“How well have scholars incorporated critical analyses of gender,
social class, ability, and sexuality in addition to racialization/colonization?
What impact does/would intersectional analyses have on the field of indigenous
histories?”
In a previous
paper, I have argued that research drawing from Indigenous perspectives and
knowledge is the metaphorical equivalent to leaving the cave in Plato’s
allegory, and seeing objects illuminated by light rather than knowing them only
from the shape of their shadows. A similar parallel can be made with
intersectional analyses: where an intersectional analysis is not present, it is
hard to tell what is missing, because it remains shadowed. Engagement with intersectional
analyses is uneven in the scholarship about Indigenous peoples, with some
scholars forming critical analyses of gender, class, sexuality, and ability as
a component of race and colonization. This is not a universal element in the
field, and this paper will thus focus on works where some engagement with
intersections is present, rather than absent. Engaging with intersectionality
illustrates the defaults in both histories and the historiography of Indigenous
people. By default, historians assume Indigenous people to be working-class, or
classless. Women, maternalism, and femininity are presented as gendered, while
men, paternalism, and masculinity are less so. While historians have made great
strides in considering marginalized ends of these spectrums of power, less attention
is still granted to deconstructing identities and representations of people of
privilege. What would a critical analysis of whiteness add to this field, for
instance? Considering the intersections between spheres of power is important,
but insufficient; there is a clear need to speak from the points of
intersections, rather than simply acknowledging their presence.
Collectively, the body of work
I have examined for this field considers intersections of race with class and
gender far more than with ability or sexuality. Ability is most present here
when seen through the lens of health, in representations of illness in
Indigenous communities. Little of this work engages with a critical disability
studies perspective, considering how ideas of ability and disability—which cannot
be equated with health and illness—are socially and culturally constructed.
Analyses of sexuality are limited and dispersed in this body of work; where
present, historians seem particularly inclined to emphasize the colonial
regulation of Indigenous people’s sexuality. This often occurred in conjunction
with age and gender. For example, Margaret Jacobs outlines how many residential
schools and other institutions for Indigenous children distributed menstrual
pads to supervise girls’ sexuality.[1]
As age—chronologically and as a representation, considering discourses of
Indigenous peoples as a “child race”[2]—also
informs the power structures that affected Indigenous peoples, particularly
intersecting as well with ability, it is another facet of intersectionality
that deserves more attention in this scholarship.
Since class is a
racialized concept, there are significant complexities in addressing it in
studies of Indigenous peoples. There are two elements at play here:
representations of wealth and poverty, and the types of work that Indigenous
people undertook. As the default position of Indigenous peoples in
Euro-Canadian and -American representations is one of poverty and unemployment,
it is important that scholars such as John Lutz and Alexandra Harmon have
undertaken work that focuses instead on work and wealth. Class as it is
conceptualized in most historiography is a slippery and Euro-centric
construction, and it is therefore critical to also consider economic systems
such as Indigenous prestige economies. John Lutz undertakes such an analysis,
using studies of the Lekwungen and Tsilhqot’in people to show that unemployment
and welfare dependency is a recent phenomenon and a product of colonialism.[3] Through participation in paid work, Aboriginal
people engaged unwittingly in the displacement of their own economies, forming
through a complex interaction of capitalism and culture what Lutz terms a
“moditional” economy.[4] This economy was not a substitution of a
“traditional” economy with a “modern” or “modified” one, but was a combination
of overlapping economic structures.[5] This could also include welfare payments when wage
work and subsistence activities were insufficient to meet people’s economic
needs.[6]
Lutz’s focus on the
intersection of Indigenous histories and economic histories of British Columbia
shows that wage labour is not a natural system or form of social relations.[7]
It is, instead, an idea that rested on the racialization of Indigenous peoples,
white settlers, and immigrants of colour in the interplay of social and
economic systems. European class relations were not automatically enshrined in
British Columbia. This is evident in Lutz’s analysis of Lekwungen perceptions
of Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) employees in Victoria: due to the HBC’s treatment
of its workers, the Lekwungen believed that the HBC men were slaves, even
asking to purchase some.[8]
“Work” in Euro-centric anthropological conceptualizations was associated with
whiteness in a way that positioned “Indian” and “work” as mutually exclusive.[9]
This was part of a construction that presented Aboriginal people as lazy
because their economies emphasized a different
form of work, thus discounting the work that Aboriginal people performed for
their physical and spiritual survival because it was not part of a wage labour
system.[10]
Indeed, Lekwungen engagement with the capitalist economy through wage labour
was not reflective of a preference for it; instead, it was a means of
bolstering their own prestige-based economy, enabling them to purchase goods to
use in potlatches using their wages.[11]
Paige Raibmon similarly notes that work was not a simple affair of labour-force
participation or based on a quest for wages. Aboriginal people who travelled from
elsewhere on the Pacific coast to Puget Sound hops fields for the seasonal
harvest did so for multiple reasons, including building their identity and
community. Picking hops was thus a political and cultural migration as well as
an economic one.[12]
Class, as well as being
culturally contingent, was shaped by the state, reflecting racialized views of administrative
bodies such as the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA). Inadequate relief
administered to Indigenous communities compared to settlers during the 1930s
Depression, for instance, rested on a DIA assumption that Aboriginal people
would still draw from subsistence activities. This was a racialized expectation
that was incongruent with the state limiting access to the natural resources
upon which a subsistence economy depended.[13]
In shaping access to capitalist, subsistence, prestige, and welfare economies,
the state turned Aboriginal people into a “reserve army of the unemployed” for
the British Columbia capitalist economy.[14]
The rhetoric surrounding relief for Aboriginal peoples intersected with ideas
about gender and ability as well as race. In Department of Indian Affairs
definitions, the “Indian” was gendered male. Family relief was not an option
for Aboriginal men, as the ability to economically support a family without use
of a welfare economy was a prerequisite for a state-sanctioned marriage.[15]
Similarly, “able-bodied Indians” were ineligible for relief, even if work was
scarce.[16]
It is important to remember, however, that “relief” was also a culturally
contingent concept: including welfare in the moditional economy was not a
source of stigma for Aboriginal communities who preferred to prioritize a
prestige economy, as it was parallel to taking gifts from their leaders.[17]
Lutz notes that culturally divergent understandings and meanings of wealth and
relief indicate a need to decentre liberal-capitalist notions of the economy.[18]
Raibmon and Harmon also
illustrate the racialization of employment and poverty, and how work and wealth
could destabilize or shape stereotyped representations of Indigenous people.
Raibmon’s analysis of Aboriginal hops pickers notes how discourses about
authenticity and the trope of “vanishing Indians” led sightseers to view hops
pickers as a spectacle of the natural world, rather than as wage labourers at
work.[19]
Harmon’s study of wealth in American Indian communities shows that wealth and
poverty are complex racialized discourses, with the media assumption linking
poverty to authentic “Indianness” and thus obscuring a history of—sometimes,
conspicuous—wealth.[20]
British colonists’ ideas of American Indians as primitive savages were shaped
in part by their lack of permanent property. The colonists’ representation of
Indians as economically careless people who used land for eating, sleeping, and
hunting rather than “working” enabled them to justify appropriating land in the
Chesapeake Bay for colonial settlement.[21]
The interplay of wealth and power gave settler colonists access and control
over Indian resources as they conflated economic culture with racial identity.[22]
This conflation, and the racialization of wealth and the power that it held,
was particularly apparent in cases where American Indian individuals or
communities rapidly amassed wealth. In such situations, white observers were
less concerned with Indians having amassed personal fortunes; their concern,
instead, was that Indians could use this wealth for political advantage.[23]
Of course, this concern ignored how white Americans also used wealth for
political purposes, showing that ideas of race and wealth interplayed in
complex and often contradictory ways. In some cases, the American public
portrayed wealthy members of Indian tribes as fundamentally white, rather than
Indian, to deny the contradiction that rich Indians implied.[24]
Where entire communities became rapidly wealthy and could thus not be
re-racialized as white, the American public nonetheless saw Indian wealth as
fundamentally different from non-Indian wealth. Wealth such as that amassed by
the Osages after their discovery of oil did not necessarily lead to an
impression of Indians as civilized, but could instead highlight the assumptions
that linked Indian culture with poverty in the American imagination. Americans
saw the Osages as lucky due to not having had to work for their wealth, and
ignored white American spending and work habits to portray the Osages as
wasteful and idle.[25]
As Lutz, Harmon, and Raibmon’s analyses show, scholarship that probes the
intersection of race and class can add not only to conceptualizations of
Indigenous histories, but also to understandings of class, showing it as a
racialized and unstable framework.
As Lina Sunseri
argues, drawing from Homi Bhabba and Stuart Hall, scholars must consider that
Indigenous identities shift in the process of colonization, shaped by histories
of “exclusion, marginalization, dispossession, and loss of control produced by
colonial discourses and institutions” such as the Indian Act.[26] Probing the intersection of indigeneity and gender
shows how masculinity and femininity are mutable performances and metaphors,
and how Indigenous lives have been molded, in part, by colonial models of
gender and the power differentials that they ascribe. It is important to note
that most of the literature conceives of gender in largely binary terms, while
still acknowledging that this is a culturally specific construction. Gunlög Fur
considers the metaphorical meanings of gender as they underpinned Delaware and
Iroquois identities and interactions. Through the eighteenth century, the
Delaware metaphorically conceptualized themselves, collectively, as “women” in
their national identity. Gender for them was a “process of thought and belief”
rather than a static role.[27] The gendered language with which Delaware people
framed themselves and their diplomatic relationships illustrates how language
can be illustrative of worldviews underpinned by both gender and race.[28] In the Delaware Nation, to be perceived as a woman
was honourable rather than derogatory, given women’s authority in peacemaking.[29] When the Delaware positioned themselves as women
and their Iroquois adversaries as men, they were not implying a hierarchy or
conceding defeat to the Iroquois, but noting the association of men with war
and women with peacemaking and diplomacy.[30] Critically, this metaphor was not universally
empowering for Delaware women, as men could become ceremonial “women” and rhetoric
about women came to stand in for actual female peacemakers. Delaware women lost
agency as the peacemaking role shifted from feminine to masculine.[31]
The intersection of gender and
race in native-newcomer relationships in the Great Lakes area shows how
configurations of gender systems shifted, making “contact” a vital point for
considering gender relations and colonial hegemony. As Gail MacLeitch argues,
“gender remained a contested arena in which competing ideas about the division
of labor, allocation of power, and nature of hierarchy collided.”[32]
In her study of the Iroquois, MacLeitch engages in one of the few
considerations of the differential racialization of masculinity in this body of
work. She notes that British military authorities expressed concern over the
manliness of Iroquois guerrilla styles of warfare, as guerrilla tactics and
armies were more egalitarian and less hierarchical than the British army and
the style of masculinity that it demanded.[33]
Importantly, the “gender frontier” in native-newcomer relations was not one of
automatic colonial imposition; instead, two systems of gender overlapped, with
changes occurring on both sides.[34]
MacLeitch emphasizes that during the 1740s and 1750s, a “high degree of mutual
accommodation and cultural synthesis” took place, in which colonial men had to
reconcile with Iroquois gender norms while also attempting to shape them.[35]
Ultimately, she concludes that while the Iroquois did not experience a profound
break in their gendered ontology, “entanglements within a British imperial
orbit generated new pressures and constraints on [the Iroquois] gendered way of
being.”[36]
Sunseri’s work shows the long-term
manifestations of these pressures and constraints, illustrating the need for a
women-centered, intersectional perspective.[37]
Referring to the “nested identity” of Oneida women, and the “complexes and
paradoxes” embedded in their identities and experiences.[38]
Sunseri notes that the culturally specific gendered issues tied to colonialism
make feminist theory useful but insufficient for conceptualizing the discourses
that inform nationalisms.[39]
For instance, “mothering the nation,” a common rhetoric in Euro-centric
feminisms, has a different meaning in Oneida culture, where “mothering” is a
broader role and experience than raising children and instead evokes women’s
centrality in the past and present of the Oneida nation.[40]
In contemporary contexts, Sunseri highlights the political importance of
intersectionality, something that is often not recognized for First Nations
women due to the denial of women’s Indian status.[41]
Reclaiming and emphasizing an intersectional identity, for Oneida women, is
thus an important part of decolonization.
Intersectional
analysis in scholarship about Indigenous peoples is a matter of academic and
political importance; indeed, I believe that academics and activism cannot, and
should not, be divorced. Intersectionality does, however, produce methodological
challenges as it unwraps multiple layers of privilege and oppression. As
history is so often written from sites of power, or depends on the work of
people with privilege to uncover other perspectives, it can be difficult to see
the perspectives of people who are marginalized from multiple forces of oppression.
For instance, Fur’s research draws extensively from the diary of a male
Moravian missionary, and her sources therefore show little of Indigenous
women’s lives and roles outside their interactions with Christians.[42] She acknowledges this as a caveat in her work,
which she describes as “a story of pseudonyms.”[43] Sunseri suggests resolving this, to the extent
possible, by drawing on sources produced by Indigenous people, shifting the
balance of research towards oral sources, to address the concern that textual
primary sources by white, male authors generalize the male experience to
describe that of all Indigenous people, and omit women’s voices. Where some
scholars compare oral and written sources to check the accuracy of oral sources
against that of written ones, Sunseri suggests that this triangulation ought to
occur in the opposite direction, giving Indigenous people, and Indigenous women
in particular, the authority to determine what is accurate in their history.[44] This, perhaps, is a path out of the cave, to
an academic world where light can be refracted from many angles.
Works
Cited
Fur, Günlog. A
Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Harmon,
Alexandra. Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American
History. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Jacobs, Margaret
D. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the
Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Lutz, John
Sutton. Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations. Vancouver:
UBC Press, 2008.
MacLeitch, Gail
D. Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers
of Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Raibmon, Paige. Authentic
Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.
Sunseri, Lina. Being
Again of One Mind: Oneida Women and the Struggle for Decolonization.
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.
[1]
Margaret D Jacobs, White
Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of
Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 312.
[2]
Jacobs, 112.
[3]
John Sutton Lutz, Makúk:
A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 4.
[4]
Lutz, 8, 22. It is unclear if “moditional" is a portmanteau of “modified”
with “traditional” or “modern” with “traditional. Lutz uses it as “modern” in
the introduction, but “modified” on page 169, without specifying if this
ambiguity is intentional. Sunseri’s consideration of tradition makes Lutz’s
term less conceptually relevant, as she argues that “tradition” can also
encompass elements created through interactions with and resistance to
Euro-Canadian culture, thus encompassing the modifications that Lutz takes into
account. See Lina
Sunseri, Being Again of One Mind: Oneida Women and the Struggle for
Decolonization (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 15.
[5]
Lutz, 23.
[6]
Lutz, 159.
[7]
Lutz, 9.
[8]
Lutz, 77.
[9]
Lutz, 31.
[10]
Lutz, 34-35, 47.
[11]
Lutz, 82-83.
[12]
Paige Raibmon, Authentic
Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 76, 108.
[13]
Lutz, 262-263.
[14]
Lutz, 287.
[15]
Lutz, 264.
[16]
Lutz, 265.
[17]
Lutz, 269-270.
[18]
Lutz, 297, 303.
[19]
Raibmon, 75, 198.
[20]
Alexandra Harmon, Rich
Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3.
[21]
Harmon, 52-53.
[22]
Harmon, 274, 277.
[23]
Harmon, 91.
[24]
Harmon, 94.
[25]
Harmon, 176-181.
[26]
Sunseri, 29.
[27]
Günlog Fur, A Nation
of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 2.
[28]
Fur, 188.
[29]
Fur, 5, 171.
[30]
Fur, 162, 166, 196.
[31]
Fur, 208, 210.
[32]
Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial
Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 114.
[33]
MacLeitch, 117.
[34]
MacLeitch, 6-7.
[35]
MacLeitch, 133.
[36]
MacLeitch, 145.
[37]
Sunseri, 14.
[38]
Sunseri, 37, 99.
[39]
Sunseri, 43.
[40]
Sunseri, 172.
[41]
Sunseri, 165.
[42]
MacLeitch, 58-59, 99.
[43]
MacLeitch, 52.
[44]
Sunseri, 45-47.
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