In Good Relation

History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms

Sarah Nickel, Amanda Fehr, Sarah Nickel, Amanda Fehr

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780887558511
• eBook ISBN: 9780887558528
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the past thirty years, a strong canon of Indigenous feminist literature has addressed how Indigenous women are uniquely and dually affected by colonialism and patriarchy. Indigenous women have long recognized that their intersectional realities were not represented in mainstream feminism, which was principally white, middle-class, and often ignored realities of colonialism. As Indigenous feminist ideals grew, Indigenous women became increasingly multi-vocal, with multiple and oppositional understandings of what constituted Indigenous feminism and whether or not it was a useful concept. Emerging from these dialogues are conversations from a new generation of scholars, activists, artists, and storytellers who accept the usefulness of Indigenous feminism and seek to broaden the concept.

In Good Relation captures this transition and makes sense of Indigenous feminist voices that are not necessarily represented in existing scholarship. There is a need to further Indigenize our understandings of feminism and to take the scholarship beyond a focus on motherhood, life history, or legal status (in Canada) to consider the connections between Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous philosophies, the environment, kinship, violence, and Indigenous Queer Studies. Organized around the notion of "generations, " this collection brings into conversation new voices of Indigenous feminist theory, knowledge, and experience. Taking a broad and critical interpretation of Indigenous feminism, it depicts how an emerging generation of artists, activists, and scholars are envisioning and invigorating the strength and power of Indigenous women.

Part I
Broadening Indigenous Feminisms

The Uninvited
by Jana-Rae Yerxa

Be like the beauty and brightness of the sun

emerge without permission

because fierce is never invited.

Tap on darkness’s shoulder

to say “I am here, it is my turn”

while lighting up the sky.

Us
by Elaine McArthur

In homes, churches

on park benches in cities small towns, on reserves and on the road

we are dirty clothes battling ghosts in the liquor store doorway

with a hand out for your change

Painted faces

high heels mini skirts

a backseat tumble

for a twenty dollar fumble we are in school

reading our way out working everyday praying that sons and

daughters stay out of gangs and out of your car

Beaded pieces adorning our bodies in modest length dress being led by the beat of a drum yet we are living in fear

that we might be the next high cheek boned missing

Chapter 1
Making Matriarchs at Coqualeetza: Stó:lō Women’s Politics and Histories across Generations

Madeline Rose Knickerbocker1

On the morning of 3 May 1976, a group of Stó:lō protestors arrived at Coqualeetza and occupied a two-storey brick building on the site that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) used as overflow housing for their adjacent base in Chilliwack, BC.2 Originally known as Kw’eqwá:líth’á, Coqualeetza is an important Stó:lō cultural site that settlers appropriated in the nineteenth century.3 For decades, Stó:lō people had been pushing for the initiation of a land claims process for return of the site, owned by the federal government and managed by the Department of Public Works. Additionally, as Stó:lō cultural education programs expanded rapidly in the 1970s, Stó:lō educators saw the Coqualeetza site as the obvious place to establish a permanent community space for their work. By 1976, Stó:lō efforts to reclaim the land had become entwined with the potential use of the space for cultural education, and the occupation that began that day was the final escalation of years of activist efforts.

The roughly forty occupiers—Stó:lō and other Indigenous people of all ages—were mainly women; they arrived midmorning with supplies and gear, prepared for an occupation of several days. Their first actions were to gather in a circle and declare that the occupation would be non-violent and drug- and alcohol-free. In response to this peaceful demonstration, soldiers stationed at the nearby CAF base moved onto the site, conducting drills and positioning snipers on nearby buildings. In the early evening, the army, now supported by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), ordered the occupiers to exit or prepare to be removed and arrested. Defying this ultimatum, the occupiers barricaded themselves inside the building and began singing and drumming together, declaring “This is our land!” At 6:30 p.m., soldiers attempted to enter the building by force and were met with resistance from the activists inside, but eventually gained entry after breaking through a glass door. The incursion provoked the departure of some occupiers, while about twenty-three stayed. Armed forces personnel physically removed activists: some were on their feet as flanking soldiers pushed them out; others who refused to walk were forcibly hauled out by officers. The occupation ended as the army segregated the seventeen remaining protestors by gender, ordered them onto army trucks, and drove them down to the police station, under arrest.4

The Coqualeetza occupation is a significant moment in late twentieth-century Stó:lō histories of culture and politics. In this chapter, I focus specifically on what the occupation and the protests leading up to it reveal about the gendered dynamics of Stó:lō politics during the 1970s. While Coqualeetza’s position as a cultural site caught up in a political battle encapsulates the interconnectedness of heritage and sovereignty in Stó:lō politics, employing such a lens in isolation frames the activism at Coqualeetza entirely within the context of Stó:lō–settler conflicts over land and knowledge. Considering the significant number of women involved, their leadership of the occupation, and their role as cultural educators, exploring the gender dynamics at play between Stó:lō people during the occupation is necessary, and reveals a more complex understanding of the protest’s significance. Incorporating gender analysis into Stó:lō-centred narratives of the Coqualeetza occupation still highlights the strength of Stó:lō political agitation against the settler state, while simultaneously affirming the power and necessity of Stó:lō women’s work as cultural curators and political leaders in communities that, to variable extents and because of historical context, were influenced by settler-colonial patriarchy.

This essay has four parts. First, I briefly trace the ways this work relates to academic literature on Indigenous feminism broadly, and Stó:lō women in particular, situating these arguments in relation to that scholarship. From there, I move on to discuss Stó:lō oral traditions relating both to gender roles and to Coqualeetza, showing the long histories of Stó:lō women’s power as political actors and cultural curators at that site specifically. This mirrors what we see in Zoe Todd’s discussion of her great-grandmother’s powerful, if largely unacknowledged, political role in Chapter 9, as well as in Sarah Nickel’s exploration of Indigenous women’s activism through Homemakers’ Clubs and sewing in Chapter 4. This foundation established, I shift to considering both changes and continuities in Stó:lō territorial sovereignty and gender dynamics during the late nineteenth century’s settler-colonial land appropriations and imposition of heteropatriarchy. Finally, I analyze Stó:lō cultural sovereignty in the 1970s, examining the politicization of cultural education work at Coqualeetza in a moment when Stó:lō political leadership was almost exclusively a male occupation, while Stó:lō cultural education was often led by matriarchs and women. Analyzing the Coqualeetza occupation from a gender perspective in this way rejects and corrects the historiographic absence of Stó:lō women from scholarship about their own communities. Moreover, considering Stó:lō women’s cultural and political work in the late twentieth century in relation to the long histories of Stó:lō women’s leadership reveals the intergenerational nature of women’s power—a revelation that has implications for understanding and framing Stó:lō feminist action in the past, present, and future.

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Table of contents

• Introduction by Sarah Nickel
• Part I Broadening Indigenous Feminisms
• The Uninvited by Jana-Rae Yerxa
• Us by Elaine McArthur
• Chapter 1 Making Matriarchs at Coqualeetza: Stó:lō Women’s Politics and Histories across Generations by Madeline Rose Knickerbocker
• Chapter 2 Sámi Feminist Moments: Decolonization and Indigenous Feminism by Astri Dankertsen
• Chapter 3 “It Just Piles On, and Piles On, and Piles On”: Young Indigenous Women and the Colonial Imagination by Tasha Hubbard with Joi T. Arcand, Zoey Roy, Darian Lonechild, and Marie Sanderson
• Chapter 4 “Making an Honest Effort”: Indian Homemakers’ Clubs and Complex Settler Engagements by Sarah Nickel
• Part II Queer and Two-Spirit Identities, and Sexuality
• Chapter 5 Reclaiming Traditional Gender Roles: A Two-Spirit Critique by Kai Pyle
• Chapter 6 Reading Chrystos for Feminisms That Honour Two-Spirit Erotics by Aubrey Jean Hanson
• Chapter 7 Naawenangweyaabeg Coming In: Intersections of Indigenous Sexuality and Spirituality by Chantal Fiola
• Chapter 8 Morning Star, Sun, and Moon Share the Sky: (Re)membering Two-Spirit Identity through Culture-Centred HIV Prevention Curriculum for Indigenous Youth by Ramona Beltrán, Antonia R.G. Alvarez, and Miriam M. Puga
• Part III Multi-Generational Feminisms and Kinship
• Chapter 9 Honouring Our Great-Grandmothers: An Ode to Caroline LaFramboise, Twentieth-Century Métis Matriarch by Zoe Todd
• Chapter 10 on anishinaabe parental kinship with black girl life: twenty-first-century ([de]colonial) turtle island by waaseyaa’sin christine sy with aja sy
• Chapter 11 Toward an Indigenous Relational Aesthetics: Making Native Love, Still by Lindsay Nixon
• Chapter 12 Conversations on Indigenous Feminism by Omeasoo Whāpāsiw and Louise Halfe
• These Are My Daughters by Anina Major
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Contributors