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

Emerging from the conversation begun during a round table session organized for the 2007 meeting of the Canadian Historical Association to commemorate Sylvia Van Kirk’s scholarship, Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada exceeds the expectations of a traditional festschrift. Designed as a means of showcasing the influence of Van Kirk and her generation of feminist scholars on the last three decades of feminist historical writing in Canada, the collection avoids becoming an unbridled celebration of hers and others’ work. Adele Perry’s thought-provoking contribution to the collection comments upon the simultaneously ambivalent and inspiring interventions that Van Kirk’s enormously influential Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (1980) made into women’s, Aboriginal, and fur trade history in Canada. Emerging from “the possibilities as well as the risks” inherent in this kind of historiography, Perry suggests, is “the power of new analytics to reframe old questions” (83, 84). These “new analytics” are present in every essay in this collection, which suggests that this approach is perhaps Van Kirk’s single most influential contribution to the development of the fields of women’s and Aboriginal peoples’ history in Canada in the decades since the publication of her first book.

This collection wields the strongest appeal for historians and anthropologists—especially those engaged in delineating the historical and cultural intersections of race, gender, and labor—but its disciplinary breadth is astonishing. History professor Robin Jarvis Brownlie’s comparative analysis of settler news media in Upper Canada between the 1820s and 1850s and the writings of two Anishinabe preachers, Peter Jones and George Copway, draws upon elements of historical and literary analysis to produce a nuanced and interdisciplinary elaboration of racial discourses on Indianness and whiteness in Upper Canada. Brownlie’s contribution represents just one of the collection’s many essays that illustrate the importance of interdisciplinarity, scholarly cooperation, and intellectual curiosity in a manner that this reviewer has rarely seen spelled out in clearer terms.

Although some pieces are stronger than others, each of the dozen essays in Finding a Way to the Heart is nonetheless valuable. The excellent triumvirate of inaugural essays by Jennifer S. H. Brown, Franca Iacovetta, and Valerie J. Korinek multitask as both personal reminiscences of Van Kirk’s collegiality and scholarly spirit, and as historical surveys of the changing landscape of feminist scholarship and its academic reception in Canada since the 1970s. These essays are invaluable memoranda to later generations of feminist scholars of the work that has been accomplished thus far, and what remains unfinished. Robert Alexander Innes’s contribution challenges the scholarly focus on tribal affiliations as the primary means of consolidating group identity on the northern plains. This focus, he argues, ignores the importance of kinship ties in the formation of group identity. Questioning the notion advocated by some scholars that tribal boundaries are “concrete,” Innes suggests that group formation on the northern plains took place instead at the band level. Innes’s essay provides a comprehensive historical review of the problematic politics of the term tribe since the 1960s and is critical of the scholarly tendency to distinguish Métis from First Nations groups, which obfuscates the close relationships that existed between them despite apparent cultural differences. Innes’s essay is perhaps most valuable for the way it enlarges the scholarly network of Van Kirk et al.’s influence, forging implicit connections with the rising focus on kinship criticism in contemporary Indigenous studies.

The structure and organization of the collection reflect the field’s increasing complexity over the decades. Although the contributors share a common pool of resources, the organization and variety of their essays nonetheless gesture toward an ever-widening field of inquiry and...