Thinking Historically through an Indigenous Lens: Kelm and Smith's Talking Back to the Indian Act

Historians who research relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state have generated profoundly important studies on the coercive nature of Canadian Indian policy and legislation over the past century and a half, illuminating various facets of a relationship unequally structured. At the heart of this relationship has been an evolving, yet stubbornly persistent piece of legislation called the Indian Act. The Indian Act, despite its significance in structuring many elements of the public and private lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada, has rarely received an historical analysis that situates it, rather than its effects, front and centre. In Talking Back to the Indian Act, Canadian historians Mary-Ellen Kelm and Keith D. Smith draw our attention to aspects of this legislation and select Indigenous responses. Focusing on the sub-sections that deal with governance, enfranchisement, gender, and land, Kelm and Smith highlight these key elements of the legislation and how it has changed, or remained the same, over time. To illustrate the diversity of Indigenous voices and perspectives, the authors have selectively gathered primary historical evidence for readers to glimpse the ways in which Indigenous leaders, communities, and individuals negotiated this evolving legal landscape, and responded to the Indian Act. Indigenous voices preserved in archival sources engaged in "talking back" to these select segments in the Indian Act when it became clear that the legislation began to infringe on Indigenous legal, cultural, and political jurisdictions.

Kelm and Smith have structured the book as a vehicle for teaching historical thinking and Indigenous methodological approaches by zeroing in on the 1876 Indian Act. As they state in the introduction, "We are putting the Indian Act, not Indigenous peoples, under the microscope" (9). In fact, rather than narrating a history of the Indian Act and Indigenous resistance, the authors provide the readers with the tools to grapple with the issues raised in the history of the Indian Act and provide an opportunity for critical reflection. To do so, Kelm and Smith introduce readers to the five concepts for thinking historically compiled by Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke: change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity. The authors recognize that the Indian Act is a piece of settler colonial legislation that operates in Indigenous worlds, and thus also apply Indigenous methodologies for interpretive analysis. By incorporating Indigenous conceptions of relationships, responsibility, respect, and reciprocity, readers and students are encouraged to query the Indian Act and the selected Indigenous primary sources, from an Indigenous perspective as well. The authors frame each chapter thematically then provide a series of inquiry-based questions employing these approaches, simultaneously illuminating the Indian Act and Indigenous responses in order for readers to gain a sense of how the legislation intersected with Indigenous lives. In doing so, Smith and Kelm provide instruction throughout the book with how to employ these tools critically for reading the Indian Act historically.

Chapter one situates the reader by providing the historical context in which the 1876 Indian Act was legislated, the key terms it defined, and the subsequent changes it underwent over time. Importantly, the authors foreground the relationships the newly legislated Indian Act sought to cement, as well as the relationships that were fractured. The 1876 Indian Act consolidated previous colonial legislation that dealt with issues relating to Indigenous peoples and lands for the new Dominion of Canada. Whereas previous legislation pertained to Indigenous peoples living in Canada East and Canada West (Ontario and Quebec), this new Act applied across the Dominion, regulating, categorizing, and administering all Indigenous peoples in particular ways without much regard for Indigenous systems of kinship, governance or land tenure. Critically, the Indian Act defined "Indian" as "any male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a particular band," and his children or spouse. These changes to band governance, enfranchisement provisions, gendered relationships and countless other areas generated Indigenous responses...