Living on the Land: Indigenous Women's Understanding of Place ed. by Nathalie Kermoal and Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez (review)

Living on the Land: Indigenous Women's Understanding of Place brings together essays on women's practices and ways of knowing. The collection highlights the significance of women's contributions to Indigenous relationships to place and situates that intervention as a resistance to settler patriarchy that privileges masculinized knowledge. The diverse essays explore knowledge produced through storytelling, mapping, hunting, and other lifeways.

This collection includes a number of articles that would be excellent teaching tools in such classes as Indigenous Studies; Indigenous Feminism; Race, Place, and Space; Indigenous Knowledges; or Canadian Cultural Studies. One of the strengths of the book is its bringing together essays that articulate the heterogeneity of women's experience and knowledge. In doing so, the book highlights a broader analysis of Indigenous relationships to place and the significance of centering women in such discussions. Essays on foodways by Todd, Parlee, and Wray, and by Hodgson-Smith and Kermoal, will particularly resonate with students. These essays enable readers to think concretely and specifically about Indigenous women's role in food production, and potentially offer an emotional respite for students taking courses that predominantly address the genocide, sexual violence, and physical violence that Indigenous women face.

All but one of the articles focus on Canada, and thus the collection has the potential to provide a specific intervention in how place is conceptualized by Indigenous women within that context. A more intentional concentration on a specific geographic region or boundary may have allowed the editors to draw out a clearer shared conversation around place and land.

Alongside the emphasis on Canada, the editors express a desire to "to stimulate a transnational conversation" (10). The international content is powerful: Altamirano-Jiménez's essay on "using maps as legal tools to secure Indigenous land rights" (101) in Nicaragua is one of the strongest in the collection. Yet the inclusion of international content does not produce a theoretical intervention in how place is theorized by Indigenous women transnation-ally. To take up the lens of transnationalism may require thinking through how place and "homeland" are conceptualized by Indigenous peoples as they experience economic or forced migrations across national borders. That is not the work of this book.

This collection offers a valuable and much-needed representation of Canadian varieties of Indigenous women's relationship to place, and should be appreciated as such.