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

In 1980 Sylvia Van Kirk’s monograph “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 ignited a revolution in the historical writing of the fur trade of western Canada. By locating women, aboriginal peoples, and Native-newcomer relations at the center of her research and analysis, Van Kirk not only turned earlier male-focused economic and political histories on their heads but also opened the way for analyses of race, class, and gender within the complex social, sexual, and familial interactions that her inquiries uncovered.

Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writing on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada is a scholarly anthology that pays tribute to Sylvia Van Kirk’s groundbreaking work of locating Aboriginal Peoples, and women in particular, at the center of the fur trade. It takes its title from the last part of the phrase “many tender ties which find a way to the heart” written by James Douglas in 1842 in reference to the familial bonds that developed across racial lines during the fur trade. Matters of the heart are further expanded in Adele Perry’s superb article “Historiography that Breaks Your Heart: Van Kirk and the Writing of Feminist History” in which the scholar examines research that generates strong emotional ties between researcher and subject. These attachments, though problematic, are part of the bold, audacious shift into the realm of domesticity and intimacy that characterizes Van Kirk’s research.

By giving voice to the Aboriginal inhabitants of western Canada and recognizing their agency, Van Kirk questioned the male focus of “staples” and “hinterland” theories and their narrow economic and political bent. Her fresh methodologies contributed to transnational and transborder conversations between the United States and Canada.

Fittingly, this festschrift opens with Jennifer S. H. Brown’s reminiscences of four decades of friendship, collegiality, and cooperation that Jennifer and Sylvia shared over their coincidental mutual investigation of fur trade women, children, and marriages. In reading archival sources “against the grain,” both promoted Aboriginal Peoples and women as centers for historical change in the fur trade.

Reflecting on Van Kirk’s colossal contributions to academe, colleague Franca Iacovetta outlines Sylvia’s unrelenting fight for feminist perspectives in the academy, while former graduate student Valerie Korinek underlines the importance of the valuable mentoring she received from Sylvia in shaping her research and teaching.

In a meticulous historiographical overview, Elizabeth Jameson’s “Ties Across the Border” chronicles the publications that were triggered by Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties. Moreover, Jameson demonstrates how Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was challenged by Van Kirk’s implementations of social history frameworks of gender, race, and Native-newcomer relations. This article alone is worth the price of the volume and is particularly valuable for Great Plains historians.

The remaining articles examine Native-newcomer relations, aboriginal multicultural ties, racial discourses, and identity formation in a chronological fashion.

In the investigation of early to mid-nineteenth-century Maori and European intermarriage, Angela Wanhalla finds that a mixed-race identity similar to the Canadian Métis does not develop in New Zealand. Former student Robert Innes notes that the role and practice of kinship in the multicultural nature of Plains bands, rather than their tribal affiliations, is paramount in shaping identity. Another unique form of multiculturalism in the complex plural society of Fort Chipewyan long predated the Canadian state. Patricia Mc-Cormack surmises that in this “contact zone” the century-long fur trade mode of production persisted until after World War II.

Robin Jarvis Brownlie’s comparison of Indigenous and settler discourses in 1840s Upper Canada revealed opposing debates of whiteness and Indianness. In “Others or Brothers?: Competing Settler and Anishinabe Discourses about Race in Upper Canada,” Brownlie concludes that...