Indigenous Labor and Indigenous History

Like all articles in this issue, this article was originally a response to a call from the Western History Association for papers by Indigenous academics. The call aimed to showcase Indigenous scholarship on certain terms: that it delve into some of the opportunities, challenges, and obstacles involved with "working from home" or doing research that bridges a space called "home" (family, community, and tribal history) and what is indelibly defined in opposition to it—the university and professional Aboriginal or American Indian history. Instead of beginning with a definition of "home" as timelessly and innately distinguishable from "history" and a definition of "history" that is necessarily foreign to Indigenous people, I wanted to try to make visible a division that separates Native people as history and Native people as historians. When many of us consider ourselves to be Aboriginal historians or those who look at history from an Aboriginal perspective, how does history become something that is self-consciously non-Native, "outside," or apart from us—a place that is decidedly not "home"?

The response, for me, involved historicizing the twentieth-century English Canadian historical profession. There are a variety of meanings associated with the word "history," and in this article I will be referring to history largely as the modern, paid labor of professional historians and the academic discipline of history. Of course, this is a very narrow definition, and it is the process and effects of its narrowing that will be the subject of this article. Philip Deloria argues that part of a project of understanding Indian modernity is to take as the subject of investigation the ideological and discursive frames non-Indians use to explain and contain Indian people. One of these frames is professional history. In Canada, Native people's history is now considered a legitimate topic of historical labor by the historical profession. Yet Indigenous professional historians remain anomalies within it. Following Deloria, I found that we cannot take the presumption of absence in the profession to be meaningless and incidental; instead, it is the result of the ways in which familiar categories like Indian and white, traditional and assimilated, savage and civilized, authentic and inauthentic, advocate and objective observer, story and history are made by and in turn create and materially enforce certain expectations.¹

In the first section of this article I show how history as a profession has remained largely isolated from Aboriginal scholarly critique, questions of equity and access, and discussions of Indigenous professionalism in other fields. Next, I use the modernization of professional history as a frame to study how Aboriginal people became marginalized and displaced in singular roles as subjects rather than producers of history. The working culture of homogeneity in the Canadian historical profession reinforces the divisions between "home" and history. Third, I explore how Aboriginal history's myths of origin, stamped onto "our" historiography, serve to protect professional boundaries and preclude the presence and even the possibility of the presence of Indigenous scholars. Last, I show how the dominant position of the nation-state in professional history and narrow definitions of identity and historical labor work to alienate Indigenous historians. My investigation will draw Indians into spheres that the history profession is not used to sharing with them, including history's own past, contemporary historical practice, undergraduate and graduate history courses, professional association meetings, and departmental hiring priorities. At the same time there are three dominant stories in this article. The first is about the professionalization of the discipline of history—the technologies of exclusion; the second is an Aboriginal critique of Aboriginal historiography—the normalization of exclusion; and the third is about the visible underrepresentation of Aboriginal people in history departments—the maintenance of exclusion.

This article is not meant to offer conclusive arguments about the historical profession but rather to raise and document some serious questions and concerns about it. My comments will be based on what I have learned about the Aboriginal history of postsecondary education and labor, informal research on Indigenous scholars and teachers of history, my own experience of the working culture of the present-day English [End Page...