Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands (review)

Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands is an exciting new collection that spans over 200 years of Canadian history, using a broad biographical approach to document twelve women or groups whose histories have too long been obscured by an over-reliance on traditional documentary sources. The biographies are more than mere accounts of diverse and changing lives. Rather, they call upon a vast collection of sources both traditional and innovative, including textual archives, oral history, and artifact analysis to explain how women changed, adapted, and survived, often in difficult environments. Twelve articles written by both established and emerging researchers locate Aboriginal and Metis or mixed-race women during the transitional time in Canadian and American history when, editors Sarah Carter and Patricia McCormack argue, colonial and national categories were not yet firmly established.

The collection is divided into five parts that address transnational connections, cultural mediation, women of the borderlands, women of the spirit world, and representations of Aboriginal women. The central themes are primarily the negotiation of fluid identities within a changing and dynamic context and the importance of looking beyond the archive to recover what, the authors argue, lies beyond the colonizing gaze. Neither of these themes is new to the study of Canadian history, yet this collection is innovative in its articulation of the lives of relatively unknown women who, the editors argue in a useful introduction, collectively demonstrate the geographic mobility, the fluid identity, and the occupational flexibility that defined the lives of Aboriginal women.

While all of the articles have merit, some are of particular note. Alison Brown thoughtfully analyzes Christina Massan’s beadwork, sent with her young sons to Scotland after the premature death of her husband in the Northwest. Massan’s story reveals a broader theme of the collection – the importance of artifacts in recapturing stories of the past and as dynamic objects in the creation of history. Lesley Erikson’s attempt to circumvent the male missionary gaze in her analysis of Sara Riel’s writings and of the history of mixed-race Grey Nuns more generally is also a particularly strong contribution that aptly demonstrates the complexities of religious and cultural identification during this period. Finally, Jean Barman’s treatment of the ‘exceptional’ life of Sophie Morigeau contains some insightful analysis of how the lives of ‘exceptional’ women have been defined and categorized in the historical record.

Like many collections, Recollecting does not offer a linear narrative of the development of the West or of the place of Aboriginal women within it. As a result of the book’s biographical approach, the snapshots offered require some pre-existing knowledge of the periods and geographical places in question. Some historians might bristle at the idea of the ‘tentative and speculative’ identities of the women who produced the goods mentioned in Susan Berry’s work, for example, or might wish that some women’s voices emerged more clearly or more directly than what is possible. This is, however, a limitation in the subject, not a flaw in the research. And, though all of the contributors make efforts to place their subjects within the wider context of nation-building, the biographical approach remains somewhat insular, offering only a glimpse of a particular aspect of a particular person within a particular time. Finally, many of the articles in this collection intimate the existence of borderlands as both a geographical and a conceptual space. This concept, one of the most interesting emerging throughout, requires more elaboration and treatment by all of the authors. Aboriginal women were indeed women of the borderlands – they lived on the geographical borders of newly emerging nations, as well as on the existing borders of their own. At the same time, they also lived within the figurative borderlands of nation, their place constantly contested and unsure, with this uncertainty reflected in the dynamism of their own lives.

Despite these relatively minor...