Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada (review)

Julia Emberley’s Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal is an extremely ambitious study, designed to contribute to the expanding ‘body of anti-imperialist and anti-racist materialist feminist scholarship that is working towards clarifying the theoretical and practical dimensions of women and children’s oppression’ around the world. The text comprises eight chapters, devoted to such subjects as ‘the imposition of the English bourgeois family’ in Canada; the politics of white male desire in Robert Flaherty’s documentary film Nanook of the North; the ‘discourses on savagery and sexual difference’ in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Tarzan, and popular commercials; masculinities in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; the Aboriginal family in archival photography, notably in the Rocky Mountains work of Mary T.S. Schäffer; an rcmp account of the mysterious death of an Inuk woman and her children in the North; justice and the Aboriginal child’s body in Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson’s memoir Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman; and the queering of kinship in recent Aboriginal texts, such as Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. As the chapter breakdown suggests, though, while the text’s range is impressive, a good portion of it is only loosely related to Canada, much less Aboriginal Canada.

Emberley describes her monograph as a ‘decolonial’ text and her animus is clearly directed at the family, specifically the bourgeois family. However, she never explains how the non-biological kinds of affiliation she favours are any less artificial than the traditional nuclear family. Her approach has other problems. To begin with, Emberley explores the political ramifications of the contact between Europe and the Americas ‘through two notable figures: Aboriginal Man and Bourgeois Woman.’ Even excluding the fact she races ‘Aboriginal’ Man but not [European] Bourgeois Woman, this model seems rather inadequate for a study of Canada. The reality is that, in the West and the North, the two regions on which Emberley concentrates, the initial contact was not between Aboriginal man and European woman but between Aboriginal woman and European man. The nature of that encounter is reflected in the genealogy of the Metis, a group that traces its ancestry primarily to a European male ancestor and an Aboriginal female one, and incidentally is largely absent in this study. Another problem with Emberley’s text is that, like other post-colonial or decolonial works, it tends to overestimate the power of empire. Without wishing to downplay the impact of ‘the English bourgeois family’ in colonial Canada, it was contested not only by the First Nations, as Emberley shows, but also by other European groups and the Metis. After all, there are historical reasons why the teachers at the ‘English’ residential school in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen are francophones.

Kiss of the Fur Queen is also a text that Emberley examines only perfunctorily, certainly not with the thoroughness she devotes to non-Aboriginal texts such as Nanook of the North or the Regeneration trilogy. This raises one final problem in Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal. Emberley often declares her superiority to the colonial material she scrutinizes, which she contends does not reveal the lives of Aboriginal people but constructs those lives. Yet it is hard not to sense her fascination with such material. Indeed, the great paradox of her book is that, with its focus on colonial images of the Aboriginal, it inserts itself into the very Western tradition it denigrates.