Matthew James Weigel, Whitemud Walking

 

 LIST OF RULES I HAVE BROKEN
                          IN THE ARCHIVE

I have gotten, on occasion, too close to the materials I study.
I am the materials I study.

I have taken photos with an unsupported camera,
the motion photos saved a record of the shaking of my hands.

I have cried in the archive.

Last year, I was introduced to the work of “Edmonton-born and -based Dene and Métis poet and artist” Matthew James Weigel through his bpNichol Chapbook Award-winning It Was Treaty/It Was Me (Montreal QC: Vallum Chapbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here], a title that was an excerpt of his larger, expansive reclamation and archival project, Whitemud Walking (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022). Structured as a single, book-length project, Weigel works through the archive, researching and discovering elements of his family’s personal history within government and university archives, to attempt to articulate a colonial past and present.  Through his thoughtful and careful assemblage of altered image and text, the collection answers the unasked question that runs across the length of the project: who gets to tell the story of one’s own family? As the back cover of the chapbook offered: “Drawing on government records, archival images and his own family history, Matthew James Weigel blends prose and poetry to look how John A. Macdonald and his government used to treaties to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. Weigel juxtaposes the machinations of the Canadian government with other versions of the story; official history bumps up against memories recorded in the body, exposing corruption and violence.” Through Whitemud Walking, he offers the archive as a simultaneously deeply personal and impersonal space, attempting to reconcile his family histories against the colonial dislocations these same documents broadcast. Through these documents, and this full-length debut, Weigel’s “documentary poetics” (as Dorothy Livesay coined it) engages what might otherwise be seen as distant materials of the archive, opening up a far deeper and broadly personal examination of colonialism, threads of history and cultural belonging. As Weigel writes as part of the opening piece, “A NOTE AS WE BEGIN”:

Just recently I marked the 100^th anniversary of my great-great-grandfather signing the last of the numbered treaties of the North-West as a witness.

The ink is dry. The sheets are stained. The decorative gold of the paper marbling is oxidized a sickly green. The spine of the binding disintegrated.

Canada has neutralized its treaty obligations by treating them as historical and complete. So I call this a resistance historiography, a journey toward an Indigenous imaginary that de-historicizes and de-neutralizes the state’s obligations to us. It is an imaginary that envisions and enacts the infinite incompleteness of treaty. Only in that expanse can a reciprocity and obligation as great as the North-West find its place.

Weigel’s Whitemud Walking pulls at a thread or series of threads that simultaneously reveal connections and disconnections, revelations and deep losses. The recombinant work in the collection is reminiscent of Jordan Abel’s ongoing poetic (Abel is listed as the editor of the collection), but just as much reminiscent of the work of American poet Susan Howe, pulling apart and reassembling both her poetry and prose into new and unusual shapes across a wide array of historical and familial scraps. Much like Abel, he uses the archive against itself, firmly writing a lineage and path through the very documents that articulate an attempt to erase his family and their culture. He discovers, for example, a photograph previously unknown to anyone in his family, and of his ancestors, “Marie Fabien and James Balsillie with four of their youngest children.” As he offers, to accompany the photograph:

When I showed the image to my dad, he got quiet, tears in
his eyes and with his hand held to his face.

This photograph is not in the possession of my family, but
in the archives of the University of Alberta.

I’ve never seen this photo. Neither has my father or anyone
else in my family. I found it online. The image has an item
number and subject taxonomy links to ‘Family and personal
life’ and ‘Aboriginal Peoples.’

I assume it sits in a box on a shelf.

A bit further in the collection, writing of a photograph of the throne at Windsor Castle, a photograph acquired by Queen Victoria in 1870, he turns the tables, offering: “I have acquired and used this photograph without permission. It has been digitally altered to suit my needs.” In Whitemud Walking, Weigel attempts to articulate the breaks even as he seeks his own way through them, writing a space deliberately broken through colonialism and ongoing governmental interference; one might best be reminded, of course, that any consideration of reconciliation would be impossible without these difficult examinations and acknowledgments, articulating every layer of wilful damage through processes that are still ongoing. To close the piece “PLACE OF CREATION: NO PLACE, UNKNOWN, / OR DETERMINED,” he writes of his grandmother, Elsie (Norn) Weigel of the Snowdrift Band, District of Mackenzie:

There have been several ways to become enfranchised over the history of the Indian Act: obtaining a university degree, becoming a doctor or lawyer, taking religious orders, leaving the country for long periods without getting permission from the department. If you were enfranchised, your children were also automatically enfranchised. And like my grandmother, if you married a white man you and your descendants were enfranchised and the government waived its treaty obligations to you and your family. In this way, the state continues its goals of extinguishing rights. My grandmother was the only grandparent I ever really knew. I remember being in Hay River with her, at a table with her sisters. The kitchen was full of laughter. There was a special kind of joy in her face when she was home that I never knew here. I miss her every day.