Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism

Introduction

Introduction Carol Williams The essays of Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism are set within the historical context of four settler nations—Canada, Australia, the United States, and Aotearoa/New Zealand—covering a broad span of time from the 1830s to the late 1980s. In each of these nations, the state overextended its bureaucratic reach into the intimate, conceivably “private,” and working “public,” lives of women.1 Scholars have been necessarily vigilant in exposing the blunt instrumentality of modern state statutory formations in contouring and disfiguring Indigenous women’s experiences, and this volume participates in that analysis (Borrows 1994; McGrath and Stevenson 1996; Robert 2001; Lawrence 2003; Ellinghaus 2002; Barker 2006; Jacobs 2007; Russell 2007; Simpson 2008; Wanhalla 2008; PerleyDutcher and Dutcher 2010). Clearly identity—or subjectivity—for Indigenous male and female constituents under the rule of settler nations has been neither straightforward nor biologically “natural” or, for that matter, decisively cleaved into gendered domains of private and public. Identifications such as “Indian,” “black,” “colored,” or “Aborigine” emerge not from sovereign identities based on fundamental relationships with tradition, ceremony, land, kin, the peoples of other Indigenous nations, or the “natural” environment but rather from an artificial morass of state legislation and bureaucratic programs, much specifically targeting women and unashamedly designed to assimilate and subordinate. These exceptional conditions distinguish the histories of Indigenous women’s labor of the modern era from the histories of other women of settler colonies. Nevertheless , while secondary sources on Indigenous women’s labor exist by scholars (including some written by scholars in this volume), a more dedicated focus on Aboriginal, Maori, Native American, Métis, or Inuit women as workers, waged or unwaged, is surely needed. Indigenous Women and Work aspires toward that end, and to prevent continued neglect of Indigenous women’s contributions as modern workers. Since the late 1980s, the discipline of Women’s History applied the analytic category of gender intersectionally with other sociocultural categories such as 2 carol williams work, class, citizenship, sexuality, ability, age, race, religion, nation, and ethnicity to understand how these variants, or intersecting inequalities, shape the experiences , consciousness, and perceptions of divergent groups of women (Bennett 2006). The intersectional approach arrived on the wake of critiques as Stasiulis explains: “Within some settler societies, divisions between different feminist and women’s politics have followed the schisms in power relations, worldviews, and living conditions between Indigenous peoples and the colonial settlers/immigrants . . . the women’s politics of those previously on the margins of feminist politics in settler societies—Indigenous women, women of colour, and ethnically non-dominant immigrant women—have increasingly called attention to the injustice of differential, racist, and sexist citizenship” (1999: 185). Hoskins summarizes from a Maori perspective: Western feminist tradition has for a long time posited gender as the primary and universal site of oppression, while largely ignoring factors of class and race . . . this position is untenable because it fails to expose/own/acknowledge not only white Pakeha2 women as beneficiaries of Maori women’s dispossession through colonization, but also their implication in these relations in a post-colonial Aotearoa. Our status as tangata whenua [first peoples], our culture and shared experience of colonization (with Maori men) situates Maori women in a much larger reality than that of “women’s rights” (2000: 43). Dissecting how and why certain dominant interpretations and certain speakers historically prevail is a prerequisite to see or meaningfully comprehend Indigenous women’s experiences. Just as Indigenous women and women of color have criticized the universal assumptions of Women’s History, Indigenous Studies and critical Indigenous scholarship dispute “mainstream history,” fruitfully testing the interpretative monopoly of Eurocentric cognitive imperialisms (Battiste 2005). Other counterstrategies , in particular the incorporation of Indigenous intellectual traditions, artistic processes, and philosophies as well as the critical reevaluation of a range of data, including visual and material culture, oral interviews and life histories, fiction, and song are deployed. Are “traditional historical forms such as song, dance, and stories ” more “valid than published forms,” as pondered by McGrath and Stevenson (1996: 38)? Indigenous “traditional knowledge” is an entirely distinct “knowledge system with its own concepts of epistemology and its own scientific and logical validity” (Battiste 2005) considering “all kinds of scientific, agricultural, technical and ecological knowledge, including cultigens, medicines and the rational use of flora and fauna” (Daes 1993 in Battiste). Eurocentric knowledge practices espouse a reliance on preexisting scholarly authority or published literature and might even be characterized as cannibalistic by so doing; in the aim toward “objectivity” is...