Colonialism

Two recurring themes in the texts I have read about colonialism are the gendered elements of contact zones, and the role of intimacies in colonial contexts. Overall, these texts show the inextricability of race and gender in colonial contexts

Van Kirk’s seminal work on women in the fur trade catalyzed conversations between historians drawing from the intersection of gender and colonialism. Given the body of work that has drawn from Van Kirk’s scholarship, I am focusing primarily on responses to Van Kirk, rather than her monograph itself. Among Van Kirk’s major contributions is extending the concept of agency to include women by exploring how women managed their marriages and altered native-newcomer relations.[1] In a context of mutual dependence, intermarriage was an essential means of cultural interchange, even where it was not official condoned by the Hudson’s Bay Company.[2] Marriage took on unique customs for the fur traders, who defended their relationships as customary and legitimate.[3] Van Kirk shows a diversity of marriage practices in the backcountry, including long-term monogamy and serial monogamy depending on the needs and values of fur traders and First Nations communities.[4] First Nations women became an integral part of the fur trade labour force, and were important for diplomacy and cultural advising, in addition to the emotional role of marriage.[5] She is careful to note that not all marriages had a positive impact on First Nations women’s lives; many found repeated abandonment, patriarchal authority over children, and living within European social structures to be emotionally challenging.[6]

By considering the position of “women in between,” Van Kirk alludes to the idea of a contact zone located within the bodies of women in the fur trade. This idea of “women in between” evolved through the course of the fur trade, as European men began to prefer mixed-blood women as marriage partners (89) and marriage customs became more recognizably European.[7] In discussing these marriages, Van Kirk portrays the cultural complexities of the fur trade, and how ideas of race and gender interacted to shape men’s treatment and opinions of their wives and children. Van Kirk’s monograph follows a narrative in which white fur-trading men engaged first with First Nations women, then mixed women, then brought white women into the backcountry as their brides. Her final chapter portrays the complex interactions between women of varying backgrounds in the fur trade, when First Nations women lost their status as wives and were instead labeled as prostitutes on the basis of their supposedly promiscuous bloodlines.[8]

Many Tender Ties has some of the shortcomings one might expect from an early work that steps outside the comfort zone of her peers. She generally relies on white men’s voices to craft a narrative about Aboriginal women, for example, when there are no sources left by First Nations women.[9] This has the consequence of occasionally reiterating stereotypes of drudgery that historians are now more inclined to question and refute.[10] Today, a historian might have used oral histories or a more innovative approach to examining fur trade records in order to pull out First Nations women’s voices. Van Kirk finds their roles and experiences, but the women themselves still remain shadowy. What this text also understandably lacks is a consideration of the nuances of sex and gender; coming before Butler and Foucault’s work on this thread, Van Kirk’s scholarship is particularly pioneering. According to Franca Iacovetta, Van Kirk “had not committed to any particular theoretical paradigm other than a feminist understanding that women had to be there, somewhere.”[11] Jennifer Brown argues that this lack of engagement with theory has enabled Van Kirk’s work to become a classic.[12]

Brownlie and Korinek’s recent collection presents a multi-vocal response to Van Kirk’s work, considering her legacy as a historian and the scholarly impact of her work, in particular Many Tender Ties. Brownlie and Korinek argue that considering women’s lives allows historians to take a more integrated approach to history.[13] In the case of Many Tender Ties, they argue that Van Kirk illustrates how Western Canada becomes an active place, not merely synonymous with the fur trade or a site for the extraction of staples.[14] Elizabeth Jameson considers Van Kirk’s influence on American historians, arguing that Van Kirk’s “narrative disrupted a mythic West that had marginalized women and people of colour” and instead situated women at the centre of Innis’s staples thesis.[15] Kathryn McPherson’s consideration of domesticity in the contact zone of the prairie west illustrates how settler women’s accounts of their interactions with First Nations women situated themselves as “authentic” pioneers, emphasizing their gendered and racialized claims to domesticity and sexual respectability underscoring the significance of relying on settler women’s accounts of native-newcomer relations that blur Aboriginal women’s motivations in these interactions.[16]

In her chapter, Jarvis Brownlie offers first nations perspectives on race, showing that discourses are not solely the property of settlers. Instead, there was a two-way interchange, in which images of “Indians” also discursively produced whites, unifying disparate settlers in a racial dichotomy.[17] Brownlie argues that settler newspaper narratives emphasized difference and disconnection, in contrast with Indigenous writings that suggested connection and continuity, focusing on a potential of solidarity, particularly among men.[18] To me, her most compelling suggestion was that discourses and representations that located Indigenous peoples in “anachronistic time” outside of historical processes linked Indigenous peoples with death.[19] Victoria Freeman places issues such as intermarriage in international context, discussing how ideas of race and gender informed discourses of miscegenation. For example, the assumption that Indigenous peoples were dying races made miscegenation less of a threat to settler society, as it would supposedly be a temporary concern.[20] In certain colonial contexts, extramarital interracial sex could be less concerning to colonial authorities, as it served as a potential means of assimilation and a necessary outlet for white men in the absence of white women.[21]

Ann Laura Stoler offers another collection, Haunted by Empire, which draws on gendered themes of colonialism by considering affect and intimacies in the United States and its empire. Her opening essay, to which the subsequent chapters respond, extends Van Kirk’s work and situates it more theoretically. In “Tense and Tender Ties,” Stoler brings together historiographies of postcolonial studies and North American history to consider role of intimate domains, resisting scholarship that sees American history as exceptional.[22] Drawing on an idea she pulls from Albert Hurtado, Stoler discusses the “intimate frontiers of empire,” a “social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between colonizer and colonized could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule.”[23] According to Stoler, “tender ties”—a phrase she borrows from Van Kirk—are generated by Foucault’s “dense transfer points” of power and are a product of the sexualization and racialization of imperial social policies, which carefully distributed affect.[24] Combining Foucault’s “dense transfer points” and Van Kirk’s “tender ties” gives theoretical companionship to Van Kirk’s work. Although it is perhaps troublesome that Stoler uses a quotation from a primary source and applies it as a broader concept of intimacy, this term allows Stoler an extensive analysis of intimate ties in colonial contexts.

Following Stoler’s introductory essays, the remainder of the collection is a response to the idea of “tense and tender ties,” showing how intimacy and affective bonds are critical in imperial and colonial contexts. Using “intimacy” to refer to emotional as well as sexual intimacy, the subsequent chapters show how intimacies were regulated according to race and gender. I will elaborate on some of the most compelling. Nayan Shah expands on these multiple meanings of intimacy, arguing that a dual meaning of sexual and familiar relations, or innermost nature and character “calibrate” legal definitions of self-possession and ownership of property. As such, the management of the intimate was a process of bolstering norms and scrutinizing deviancy.[25]

From a Canadian perspective, it is troublesome that there is so little Canadian content in a collection that labels itself as “North American”; this collection is more accurately an exploration of the United States and its empire. Nonetheless, Stoler provides critical insights into American imperialism. Situating the United States as an imperial power, Stoler argues that “interventions in the microenvironments of both subjugated and colonizing populations” enabled the social construction of difference in colonial environments; empire was thus present in both public and private, or intimate, spaces.[26] Notably, racialized people also had the agency to intervene: Damon Salesa considers the idea of “strategic intimacy” in her analysis of Samoan half-caste people, described as an embodiment of intersections that show the connections between the intimate and the strategic.[27]

The chapters presented in this collection are diverse in their focus and methodology. Lisa Lowes focuses on Chinese labourers, arguing that their obscurity enabled modern humanism and racialized divisions of labour. She posits that there is a gap in historical knowledge concerning the intercontinental intersections of intimacies.[28] Gwenn Miller’s essay shows the key role of Aleut and Alutiiq women as mediators in the Russian expansion in to Alaska during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Despite the paucity of written records, Miller argues that historians can see evidence of proximity from material artifacts.[29] This evidence of everyday life activities “encompass both violence and dependence; the tension between the two is part and parcel of colonial ties.”[30] Shannon Lee Dawdy’s close textual analysis of a slave-owner’s how-to manual suggests that we consider the “domain of the intimate” as a global space in circuits of knowledge production.[31]

Collectively, these chapters suggest an extremely broad definition of intimacy. At times, this definition may be too broad, or too contradictory, to be useful. There is tension between scholars in how “intimacy” is defined. In some cases, this is problematic, such as in Laura Wexler’s analysis of Kate Chopin’s experiences of domestic violence. Wexler argues that other scholars position intimacy as equivalent to sexuality and thus genital penetration, and calls for scholarship going beyond this narrow vision of white male violence.[32] This is troubling, as scholars in this collection had already employed a more plural and nuanced concept of intimacy, so that Wexler was essentially arguing against a straw man. Nonetheless, this is evidence of a complex and intersecting conversation between historians on what is, at this point, a fairly novel thread of analysis.

Three concluding chapters cement the significance of this collection. Linda Gordon argues that historians need to revive the concept of “internal colonialism” and include within it a gender analysis.[33] She stresses the need for an integration of gender with all facets of history, as women and gender are key to state and colonial power.[34] Historians can broaden their understanding of the meanings of accommodation and resistance, she suggests, by studying the intimate.[35] Catherine Hall’s commentary resituates this collection’s contributions as an extension of Van Kirk’s work, suggesting that readers consider Van Kirk’s scholarship through a lens of affect; the control of Aboriginal women’s love, care and sex, she argues, shows the importance of affect to colonial rule.[36] Finally, Nancy Cott’s afterword stresses the need to consider intimacies in analyses of governing strategies.[37]

According to Mary Louise Pratt in her article “Arts of the Contact Zone,” contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” They are, she argues, a useful concept for reconsidering models of community.[38] Pratt uses this concept to analyze phenomena such as autoethnography and transculturation as products of an uneven relationship. For Pratt, contact zones are places of chaos, anomaly, and heterogeneity.[39] Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s work, she notes that contact can occur between imagined entities, rather than stable and concrete communities.[40]

Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale add a gendered dimension to Pratt’s concept in their edited collection, appropriately entitled Contact Zones, in which chapters consider relationships between settler and Aboriginal women in Canada. The dozen essays in this volume firmly position urban streets, missions, legal systems, and cultural forms as contact zones; what is unclear is whether these spaces formed one cohesive, interlinked contact zone, or many discrete zones. Certainly, the chapters weave together diverse theoretical paths to a contact zone and successfully position the contact zone as a gendered colonial space. The purpose of the collection is most clearly articulated by Adele Perry, who states, “gendered encounters in British Columbia were…complicated interactions that cannot be disaggregated from the asymmetrical power relations upon which Europe’s colonizing project was premised, nourished, and maintained.”[41]

The arrangement and meanings attached to physical space were an important element of contact zones. According to Jean Barman, the streets of colonial Victoria were significant as a location that signified Aboriginal women as sex workers – newcomer men assumed that women claiming or taking up space were sexually available.[42] This labeling of women as prostitutes was a way of constraining their agency.[43] Jarvis Brownlie further highlights this extra surveillance placed upon Aboriginal women’s sexuality, shown in the correspondence of Indian Agents who assumed their right to regulate Aboriginal women’s sexuality and gender expression, and exercised this regulation by controlling access to treaty payments, relief, and the women’s own children.[44] Sarah Carter shows how this regulation actually transgressed Canadian laws, as withholding treaty payments was not legal, but a wide interpretation of the Indian Act.[45] Age adds another layer of complexity to Brownlie’s analysis; older women were of economic concern to these Indian agents, rather than a moral or sexual problem. Agents took a paternalistic tone of responsibility towards older women, emphasizing a need to ensure their welfare.[46] Adele Perry highlights the intersection of gendered and racialized bodies with geographical spaces, arguing that a key colonial concern was reducing the mobility of First Nations people, creating permanence in order to civilized populations.[47] Women’s labour was an important component of this intersection, as an important capitalist commodity that gave women a ‘dangerous’ degree of independence.[48]

Contact Zones also shows the doors opened by Van Kirk’s scholarship, in Sherry Farrell Racette’s analysis of Métis women’s sewing and artistic production. Farrell Racette draws upon oral history to argue that Métis women’s sewing was integral to fur trade posts, enabling economic and physical survival in a subarctic climate.[49] More critically, however, she considers the symbolic power of clothing in giving women power by dressing men, “[inscribing] their voices on the canvas of the male body.”[50] This fashioning of bodies was a two-way process; Myra Rutherdale situates clothing as a symbol of missionary work, as Aboriginal women adopted or resisted Western dress.[51] One perhaps unusual element of Contact Zones is its significant engagement with male theorists. Editors Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale point out that this shows how Foucault and Derrida form a good deal of “the scaffolding for much feminist thinking on the body.”[52] This reliance is not unique to Contact Zones; despite the utility of Foucault and Derrida, it is perhaps surprising that theories by feminist anti-racist scholars have not figured more prominently in these collections.

In her frequently cited work, Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock links colonialism with the conquest of colonized women’s sexuality and labour, and explores what she refers to as a “dangerous and contradictory liaison” of dyads such as money and sexuality, violence and desire, and labour and resistance.[53] She highlights a need for an integrated analysis of the “intimate, reciprocal, and contradictory relations” between gender, race, and class, arguing, “an elaborate analogy between race and gender became…an organizing trope for other social forms” including, for example, the cult of domesticity.[54] In colonial contexts where experiences, particularly those of violence, were not written, McClintock extends the idea of discourse beyond its traditional textual application to cover colonial actions as well.[55] Considering gender and race, McClintock interrogates whiteness and masculinity, rather than strictly focusing on the experiences of marginalized races.[56] Given the ongoing colonial marginalization of women of colour, McClintock rejects ideas such as “postcolonialism” and complicates notions of agency, calling for “a more diverse politics of agency, involving the dense web of relations between coercion, negotiation, complicity, refusal, dissembling, mimicry, compromise, affiliation, and revolt.”[57]

In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, Jacqueline Jones stresses the position of black women as mothers.[58] This is a perspective that is muted in analyses of Aboriginal Canadian women considered in this paper – most of the other historians I have considered here focus on women’s roles as wives. Women’s roles as mothers worked in relation to their roles in the marketplace as paid or slave labour that reinforced their subordinate status as black and as women.[59] Jones’s focus on women’s agency rather than victimization appears to be a trend in the study of women’s history during the 1980s. In this case, black women’s agency was apparent in the extent of care that they applied to their work in different contexts.[60] Jones considers how black women’s labour was critical to industrial development, by providing raw materials such as cotton, and by freeing white women from daily domestic tasks so that they could shop, work outside the home in paid labour or in social welfare activities; while black women played an important role in development, they lacked social power, having only informal community authority rather than control over their labour and production.[61] She illustrates continuities and changes in black women’s roles and experiences prior to, through, and following the civil war, then through the late nineteenth until the late twentieth century, highlighting the commonalities and diversity of black women.[62]

Finally, Kay Anderson’s Vancouver's Chinatown is a pioneering work that demonstrates race as socially constructed. While Anderson’s emphasis is on racial discourse, she shows how gendered discourse interweaves with the racialization of Chinese people and spaces. Chinatown was a space for the application and reproduction of white ideas about the Chinese, showing the geographical underpinnings of racialization (and the racial underpinnings of geography?), and how these constructions can be resilient as well as mutable.[63] As the Chinese community was, for some time, largely male, the predominant construction of a Chinese person was that of “John Chinaman,” a potential threat to white women.[64] Anderson’s work highlights an ongoing thread in these analyses of gender and colonialism, where one can see importance of physical space in the intersection of gender and race in colonial contexts. Within this selection of work, readers can see the utility of concepts such as the contact zone and a broad understanding of affect and intimacy as tools for understanding the complex colonial linkages between race and gender.

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[1] Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 2011), 17, 73.

[2] Ibid., 19, 23, 24.

[3] Ibid., 44.

[4] Ibid., 51.

[5] Ibid., 55, 56, 64.

[6] Ibid., 83-85.

[7] Ibid.,106.

[8] Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 130.

[9] Ibid., 73.

[10] Ibid., 26-27.

[11] Franca Iacovetta, “Silvia Van Kirk: A Feminist Appreciation of Front-Line Work in the Academy,” in Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada, ed. Robin Brownlie and Valerie Korinek (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 40.

[12] Jennifer S.H. Brown, “‘All These Stories About Women’: ‘Many Tender Ties’ and a New Fur Trade History,” in Finding a Way to the Heart, 33.

[13] Brownlie and Korinek, eds., Finding a Way to the Heart, 3.

[14] Ibid., 7, 9.

[15] Elizabeth Jameson, “Ties Across the Border,” in Finding a Way to the Heart, 66, 67.

[16] Kathryn McPherson, “Home Tales: Gender, Domesticity, and Colonialism in the Prairie West, 1870-1900,” in Finding a Way to the Heart, 232-233, 239.

[17] Brownlie, “Others or Brothers?: Competing Settler and Anishinabe Discourses About Race in Upper Canada,” in Finding a Way to the Heart, 171.

[18] Ibid.,173.

[19] Ibid., 180.

[20] Victoria Freeman, “Attitudes Towards ‘Miscegenation’ In Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, 1860-1914,” in Finding a Way to the Heart, 204.

[21] Ibid., 207, 210.

[22] Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, American Encounters/global Interactions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 23, 31.

[23] Ibid., 24.

[24] Ibid., 24-25.

[25] Nayan Shah, “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers,” in Haunted by Empire, 116, 118.

[26] Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire, 1-2.

[27] Damon Salesa, “Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison,” in Haunted by Empire, 72.

[28] Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire, 191, 192.

[29] Miller, Gwenn. “‘The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy’: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784-1821,” in Haunted by Empire, 301.

[30] Ibid., 315.

[31] Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-To Manual from Colonial Louisiana,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, American Encounters/global Interactions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 143.

[32] Laura Wexler, “The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904,” in Haunted by Empire, 275.

[33] Linda Gordon, “Internal Colonialism and Gender,” in Haunted by Empire, 427.

[34] Ibid., 422-423.

[35] Ibid., 443.

[36] Catherine Hall, “Commentary,” in Haunted by Empire, 456, 460.

[37] Nancy F Cott, “Afterword,” in Haunted by Empire, 470.

[38] Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34.

[39] Ibid., 34.

[40] Ibid., 39.

[41] Adele Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge, Colonial Practice, and Indigenous Womanhood: Missions in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, ed. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 109.

[42] Jean Barman, “Aboriginal Women on the Streets of Victoria: Rethinking Transgressive Sexuality during the Colonial Encounter,” in Contact Zones, 205–206.

[43] Ibid., 221.

[44] Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “Intimate Surveillance: Indian Affairs, Colonization, and the Regulation of Aboriginal Women’s Sexuality,” in Contact Zones, 163.

[45] Sarah Carter, “Creating ‘Semi-Widows’ and ‘Supernumerary Wives’: Prohibiting Polygamy in Prairie Canada’s Aboriginal Communities to 1900,” in Contact Zones, 153.

[46] Brownlie, “Intimate Surveillance,” 164.

[47] Perry, “Metropolitan Knowledge,” 113.

[48] Ibid., 123.

[49] Sherry Farrell Racette, “Sewing for a Living: The Commodification of Metis Women’s Artistic Production,” in Contact Zones, 24.

[50] Ibid., 41-42.

[51] Myra Rutherdale, “‘She Was a Ragged Little Thing:’ Missionaries, Embodiment, and Refashioning Aboriginal Womanhood in Northern Canada,” in Contact Zones, 240.

[52] Pickles and Rutherdale, Contact Zones, 3.

[53] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3-4.

[54] McClintock, Imperial Leather, 5, 7.

[55] Ibid., 16.

[56] Ibid., 8.

[57] Ibid., 11-13, 15.

[58] Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 3.

[59] Ibid., 3.

[60] Ibid., 5.

[61] Ibid., 6, 7.

[62] Jones, Labor of Love, 10.

[63] Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980 (Montreal; Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 6-7.

[64] Ibid., 71, 98.