Throughout the project’s development, updates were provided to the community living network, and as word of the project spread, the BCACL office began to receive occasional calls from family members enquiring about a relative who might be buried at the cemetery. After a front-page story about the project appeared in a national newspaper (the Globe and Mail, see Hume 2005), these inquiries about forgotten relatives
intensified, and the calls were usually directed to me as the memorial garden “point person.” The callers were usually of a different generation than their deceased relative: an elderly man inquired about his father, institutionalized at Essondale as a young man in the 1930s; a woman asked about a distant uncle that no family members had been able to trace since the 1930s. One inquiry came from a woman whose oldest sister was taken to Woodlands as an infant in the 1940s, and was never spoken of again.
Most callers had been able to glean only minimal information, if any, from other family members. Once institutionalized, the asylum patient had taken on a ghostly
identity – their story within the family ending abruptly, or gradually fading into what one caller referred to as “a fog of forgetting.” Locating “public” information had also proven difficult. Though the provincial Order-in-Council had mandated that Queen’s Park Hospital retain burial records for the Woodlands cemetery, this was not made public and was not well known even among the hospital’s executive staff.5
As a result, family members had rarely had an opportunity to learn, let alone speak, about their forgotten relative, had no coherent story passed down within their family about that relative, and even if they were able to construct a story, had no cultural “place” to tell it. Yet it was apparent that something was going on here – something that planners of the Woodlands Memorial Garden had not anticipated. As the memorial garden project gained more public attention, family members were prompted to find out where their “lost” relatives were laid to rest, and to learn more about them. The creation of a public memorial had opened not just a material, geographic space for collective recognition, but a symbolic, discursive space that seemed to enable individuals to begin exploring suppressed family histories.
These inquiries were not made lightly, and callers frequently exhibited a mix of complex emotions or referred to difficult family dynamics surrounding their enquiries. I became curious about the relationship between these private family explorations, the mixed emotions associated with them, and the collective processes of erasure and commemoration that coincided with them. As I listened to family accounts, I was also struck by what they indicated about the diffuse, long-term, intergenerational impacts of institutionalization – impacts rippling out from the person who had lived in the
institutional environment, not just to immediate family members but to distant relatives who had not even known them, to subsequent generations, and to public understandings of citizenship and belonging. I could sense, in several cases, the depth and persistence of shame and secrecy that hovered over a family member’s inquiries. These institutionalized relatives seemed indeed to be shrouded in a “fog of forgetting” and surrounded by a
5 It took BCACL some time to locate these records and negotiate access to them. In the hospital
environment, they were treated as confidential patient records, despite the fact that a burial list of names was also publicly available in the BC Archives – though again, few people would have been likely to know it existed or how to access it.
“force field of silence” that signaled an earlier reluctance to recognize or know the people who failed to measure up to standards of “normality.”
The public and collective actions related to the Woodlands cemetery manifested these same tensions – in both a “need to know”6 that has emerged in a contemporary context of historical truth seeking and struggles for justice, and an equally powerful reluctance to acknowledge or “remember” what Lehrer, Milton and Patterson refer to as “difficult knowledge” (Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson 2011). In this case that reluctance masked a collective practice of organized exclusion and marginalization which enabled the desecration and erasure of an institutional graveyard and allowed it to pass as
mundane and almost unremarkable, or as simply a necessary cost of urban development.
At the official opening of the Woodlands Memorial Garden on June 27, 2007, many former residents of the institutions, as well as family members of recent and long past inmates, were in attendance. On that day, the site came alive with activists,
supporters, various public officials, and community service providers. But as the
Memorial Garden installation had neared completion, I developed a growing concern that no one would attend to the family enquiries that were emerging in what seemed like a whole new phase of the memorial process. As a result, I entered the graduate program in anthropology at SFU (September 2006) with the goal of exploring this history more fully with family members.
That journey was longer, of course, than I anticipated. My master’s thesis laid a foundation with research on the life story of a BC mother who took up a life of activism to shut down institutions like Woodlands (where her son was involuntarily admitted) and create community-based supports for people with developmental disabilities. I then embarked on a doctoral program to expand this family focus by exploring the Woodlands cemetery story, beginning field work in late 2011.
6 Reflected in the title of Dulcie McCallum’s report on her administrative review of systemic abuse at Woodlands, The Need to Know (2001)