Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women's History in Canada ed. by Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek (review)

It must be supremely gratifying to look back on one's career and know that you have touched so many lives in so many ways. This Festschrift for Sylvia Van Kirk honours many aspects of her career - scholarship, teaching, and service - demonstrating the importance and seamlessness of feminist academic practice. The book opens with a chapter by Jennifer S.H. Brown devoted to Van Kirk's well-known collegiality. Van Kirk and Brown, both graduate students writing on women and family in the fur trade, might have been rivals. But Van Kirk's generosity and their shared love of Rupert's Land and its inhabitants instead produced a life-long friendship. Franca Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek reflect on Van Kirk's impact on the University of Toronto History Department. Iacovetta, in a revealing chapter on the dynamics of that department in the late twentieth century, shows how Van Kirk's persistent, reasoned arguments challenged the conventional assumptions of her colleagues and helped make that department more open to women and to feminist perspectives. Korinek observes that through the 1980s and 1990s it was extraordinarily unlikely that any student of women's history in Canada would graduate without reading Van Kirk's work. The ubiquity of her work and her subtle yet challenging classroom presence drew graduate students to her, and she pressed them to ask "audacious questions." If it is a relatively easy task today to study women's history, to take a feminist perspective, and to have women's research and writing taken seriously in this country, it is due to Van Kirk and scholars like her. Unusual for a Festschrift, these opening chapters recognize the often undervalued academic work of teaching and administration.

Then there is the scholarship. Adele Perry and Elizabeth Jamieson assess how asking "unconventional questions of the conventional archives," as Van Kirk did of Hudson's Bay Company records, transformed the historiography of the West by demonstrating the social, economic, and political importance of women, and opening up intimacy and emotion (those "many tender ties") to scholarly inquiry. American scholars were receptive to Van Kirk's work, especially as the New Western History gained traction. Angela Walhalla and Victoria Freeman take the focus transnational, uncovering unique patterns for Maori women and pakeha men and tracing ideas about miscegenation as they developed in settler colonies. Other contributors extend Van Kirk's insights into their own scholarship. Jarvis Brownlie examines how both settler and Aboriginal men deployed gender and racialization to mark out new identities in the shifting political environment of mid-nineteenth-century Canada. Kathryn McPherson studies Prairie women's writing and uncovers a "domestic intrusion" trope that transforms rather mundane encounters with First Nations into tales of women's courage and their civilizing influence while acting as a metaphor for the extension of women's involvement into the public sphere. Literary and legislative imaginings of race and kinship haunt Indigenous women's experience as Katrina Srigley documents through her work with Anishnawbe women navigating their renewed status under the Indian Act amendment of Bill C-51.

While all the chapters both honour Van Kirk and offer fascinating new scholarship, Robert Innis's piece stands out for the way it, like Many Tender Ties, asks challenging questions of the historiography. Innis argues that tribal histories ignore the importance of kinship and dismiss the historical multiculturalism of Indigenous communities. Further, Innis contends, historians have racialized the Metis by keeping their history too distinct from First Nations with whom they shared important kinship ties through their maternal lines. That both First Nations and Metis historically recognized their close ties helps explain the relative lack of violent conflict, despite the tensions that arose as each used the declining buffalo herds. Innis also suggests that historians have not fully accounted for the extent...