VIA MEDIA
Haunting Ryan Turnbull
Earlier this year I wrote a reflection for this publication on the evergreens on my family’s farm and what they might mean for remembering the land through land acknowledgement statements. This summer, I bought a new house hundreds of kilometres away from that farm here in the City, and as I settled in, I felt excited about the possibility of establishing some roots somewhere for the first time as an adult, but also a bit nostalgic for that farm life that seems to keep getting further and further away. As I unpacked boxes, I discovered a book of poetry that my great-grandfather Norman had written. Reading through it I found the following poem:
and the promises and limits of haunting as component piece of a more radical remembering. ‘Hauntology,’ as a term, was coined by Jacques Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx. ‘Hauntology’ is a portmanteau combining ‘haunt’ and ‘ontology’ to indicate the absent presence of a time out of joint. Derrida’s concept has proven to be especially prescient of our contemporary cultural moment, as pop-culture continues to serve up nostalgic reinterpretations of late 20th century popculture. One of the best live performances I have ever attended was by Canadian electricpowwow group, A Tribe Called Red, at the 2018 Winnipeg Folk Festival. A major theme of their performance was the idea of the Gifts “Halluci Nation.” Give me the western prairies before the white man came In one of their Rolling into the sunset, God's immense domain. songs, they repeat Give me the poplar wildwood, the plains astrew with flowers the line, “We are The crocus and the lilies, God's balm in leisure hours. Give me the creeks and rivers, winding to lake or the sea the Halluci The darting fish and the drinking deer, God's wildlife to pleasure me. Nation” over and Give me the sunrise and sunset, the hues and colors rare, over as the back The lengthening shadows spreading, God's restful night from care. screen is flooded Give me the gift of vision, that is the best of all; with images lifted That I may ever upward look, God's strength for a growing soul. from settler media These are the gifts I'd ask had I to live here over again; of caricatured Now I pass them on to the children: God, thanks for each wonderful thing. depictions of Indigeneity. In front of this What this poem reminds me is that, despite screen, hip-hop and traditional dancers blend our best intentions, remembering can be tricky their dress and steps as if to say, ‘we are here, business. For as we see in Norman’s poem, an we are not a hallucination, and we definitely do act of re-membering that gives a future to his not fit inside your stereotypes.’ Through this children can also simultaneously be an act of performance, A Tribe Called Red asserts the dis-membering insofar as it erases indigeneity creative genius of Indigenous artists, and, in the image of the pre-settler prairie wilderness situated as they are within EDM, make use of as God’s abode. the hauntological edge of the genre, not merely by repeating the sounds of settler pop-music, Haunting the Membership but by resurrecting the powwow drum and the Insofar as this settler memory can fail, allow traditional singing that has long echoed across me to turn to a brief discussion of hauntology these lands. Ultimately, A Tribe Called Red’s
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