Skin: An Assemblage on the Wounds of Knowledge, the Scars of Truth, and the Limits of Power

Abstract

I wonder how long the ghosts will stay with me? And sometimes I wonder if holding on to the memories is holding me back? It is difficult to explain how my remembers something that has not happened The familiar awaits me and this journey longs to leave the unfamiliar behind. Muffins for Granny: Stories from Survivors of the Residential School System Nadia McLaren (director) WOVEN THROUGH THE DISCRETE STORIES of survivors of the Canadian residential school system in Nadia McLaren's documentary film Muffins for Granny: Stories from Survivors of the Residential School System (2007) are scenes of McLaren baking muffins in the kitchen with family and friends for her grandmother. Why is baking muffins significant to how McLaren assembles her stories? To bake muffins constitutes an act of love and sustenance, a way to make a gift to her grandmother to replace the loss of love, respect, and dignity experienced in residential school. At her grandmother's school, white children were given muffins to eat. The indigenous children were left to consume the paper wrappings thrown away by the white children. Eating paper symbolizes the indignities of colonial violence, and like the consumption of words on paper without body, spirit, and feelings one is left hungry and wanting more. The of truth and reconciliation represents an historical moment in which to think through the surface of things, to consider what penetrates beneath the porous surface of colonization and what can also seep through from below when skin remembers something that has not happened yet. In the 1950s scientists experimented on the of Inuit children, testing the capability of grafting with tissue taken from one person's body and placed on another. The use of grafting to repair severe damage due to burns or disease is commonplace today, and this little miracle of science is, in general, appreciated. But Rhoda Kaujak Katsak knew of this scientific endeavour in its early days when experimentation and failure were part of its development. The big thing I remember, though, was that they took bits of off our forearms. First they made the whole area numb, then they took this very long, thin cylinder, like a stick, sharp on one end, and they kind of drilled it into my arm to cut the skin. They took the off, it was at the end of this little cylinder thing. It was all inside. They did that twice. Once they took the two pieces of off my arm, they put in from my sister Oopah and my brother Jake's arm. I got their skin, Jake got my and Oopah's, Oopah got Jake's and mine. I think my mom was there. Of courses we were her children, so she had to be there, maybe to consent or something like that. But I don't think it was a matter of her consenting, I don't think she thought of it that way. Then, after they did that, they put bandages on. It didn't hurt that much at the time. It hurt later, like a regular cut would, but it didn't hurt at all at the time because of the anaesthetic. (175) The experiment failed in Rhoda's case. Today, she has a scar on her arm as a result of repeated attempts to make the adhere. But the stubbornly refused to take hold of her body, and this rejection of an apparently new layer of did nothing more than register the failure of a medico-scientific experiment. But this scar also tells another story, one of repetition and trauma. Here the scarred no longer resides within a scientific epistemology. Rather, it produces another storyline. In this story, let's call it the story of epistemic colonization, the of a child perceived by scientific workers to be an available object for experimentation unfolds the complicity of the Canadian postcolonial nation state and scientific knowledge. This child is positioned as a subject of the state by the scientists and as so subject to federal policies to assimilate her body, her family and her community into an impossibly undifferentiated mass of flesh, to obliterate the sign of difference her body is being made to signify This sign of difference is not simply one of colour--although the properties of racial difference were no doubt part of the scientist's lexicon. …