Restoring the Balance: First Nations Women, Community, and Culture (review)

The editors of Restoring the Balance have assembled a tremendously important collection of essays that foreground and analyze the dynamic contributions Indigenous women have made to Canadian society. Indigenous women’s commitments to restoring Indigenous community practices and supporting Indigenous self-determination struggles, both historically and in the present time, form the backbone of the collection, which shows their involvement in cultural and political activities to revive, protect, and promote Indigenous culture. In focusing on Indigenous women’s contributions as intellectuals and agents of social change, the book is groundbreaking in both its achievement and vision.

Divided into four sections, the collection coheres around several key organizing themes that address historic trauma, intellectual and political social movements, health and healing, and arts, culture, and language. Essays in each section analyze Indigenous women’s roles by taking into account their concern for kinship affiliations (Big Eagle and Guimond, Boyer, Harper), gender-centred epistemologies (Anderson, Castellano, Hanson), and the preservation of women’s cultural contributions (Archibald, LaRocque, Gray, Racette, Norris). The result is a holistic and conceptually rich text that heightens awareness of both Indigenous and women-centred objectives and furthers the goals of ‘complementarity’ and ‘interconnectedness’ for Indigenous peoples in society (Wesley-Esquimaux). The book’s critical centre is aptly expressed through Sherry Farrell Racette’s metaphor of ‘unbroken threads’ that connect Indigenous women’s presence to a vibrant cultural and intellectual legacy, one that not only informs the wider social sphere but also affirms Indigenous women’s ongoing activism and presence.

Among the many outstanding contributions that emphasize Indigenous women’s voice and agency, Jo-Ann Archibald’s essay is noteworthy, not only for exploring the institutional activism of Freda Ahenakew, Marlene Brant Castellano, Olive Dickason, Verna Kirkness, and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis as ‘first-wave First Nations women’ who created ‘an indigenous intellectual movement in Canada,’ but also in drawing attention to the often overlooked contributions these women made to wider social debates that remain prominent in society. Olive Dickason has been especially important, for example, in establishing aboriginal history as a field of scholarship and intellectual debate and as one of the first persons to challenge the mandatory retirement age policy set at sixty-five. Archibald notes that Dickason won both her cases before the Alberta Human Rights Commission and the Court of Queen’s Bench but lost on appeal. Like Dickason, the women fore grounded here, many of whom are the subjects of study and contributors to the collection, aptly take their place through this collection at the forefront of socially engaged activism and institutional change that, in the words of Mary Jane Norris, characterize them as purveyors of ‘cultural and language revitalization.’ They bring about, in Vivianne Gray’s view, a ‘culture of art’ that expresses the integration of tradition with contemporary artistic forms. The fourteen photographs that accompany Gray’s essay fittingly convey this impression through their elegance and beauty. The ‘cultural competence’ of these women, as Gaye Hanson notes, provides readers with a model of Indigenous women’s activism and commitment to diversity that include human, ecological, and spiritual relationships. The editors have made an enormously important contribution to the academic and social field by assembling these contributors together and by making the recognition of Indigenous women’s activism and accomplishments the book’s centrepiece.