Carrying the Burden of Peace

Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story

Sam McKegney

• Publisher: University of Regina Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780889777934
• eBook ISBN: 9780889777972
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honour song—one that celebrates rather than pathologizes; one that seeks diversity and strength; one that overturns heteropatriarchy without centering settler colonialism? Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities even be creative, inclusive, erotic?
 
Carrying the Burden of Peace   answers affirmatively. Countering the perception that “masculinity” has been so contaminated as to be irredeemable, the book explores Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism.
 
Sam McKegney’s argument is simple: if we understand that masculinity pertains to maleness, and that there are those within Indigenous families, communities and nations who identify as male, then the concession that masculinity concerns only negative characteristics bears stark consequences.
 
It would mean that the resources available to affirm those subjectivities will be constrained, and perhaps even contaminated by shame. Indigenous masculinities are more than what settler colonialism has told us. To deny the beauty, vulnerability, and grace that can be expressed and experienced as masculinity is to concede to settler colonialism’s limiting vision of the world; it is to eschew the creativity that is among our greatest strengths.
 
Carrying the Burden of Peace weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominative Indigenous masculinities. It is from here that a more balanced world may be pursued.
 

1. Indigenous Masculinities and Story

And I know I may be really good, but I can’t teach my son to be a man because there’s things that I don’t know and never will know and choose not to know because it’s not my responsibility.

The unfortunate thing is that most men in our community don’t know those things either. . . . —janice hill kanonhsyonne (“Where Are the Men?” 17)

How can you forget everything and be a man? —daniel david moses (Almighty Voice and His Wife 21)

Of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island, Mi’kmaq activist Sakej Ward declares that “We are a warrior race.” However, according to Ward, the colonial process through which European peoples have come to dominate much of North America has obscured this truth, encouraging many Indigenous Peoples to deny who they are and mistakenly “think of themselves as colonized subjects of Canada.” “We try to bring back roles and responsibilities,” Ward laments, “but we always fail to bring back the traditional role that encompasses half of our people: the male population” (qtd. in Alfred, Wasáse 67). Settler colonialism is a project of acquisition—fundamentally and always about land. Colonization has displaced hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people from sacred landscapes inhabited by their nations for millennia; at the same time, colonial policies and practices have worked to alienate many from tribal-specific roles and responsibilities. This double removal—from physical landscapes and from senses of social cohesion and purpose—can be understood as settler colonialism’s deterritorializing imperative. In order to transform ecosystemic networks of meaning into exploitable resources, settler colonialism works to deanimate lands, waters, and skies by targeting for eradication the dynamic bonds of reciprocal relations (experienced as kinship) that obtain among Indigenous Peoples and their territories. The concept of territoriality provides a lexicon through which to register the land- and place-based dimensions of what I referred to in the introduction to this volume as integrity: the pursuit of “meaningful way[s] to live in the world” that are “consistent with [one’s] most intimate realities” (Simpson, As We 120). Processes of integration, or territorialization, cultivate meaningful senses of self while animating reciprocal relations that splay outward to human and other-than-human kin and to constellations of animate places. In this sense, territoriality refers to connection, embeddedness, nesting—the integration of the self within a nexus of relations that extends beyond the self and beyond the human. “Deterritorialization,” as I use the term here, refers to the active suffocation of such relations via settler colonialism’s technologies of disorientation, disintegration, and ultimately dispossession. As Claire Colebrook explains, if territorialization refers to the “connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is,” then deterritorialization is the process through which a form of life is coerced to “become what it is not” (xxii). Deterritorialization is a process of coercive unmaking (disappearance) rather than remaking (assimilation).1 In order to naturalize settler belonging through the commoditization of land as property, settler colonialism has sought both to erase Indigenous presence from the land and to transform Indigenous lives into that which they are not, interwoven processes that, as theorists such as Paula Gunn Allen, Lee Maracle, Qwo-Li Driskill, and Mishuana Goeman demonstrate, are always gendered. Settler colonial violence is enacted at the intersections of gender and race, with different (though interconnected) implications for those who identify as men, those who identify as women, and those who identify as both, neither, or otherwise. Cree-Métis gender theorist Kim Anderson has argued that, though “many Native women have been able to continue their traditional responsibilities of creation and nurturing, . . . many men’s responsibilities have been greatly obscured by the colonial process,” which has made it “more difficult for men than it is for women to define their responsibilities in the contemporary setting and reclaim their dignity and sense of purpose” (239)—conditions that inform Ward’s demand to “bring back the traditional role” of Indigenous men and Timothy Sweet’s argument that the “project of ‘recovering the feminine’” in Indigenous communities must “be complemented by an endeavour to recover the masculine” (475).

Carrying the Burden of Peace is not a recovery project. Although I recognize tribal-specific teachings about masculinity to be resources of urgent value, like Ngāti Pūkenga scholar Brendan Hokowhitu,2 I am skeptical of the romanticizing pull of the “traditional” and the fixity that the concept of “traditional masculinities” can imply. I also remain alert to the ways in which traditions can be affected by the centuries-long siege of Indigenous communities by heteropatriarchal Christian assimilation and thereby come to leave certain bodies and identities out. Nor does this book attempt to define Indigenous masculinities. As I argue elsewhere,3 efforts to define Indigenous masculinities are doomed to failure by the diversity of Indigenous nations and communities from sea to sea to sea on the northern part of Turtle Island; by the inevitable evolution of understandings of gender within and among communities over time; by the contextual specificity of how gender is experienced and expressed by groups and individuals; and by the fact that “what comes to be considered masculine within a given context necessarily falls short of capturing the complex experiences of individual[s]” (“Into” 2). Furthermore, academic efforts to identify, theorize, and revitalize tribal-specific understandings of masculinity, in my view, are compromised if not conducted by scholars within the cultures under analysis, those whose “living, primary, feeling citizenships,” to borrow language from Kanien’keha:ka scholar Audra Simpson, enable not only privileged access to knowledge but also the corrective vitality of reciprocal relationships that hold academics to account (175).4

In Carrying the Burden of Peace, I do not endeavour to authenticate Indigenous masculinities or to measure the distance between a mythic pre-contact past and contemporary expressions of identity. I am interested less in what it means to be an “Indigenous man” than in what allows some stories to nourish, validate, and (re)vitalize Indigenous senses of self—thereby fortifying individuals to serve their families, communities, and territories according to their gifts and passions—while others diminish identities and isolate, quarantine, and contain Indigenous freedom as expressed through gender. Which stories nurture individual integrity? Which serve to dis-integrate? Cherokee Nation scholar Daniel Heath Justice contends that there are stories that “give shape, substance, and purpose to our existence and help us understand how to uphold our responsibilities to one another and the rest of creation,” and there are others that “are noxious, bad medicine” and “can’t help but poison both the speaker and the listener” (Why 2). In this chapter, I engage with stories in a variety of registers to consider how the settler colonial imperative of Indigenous deterritorialization is bound to the diminution of Indigenous humanity and further to consider what this means for Indigenous masculinities. I analyze creation stories, political discourses, media representations, and films to think through how settler colonialism has conscripted gender in the enterprise of turning Indigenous people into that which they are not and how Indigenous individuals and communities—and particularly, for the purposes of this project, artists—have refused, asserted their collective humanity, and affirmed commitments to do gender differently.5 Masculinity is a story. “Masculinities” are stories, just as “femininities” are stories, and how they are told, where, when, and by whom influence their meanings and how some of them come to illuminate others while placing still others in shadows, thereby obfuscating alternative horizons of possibility. As settler gender theorist Scott Morgensen argues, “other stories existed before this category, ‘sexuality,’ appeared or became dominant; and they can be retold, or new ones can be invented that leave the boundary-policing power of sexuality behind” (56). In short, the stories that we hold up matter. Justice argues, for example, that “the story of Indigenous deficiency”—which has been rehearsed in North American popular culture ad infinitum to dehumanize Indigenous men (as well as others)—“displaces . . . other stories, the stories of complexity, hope, and possibility. If the simplistic deficiency accounts are all we see, all we hear, and all that’s expected of us, it’s hard to find room for the more nourishing stories of significance” (Why 4). Here I set out to interrogate and understand stories that simulate, diminish, and quarantine Indigenous masculinities in order to open up space for discussions of Indigenous “stories of significance” in the chapters that follow.

I begin this endeavour by sitting with the language of “roles and responsibilities,” not to reify problematic notions of biological determinacy or re-entrench the gender binary, but to consider whether roles and responsibilities offer the potential for non-prescriptive means of social integration that are generative for both individuals and communities. In my conversations with Indigenous artists, activists, academics, and Elders on the subject of Indigenous masculinities, the phrase “roles and responsibilities” came up again and again—at times because of specific questions that I was asking but just as often organically—and it can be found peppered throughout the burgeoning scholarship in Indigenous masculinities studies. However, anxieties persist about the potentially prescriptive nature of roles and responsibilities when understood in strictly gendered terms that might require one to deny aspects of one’s full humanity in order to be recognized, validated, and integrated into the group.6 As such, to be mutually generative for individuals and communities, roles and responsibilities are perhaps best understood as sites of creative negotiation between the needs of networks and the gifts and talents of individuals within them. Justice provides an instructive example from his youth involving hunting with his father: “I’d lean up against a tree with a novel and read, and he was good with that. You know, I had my rifle; I’d know if there was an elk coming, and being part of the hunt was my responsibility. So we adapted; we adapted some of these masculinist pursuits for my nerdy fantasies” (“Fighting” 135). Justice was not forced to conform to particular expectations of masculine identity, yet he recognized and acted upon his own responsibilities to the group’s objectives in ways that enhanced both self-worth and group success: “[S]o it’s a balance: you honour people’s integrity, but you’re also honouring what’s bringing you together” (139). Here, as elsewhere, integrity speaks to the unique traits and desires that allow one to be fully oneself while also hearkening to the sense of shared purpose that fosters integration into a larger community.

Another concern involves the risk of treating roles and responsibilities as themselves identities rather than vehicles through which identities can be developed and expressed. When discussing roles and responsibilities during our interview in Masculindians, Stó:lō writer and theorist Lee Maracle clarified that “it’s not a role. We are that. . . . I’m not a role. I’m a Wolf Clan, backward and forward visionary. That is my relationship to the whole. . . . That’s what’s going to take us from yesterday to tomorrow—this vision. And I keep it. It’s my bundle” (“This” 39). Here Maracle distinguishes between who we are—in her own case, a “backward and forward visionary”—and the behaviours through which such identities become legible. To call one’s identity a role is to diminish the richness and complexity of one’s full humanity and to divert attention from the gifts in one’s bundle toward a utilitarian assessment of duties taken on. “[I]t’s not a role. We are that” reminds us of the limits of the language of roles and responsibilities, particularly when such language can become ossified in highly gendered ways that coerce conformity. In his seminal article “Native Ethics and Rules of Behaviour,” Kanien’keha:ka psychiatrist Clare Brant identifies the ethic of non-interference as “one of the most widely accepted principles of behaviour among Native people,” arguing that “a high degree of respect for every human being’s independence” ultimately discourages “coercion of any kind, be it physical, verbal, or psychological” (535). Within a worldview that values the ethic of non-interference, roles and responsibilities cannot be identities; they are duties, commitments, behaviours, and interactions that constitute a dynamic interface between the gifts of individuals—their “bundles”—and the needs of the larger group, be it the family, the community, or the nation. In this way, the autonomy of the individual acts as a catalyst rather than an impediment to one’s integration into the community. Using Brant’s work, settler legal expert Rupert Ross elaborates that those who develop in a context of ethical non-interference tend to become “‘layered’ onto [the] extended family,” thereby becoming “integral, as opposed to autonomous, parts of it” (22). The danger in contexts in which the ethic of non-interference has been assaulted by settler colonial policies of dispossession and imposed individualism is that roles and responsibilities might cease to function as resources for the organic affirmation of identities and instead become arbiters of one’s ability to conform to preformulated expectations. In such contexts, the responsibility for “carrying the burden of peace,” for example, might become ossified into a static, Westernized notion of “warrior”—saddled with hypermasculine baggage and misaligned with aspirations toward Indigenous futures.

To mitigate the potential for gendered coercion in roles and responsibilities discourse, Anishinaabe scholar Randy Jackson champions two-spirit theory, arguing that

people bring their skills and their gifts to contribute to ...

Table of contents

• Burdens and Bundles: An Introduction
• 1. Indigenous Masculinities and Story
• Land
• and the
• 2. Shame and Deterritorialization
• 3. Journeying Back to the Body
• People
• and
• 4. De(f/v)iant Generosity: Gender and the Gift
• 5. Masculinity and Kinship
• Naked and Dreaming Forward: A Conclusion
• Gratitude
• Acknowledgements
• Works Cited
• Permissions