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  • Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation by Robert Alexander Innes
  • Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (bio)
Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation
University of Manitoba Press, 2013
by Robert Alexander Innes

WHILE QUESTIONS OF INDIGENOUS NATIONHOOD, governance, and citizenship remain central to the field, Native studies’ aversion to the exploration of kinship—due to its close association with anthropology that produced evolutionary and cultural relativist theories and abstract taxonomies holding little relevance to Native studies scholars or Native communities—has precluded a potentially rich consideration of kinship’s role in the maintenance and affirmation of individual and collective identity. Robert Alexander Innes, in Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation, brilliantly takes up this question to understand Cowessess responses to their relatives who had been displaced by colonialism. Defying perceptions that Indigenous peoples have internalized colonial, state-imposed notions of Indianness, Innes’s work shows how Cowessess undermined the imposition of Canada’s Indian Act and its legal definition of “Indian” by acknowledging kinship relations to band members who either had not been federally recognized as Indians prior to 1985 or were urban members disconnected from the reserve.

This maintenance of kinship, Innes reveals, follows Cowessess law contained in Elder Brother stories. In chapter 1, he argues that the Law of the People contained within these stories has been kept alive through the social practices of Cowessess band members that pre-dates the reserve and persists today. In the second chapter, Innes demonstrates that band membership was historically fluid, flexible, and inclusive, by providing a history of the four groups that constitute Cowessess (the Plains Cree, Saulteaux, Assiniboine, and Métis) and the emergence of the Iron Alliance. Similarities between these groups, he contends, have not been afforded proper recognition, as cultural and social differences have been regularly emphasized in Indigenous histories at the expense of attention to long-term practices of intermarriage, alliances, and cultural exchanges between these groups.

Chapter 3 extends this critique with a focus on the term “tribe,” which has been used to categorize and delineate Indigenous history. Innes argues that constructing Indigenous histories along tribal lines fails to account for the role of bands as the primary social and political units eschewing how Indigenous nations both organized themselves historically and are viewed today. [End Page 184] As one example, Innes argues that academic framings of Métis as fundamentally distinct from First Nations have further perpetuated a focus on tribal distinctions that eclipses relatedness. Innes shows how scholarly obsession with categorizing Indigenous peoples has favored a narrative of hybridity, with the consequence of blinding scholars from seeing the rich multicultural mosaic that makes up many Indigenous communities.

The fourth chapter delves into a history of Cowessess to demonstrate the degree to which scholars have misrepresented ethnic identities of Indigenous peoples on the prairies. Cultural boundaries drawn between Indigenous groups, Innes asserts, is largely a fiction that has served some scholars and government officials but has had little relevance to the actual lives of the peoples under examination. Kinship traditions allowed the band to maintain their multicultural composition well into the twentieth century. This is demonstrated in chapter 5, which draws on interviews with Cowessess members to outline how kinship obligations have both been changed by outside forces and contemporary realities, and also persisted as critical mechanisms guiding social interactions and determining membership and belonging. Innes extends his analysis of Cowessess membership and belonging in chapter 6 by challenging dominant media discourses surrounding Indigenous responses to Bill C-31 changes to the Indian Act. Innes lays out how mistrust in the Canadian government—rooted in failed treaty implementation and assimilation policies, and fueled by 1969 attempts to terminate federal responsibilities to Indians via the White Paper—spurred First Nations leaders to oppose any changes to the Indian Act, including amendments that sought to correct discriminatory elements. He notes, “In contrast to the position of most First Nations leaders, Cowessess band members had a relatively high tolerance for band members who regained their Indian status through Bill C-31” (142).

In chapter 7, Innes...

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