Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Gratitude is extended to University of Illinois Press senior editor Laurie Matheson to whom I proposed this manuscript in 2007. She has sustained a firm commitment and confidence throughout the many stages of our project. I also thank Ned Blackhawk, Devon Mihesuah, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Kate Ellinghaus, Angela Wanhalla, and Joan Sangster who responded to my search for names of individual scholars during the early development of the manuscript. In August 2008, Joan Sangster and I coorganized a workshop at Trent University, generously funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to assemble the contributors. Joan secured additional funds from Trent’s Frost Centre for Canadian and Indigenous Studies; Canadian Studies Department; President’s N.I.N.D. fund; Indigenous Studies Department and the History Department for extraordinary expenses. Thank you, Joan, for this valuable work and commitment to the project. Trent’s Research Office headed by Dean James Parker and administered by Cathy Smith provided ongoing support between 2008 and 2011 as well as a generous subvention to support photographic reproductions in the publication. Support for student research assistance, travel, and some printing expenses for the workshop was provided by The Canada Research Chair Program as well as by Dean Christopher Nicol in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Lethbridge (AB); the University of Lethbridge’s Students’ Union; and the Copy Centre at the University of Lethbridge. All of the contributors who attended the 2008 workshop have remained loyal to the project. I appreciate the hard work and avid commitment of all the contributors despite many disruptions caused by my itinerancy across the continent over the course of three years. Marlene Brant Castellano, Sarah Carter, Sandra Fairman-Silva, and Beth Piatote provided valuable commentary on the presentations at the workshop and they deserve our collective acknowledgment for their efforts. Shirley Williams offered her ceremonial blessings at that time. Miigwech, Shirley, you set us off in the right direction! Although we had never met, I had frequently seen the work of Faye HeavyShield in exhibition and subsequently invited her to permit us to feature a reproduction of one of her works on the book’s cover. Don Gill provided services in kind to generate a beautiful reproduction of Faye holding her beaded book. The book, and Faye’s explanation of it, offered a doorway into my introduction. Don Gill, Sarah Williams, Heidi MacDonald, Tracy McNab, Dee McArthur, Glenda Bonifacio, Colleen O’Manique, Caroline Langill, Marlene Brant Castellano, Faye HeavyShield, Beth Piatote, Margaret Jacobs, Leanne Simpson, Wanda Nanibush, and Susan Roy all significantly influenced my conceptual thinking about this project. I would like to particularly acknowledge the individual anonymous reviewers because they were so generous with their close reading of our manuscript in draft. I hope I may reciprocate in some way in the future. My work on the manuscript would not have been possible without the collegial support of faculty and staff in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department and Indigenous Studies at Trent and in the Women and Gender Studies and History Departments at the University of Lethbridge. I am particularly in debt to Dean Chris Nicol in the Faculty of Arts and Science at University of Lethbridge; his sustained commitment to my professional activity and to Women and Gender Studies has been invaluable. Graduate and undergraduate student research assistants put considerable effort and time into this manuscript at both development and editing stages. Therefore, this volume is dedicated to Kelly Pineault, Daisy Raphael, Thera Body, Lynette Schick, Michelle Bennison, William Knight, and Christine Sy. Their delightful company, whether extended or momentary, was enthusiastic and inspired. May your intellectual and community labor be enriched by all the contemporary and historical women you encounter. xiv Acknowledgments Indigenous Women and Work ...