Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism ed. by Carol Williams (review)

In a recent editorial for Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez observed, “We still learn little of Native Americans in our history classes, and of Ndn [Indian] women, not much beyond Pocahontas and Sacagawea. Rarely is that history linked to living Native American women and their contemporary lives and struggles. Some historians, activists and Native American and Women’s Studies scholars are trying to change that and are beginning to teach the history and triumphs of the ‘invisible among the invisible’ of First Nations’ people” (“Women’s History: Native Americans,” Daily Kos, March 2, 2014, www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/02/1280488/-Women-s-History-Native-Americans). The seventeen essays in Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, edited by Carol Williams, exemplify this trend and extend it to the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Specifically engaging the field of labor history, the collection challenges “the multitude of ways Indigenous women—as colonized workers, as Indigenous, and as women—were disciplined and paternalistically presumed by the respective settler nations as dependent and incompetent rather than economically or socially sovereign” (13). As Mohawk scholar- activist Marlene Brant Castellano notes in her preface to the volume, it makes “a welcome and valuable contribution to documenting the continuity and adaptability of Indigenous women’s work as wave after wave of change swept through their communities” (x–xi).

Indigenous Women and Work developed from a 2008 workshop that convened leading anthropologists, historians, and Native American studies scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The contributors share a broadly historical approach and a commitment to ending the virtual invisibility of aboriginal women within traditionally male-centered settler narratives. Williams further dedicates the volume to the project of cognitive decolonization by framing the essays as a critique of “the universal assumptions of ‘Women’s History’” (2) as well as of the methodological and epistemological biases of Western history writ large. Hence her introduction features brief analyses of the cover art by Faye HeavyShield and the concluding short story by Beth H. Piatote. These “unconventional inclusions” (3) are meant to evoke both indigenous women’s unwaged labor and alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and communicating rooted in oral culture and lived experience. Williams does not reject scholarly research, of course, but rather calls upon practitioners to seek “meaningful reciprocity in the process of knowledge production and exchange” (3). The high quality of the work she has assembled here attests to the fact that historical scholarship can be socially conscious and politically engaged without sacrificing either intellectual rigor or academic integrity.

Collectively, the essays survey indigenous women’s engagement with the inter-locking forces of capitalism and colonialism from the early nineteenth century to the present. Although the omission of Latin America limits the anthology’s scope to Anglo-phone settler states, several chapters take a comparative or transnational approach. Joan Sangster’s opening piece sets the tone with an insightful discussion of the extant literature about native women and work on both sides of the 49th parallel. She advocates trans-national study but cautions scholars not to fetishize that perspective, especially because of its potential to render the struggles of native women too abstract. Similarly, she applauds the “cultural turn” in historical writing about indigenous labor while warning against the uncritical celebration of agency, which can sugarcoat colonialism and signal acceptance of capitalist hegemony. The tension between agency and exploitation, autonomy and dependency, emerges as a recurring theme in the essays that follow.

The rest of the collection moves chronologically and thematically through various sectors of indigenous women’s work, including unpaid and unfree forms that often escape the attention of labor historians. Although some essays defy easy categorization, roughly half the chapters focus on manual or resource-based work. To combat North American stereotypes of the “lazy squaw” and “squaw drudge” (149), along with their counterparts in the Antipodes, the contributors marshal evidence of female productivity, creativity, and...