All My Non-Relations

This talk brings together Indigenous concepts of kinship—the appeal to “all my relations” recently theorized by UBC scholar Daniel Heath Justice in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter—and Jacques Lacan’s dialectics of the “non-relation,” as worked out with reference to the plot and characters of Sophocles’ Antigone. From Cree performances of Antigone (adapted by Deanne Kasokeo) on the Canadian prairies to Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone, the figure of Antigone has come to stand for a resolute, post- or anti-colonial challenge to authority. Interrogating this claim has personal stakes for Clint Burnham, who comes from a Scoop-Up family. His youngest sister, who is Indigenous and an intergenerational Survivor, was adopted into his family in 1971. Are the Indigenous family relations that the residential school system attempted to destroy, then, “non-relations”? In terms of current debates around reconciliation, a decolonizing Antigone helps us to think of what may be, in fact, irreconcilable.