Trying to Get It Back: Indigenous Women, Education and Culture by Gillian Weiss et al. (review)

HUMANITIES 159 Gillian Weiss et al. Trying to Get It Back: Indigenous Women, Education and Culture Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xvi, 332. $44.95 Centring the voices and experiences of Indigenous people in a respectful, collaborative way is always a challenge. Gillian Weiss in her research project and book Trying to Get It Back: Indigenous Women, Education, and Culture meets this challenge with style and grace as she brings forward the stories and dialogues of three generations of Indigenous women on two continents B Australia and Canada. Critical feminist literature has legitimately critiqued white researchers appropriating Indigenous people=s culture and diverse voices, urging the protection of Indigenous peoples from the scrutiny and gaze of white researchers. Acknowledging this critique, Weiss respectfully explains that writing her book is her >tentative= contribution to Indigenous peoples. She has endeavoured to provide a collaborative arena to bring forward the vital issues and challenges of Indigenous women in order to enable them to empower their own voices. She has rationalized that white researchers who ignore Indigenous peoples= stories and histories because of race or position contribute to the continuing silencing of Indigenous women. Such silencing yields to white power and privilege that prevents Indigenous people from fully contributing to their own empowerment. Towards respectful inquiry, Weiss incorporates several participatory strategies in her research agenda to ensure that the voices and perspectives of the selected Indigenous women and the benefits of this research are shared by them and other Indigenous women. Pearl McKenzie, Pauline Coulhard, and Charlene Tree are mother, daughter, and granddaughter of one family of the Adnyamathanha people of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Bernie Sound, her niece Valerie Bourne, and Valerie=s daughter Brandi McLeod are Sechelt women from British Columbia, Canada. The interviews with each of the women and the shared dialogues with one another through video conferencing provide a rich store of Indigenous women=s lives across generations that embrace their joys, struggles, differences, and aspirations; their insights and perspectives about their choices in life; and the consequences of their diverse histories. The book opens with the context of the research project, the author=s quandary with the research critique, and the significance of the research to the lives of three generations of women on the two continents. It shares their eagerness and willingness to tell their stories, and their evolving relationships that reveal the heart of Indigenous people who so naturally open themselves to others, sharing and giving, but also, in this story, receiving. Prompted by probing questions, each woman tells her story. Later in the project, the women have an opportunity to talk to each other about their shared stories and in particular their observations about their lives and struggles. The edited transcripts of the dialogues illustrate their 160 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 emergent awareness of their similar life experiences, despite seeming great geographical distance and diasporic life conditions, and the similar importance they place on family, community relationships, and connections to their land. This book gives colonialism an intimate voice. Colonial schooling, prejudice, discrimination, racism, and an eroding cultural base are everpresent themes in all three generations in both Australia and Canada. Though child-rearing practices change over time among the Indigenous women owing to their growing participation in domestic and modern economic activity, similar colonial schooling in attitudes and practices yields to predictable diminished school outcomes for youth. The families= traditional practices involving the land and the changes needed within a colonial regime emerge with the necessary maintenance of cultural values and traditions to sustain the people over their difficult times. Most interesting is their evolving awareness of the changes in leadership needed to deflect the colonial experience in education, economy, and politics, and their evolving perceptions of religion and identity. Weiss documents their persistent interaction with racism, stressing the consequences of racial and cultural superiority that inspire change not sympathy. Their stories are rich, their pain and challenges with colonization relevant and familiar, their choices and perspectives important to understanding the multiplicity of struggles of Indigenous peoples today as they inch towards a postcolonial reality. While the women=s stories accentuate the anguishing similarity of intrusion of outside religious missionaries and colonial educational attitudes...