Women and Gender in the American West

Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850–1900

 I N July  I listened in aVancouver court room as Catholic Bishop Hubert O’Conner defended himself against charges of having raped or indecently assaulted four young Aboriginal women three decades earlier. His assertion of ignorance when asked what one of the complainants had been wearing on the grounds that, “as you know, I’m a celibate man” encapsulated his certainty that he had done nothing wrong. He admitted to sexual relations with two of the women,but the inference was clear:they had made him do it.They had dragged him down and led him astray.The temptation exercised by their sexuality was too great for any mere man, even a priest and residential school principal, to resist. I returned home from that day, and subsequent days in the courtroom , deeply troubled. I might have been reading any of hundreds of similar accounts written over the past century and more about Aboriginal women in British Columbia.This essay represents my first attempt to come to terms with Bishop O’Conner and his predecessors , made more necessary on reading the National Parole Board’s Jensen-Miller Prize 1998 Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850–1900 Jean Barman * Jean Barman,“Taming Aboriginal Sexuality:Gender,Power,and Race in British Columbia, –,” BC Studies / (/). © BC Studies. Reprinted by permission.  Taming Aboriginal Sexuality decision of March .The Board denied Bishop O’Conner parole, subsequent to his conviction on two of the charges, because “your recent psychological assessment indicates that you hold your victims in contempt,” and “at your hearing today . . . you maintain that . . . you in fact were seduced.” If I earlier considered that my response to my days in the courtroom might have been exaggerated, I no longer did so. My interest is not in Bishop O’Conner’s guilt or innocence in a court of law, but, rather, in tracing the lineage of his attitudes in the history of British Columbia. The more I have thought about Bishop O’Conner,the more I realize that those of us who dabble at the edges of Aboriginal history have ourselves been seduced.However much we pretend to read our sources “against the grain,” to borrow from the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin,we have become entrapped in a partial world that represents itself as the whole world. Records almost wholly male in impetus have been used by mostly male scholars to write about Aboriginal men as if they make up the entirety of Aboriginal people. The assumption that men and male perspectives equate with all persons and perspectives is so accepted that it does even not have to be declared. Thus, an American researcher wanting to find out about her Aboriginal counterparts discovered that “indigenous communities had been described and dissected by white men—explorers,traders,missionaries,and scholars —whose observations sometimes revealed more about their own cultural biases than about Native people.Misperceptions of Indian women were rampant because they were held up to the patriarchal model.” So what happens when we turn the past on its head and make our reference pointAboriginal women instead ofAboriginal men?We come face to face with Aboriginal sexuality or, more accurately, with male perceptions of Aboriginal sexuality.The term ‘sexuality’ is used here in its sociological sense as “the personal and interpersonal expression of those socially constructed qualities, desires, roles and identities which have to do with sexual behaviour and activity,” the underlying contention being “the social and cultural relativity of norms surrounding sexual behaviour and the sociohistorical construction of sexual identities and roles.” In a useful summary of recent scholarship,English sociologist Gail Hawkes tells us that the word sexuality “appeared first in  Jean Barman the nineteenth century,” reflecting “the focus of concerns about the social consequences of sexual desire in the context of modernity.” Christian dogma defined sexual desire “as an unreasoned force differentially possessed by women,which threatened the reason of man” and the“inherent moral supremacy of men.”According to Hawkes,“the backbone ofVictorian sexuality was the successful promotion of a version of women’s sexuality, an ideal of purity and sexual innocence well fitted to the separation of spheres that underpinned the patriarchal power of the new ruling class.” Sexuality,as Hawkes contextualizes the term, helps us better to understand the half century in British Columbia, - , when newcomers and Aboriginal peoples came into sustained contact. Everywhere around the world Indigenous women presented an enormous dilemma...