Decolonize the Queen’s funeral: Why it shouldn’t be a national holiday in Canada
Decolonize the Queen’s funeral: Why it shouldn’t be a national holiday in Canada
Clint Burnham
Professor, Department of
English, Simon Fraser University
In light of Canada’s national holiday for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and the recent mass murder of 11 people on and near James Smith Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, American philosopher Judith Butler comes to mind:
“One way of posing the question of who ‘we’ are … is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable.”
Butler wrote these words in 2009 in the book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
Butler was referring to how, during the war on terror, certain lives — those of the victims of that war, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq — appeared to be less “grievable,” less worthy of mourning than, say, the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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