Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs by Sarah A. Nickel (review)

Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs is an important and timely book that considers late-twentieth century Indigenous politics in British Columbia. Its focus is the United British Columbia Indian Chiefs (ubcic), a broad-based, male-dominated organization that emerged in the late 1960s, bringing together elected chiefs and representatives of existing BC Indigenous political groups as voting members, and hereditary chiefs as honorary attendees. Drawing on the ubcic's oral history (comprised of a dozen interviews) and documentary archives, Sarah Nickel assesses how the organization's commitment to unity – which on the surface seemed a fraught agenda in light of the inequities that existed between the various partners and the formal exclusion of women – operated from the 1960s through the 1980s to support greater Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and, to an extent, Indigenous women's issues.

The ubcic coalesced at a time when Indigenous peoples across North America, alongside students, women, Black people, and others, created organizations as remedies to social, economic, and political marginalization. In situating the ubcic within this wider context, Assembling Unity shows how the ubcic's aims and goals were era-specific responses to emerging international ideologies and political trends. But just as important, and what is particularly novel about Assembling Unity, is how Nickel also deftly situates Indigenous politics in British Columbia within the long political history of the province's Indigenous peoples. The emergence of the ubcic, she emphasizes, was not simply a reaction to colonialism or a response to the infamous 1969 White Paper, the creation of which is often credited as the central catalyst for a surge of Indigenous political activism in this era in Canada. Recognizing the tendency of history to "flatten … historical complexities" (19) of Indigenous politics, Nickel makes clear the ubcic flourished because it was built on definitively Indigenous political continuities that allowed for flexible and effective political strategizing. The ubcic succeeded not despite participants' diverse perspectives, but because of them. This portrayal of an Indigenous political organization that found success amidst competing, and sometimes divergent interests, serves to undermine the long-standing colonial critique of Indigenous politics as being inherently discordant and, thus, ineffective.

A central aim of Assembling Unity is to highlight the complicated, often contentious, involvement of women in the ubcic. In this, it offers an important corrective to a national historiography inclined to treat the issues embraced by Indigenous men as legitimately political while discounting Indigenous women's activism around family and home as non-political. Nickel's assessment of the ubcic's wan, at times hostile, receptiveness to women's interests pulls no punches: the ubcic structure that excluded women, its masculinist culture that privileged men, and its sometimes vehement condemnation of women's interests as threats to Indigenous sovereignty, created extraordinary challenges for Indigenous women in BC. Still, Nickel demonstrates how women harnessed the unity mandate of ubcic to proactively advance their own political goals. Echoing the book's wider situation of the strength of the ubcic in contemporary global, as well as historical Indigenous political currents, Assembling Unity fixes women's successes within both contemporary activism – for example, women's alliance with the wider women's rights movement – as well as in a long legacy of Indigenous women's activism, for example through Homemakers Clubs. Drawing on insights of Indigenous feminism, Nickel presents women's family and community-centred activism as political, even when women themselves eschewed that characterization. She convincingly argues that by harnessing their political legacy, Indigenous women in BC were able, to a considerable extent, to fight for their interests within the ubcic.

Scholars of Canadian Indigenous history – especially those engaged in studies of colonialism and critical feminist studies – will appreciate the ways in which Assembling Unity challenges existing conceptions of Indigenous politics as reactive and male-centred in favour of a perspective that centres the long-standing...