Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada ed. by Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek (review)

For years, historical narratives marginalized women and Aboriginal women in particular. To a degree, this long-standing tradition of marginalization continues today. The intersection of race, class, and gender occupies a largely unexplored place in modern discourse with many doors and windows yet to be opened. Gradually, the historical details about these intersections are emerging in a range of disciplines including history, Indigenous studies, women’s studies, sociology, anthropology, and others. Tendencies to avoid important complexities yield inadequate narratives that often diminish the critical role of women, in particular, Aboriginal women. Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek’s edited volume, Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada, is an exception to these limitations. Their volume celebrates the work of Sylvia Van Kirk.

Brownlie and Korinek’s book offers a comprehensive exploration of works presented by international contributors in twelve chapters plus an introduction and a chapter listing all of Van Kirk’s writings. Though the title of the book notes a focus on Aboriginal and women’s history in Canada, the collection is, in fact, international in scope and also offers chapters about the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. In her chapter Elizabeth Jameson reminds us that the border between Canada and the United States was fluid in the active fur-trading period of history and that important relationships across borders were initiated through tribal affiliations, marriages, and family relations between white fur traders and Aboriginal women.

Van Kirk herself is characterized by the contributors – primarily her colleagues and former students, as well as noted historians who built on her scholarly foundation – as a woman with courage and imagination who engages new historical material that was previously avoided, misrepresented, or unexplored, often out of political or economic bias or pure ignorance.

Every contributor considers Van Kirk’s book Many Tender Ties as a tour de force that shifted attention to the critical role of white and Aboriginal women in the fur-trading industry. Jameson writes, “Van Kirk’s narrative disrupted a mythic West that had marginalized women and people of colour.” Van Kirk presented her powerful interpretive framework in the 1980s. Since the publication of Van Kirk’s works, scholars in diverse disciplines have studied, analyzed, critiqued, and built on her initial findings and interpretations.

After the detailed introduction, Jennifer Brown and Franca Iacovetta give us a thorough tour of Van Kirk’s career and scholarly works. Patricia McCormack and Robert Alexander Innes describe the contexts of plurality and multiculturalism that pervaded exchanges across tribes, territories, races, classes, and genders. Katrina Srigley takes up the issue of the effects of Bill C-31 on women and children for Anishinaabekwe. Adele Perry advocates Ruth Behar’s conceptual approach of the vulnerable observer as a lens through which to study histories of the period. Angela Wanhalla and Victoria Freeman describe how Van Kirk’s works have travelled into international scholarly discourses to highlight the important role of women. Kathryn McPherson describes the importance of pioneer women’s claim to class, racial, and gendered respectability and their role in building white settler nations.

Indeed, taken as a whole, the chapters emphasize the importance of mutuality across races, classes, and genders. This mutuality guaranteed the success of the fur-trading industry through benefits in relationships, marriages, and families who settled or often were required to reinvent themselves as colonial mandates and new developments in economies emerged. This is also a story of the power of a sustained program of scholarship initiated by Van Kirk, who influenced several generations of feminist scholars to build their ideas standing on her initial scholarly acumen and her rejection of the inadequacies apparent in a male-dominated historical context.