Manic History

Abstract

On May 27, 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the discovery of 215 unmarked graves on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Their first response was mourning for the loss of young lives; their second response was melancholia for the loss of the children's names. David Eng and David Kazanjian advocate a “counterintuitive” interpretation of melancholia as “creative,” redefining it as the work of mourning that sustains “a continued and open relation to the past.” Jeff Barnaby's 2013 film about residential school resistance, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, affirms melancholia as a creative relation to the past for Indigenous people while drawing attention to another agency that allows settler society to actively lose the past. Freud remarks that the “most remarkable” quality of melancholia is the way it turns into mania, which ensues when “the ego coincides with the ego ideal.” What if some losses do not make us melancholic but manic? Is it possible to make history by losing history? Settler mania incites Indigenous melancholia by displacing responsibility for children's deaths from church and state to parents who are themselves school survivors.