Narrating (Her)story: The Politics of Commemoration in Yvette Nolan’s Annie Mae’s Movement

Elsawy, Amany

doi:10.21608/herms.2022.249203

	Narrating (Her)story: The Politics of Commemoration in Yvette Nolan’s Annie Mae’s Movement
هرمس
Article 8, Volume 11, Issue 3 - Serial Number 41, July 2022, Page 207-232 PDF (3.65 MB)
Document Type: المقالة الأصلية
DOI: 10.21608/herms.2022.249203
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Author
Amany Elsawy
Associate Professor Faculty of Education, Alexandria University
Abstract
Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an imperative, yet invisible social reality. Thus, I attempt in this paper to reckon with violence against Indigenous women in Canada, not only as an ongoing material reality alternately evoked and elided in the temporalities of dominant discourse, but also in those seemingly less likely places, as in the ostensibly anti-violence rhetoric of remembrance itself. Therefore, narrating the unheard women’s stories is considered as a way to both “raise awareness” and promote “recommendations to influence positive change”. Thus, this paper analyzes how and why Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash’s figure is evoked as archetypal victim of gendered and racial violence, in part by querying the reiterative tendency with which her “tragic” path, from life to death, is rehearsed in public acts of remembrance. Ultimately, I argue that narrating Aquash’s story can help complicate the place of life narrative. Accordingly, I am concerned to interrogate the memory of Aquash as invited by Yvette Nolan’s 2006 commemorative play: Annie Mae’s Movement to “connect the memory of a woman murdered” to a broader “drive for social reparation”. This paper explores the strategy of storytelling as a means of remembrance and as a catalyst toward action, asking: what is at risk in assuming a translucent relation between the telling of missing and murdered women’s stories, and the hopeful outcome of social change? Accordingly, the paper strikes the foundations of the ostensible transparency with which anti-violence initiatives employ the “grievable” narratives of missing or murdered Indigenous women toward the end of battling public indifference and raising awareness.
Keywords
Commemoration; Indigenous women in Canada; sexism; social reparation; storytelling; violence


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