II. What is Reparation?

The concept of reparation has specific genealogies that are philosophical, political, cultural, religious, and legal. A cursory review of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of reparation reveals these genealogies as interdependent.

The OED definition illustrates the breadth of the definition of reparation and the diffuse nature of its possible iterations in social, political, and cultural life. Indeed, to render whole (what may be broken), to redo (what has been undone), to fix (what is broken or perceived to be broken), to replace (what has been removed or stolen), to redress (what or whom has been injured or disarranged), to compensate, to pay, to reconcile is the work of reparation—whether legal, cultural, psychic, or philosophical.

From Aristotle’s “corrective ethics”^{Footnote 18} to St. Thomas Aquinas’s “commutative justice,”^{Footnote 19} the animating concept of reparation has a long history in Western political and legal philosophy. Reparations were reconstituted in the post-World War II period culminating in a recent and significant United Nations statement of principles and guidelines for reparation. As the guidelines assert: “The various forms of reparation” include: restitution (to “restore the victim to the original situation before the gross violation”), compensation (to provide “for any economically assessable damage, as appropriate and proportional to the gravity of the violation and the circumstances in each case”), rehabilitation (which may include medical, psychological, legal, or social services), satisfaction (“includes a broad range of measures, from those aiming at cessation of violations to truth seeking, the search for the disappeared, the recovery and the reburial of remains, public apologies, judicial and administrative sanctions, commemoration, and human rights training”), and guarantees of non-repetition (“comprise broad structural measures of a policy nature such as institutional reforms aiming at civilian control over military and security forces, strengthening judicial independence, the protection of human rights defenders, the promotion of human rights standards in public service, law enforcement, the media, industry and psychological and social services”).^{Footnote 20} These guidelines—restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition—point to the complexity of practices that compose the fields of activities associated with reparations.

As an international human rights mechanism, reparations are bound by liberal moral and legal obligations and entitlements.^{Footnote 21} Indeed, reparation binds entitlement and obligation. As Margaret Walker explains:

The mutually conditioning relationship between entitlements and obligations suggests that the legal, philosophical, and cultural imagination of reparations is structured through liberal individualism. In some instances, the liberal subject in reparations is confined to an individual entitlement and demand for “repair” (for example, in a case where an individual is at the centre of a demand for recompense). In other instances, the liberal subject is stretched to the collective (in the context of historical claims). In most cases, however, the transformation from the individual to the collective is amplified to the point of where “claims to x” are battlegrounds for the politics of difference and violence. Michel Rolph-Trouillot describes this reparative process as “transformative rituals” that “imply a transfer to collectivities . . . the attributes that a dominant North Atlantic discourse had hitherto assigned to the liberal subject.”^{Footnote 23} In reparations, as in liberalism, the liberal subject is the bait and switch for the category of human.

Psychoanalysis offers another genealogy for the concept of reparation. David Eng argues that, although the “political and psychic genealogies of reparation would seem to circulate in widely disparate economies,” the “convergence of moral response to violence in the domain of the political and psychic is no coincidence.”^{Footnote 24} As Eng suggests, “[I]n its plural form, reparations describe the convergence of a number of political as well as social justice movements seeking redress for state-sponsored and extra-state violence. In its singular form, however, reparations describe the repairing of harm in object relations theory, not on the level of the social but on the level of the psychic.”^{Footnote 25} Eng demonstrates that whether a political or psychic definition of reparation is mobilized, each is motivated by an “expansion of reparations” in a “more productive and moral direction.”^{Footnote 26} Drawing on Judith Butler’s exegesis on Antigone’s mourning and grief over the death of her brother Polyneices,^{Footnote 27} and on Melanie Klein’s object relations theory and “its moral genealogy of reparation,”^{Footnote 28} Eng argues that reparation creates the human, and that “those to whom reparation can be offered become the very sign of the human.”^{Footnote 29}

To recall the drama, Eng explains: “Antigone not only buries her brother Polyneices in defiance of the King’s command, but also refuses to disavow her act of disobedience, even in the face of death. In so doing, she figures a crisis in kinship and politics in a state of war.”^{Footnote 30} In mourning Polyneices, Antigone enacts an ethics of care and kinship. Eng continues: “By insisting on her right to bury Polyneices, Antigone enacts kinship not just as a repeated ‘public scandal’ on the edges of social and cultural intelligibility but, equally important, as the condition for care—as the precondition of being human in a state of violence.”^{Footnote 31} The “performance” of kinship by Antigone, “the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human,” is an “act of repairing, an act of reparation.”^{Footnote 32} The form of kinship and care enacted by Antigone is the precondition to the category of human. Antigone’s grief and mourning “raises critical questions of how kinship is mobilized to secure the conditions by which certain lives become livable and recognizable or, alternately, repudiated and foreclosed.”^{Footnote 33} Eng’s analysis of Antigone’s performance of kinship reveals a distinct politics of social difference where reparation is the precondition to the category of human.

Furthermore, Eng highlights Antigone’s kinship performance against a striking passage from Klein in which she offers an account of reparation as represented and constituted by the colonial encounter. Part of the passage from Klein reads:

Eng demonstrates that Klein’s theory of reparation is constituted through the European colonial encounter: “Reparation comes to name the psychic and social process of responding to the horrors of genocidal destruction.” Eng continues,

This representational terrain of reparation gives rise to moral questions that constitute the content and form of racial difference. Reparation (to restore a state of affairs, to repair the brutality of violence, and to constitute the human) is underpinned by racial and colonial difference. Reparation is a theatre for racial difference and the category of human. As Eng explains: “[W]e might describe the political unconscious of reparation as the hidden history of colonialism and race . . . reparation names the collective and political process by which love and justice become naturalized properties of the (European) liberal human, foreclosing the possibility for racial reparations and redress.”^{Footnote 36}

What of the relationship between reparation and possibilities for anti-colonialism? Eng’s analysis recalls Fanon’s treatise on anti-colonialism, since he highlights the idea that possibilities for reparation and possibilities for decolonization are always invested in the violence of colonial projects. The Wretched of the Earth begins with the following prescription for decolonization: “National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name is used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.”^{Footnote 37} Reparation as restoration is constitutive of decolonial possibilities in Fanon’s vision. Fanon’s call for decolonization offers a new scene for human relations and new forms of relating in a social and psychic field that has been distorted by colonialism. Fanon’s uncompromising violent scene of decolonization is arguably as aesthetic as it is doctrinaire. As Samira Kawash explains: “In Fanon’s account of the violence of decolonization, violence oscillates between two forms: a mythical violence that would find a new arrangement of rule within the flow of history (this new arrangement might be called ‘postcolonialism’ or ‘neocolonialism’), and a new divine violence that would herald the blasting open of history to an order not after but on the other side of colonialism.”^{Footnote 38} Violence, therefore, is central to both the colonial and the anti-colonial process. Fanon offers one consequence of the “other side of colonialism:” “Individualism is the first to disappear,” Fanon declares.^{Footnote 39} To find a way on the other side of colonialism is to resist the violent (Hegelian) dialectic forced on colonized people. Fanon imagines a repudiation of liberalism and capitalism as structured through individualism. He offers a new form of kinship and collectivity: “The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend—these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on.”^{Footnote 40} Elizabeth Povinelli observes that Fanon is invoking a form of “sociality” that is an “intensification of kinship rather than its negation.”^{Footnote 41} To destroy the colonial dialectic of liberal individualism is to articulate a new form of kinship as a prophylactic to the racial schema of human difference required by colonial projects. Kinship as reparation, and reparation as kinship, imagines a new relation of friendship, neighbourliness and collectivity on “the other side of colonialism.” When kinship is intensified, or offered as a horizon, we must ask how and whether kinship as a form of community can or may avoid romanticism, violence, or nepotism.

III. 8th Fire

8th Fire is animated by an aesthetic and representational ethics of kinship and neighbourliness as reparation. Against the backdrop of Toronto’s urban sky, Wab Kinew begins 8th Fire with the following invitation to viewers:

The narrator of 8th Fire speaks directly to the settler, calling on the settler to concede the lack of knowledge animating the settler’s understanding of Indigenous people’s contestations with the Canadian state since early settler colonialism. In addressing and speaking directly to the settler Canadian, 8th Fire sets up a representational structure in which the (white settler) spectator is pulled inside the individual and collective stories depicted in the four episodes. In this sense, 8th Fire is immediately structured as pedagogical, providing non-Indigenous Canadians with a window into the lives of Indigenous people. The invocation of relationships needing work, reconciliation, neighbours, and no guilt trips collapses a discourse of (human) recognition and reparation facilitated by the narrative and visual mechanism of testimony.

8th Fire is structured in a journalistic documentary style. The narrator frames the intervening stories concerning urban Indigenous issues, land and territory, and community and culture. The documentary prioritizes a present-day account of the lives of those featured. Each individual featured provides a testimonial account of life in contemporary settler colonial Canada. The subjects of the documentary offer stories of what it means to thrive as Indigenous people in a liberal settler state. Collectively, the first-person testimonies are performative and affective. The stories are candid and cut through with some historicization of the conditions of life and death for Indigenous people. The individual testimonies give rise to particular forms of “citationality” for the current state of reconciliation and reparations.^{Footnote 43} There is a common narrative that links the four episodes. In each episode, an implicit temporality structures the testimonial content: How can (and how have) Indigenous people find (found) a way forward (now that going back is not an option)?

The first episode, for example, opens with the following challenge from Leslie Varley, of Aboriginal Health Services, British Columbia, to non-Indigenous Canadians: “What stereotypes do you have, as a Canadian, about Indigenous people? I really, really ask you to examine those stereotypes that you carry.”^{Footnote 44} Indeed, 8th Fire is intended to debunk myth and stereotype by highlighting the individual life stories of Indigenous people. The first episode canvasses the lives of urban Indigenous people (whom one grandfather refers to as “concrete Indians”). As the narrator declares: “After all, it’s true, we’re not all hidden away on reserves anymore . . . so, how do we form a new relationship, if we don’t know each other?”^{Footnote 45} The litany of racist stereotypes are offered in quick streeters with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in urban spaces, thus conveying the sense that such stereotypes saturate the cultural imagination and are commonplace perceptions facilitated by routine pronouncements of racial stereotypes. The narrator dismisses the list of racial stereotypes as “comic book characters,” and according to a series of rapid testimonies, “We’re kind of invisible almost. The only time we’re really noticed is when something is wrong.” As Nakuset, a community worker in Montreal adopted into a white Jewish family as a child, explains: “[D]eath rates, poverty, alcoholism, I don’t see myself as an Aboriginal being any of those statistics.” These individual accounts, these urban testimonial subjects, confound stereotypes and do not express simple appeals to “Aboriginal authenticity”; rather, collectively, their insights reveal the density and complexity of political subjectivity for Indigenous people navigating ongoing settler colonialism.

Resisting the “myth of the vanishing Indian,”^{Footnote 46} the testimonial narratives provide an affront to racist stereotypes. There is a rhetorical pragmatism that propels the narrative, conveying what Rosalind Morris (assessing some of the ways in which the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission “captured” the political problem of sexual violence) describes as a “nearly Habermasian conception of the political as a space of transparent communicative relations between all people.”^{Footnote 47} The individual testimonies are embodied performances of liberal individualism. 8th Fire proceeds through an imagined landscape of equal and legitimate political subjects facilitated by an era of reconciliation; however, these testimonies are not projected onto uncontested political space. Instead, the narratives constitute forms of subjectivity (and the discursive formations required by those subjectivities) that are made possible in a new century of liberal settler colonialism. In an era of reparations, where the “guilt of nations”^{Footnote 48} is manifest through testimonies of survival, endurance,^{Footnote 49} and through the persistence^{Footnote 50} of racialized subjects, historical forms of racial governance and violence (corporeal, territorial, epistemological) are overlaid with stories of reparative overcoming. Even where a calibration of the links between past and present is advanced in 8th Fire, the idea of a new time for relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people prevails.

8th Fire attempts to depict the contingency between the colonial past and present. The documentary is structured through rough-cut distinctions between past and present. The testimonial and authorial subjects of the present offer complex stories concerning living on and living with ongoing settler colonialism. The past is represented through archival images of maps, the Indian Act, and vast barren land. The past is marked as legal racial governance and expanses of landscape (an iconographic image of Canadian nationalism) and the present is represented as urban dirt, noise, and traffic. The mini-history lesson offered in “Indigenous in the City” asks:

What follows is a short inventory of the historical strategies (criminalization, forced removal, the reservation system, regulation by government agencies, the interruption of processes of cultural transmission) of settler colonial racial governance. The narration is set against archival and landscape images—the contingency between past and present is rendered spectral and ahistorical.

In a way that recalls Maracle’s insistence on the need to recognize the processes of dehumanization in settler colonialism, the featured and celebrated Cree artist Kent Monkman addresses the ongoing violence of colonization. “There was such a strong will to disappear us, to disappear us from the places where we lived, the places where we were born. Our present is informed by our histories and we have to engage with these histories to understand where we are right now,” Monkman insists. Monkman is a multimedia artist whose “subversive work” concerning colonized sexuality “reverses” the colonizing gaze.^{Footnote 51} “While you’ve been looking at us, we’ve also been looking at you,” he declares.^{Footnote 52} The depiction of Monkman’s anti-colonial work highlights possibilities for finding a way through ongoing violence. The episode, however, truncates the politics of reversal and transversal inspired by Monkman’s work and reorients the settler-viewer to learning about the work of Indigenous artists. The episode concludes with Kinew declaring: “One of the solutions, get to know your neighbour! It’s all about education.” Monkman’s anti-colonial creative interventions, and those of the other artists depicted, are transformed into “native informant”^{Footnote 53} pedagogy confined to the realm of racial difference. Reconciliation and reparation is rendered possible through neigbourliness as an ethic of kinship.

The third episode, “Whose Land Is It Anyway?,” begins with Kinew stating: “Let’s face it, one of the biggest issues that stands between us is land. It used to be all ours and now, not so much. But, you know what, I’m not mad.”^{Footnote 54} The past is represented with archival romanticism through images of the Indian Act and original treaties, casting a pall over graffiti in the streets of Winnipeg, combined with the music of Winnipeg’s Most, a hip hop crew. Far from offering a teleology or chronology of the centrality of land theft and land redistribution to the settler colonial project—and obscuring violence, eviction, forced removals, forced re-removals, environmental and food source destruction—the episode foregrounds successful land redistribution and economic contracts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. “The best relationships between native people and non-native people are business relationships. That’s the best because it’s based on work, it’s based on production, it’s based on sharing,” states Chief Clarence Louie, the chief of the Osoyoos Band in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia.^{Footnote 55} Chief Louie continues: “Most of this desert back here [pointing to the Okanagan Valley behind him], this 1,000 acres, we can make millions off it, easily.”^{Footnote 56} Indeed, the Osoyoos band have “developed,” “redistributed,” and engaged in economic neoliberal partnership contracts—the land is now a centre of tourism in the Okanagan valley boasting a vineyard, a golf course, and a five-star hotel. The local non-Indigenous winemaker states: “The band understands what it takes to survive in the twenty-first century. They’re very forward in their thinking.”^{Footnote 57} In this instance, neoliberalism revives the stereotype of Indigenous people as inevitably on the path to extinction, even as it frames the Osoyoss band as exceptional. These stories of economic ingenuity are presented as affective success stories and as “people thinking creatively.”^{Footnote 58} Reconciliation and reparation is framed within the language of culture and survival as realized through land redistribution and economic contracts. In a neoliberal world, neighbours do business. Transcending the saturation of history and stereotype depicted earlier in the documentary, the individual and collective “native informant” neoliberal subjects offer unfettered acceptance of environmental and land redistribution initiatives. These forms of subjectivity emerge with and through the combined effects of assimilation, neoliberalism and multiculturalism. As Gillian Cowlishaw explains: “In the authorized narratives of sophisticated multiculturalism, there is no room to recognize the legitimacy of the violence of marginalized people, let alone to discover how it is continuously reproduced.”^{Footnote 59} Neoliberal economic contracts necessitate new of forms of land redistribution that work to reconstitute the centrality of land theft and violence to settler colonial projects. Economic independence through land redevelopment makes possible reparative and reconciliatory neoliberal kinship. As Irene Watson explains: “The state offers a process of reconciliation, one which leaves intact the scars of annihilation, one which refuses to give restitution for the loss of country, and life, as it continues to bore even deeper into the earth.”^{Footnote 60}8th Fire offers the view that reparation, whether legal or economic, provides a path forward—it does so through the spatio-temporal specter of violence.

Recent scholarship demonstrates that the global regime of international human rights proliferates as a legal and cultural (visual/symbolic) phenomenon. As Wendy Hesford explains: “International human rights politics is saturated with images, advocates, policymakers, scholars and news media.”^{Footnote 61} The discourse of human rights, therefore, is representational, performative, and affective. As Eng points out (drawing on the work of Lynn Hunt), “human rights are not only legal doctrines forged in the jurisprudence of international relations but also intimately depend on an affective logic, ‘on a disposition toward other people, a set of convictions about what people are like and how they know right and wrong in the secular world.’”^{Footnote 62} Or, as Sharon Sliwinski explains: “[T]he long struggle for universal human rights is a story of atrocious events and courageous campaigners, but it is also a lively aesthetic scene full of pictorial images and fascinated spectators.”^{Footnote 63} The consideration of reparations as a specific and unique “visual field of human rights” has drawn less attention.

In pursuing an analysis of the visual legalities of reparation, 8th Fire is instructive to the extent that it provides clues about the structuring and circulating representations of reparations in settler colonialism. One of the most important characteristics constructing human rights as representational, performative, and affective process is the role of the spectator. In her influential work, Shoshana Felman describes spectatorship as an “alignment of witnesses,” or bearing witness to the witness, where “life-testimony is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like actual life.”^{Footnote 64}8th Fire operates through the structuring mechanism of testimony. The spectator/witness marks a transfer point for the logic of social difference in the visual legalities of reparations. As Hesford explains (relying on Jacques Rancière), “the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection.”^{Footnote 65} Bearing witness to testimonies that index reparation (with the goal of “reconciliation” and “no guilt trips”) provides an ethical identification with the testimonial subjects depicted in 8th Fire. Far from advocating a splitting open of the legal (constitutional, sovereign) and dehumanizing effects of settler colonialism, the testimonies reconstitute a form of ethical and benevolent nationalism. Obscuring the effects of ongoing forms of everyday and structural violence, reparation as a form of visual legality works to shore up the mutual conditioning relationship between violence and reparation. Reparation is not, therefore, the legal or quasi-legal antidote to historical violence; rather, I argue that reparation is constitutive of ongoing violence. This constitutive violence compels an analysis of the racial formations that are part of the legal and psychic genealogies of reparation. As Eng explains: “Reparation and aggression, as well as morality and violence, cannot be described as oppositional. Rather, they must be considered as collectively constituting a larger psychic and social dialectic delineating the evolution of Western subjectivity and conceptions of the human, outside any prospects of the universal.”^{Footnote 66}

Scholarly work has demonstrated that a distinct feature of the visual field of human rights is that of crisis and spectacle. As Hesford explains: “[H]uman rights discourse constructs humanity and its capacities through spectacular rhetorics, imagining technologies, and an ocular epistemology [where] human rights internationalism often functions as a site of power for and normative expression of American nationalisms, cosmopolitanisms, and neoliberal global politics.”^{Footnote 67} Reparation as representation in 8th Fire is not depicted as spectacle or crisis. Rather, testimonial narratives of everyday life and human overcoming facilitate the reparations discourse at work in 8th Fire. The testimonies work to fuse the racial other to new forms of neoliberalism. Importantly, the mode of spectatorship is neither acknowledgment nor (something we might call) ethical responsibility. Rather, the scene of reparation requires that a racial subject perform an ontological reparative overcoming. The subject of racial difference is therefore marked as ontologically broken (in need of repair) and is (as Eng emphasizes through Butler) “the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human.”^{Footnote 68} Racial difference and the category of human define the visual legalities of reparation. Indeed, the scenes of reparation distribute and reorganize the conditions of possibility for reparations in the service of nationalism. Ultimately, 8th Fire folds the call of decolonization into liberal humanism and reparation. The visual legalities of reparations are structured by finality and closure (with the past) and assimilation through neoliberal economic contracts and neighbourly overcoming. Kinship fails when animated by racial difference. Witnessing the humanity of those who are targets of colonial racism, we are left with the relief that their survival and determination confirms settlers’ ethical obligation to a form of nationalism as reparation.