanne, we are also White, and like her, we find ourselves in Canada today as the descendants of European settlers. We also now work for universities—teaching undergraduates and ever attempting to eek out time to read, research, write, publish. Like Suzanne, we have found ourselves somehow compelled to think on and to write about murderous violence against women, so many of them Indigenous women, that occurs/occurred near where we live or lived—in cities we feel like we know. Each of us seems to feel this violence as a kind of weight, as well as a kind of motivation; to say we feel it as a purpose might expose all we have invested in this work. For each of us, this is one part of our lives. For each of us, this has come to be something of who we are—part of what renders us visible. Suzanne’s fictitiousness does nothing to quiet this shock, it does not dispel the uncanniness; it, in fact, seems barely a detail when situated in our ongoing struggles to articulate an ontology that does not claim visibility, presence, or recognition as foundational.

If, as we have come to suspect through our research, many people living in Canada actually “[know] what not to know” (Taussig, 1999, p. 2) about violence against Indigenous women—if the ongoing and alarmingly disproportionate murdering and kidnapping of Indigenous women is indeed a “public secret” and concurrently a form of what Michael Taussig (1999) calls “important social knowledge”—then it is not surprising that such a secret might appear (or even be securely kept) in “fictive” form, a form easy to dismiss as imaginative, as fanciful, as not real. Such texts are perhaps to be read, but not to be taken as fact. They are viewed as a form of entertainment, in some circles even as a source of aesthetic accomplishment or enlightenment, but not as containing knowledge that might be useful for exposing the public secret, and especially not as useful for informing a process that relies on the factual as much as justice . Reading about Rosalie in this fictive form, as the deuteragonist to Suzanne Vail, despite her real existence and potentially still-living kin, presents us with the secret we already know—and knew, when we first encountered the novel—that we, as Canadian citizens, are not supposed to know. “‘I don’t know why you’re so excited,’” Suzanne’s lover insists, in the novel. “‘Some old murder. It’s not exactly a state secret.’” Suzanne does not speak her reply aloud, but her response reverberates through her thoughts in 1987 and finds an echo in ours: “But a state secret was exactly what it was” (Govier, 1987, p. 164).

Rosalie remains spectral in Govier’s novel: shadowy, translucent, almost invisible here and in the few other textual accounts of her murder. We three scholars began by imagining that the Indigenous women who were facing violence and sometimes murder were being rendered invisible by and for a complicit colonial state and an indifferent public. So we were each struggling, initially, to make visible a form of violence too often, we thought, not seen. But the question of visibility became immediately problematic. For attempts to render those who faced such brutality visible require too many assumptions: Are the women and the violence they experience really not seen? Not seen by whom? We quickly realized it was a mistake to theorize that either the women themselves or the violence they experienced was invisible. Moreover, even if addressing this violence were a matter of visibility, our attempts at representing the underrepresented would function also as efforts “to name and thus to arrest and fix, the image of that other” (Phelan, 1993, p. 2); we would fall into the common mistake of conflating greater visibility with greater power (Phelan, 1993). So we theorized instead that their recognition as fully complex and multifaceted human subjects was obscured, or rendered indiscernible—not from all positions, but from particular subject locations. (Perhaps, most tellingly we feared, from our own?) But this approach, too, was quickly exposed as flawed. As Andrea Smith (2014) argues, advocating for the recognition of Others as self-determining, fully human subjects fails to “question the terms by which humanity is constituted” (p. 209). She suggests that those of us wishing to question such terms might instead try “to see glimpses of the outside—ghosts that gesture toward a beyond—within the current system” (p. 224). And so, we found ourselves propelled away from an analysis of visibility or recognition, and toward an analysis of ghosts.

Where Rosalie appears fleetingly—spectrally—in the few other textual accounts of her death, the emphasis and repetition of her status as “prostitute” renders her hypervisible—and thereby, as Avery Gordon (following Ralph Ellison) reminds us, “unvisible” (1997, p. 17). Recounting a description of Rosalie’s murder in the Calgary Tribune around the time of her death, historian Donald B. Smith (2005) sums up the event as “the murder of the Native prostitute” (p. 58). For the journalists of Rosalie’s day and the proper historian of today, writers who so frequently purport to recount only facts, this was not the murder of a girl, a person, but only of a prostitute. Writing, like Donald B. Smith, in 2005, more than a century after the lurid newspaper accounts of Rosalie’s murder, historian David Mittelstadt also mentions Rosalie in passing in his history of Alberta courthouses:

Life on the frontier had a dark and squalid side. Nowhere was this more clear than in the 1889 trial of William “Jumbo” Fisk for the murder of Rosalie New Grass. Jumbo had come into Calgary and picked up the fifteen-year-old Cree girl off a street corner. Like altogether too many young native girls living around Calgary, she was a prostitute. (p. 20) ⁵

The resonance between “squalid” and “squaw” here seems too telling to be dismissed as coincidence; Mittelstadt’s assertions of fact leave many questions unanswered. How does he know that Jumbo “picked up” Rosalie on a street corner, and what was the nature of this “picking up”? Even if they did meet on a street corner, are there no other reasons a Cree girl might stand on a street corner, then or now, except for the purpose of selling sex? And how does Mittelstadt know that “too many young native girls” were prostitutes in 1889? How is prostitution defined and understood here?

Our point is not to deny that some, maybe even many, young Indigenous women might have exchanged sex for money, food, or other goods in and around Calgary in 1889—certainly that’s possible, although another historian, Leslie Erickson (2003), points out that there is really no evidence in the historical record to support this assumption, as arrest records don’t bear it out, and she also reminds us that the contention that Rosalie herself was selling sex was “never legally proven” (p. 101). But we are not really interested here in who is the better historian, although we do have our opinions. Instead, we want to draw attention to how, in so many historical (and contemporary) accounts, the exchange of sex for cash or other goods is not situated in the context of ongoing colonialism, in the severe poverty and food deprivation that the colonial conquest of Western Canada is bringing to Indigenous communities on the prairies at the very moment historians like Mittelstadt proclaim that “all too many native girls” are engaging in prostitution. Starvation had become part of the context on the prairies, especially in late winter (Carter, 1996; Daschuk, 2013), and emerged as a consequence of the imposition of the land reservation system (Treaty 7 came into effect in 1877 in this area). The dire situation is expressed in

an 1883 petition to the prime minister and the minster of the interior, [in which] Cree Chiefs of the Edmonton District contended that their young women were reduced by starvation to prostitution, a thing unheard of among their people before. (Carter, 1996, p. 69)

Starvation, however, does not factor into Suzanne Vail’s investigation. Nor does it feature as meaningful in these other historians’ accounts of Rosalie’s murder. Even without consideration of this context, it is striking that Mittelstadt is not required to offer any real evidence to make his assertion about Rosalie’s status as a “prostitute” read as truth. Her self-determination is assumed. Here historians like David Mittelstadt and Donald B. Smith, and the late 19th-century journalists whose accounts they reply upon—all writers who purport to teach us fact from fiction—deploy colonial tropes of Indigenous womanhood that frame “reality” in a way that is overly familiar, reiterating stereotypes that actually derive largely from various fictions of imperial dominion. As early as 1892, for example, Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson published a column in the Toronto Sunday Globe in which she decried the narrow and stereotypical representation of Indigenous women in popular 19th-century North American fiction. Her editorial offered readers an early critique of colonial imaginings of Indigenous womanhood—a critique that seems to have gone largely unheeded by journalists, historians, and novelists alike for more than a century now. When they wrote Indigenous women into their fiction in the late 19th century, Johnson argues that White authors frequently represented these characters as some version of a stock, animal-like, desperate “Indian princess” or, worse, as a “beautiful little brute”:

[A]s usual the authors take away her love, her life, and last and most terrible of all, her reputation; for they permit a crowd of men—friends of the hero to call her a “squaw,” and neither hero nor authors deny that she is a “squaw.” It is almost too sad when so much prejudice exists against the Indians, that any one should write up an Indian heroine with such glaring accusations against her virtue, and [include] no contradictory statements either from writer, hero or circumstance. (n.p.)

The caricatured representations of Indigenous women that Johnson decries in late 19th-century fiction are similar to those mobilized in the Calgary Herald in the 1889 reports of the murder of Rosalie and trial of her murderer; in these stories, Rosalie is most commonly referred to as “the squaw Rosalie,” and of course her lack of “virtue” is presumed self-evident. That these sorts of fictionalized representations of Indigenous women could persist with no “contradictory statements” or contextualization of circumstance in the purportedly “objective” and “factual” recountings of journalists and, even much later, of historians, exposes the utter porousness of the boundaries drawn around fiction and fact. ⁶

Suzanne Vail, a properly trained Historian, stumbled upon this porousness as well. Eventually, when the historical record yields nothing but these very sorts of stock representations of Rosalie, representations she took to be based on fiction as much as fact, Suzanne grants herself freedom from writing a conventional history and allows herself to break with disciplinary tradition, liberating her from simply recounting the partial details of what really happened to Rosalie contained in the historical record. Suzanne is, after all, a scholar whose teaching repertoire includes a course titled “Reinventing the West”; she is part postmodernist. And so Suzanne emerges from her crisis of representation empowered to rewrite Rosalie. It is Govier, not Suzanne, who first introduces us to Rosalie in the novel, and she deploys more ambiguous terms than the journalists and historians but it remains clear, she assumes that we will recognize Rosalie as a prostitute. ⁷ There are few words spoken in the novel between Jumbo and Rosalie. They meet on the street. She follows him into the Turf Club. We expect she is a prostitute. But Suzanne Vail eventually writes a different story, one in which Rosalie is a girl seeking an abortion, a girl who has made the vital error of mistaking “Jumbo” for the local back-room abortionist.

Amid the various fictions we might consider when reflecting on what really happened to Rosalie, we find ourselves questioning Suzanne’s motives for rewriting Rosalie’s story in this particular way. We feel the need to separate our motivations for troubling the fact/fiction distinction from hers—the need to ask Suzanne some hard questions. “Suzanne,” we ask, “would a Cree girl in 1889 who wanted to terminate a pregnancy really have turned to an unfamiliar White man with, at best, some training in Western medicine?” ⁸ “Maybe not,” Suzanne replies, “but it makes her much more sympathetic, inviting the reader to imagine that she was looking for an abortion, that she wasn’t actually a prostitute.” “Suzanne,” we insist,“come on, look around you. It’s 1987. Does this really make Rosalie so much more sympathetic? Even isolated out there in Alberta, you know what’s going on, you hear about what’s being debated across the nation right now. We can tell you from our vantage point that a year from now the Supreme Court is going to side with Morgentaler and his feminist supporters and strike down the criminal laws against abortion. In two years, the Court will also refuse to grant Chantal Daigle’s abusive boyfriend the right to stop her from aborting her pregnancy. Big changes are coming in the way people think about abortion. We know these changes are already underway right now, Suzanne, that a lot of people, a lot of feminists especially, might agree that Rosalie is more sympathetic as the victim of a botched abortion than as a victim of violence inflicted on a prostitute. But just as many, maybe more, oppose abortion, see it as just as blameworthy an act as prostitution, just as much a stain on a woman’s character. So in fact, Suzanne, isn’t it true that rewriting Rosalie’s story the way you are doing right now has everything to do with who you are and what purposes you imagine this version of her story can serve in the present, your present in 1987? Isn’t it true that you hope by re-telling Rosalie’s story as a story about abortion, as a story about your abortion, you can re-write not Rosalie’s story, but your own? We know this is important to you, Suzanne, because we know about your abortion, your regrets. Govier told us. She wrote them into your story, about how you “wished [you] could be Rosalie again,” but this time you “would go on living and the child would go on living, and there would be more life after that” (p. 283). So you made Rosalie the victim of an abortion, because you felt yourself a victim of it. Isn’t that true, Suzanne?”

“Maybe,” snarls Suzanne, “maybe I used her story for my own ends, just like all the other historians. But I bet you are too, both of you: what are you using her for?”

Although it is impossible to fully assess her motives, Suzanne may very well have been attempting to excise representations of Rosalie from their entrapment as spectral by rewriting her story as she does. But we argue that Suzanne’s efforts to achieve recognition of Rosalie as fully human keep relations of domination and oppression intact; with her rewritten story about abortion, Suzanne maintains common/colonialist understandings of Indigenous people as lacking and dependent on the superior knowledge of their Euro-Canadian colonizers, understandings that are completely in keeping with those representations that characterize the young Indigenous woman as always already a prostitute. Either way, Rosalie is rendered the victim of a White man or men. In Suzanne’s revision, she was subject to the carelessness and sexual desire of the local journalist, Murphy, a married man who, we are led to believe, gave her the CAN$14 she would need to obtain an abortion, who then sat at the Turf Club watching as Rosalie climbed the stairs with Jumbo to meet her violent end, and who later wrote the media record of the murder, the arrest and trial.

In Suzanne’s story, Murphy the journalist embodies the absurdity of fact when so much is at stake. The point Suzanne wants to make by introducing Murphy as a key player in the events of Rosalie’s death can of course be read as a postmodern critique of any attempt at objective or innocent representation of the “real.” Murphy writes the record. He protects and maintains the archive. He provides the fruit not only for Suzanne’s fiction but also for the counter-record of purported fact. His role in Rosalie’s pregnancy is secret, off the record, as is his silent compliant witness to her fatal misidentification of Jumbo. There is no author listed in the actual 1889 Calgary Herald reports of Rosalie’s murder, but a Murphy does appear in an account of the opening of Jumbo’s first murder trial: ⁹ Murphy is listed as one of the potential “ . . . jurors who had been challenged and ordered to stand aside” (“A Life at Stake,” 1889, p. 4). Not coincidentally, both of these Murphys—one in the historical record and another a crucial character mixed up in the revised story of Rosalie’s death—bolster Suzanne’s (and later our) assertion that the “facts” of Rosalie’s murder traceable in the colonial archive are, by virtue of how they leave out so much of what’s at stake, inherently insufficient.

But the fictions are insufficient too. Whether Rosalie was selling sex or seeking an abortion when she entered the Turf Club, Suzanne does not rewrite Rosalie’s violent death to interrogate its (or her own) settler colonial context. In her rebuttal to history and fact and dead, in her effort to trouble Eurocentric rationality and positivist epistemologies, Suzanne still does not find her way outside the colonial practice of “knowing better,” even though she imagines she does. We propose that there is actually no “outside” there and those critics of positivism who imagine that an escape can be found by shifting the site of knowledge production to literature, or to the use of experimental arts-based methods and other representational practices that trouble “the real” risk making a dangerous mistake. In other words, when we imagine that fiction or storytelling can offer a more pure, more truthful, or less partial interpretation, as Suzanne does, we repeat the mistake of the Historian who imagines the same about his accumulation of facts. The Historian was always both a writer of fiction and of fact, as was the journalist, as was the novelist, as are we. It is the artifice of a divide between the two that requires our undoing now.

We continue to use “we” here because initially we—Kara and Amber—followed Suzanne in her desire to rebut history, fact, and dead by turning to fiction and ghosts. Initially, we too thought that these might offer opportunities for knowledge production outside of the positivist methods that continue to dominate so many of the disciplines (even the so-called interdisciplines) in which we struggle to find a home in the academy. But Suzanne is right when she insists that we too have motives, that we are motivated toward particular ways of interpreting Rosalie’s story ourselves. In fact, when we first read Govier’s novel in 2010, neither of us actually noticed that Suzanne’s rewriting of Rosalie’s story was about abortion. We both missed that aspect of her retelling entirely—not until we turned to reviews of the novel did we make note of it, although it is hardly a subtle aspect of the novel. But we wanted so much for Suzanne to be doing something different that we interpreted her retelling of Rosalie’s story to suit our present in 2010: namely, as a story about violence against Indigenous women presumed to be selling sex, particularly acts of violence committed by White men and sanctioned by a lack of state intervention or public outcry, reflecting the degree to which the colonialism of 1889 remained so much a part of the contemporary violence experienced by Indigenous women that we were attempting to understand and oppose. As Suzanne herself states, “Violent murder of women: a cultural constant” (p. 108). This version of the story was in turn so familiar to us in that present that we took it for granted that Suzanne was trying, in 1987, to tell the same story that we were trying to tell again in 2010, the one about making visible the violence against Indigenous women that most people preferred not to see, and about making the Indigenous women who suffered such violence recognizable as fully human. Of course, much changed between 1987 and 2010: by 2010, activism, research, writing, and cultural production had begun to address the problem of (in)visibility by advancing representations of murdered or missing Indigenous women that demonstrated their complex personhood—urgent work, and yet in 2015, the violence continues, which prompts us to try to tell a different story yet again (not only by changing the way the story gets told but also by learning from Suzanne’s mistake of the dangers of turning an Other’s story into one’s own). ¹⁰ But we can’t blame Suzanne for our oversight; we see now she was explicit about what she was doing by researching and rewriting Rosalie’s death. As she admits to her student, Roberta Asp: “‘You see it’s really something about me I’m looking for . . . To do with my own—,’”

“‘Poor Rosalie,’ said Asp. ‘Everyone’s victim. Yours, too’” (p. 108).

Despite our desire now, in 2015, to question Suzanne’s motives and approach (and by extension, our own), we are not trying to position Suzanne as the “bad” scholar and ourselves as “good,” even though we realize we risk being read that way. But an important difference between our approach and Suzanne’s might lie in how, as analysts, we represent the ghosts we encounter en route to our different understandings of the violence of the present. Suzanne does not speak with the ghost of Rosalie so much as for her: like so many White feminists throughout history, she collapses Rosalie’s story with her own, sidelining difference in the pursuit of a shared experience of suffering as women under patriarchy—as women, between men. ¹¹ She attempts, then, to challenge the positivist accounts of history that she so decries by producing a subjectivism that Avery Gordon argues is a “twin pitfall” of positivism (1997, p. 19). Failing to find the “facts” of Rosalie’s life and death in the archives satisfactory, Suzanne instead transforms Rosalie’s story into a version of her own. And when we reduce the violence of Others to a version of our own stories, we fail to see how the causes and therefore a just response to that violence might actually be quite different from how we might like to imagine them (see Simon, 2013).

Suzanne Vail is not the only scholar to have put faith in literature as a way out of this mess, far from it. As Avery Gordon herself insists:

In the twentieth century, literature has not been restrained by the norms of a professionalized social science, and thus it often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension. Where else do we learn of the tremulous significance of furniture without memories, learning about it in the same moment as we are drawn in, hearts in hand, to a story told just so? (1997, p. 25)

Although she goes on to insist that (capital-L) Literature of course “has its own problems” (pp. 26-27), here Gordon suggests that the imaginative, the fictional, can teach us something Social Science cannot, because it calls upon our emotions, draws us in through its artful storytelling. This is an apt description of our first reading of Govier’s novel. Yet we have grown increasingly suspicious of this technique some imaginative fictions hold for drawing us into their purportedly different claims to knowledge. By reading and rereading Govier (and Gordon for that matter), we begin to see that the escape that some Social Scientists (or positivist Historians) seem to want to locate in imaginative fictions—in literature, art, drama, film, and so on—can, and often does, lead us right back to the problems with which we began: the problem of what knowledge is, the problem of how it gets recognized as knowledge, and the problem of how the colonial logics of knowledge production get reproduced across centuries. Because the facts were incomplete and those she was able to uncover were tainted by power, Suzanne, for example, turned to fiction to reveal a “truer” version of the violence that ended Rosalie’s life. But because Suzanne is a person situated in a particular historical context, with motivations that shape her observations and an unconscious that renders those motivations for the most part opaque to her, her fiction takes on the authoritative voice of a facticity that retells history still from the vantage-point of domination. Using Rosalie to realize herself, Suzanne’s subjectivity is discursively bound up in the fiction she weaves in ways that she at once attempts to confess and at the same time appears utterly unable to recognize. This dependency on the Other inherent to the colonial knower and knowledge system is precisely what Andrea Smith (2014) urges us to refuse. Even through many of our most radical modes of knowing, with their bases in experimental and arts-based approaches, this basic relation needs to be upended: it is one through which a subject is realized precisely in the constitution of some object of knowledge, whether through fact or through fiction.

For Rosalie to become something other than spectral, we must interrogate the limits not just of Suzanne’s but also of our own conflations of Indigeneity with spectrality. For, as Emilie Cameron (2011) reminds us:

The Aboriginal ghost has been used to evoke a generalized sense of history in the Canadian landscape, but always with a sense of linearity and succession. It is assumed that Aboriginal ghosts are all that remains of the “disappearing Indian,” and that settler-Canadians have inherited this rich land from those who have now “passed.” (p. 144)

Alarmed by how a generalized tendency to conflate Indigeneity with spectrality in colonial and postcolonial contexts can direct attention away from the political demands of Indigenous people in the present, Cameron argues that “hauntologies dwell more upon the anxieties of settlers than they do upon the specific claims and experiences of Indigenous peoples” (p. 154). Our focus on making the violence Rosalie experienced visible, like Suzanne’s focus on making Rosalie victim, reflects the colonial assumption of an epistemology of presence in which absence is akin to negation. To be visible or present within such an epistemology is contingent on being recognized by the colonial subject as subject and not object, but colonialism has specifically turned “the ‘native’ into a ‘thing,’ an object of exploitation” (Franz Fanon in Thobani, 2007, p. 37). This objectification, according to Mbembe (2001), is an historical aspect of Western thinking that cannot abide difference as variation, and instead takes it up only as nonbeing. Andrea Smith (2014) argues that even when subjectivity is granted some Other, as various forms of experimental writing and reflexivity attempt to accomplish, it is usually through either deferring or shifting who is Othered. The logic of Eurocentric epistemology hides the subject’s contingency on these very processes of Othering. Rosalie was made an object via the violence that ended her life and the 1889, 1987, and 2005 accounts thereof. We suggest that any attempt to redeem Rosalie’s subjectivity in terms consistent with colonial epistemologies may guard her individually and temporarily, but it will never challenge the larger structures of thought that undergird the violence to which she was submitted, and hence is effectively another exercise of colonialism as ongoing everyday practice.

Can our scholarship do more than expose the anxieties of settlers—ours and Suzanne’s? Can it inform us of the nature of those anxieties? We referred earlier, in the article, to violence against Indigenous women as state sanctioned, a public secret. Can we understand settler anxiety as rooted in other aspects of the secret—in the contingency and immediacy of settler presence—and hence as troublingly necessitating these ongoing enactments of colonial violence? The contingencies of settlers’ various claims (to land, to belonging, to a nation) seem directly tied to practices of colonial violence, as well as to the means by which such violence is entrusted to the past. We wonder now whether our task is not so much a matter of doing justice to Rosalie herself, although that too remains important, but also a matter of addressing and challenging the injustices of colonial conquest writ large, and hence a matter of bringing the various changing and unstable practices of colonial knowledge production into the visible present to emphasize their ongoing presence (or reenactment) as something other than spectral, as something that has not “passed.” This would include addressing the practices that produce the Settler as well as those that produce the Other—as it is in part this dichotomy which formalizes the distinction, the one Mbembe (2001) identifies as subject and object, that grants settlers this comfortable sense of distance from the violence that concerns us here.

Between Men, we see now, provides us with another story through which to launch just such a challenge to the unstable practices of colonial knowledge-making. Roberta Asp is another seemingly minor character in the book, a Cree undergraduate student who takes Suzanne’s “Reinventing the West” course and is first an irritant and later an enigma to Suzanne. At one point, Asp shows up at Suzanne’s office and invites her for a beer. Suzanne is charmed by Asp and agrees, but her thoughts betray her anxieties about going anywhere with Asp:

Asp’s car was the colour of rusty primer; it had no doorhandles on the outside. Asp opened the driver’s side with a screwdriver and leaned over to push the passenger door with her foot. Suzanne took careful note of how it was done. Once in, she wanted to be able to get out. (p. 105)

Suzanne wants to go with Asp and wants to be sure she is able to get out of being with Asp at the same time. Given already established colonial narratives of Indigenous threat to White women in the West (Carter, 1997), perhaps Suzanne’s fear is another version of settler anxiety; she anticipates a need to escape being “taken away” by the Indians. We read this as an anxiety about having the roots of Eurocentric epistemology exposed; it is a fear of being in relation to Asp, a relation Suzanne unconsciously knows might trouble her constitution and authority as Historian. Suzanne needs to be able to get out of the inherent relationally that is both disavowed and foundational to colonial settlers’ claims to know (better), to possess the land, and to maintaining the legitimacy of the colonial state. Suzanne thus wants to be able to get out of how very obviously she needs Asp—out of an awareness that a seemingly individual and autonomous subjectivity is secured only momentarily through the comforts of Eurocentric claims to presence. As their encounter comes to an end, Suzanne confesses her crisis: “It’s all breaking down, all breaking down” (p. 11). Asp eventually addresses their interdependency in a later conversation with Suzanne, though apparently speaking of another settler/Indigenous dyad: “They didn’t have any meaning without each other” (p. 232). Phelan (1993) characterizes this kind of encounter between Asp and Suzanne as one of both “profound romance and deep violence” (p. 4), although the “romance nestled within” is one rarely considered by cultural theorists. And indeed their rendezvous seems to cohere with this characterization.

Asp takes Suzanne to a bar called “the Northwest Rebellion” ¹² in “the flats,” a newly gentrified area that had “been a poor little village of displaced Indians and blacks” (p. 105). Suzanne has often passed this bar but, significantly, she has never noticed the place until Asp takes her there. The two have a drink and discuss their different understandings of history. In Asp’s version, history amounts to the names that are legacies scrawled in layers on the papered-over walls of the bar. There, Asp points out the name Nelson Small Legs, a name never covered no matter how often the walls are scrawled up and repapered. Nelson Small Legs, like Rosalie, Jumbo, and Murphy, can be found in the official historical record—he was a leader within the American Indian Movement in Alberta and actively involved in protesting the Canadian Government’s continued exploitation of Indigenous people and lands in the 1970s. In most accounts, it is said that he committed suicide in 1976, although there are gaps in the historical record that raise questions about this “factual” account as well. On the same wall, the wall upon which Small Legs is memorialized for his refusal to capitulate to colonial power or to see it only as a vestige of the distant past, Asp signs her name as “Rosalie New Grass.” Some might argue that this is where the haunting happens in Between Men—and indeed we have made such an interpretation at another time. But now we see Asp’s decision to sign the name of a woman murdered over a century ago not as a collapsing of herself and Rosalie (such that Rosalie becomes the ghost who speaks through her) but instead as a refusal to render the violence that Rosalie was subject to past. It is Asp’s epistemological breaking with a modern temporal order of linearity which would otherwise see Rosalie as either dead or purely spectral. Asp illustrates for us that the approach we seek requires conceiving of the past as present, the dead as living (on). She reveals for us that the repapering of the wall is precisely what formal disciplinary knowledges do, whether history or sociology or English literature. We read Asp’s signature as pushing us to heed Walter Benjamin’s (1968) warning in his theses on the philosophy of history: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (p. 255). Asp insists that Rosalie and the injustice of her death are a present concern. She reads and writes the wall as palimpsest. This is something Suzanne, in her obsession with determining the “truth” of Rosalie’s past, and then modifying Rosalie’s story according to her own experience, simply cannot understand.

We argue that in this way Roberta Asp actually does pose a threat to Suzanne Vail, although not the violent one that Suzanne anticipates. Instead, Asp’s threat is to Suzanne’s struggle to define herself autonomously, as unaffected by others, specifically by Asp, Rosalie, her ex-husband, her lover, or by the fantasy of her unborn child. Asp’s threat is also to Suzanne’s sense of Calgary as familiar, as home, as a place to which she was (and is) entitled to return. It is also a threat to the version of Rosalie’s story that Suzanne is in the midst of constructing; by scrawling Rosalie’s name on the wall of the bar, Asp draws attention to what is lost in Suzanne’s rewriting of Rosalie. Asp is concerned that Suzanne’s own psychic protection of her “self” eclipses a concern for Rosalie, and thus a wider concern for justice. Although able to challenge positivism as an intentional practice of writing and research, Suzanne is not able to attend to how or why she writes herself over/as Rosalie. Asp exposes this truth to Suzanne (although Suzanne remains oblivious), and as she does she reminds us of our use of Rosalie: “everybody’s victim.”

In her book on transgenerational haunting, Gabriele Schwab (2010) diagnoses the limitations of the kind of obsession with the past that characterizes Suzanne’s (and our) pursuit of Rosalie’s story:

Perhaps the only way to avoid the fixation on past violence and injuries is to bring their traces into the present. Focusing on traumatic history often seems to release us from the present. We can ignore the violent histories that unfold before our very eyes when we are fixated on the past. (p. 6)

Fixated on Rosalie’s violent death, and in particular on how to rewrite the story of that death as a version of her own concerns in her present, Suzanne is utterly unable to recognize how the violent history of colonialism continues to unfold right before her very eyes. Govier shows us this by situating Suzanne’s rewriting of Rosalie in a very particular time and place—during the annual Calgary Stampede. Initially launched as a fair in 1886, by 1912, the stampede had become an event “to preserve and promote Western heritage and values” (in Kelm, 2009, p. 713). The Calgary Stampede remains a hallmark of the continuing violence of colonialism and is the backdrop to the 1987 story, functioning in Between Men as the normative framework through which it becomes impossible for Suzanne to see European settlement in the area as evidence of a still present and ongoing colonialism.

The Stampede occurs annually in Calgary, and is characterized by Suzanne as “ten days of scheduled mayhem to which the city was tradition bound” (p. 97). Historian Mary Ellen Kelm (2009) identifies the occasion as inherently contradictory: both an attempt to “portray the past in the present” (p. 729) and an event without a “genuine” history. Established in 1886, the founder of the Stampede asserted that simple presence was enough to warrant entitlement: “If you live in Calgary—you are a westerner—it does not matter how long you have been here” (Weadick in Kelm, 2009, p. 729). Hence the annual event, ostensibly a celebration of the past, mobilizes a surprising presentism by refusing to recognize any regional past that is not “Western” or “proud,” remembering only an era in which the West, the Cowboy, and the Indian are present in commodified forms. Yet the annual affair includes a series of practices that are largely unexamined for the repetitions of colonial violence they embody. Describing the lawyers and waitresses dressed up in “cowboy outfits,” Suzanne insists that such costumes were “obligatory; the obligation came with citizenship” (p. 97). Participation in this annual affirmation of ongoing colonial conquest as cowboys becomes imperative to one’s recognition as an (entitled) Albertan. Childhood visits to the fair, Suzanne remembers fondly, included “the Indian village at the end of the midway, where Blackfoot and Cree from nearby reserves came and sat in skins and feathers under their painted tepees, with sour faces” (p. 99). With the obligatory Cowboys and Indians, Suzanne is remembering a “contact zone” (Pratt, 1992); the Stampede was “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict” (p. 6). The Stampede remains a site of such struggle, despite what are arguably contexts of geographical and historical intimacy; through the Stampede, the settler/Indigenous, Cowboy/Indian divide is reasserted; geographical and historical distance is rearticulated; and the ongoing relations of inequality and conflict endure. Then, as now, the Stampede operates as a mechanism through which the Cowboy and Indian arrive again, both fictions necessary for defining the autonomous settler-citizen. Within Suzanne’s memory flashes an episteme (Foucault, 1970) that demands its object to emerge as subject. With Benjamin’s insights in mind, we wonder whether “images of the past” that seem to secure the past as (gone) distant, of which there is nothing present (beyond supposedly “innocent” and romantic reminiscence), might be the images most repeated for their capacity to maintain a linear temporal order, for the “proof” they seem to provide that the past is past, precisely for their effects of distancing what was from what is, and thus for their effectiveness in delivering a present devoid of a past. Suzanne tells us that “ . . . everyone had fun at Stampede time . . . It was just innocent family fun” (p. 99), and we see in her account an opportunity for examining how such practices are anything but innocent—not then, not now. Instead, contact zones are times and places of “coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict” (Pratt, 1992, p. 6). With eyes fixated on the past, Suzanne’s reminiscences of the Stampede cannot see the annual celebration of settler conquest as part of the framework through which the injustice of Rosalie’s murder can never be made visible except from certain vantage points, her life so seldom recognized as mattering in, and for, the present.

Beyond its function in Between Men, the Calgary Stampede is a contact zone that works also as a form of remembrance practice—the annual reenactment of an early period of settler arrival on the prairies as a time of conquest (over land and people) and nation-building, a time of progress and development. We argue that practices like the Calgary Stampede are haunted, not by ghosts that might be rendered victims, but insofar as they are practices that are at once repeated and rendered benevolent in the historical record, and again every summer. As we conclude, then, we find we have shifted away from an attempt to articulate Rosalie identifiably and sympathetically human, and instead are attempting to do the work that Suzanne refused by discerning which practices are unjust and repeated and at work in delineating the very colonial distinction between who is recognizable as Subject and who is not. As Judith Butler (2004) insists: “It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology” that is necessary (p. 33). Those of us compelled to incite such an insurrection may well need to critique the drive to humanize, to curb our own leap to do so, even as we continue to recognize Suzanne’s laudable intentions.

Despite our concerns with her storytelling practices, Suzanne remains our collaborator, serving a very important function; she helps us recognize and work through what Roger I. Simon (2013) calls “the interplay between what we do know (or think we know) and what we don’t know or don’t want to know, and what we desire of and for ourselves and accept as our responsibilities” (p. 134). The coarse resemblance in our forms calls upon us to reckon “not only with stories of the past but also with ourselves as we are (historically, existentially, ethically) in the present” (p. 137). We must accept what we share with Suzanne, not fully knowing, not fully being aware of the implications of what we do, not being ethical or good, despite how, precisely because of the work we do, we are sometimes recognized for what Simon understands as a troubling and questionable effect of such work: our “own humanitarian character” (p. 133). Like Suzanne, we are not ever fully able to see how we are the subjects and objects of our own inquiries. The possibilities for reflexivity here cannot address or interrupt this difficulty. ¹³ What we can recognize is that Suzanne is the collaborator we would prefer to leave at home, with whom we would rather not write. But she remains a necessary interlocutor, we think, because she stands in as a reminder to at least attempt to see how what we write, what we say is always more than we expect, and also much, much less.

Perhaps, in concluding, it is important to address why it is that we did not instead invite Roberta Asp to become our collaborator, once we stumbled upon the traps of Suzanne’s approach. This might appear the move that could redeem our initial error. Indeed, Asp seems the clear preference, for she clearly knows more and better than Suzanne about what undergirds the task at hand. But we see this alliance as presumptuous and no less fraught with difficulty. We selected Suzanne for our initial epistemological alignment; we hope that through her we can learn what we otherwise cannot see of ourselves. Asp may well also be able to provoke such reconsiderations, but we argue that this is not her responsibility. Nor would she have accepted the task, for the invitation profoundly misses the point. We are guided by Jeannette Armstrong’s urging that we, “as writers from the dominant society might turn over some of the rocks in [our] own garden for examination . . . courageously questioning and examining the values that allow the de-humanizing of peoples through domination” (in Mackey, 2001, p. 1). For that reason, we attempt to hear and take up the challenge Asp poses, by doing the work of interpreting and exposing, where we can, those most familiar and comforting colonial modes of knowing, writing, living, and being in relation with others (especially those that rest upon our fantasies of autonomy and self-determination).

We see now that our approach requires acknowledging the illusiveness of the task of adequately attending to the complexity and specificity of a life and of a violent death. It requires refusing to generalize or to have any one “stand in” for violence against Indigenous women and girls more broadly, even as we can and should distill parallels. The violence that ended Rosalie’s life was certainly specific, but not singular. Most recently, we see brutal and shocking parallels in the 2011 murder of Cindy Gladue, also in Alberta, and in the 2015 acquittal, by a jury composed entirely of settler-Canadians, of the man who confessed to inflicting the injury that resulted in her death. Unlike Suzanne, we cannot and will not speak for Rosalie. Nor can we speak for Cindy. And we cannot and will not let the partial public record speak for itself. What we will attempt to do is contemplate the possibilities for an epistemic justice that is not based on whether or not you or we can see Rosalie, or Cindy, or recognize them as fully and complexly human. The projects of visibility and recognition are after all inherently flawed, and are themselves unjust from anywhere but a Eurocentric epistemology that demands visibility and presence for recognition. So, although Suzanne Vail remains a valuable interlocutor, we now write against our initial (mis)identification with her (the terms of our identification turn out to be so thoroughly problematic, in the end), in the interests of challenging not just dominant cultural memories of the formation of “Alberta” but also dominant modes of studying or theorizing the production of such memories—once again, including our own.