ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the pedagogical potential of oral history as enacted in an adwaak by Mary Johnson, an Indigenous elder, in a Canadian land-claim trial. I first discuss the role of the adwaak in storying historical consciousness in Indigenous epistemology, as it pertains to this particular case. I show how Johnson’s determined efforts to give the adwaak in a Canadian court orients our understanding from evidentiary form of history to one that lives and plays out in the lives of those it affects in the present. I argue that for Mary Johnson and Indigenous people in Canada, storying historical consciousness becomes a re-stor(y)ing -- a symbolic act of resistance that tells historical truths and, by doing so, restores a historical, epistemological, and legal wrong of the past committed to their peoplehood to justice. Johnson’s face-to-face encounter with a judge who refused to hear her oral testimony provides a vivid depiction of how history is restored in its fraught reenactment carried by the act of bearing witness to colonial violence. Along with examining the meanings of history, following Indigenous scholars I argue that oral history reenacts and regenerates the historical and cultural loss of a people in the present. The case of Mary Johnson’s adwaak demonstrates that restor(y)ing historical consciousness extends beyond a contestation of history or what actually happened -- the oral recounting of historical wrongs pedagogically interrogates and excavates the role of the legal, historical, and political apparatus in the willful sanction of historical records. These official records continue to deny the existence of Indigenous peoplehood in Canada by denying them recourse to their forms of knowledge that account for history through the adwaak and other regenerating forms of oral testimony that seek to bears witness to and account for a terrible history of colonial injustice.
