Redeeming Oblivion

The search for unmarked graves of Indigenous children in Canadian Residential Schools led to disturbing discoveries about the Church and State-enforced disappearances of children. This text recounts the ongoing alliance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous survivors of childhood institutionalization in Quebec to protect forensic evidence of atrocities committed against them between World War II and the 1960’s.

By contrast with the Christianized overtones of “Creator” or Shonkwaia'tíson—literally “the one who made our bodies”—the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) traditionalists from the Kahnawà:ke community, with whom I work near Montreal, prefer the expression “Creation” or Ka'shatsténhsera'kó:wa sha'oié:ra, literally “the Great Natural Power”. Their immemorial tradition admits of no transcendence other than the vital, creative impulse that drives the world to ceaselessly pursue and renew itself. This is conveyed by the image of generations succeeding as the needles of the Great White Pine or Tionerahtase'kó:wa—literally “the great ever-renewing tree”—the tree of peace under which the hatchet was buried to seal the original alliance between the five nations of the Rotinonhsión:ni (Iroquois) confederacy to which the Kanien'kehá:ka belong.^[1]

It is by virtue of this same natural power of self-continuation that Kanien'kehá:ka women are said to have an “umbilical” link with the earth. O'nísta, the root of Kahnistensera (women), designates both the cord attaching the child to the mother and the stalk of a fruit. This explains why the Kanien'kehá:ka tradition deems women to be progenitors of the soil and caretakers of the land,^[2] which they ensure is preserved for future generations: the Tahatikonhsontóntie, literally “the children whose faces are still in the ground”. It is through this Indigenous conceptual grid—and their rejection of the nature/culture divide—that I propose here to share a Kanien'kehá:ka ethnography of Quebec’s historical denial of childhood and future generations that I witnessed while accompanying the Mohawk Mothers in their encounter with a group known as the Duplessis Orphans.

Carceral shadowbox

Having heard about the Mohawk Mothers’ legal battle to protect unmarked burials, the Orphans attended the court proceedings and meet them to share a well-kept public secret: Montreal's subcontracting of the MK-Ultra program in the 1950s and 1960s, from which the CIA would derive the torture and brainwashing methods it would soon export from Guatemala to Guantanamo, was not limited to the Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute, the psychiatric outpost of McGill's Royal-Victoria. Lunatic asylum mind control experimentation in Montreal also benefited from the existence of an entire municipal constituency, Ville Gamelin, whose Mother Superior was mayor by acclamation, albeit with a population of zero, as her tens of thousands of souls lived there incarcerated. Within this fortified stronghold in the east end of Montreal, including the mega-asylum of St. Jean-de-Dieu near the St. Lawrence River (eloquently the largest building in Canada at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries) and the “medico-pedagogical” institution of Mount-Providence, located on Rivière des Prairies, the Sisters of Providence had their own administrative shadowbox, guarded by their own hospital police, whose archives are nowhere to be found.

Extracting child labor

In the 1990’s, the Duplessis Orphans filed no fewer than 321 criminal charges (today sealed at the Quebec national archives for reasons of “national security”), all of which were dismissed by the Attorney General. In 2001, after a half-hearted apology from the Quebec Prime Minister and the Sisters of Providence's former lawyer Lucien Bouchard, the orphans were forced to accept a meagre average of $20,000 in “financial assistance” (with no admission of guilt) in exchange for dropping all potential charges against the Church and State. Yet Quebec’s responsibility was undeniable: on August 12, 1954, Prime Minister Duplessis, an admirer of Salazar’s Portuguese Catholic-fascist regime, had decreed, through Order in Council no. 818, that an entire generation of orphans (the overwhelming majority of whom had in fact been confiscated from their parents because they were “illegitimate”, e.g. born out of wedlock) would henceforth be considered, at the stroke of the pen of unscrupulous psychiatrists, as “mentally retarded”. The motive was purely pecuniary, with each psychiatric patient generating $2.25 a day in federal money, compared with 70 cents for orphans; not to mention the profits generated by the sale of these children for adoption or the extraction of their consciousness as guinea pigs for medical experiments, notably with the mass testing of the first psychiatric tranquilizer, chlorpromazine/largactil/thorazine (described as a “chemical lobotomy” by McGill doctor Heinz Lehmann).

As the Sisters of Providence staffed dozens of Indian Residential Schools in Western Canada and United States (including the St. Eugene Mission in British Columbia, where evidence of 182 unmarked burials were detected in 2021), the Mohawk Mothers discovered troubling parallels between the Duplessis Orphans' stories and the way their traditionalist families were targeted by genocidal policies. Not only were Native children rounded up in Quebec and systematically hidden among the larger population of orphans, having their names changed or falsely declared dead, but a similar system of economic slavery was imposed in Indian Residential Schools as in orphanages and asylums:^[3] forced labor in the laundry, to care for other patients, to make rosaries under the guise of occupational therapy, or by toiling the fields to provide food to neighboring groceries, orphans then forming the enslaved agricultural labor force which is now relegated to fly-in, fly-out Indigenous Mesoamericans in Quebec.

Having learned the forthcoming construction of an automated warehouse for Quebec’s liquor board, the SAQ, in the vicinity of St. Jean-de-Dieu asylum’s cemetery for unclaimed patients, disturbingly referred to as the “pigsty cemetery”, the Mohawk Mothers joined the Duplessis Orphans in demanding an archaeological and forensic survey before construction in January 2024. While the Sisters of Providence had officially exhumed more than 2,000 bodies in 1967, the SAQ discovered many more remains “by accident” in 1976, and again in 1999, during expansion work led by none other than François Legault, the current Prime Minister of Quebec. I accompanied the Duplessis Orphans and Mohawk Mothers for five months to try to convince the SAQ to follow the recommendations of the Canadian Archaeological Association's Working Group on Unmarked Graves to use Historic Human Remain Detection Dogs (HHRDD) capable of sniffing out human remains at a depth of two metres, to no avail. For 20 years the Duplessis Orphans have been asking for the site to be examined by forensic experts to uncover evidence of lobotomies and other violent treatments against incarcerated children. But the SAQ simply refused to let the dogs in, citing Quebec’s Cultural Heritage Act, which gives Quebec’s Minister of Culture and Communications full discretion to grant archaeology permits.

This law, whose constitutionality will soon be challenged in court by the Mohawk Mothers, considers all the content of the subsoil as the exclusive property of the Quebec nation through its minister, even though its content was put there long before Europeans arrived on the continent. I'm thinking not only of artifacts and remains—whose forensic integrity is in no way protected—but also of pollens, which constitute the ultimate paleobotanical trace of pre-colonial Native landscaping practices and the lifestyles they imply. It is against this daily eco-genocide of excavating theaters of atrocities and unceded lands, extracted, displaced and dominated elsewhere along with their proof of ancestral title to make way for some condo, that the Mohawk Mothers and Duplessis Orphans are now fighting together.

Childhood and Creation

But the excavation of Mother Earth, of the great natural power of Creation, is not limited to anti-vegetative geotextile membranes. The extraction of Creation is also that of the most creative minds this part of the world has ever known, who have become the founding artefacts of Quebec’s “national culture”. In turn, St-Jean-de-Dieu witnessed the straitjacketing of Metis leader Louis Riel (whose 1885 North-West Rebellion was crushed by the Federal government), national poet Émile Nelligan (Quebec’s Beaudelaire, published, locked up and possibly lobotomized against his will), singer Alys Robi (Quebec’s Judy Garland, exploited for her talents from the age of seven before being placed into solitary confinement) and writer Claude Gauvreau (Quebec’s William Borroughs, whose hippy prose explorations went too far for some).

According to the Mohawk Mothers, the way of Creation, of the Great Natural Power is a learning relationship based on trusting the natural freedom of every being’s consciousness. This is why they prefer “Great Path of Peace” to the usual translation of Kaianere'kó:wa (the ancestral constitution of the Rotinonhsión:ni confederacy) as “Great Law of Peace”; because no one is free before the law, which hinders ethical learning by imposing an automatically applicable moral maxim. Cultural creation is of the same ilk as that which enables human and non-human natures to learn, get along, work things out and endure. In conclusion, I would like to take the analogy further, or rather closer, to what we might call the origin of our common humanity: childhood.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben compares the figure of the “eternal child”, who constantly pushes us from within, with the axolotl, the curious salamander indigenous to Tenochtitlan, which is said to be “neotenic” because it stops its evolution in mid-stream to keep its lungs outside its body. The animal parallel is a common one, given Aristotle's dictum that “a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal”.^[4] Agamben sees this as a sign of humanity's original indeterminacy and destituteness, and as a pledge of its power of aperture to unfinished forms, by way of which our immaturity presides over our creativity, despite “the attempts, fatally come to nothing, to make graspable the ungraspable, to become—this eternal child—an adult”.^[5]

A recurring theme in the testimonies of the Duplessis orphans I spoke to has to do with the hardships of apprenticeships after being discharged from the medico-pedagogical institutes, where they were deprived not only of an education, but of essential social faculties, not least because of the general prohibition to speak (to which the nuns and monitors preferred a training clickers to stand to attention). The IQ tests used to falsely diagnose them with mental retardation were so rigged that only a person raised outside these terrible institutions could succeed: in one test, for example, a child who was asked to define the word “achieve” answered “keep still”. According to witnesses, when they emerged from these institutions the now-adult orphans were blank pages waiting to be told what to do. Yet for this same reason their apprenticeship of the social world precisely relied on a spontaneous survival: a creative astonishment. An ex-orphan, Gilles Dupuis, told me how he suddenly became capable, learning how to collect garbage on the job, to know the exact contents of bags just by lifting them. In so doing, he turned the inhumanity to which the Duplessis regime had confined him into an opportunity to learn the power of knowing. His naturally endowed creativity allowed him to overcome the extraction of his understanding by a theocratic State endeavouring to mold him in its own image of a creature of power. One may say this is how psychological torture may be survived, despite attempts—taken to the extreme at McGill—to erase consciousness to a “childhood state” and reprogram it from there.

Yet Kanien'kehá:ka orphans and elders alike prove that this ongoing origin continuously staved off by colonial regimes still lurks deep within us, because this creative power helped them survive the most daunting attempts at extraction. As the Kanien'kehá:ka say: Tóhsa sathón:tat naiesa'nikonhráhkhwa, “don't let them take your spirit”.