Indigenous Women and Work

From Labor to Activism

Carol Williams

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780252078682, 9780252037153
• eBook ISBN: 9780252094262
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

The essays in Indigenous Women and Work create a transnational and comparative dialogue on the history of the productive and reproductive lives and circumstances of Indigenous women from the late nineteenth century to the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Canada. Surveying the spectrum of Indigenous women's lives and circumstances as workers, both waged and unwaged, the contributors offer varied perspectives on the ways women's work has contributed to the survival of communities in the face of ongoing tensions between assimilation and colonization. They also interpret how individual nations have conceived of Indigenous women as workers and, in turn, convert these assumptions and definitions into policy and practice. The essays address the intersection of Indigenous, women's, and labor history, but will also be useful to contemporary policy makers, tribal activists, and Native American women's advocacy associations.

 

Contributors are Tracey Banivanua Mar, Marlene Brant Castellano, Cathleen D. Cahill, Brenda J. Child, Sherry Farrell Racette, Chris Friday, Aroha Harris, Faye HeavyShield, Heather A. Howard, Margaret D. Jacobs, Alice Littlefield, Cybèle Locke, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Kathy M'Closkey, Colleen O'Neill, Beth H. Piatote, Susan Roy, Lynette Russell, Joan Sangster, Ruth Taylor, and Carol Williams.

CHAPTER 1

Aboriginal Women and Work across the 49th Parallel

Historical Antecedents and New Challenges

Joan Sangster

Interpretations of Aboriginal women’s work have shifted over time, but they have been absolutely central to First Nations women’s experiences of colonialism. Yet, in both women’s history and Aboriginal history, there has been a “mystification” of Indigenous women’s labor, because it was often defined as nonproductive or marginal within capitalist economies; wage work was particularly neglected (Littlefield and Knack 1999: 4). Yet, by studying women’s labor in its multiple forms (paid, unpaid, voluntary, ceremonial, commodity production), and in multiple contexts (bush, urban, reserve or reservation), we can gain immense insight into how colonialism was structured, experienced, negotiated, and resisted by women at the level of daily life. By perusing past academic writing on Aboriginal women and work, this paper explores some of the intellectual, political, and social influences that have shaped understandings of Aboriginal women’s labor in Canada and the United States, asking what insights we have gained, what questions we need to answer, and what contradictions we still face in our research.¹ Arguably, we need a dialogue that crosses disciplines and theoretical approaches, with perspectives and traditions from Aboriginal history, feminist theory, and labor studies informing and challenging each other. There are transnational trends and shared perspectives in Aboriginal women’s history that cross the 49th parallel; however, we also need to identify how and why national and regional histories and interpretations diverge. Still, one transnational commonality highlighted in this paper is the close connection between politics and research, between the present and the past: the questions posed by scholars have been stimulated and inspired by Aboriginal thought and organizing, and Aboriginal politics have benefited from scholarly research. Although research may still be difficult and contested terrain in Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations (Smith 1999; Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997), there is hope that scholarly dialogue might contribute productively to decolonization.

Perspectives on Aboriginal Work in the Post–World War II Period, 1950–2000

In comparison to historians, anthropologists have a more extensive (if contentious) history of studying Aboriginal economies, families, and gender relations: when Ruth Landes’s 1938 monograph, Ojibway Woman appeared, for instance, there was nothing comparable in history. Even still, feminist anthropologists have been intensely critical of the masculinist perspectives that shaped the discipline of anthropology, the way in which male researchers filtered their interpretations through their own ideas and experiences as well as through male informants, paying less attention to women and gendered power relations within Aboriginal nations (Fiske and Sleeper 1998). In the immediate post–World War II period, anthropologists across Canada and the United States had substantial influence as accepted experts on Native peoples and often acted as advisors to the state on policy (Kulchyski 1993). The dominant paradigms of the time stressed culture, cultural difference, and acculturation, with researchers primarily asking whether and how Native peoples would integrate into the dominant norms of white society. Anthropologist Harry Hawthorn’s extensive study for the Canadian government, for example, opened by rejecting the “assimilation” of “Indians” but his prognosis for labor nonetheless saw integration into the industrial capitalist economy as the best path for Aboriginal economic development. American studies of acculturation also assumed that Native Indians should be free to maintain their identity, but that increasing economic integration was inevitable, save for the “conservative nuclei” of the population clinging to the past (Vogt 1957: 137). Many social scientists nonetheless feared that Native culture was inherently inhospitable to industrial work discipline and the acquisitive capitalist values of accumulation, thus making acculturation to “modern” wage labor difficult, a view that mirrored modernization theories of the time applied to the Third World.

Women’s work was seldom analyzed seriously and critically, though unstated assumptions about gender differences nonetheless pervaded the writing of many social scientists. Hawthorn, for example, assumed a male breadwinner family as the ideal for Native peoples, despite ample evidence that Aboriginal communities were characterized by multioccupational, multiearner families. Even economists who had insights about the colonial economies characterizing Native communities tended to see women’s work as ancillary rather than central to the family economy. The impact of these gendered assumptions on policy development was significant. In the 1950s, federal programs developed on both sides of the border to draw Native peoples away from “dying” reserves/reservations and into urban wage labor promoted a rather rigid gender division of labor, with women trained for service, or at best white-collar positions, while men were ideally to be miners and welders (McCallum 2008; MacKay 1987; Sangster 2007). Governments also acted on these assumptions when they acted as labor contractors, “placing out” girls from residential/boarding schools in domestic jobs, and boys in agricultural work.

The shifts that took place in academic thinking in the late 1960s and through the 1970s should not be underestimated: culture as a totalizing explanation for economic marginalization was supplanted by questions of global capitalism, colonialism, inequality, underdevelopment, and dependence. This “left turn” in scholarship was influenced by the emergence of global anticolonial movements, though new perspectives may also have been percolating below the surface within the research community in the postwar period (Ray 2003). By taking a structural view of colonial exploitation and dispossession, they hoped to negate the “blame the victim” approach (Loxley 1981: 154), rejecting cultural analyses that posited “Native values” as the impediment to the inevitable progress of capitalist development. This ideological shift was no doubt encouraged by Aboriginal political organizing, as Red Power and New Left activists increasingly described Native American lives in terms of conquest, destruction, and imperialism. Organizing on both sides of the 49th parallel assumed far more militant forms that also involved transnational protests, cooperation, and the provision of refuge for political activists. State policy reflected this turn to militancy, as governments nervously sought ways to incorporate Aboriginal youth into community-based development projects that were more benign than blockades and protests (Pineault 2011).

If these materialist, political economy explanations “overplayed the hand of capitalism as a force” on Aboriginal economies, notes Patricia Albers (2004), they at least avoided the “cumbersome dualisms of more culturally oriented theories.” The limitation of Left political economy approaches was not so much their debt to historical materialism as it was their tendency to employ highly abstract models that lost sight of human beings’ actual laboring activity and agency—including women’s work. However, this scholarship did pose questions about the relationship between production and reproduction, household and the marketplace, that opened up new questions about women’s labor. At precisely this time, feminists writing labor history were also arguing that women’s labor could be studied only if one looked beyond the traditionally defined male workplace, taking in domestic and unpaid work as well (Kessler-Harris 1987), an admonition that was especially relevant for Aboriginal women’s labor. The promise of an emerging feminist political economy was exemplified in Patricia Albers’s scholarship, in which she struck a balance between a discussion of structural economic changes and state policies on the one hand, and the way in which these were experienced, translated, and negotiated by Dakota women on the other hand (Albers 1985). Similarly, Jo-Anne Fiske’s analysis of Carrier women’s role in the fishing industry indicated how state policies interacted dynamically with the existing gendered division of labor and cultural traditions, producing an unintended result: the increased financial importance of women’s fishery work, and thus their enhanced role in both distributing economic resources and sustaining Native culture (1987).

This writing mirrored a transformation that was taking place across many disciplines as silences about women’s lives were increasingly challenged by feminist writing. The same year that Rayna Green lamented the absence of historical writing on American Indian women’s economic contributions, Sylvia Van Kirk’s book Many Tender Ties appeared, making a new argument that women were central to fur-trade work and exploring the relationship between gender, class, and Métis identity (R. Green 1980; Van Kirk 1980). While anthropology had historically collaborated in the creation of a colonial gaze in which static or disappearing Indigenous cultures needed “salvaging” and “documenting” (Simpson 2007: 69) under the influence of new paradigms and self critique, the discipline interrogated its own “collusion” in colonialism and “representations of others” (Speed 2006: 66). Feminists turned to anthropology to understand the origins of gender inequality and western assaults on egalitarian Indigenous cultures, with an eye to critiquing and “overturning Western patriarchy” (Collier and Yanagisako, 27). An emerging feminist anthropology could build on the pathbreaking work of Beatrice Medicine who was already fashioning an “Indigenous anthropology” in which “Native women were seen through the lens of Native women” (Ross, 40; Medicine 2001). A new generation of Indigenous anthropologists, many asking feminist questions, would follow (for example, Guthrie-Valaskakis 2005; Ramirez 2007; Simpson 2007).

While an interest in Aboriginal women’s work lives tended to be the preserve of feminists, historians in general were placing more emphasis on Aboriginal agency, cultural interchange, and—in Canada—on Métissage, indicating a conscious attempt to escape a straightjacket of victimhood in Aboriginal history.² Again, these new perspectives should not be interpreted only as shifts in academic writing; they were shaped in the context of new political ideas, movements, and activism. In North America, women were less prominent in the public reports of many Native American struggles, but this was a far cry from their actual work in radical organizations like AIM, in legal defense work, and in local campaigns for Native rights and social services (Hightower Langston 2003). Often located outside the dominant “media show,” these women’s foundational organizing may be fully recovered only if we pay particular attention to their life stories and testimony, published by themselves, or in conjunction with researchers (Castle 2003: 841; see also Anderson and Lawrence 2003; Culhane 2003). Aboriginal women were also building woman-centered campaigns, like the one against violence and forced sterilization in the United States (Torpy 2000; A. Smith 2005), or against the Indian Act’s marrying-out clause in Canada (Silman 1987; Barker 2006), and new organizations like WARN (Women of All Red Nations) and the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) were established. Their activism encouraged a concurrent scholarly dialogue about the interplay of individual, collective, tribal, human, and women’s rights, as well as the discursive strategies employed in Aboriginal women’s rights talk (Denetdale 2006; Fiske 1996; McIvor 1999; Nahanee 1993; Ramirez 2007).

By the 1980s, a feminist sensibility (rather than a specific feminist ideology) had sparked new investigations of how the church, the state, and white settlers had attempted to recast gendered work roles within Native cultures, often in their own patriarchal and middle-class image. Researchers, reflecting the strong emphasis of post-1960s feminist writing on the social, as opposed to the “natural” construction of gender roles, stressed how malleable definitions of work were across gender and cultural barriers; for example, while Native women in the American Great Lakes region were the iron ore miners, whites saw this as a job only suitable for men (Eldersveld Murphy 1998). Comparative research on a diverse range of tribal/national experiences of Aboriginal women also challenged a linear one-story-fits-all narrative of Native women’s automatic fall from matriarchy or economic egalitarianism (Shoemaker 1995: 13–14). However important these feminist questions were, we should be wary of a Whig view of historical production, in which research achieves sophistication only when gender differences are explored. This theory of academic excellence assumes that one set of political priorities fits all contexts, when in fact class relations or imperialism may seem the more pressing historical problem for Indigenous women. Finding the right balance between posing a set of feminist questions about oppression and respecting colonized groups’ desire to articulate their own political agendas is not always easy, though some Aboriginal women have fused feminist and anticolonialist ideas to create an Aboriginal feminism as a distinct political mode of thinking in its own right (J. Green 2007).

Although feminism was sometimes cast negatively in Indigenous writing as “untraditional, inauthentic, non-liberatory” (20), the recent appearance of special journal issues, books, and political forums on the topic reveals how feminism has been claimed, refigured, and recast by Aboriginal women.³ Respecting and recovering women’s experiences, “taking gender seriously as a social organizing process” (21) and critiquing the patriarchal legacies of colonialism are just a few of the themes explored; these are also essential to our understanding of women’s labor as it changed in response to the resources available, family and community needs, state policies, and the inexorable engine of capitalist accumulation. Simplistic dichotomies equating feminism solely with liberal, white, middle-class women have been jettisoned in favor of historicized understandings of race, class, and the multiple feminisms in the women’s movement, as Aboriginal women debate whether, and how, feminism might contribute to their critique of the masculinist and heteronormative underpinnings of colonialism (A. Smith 2011). While recognizing that social location shapes our experience and understanding (Moya 2000) in important ways, it does not completely determine our politics: for those of us who are non-Aboriginal, our project, like the workshop that spawned this book, is a political and scholarly commitment to an anticolonial critique.

Despite the extraordinary riches of writing on themes such as politics, representation, self determination and law (Barker 2006; Denetdale 2006; La Rocque 2010; Hernandez-Avila 2002; Sunseri 2000; Monture-Angus 1995), the history of labor has figured less prominently in scholarship, especially for the twentieth century. The same was tru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Aboriginal Women and Work across the 49th Parallel: Historical Antecedents and New Challenges
• 2. Making a Living: Anishinaabe Women in Michigan’s Changing Economy
• 3. Procuring Passage: Southern Australian Aboriginal Women and the Early Maritime Industry of Sealing
• 4. The Contours of Agency: Women’s Work, Race, and Queensland’s Indentured Labor Trade
• 5. From “Superabundance” to Dependency: Women Agriculturalists and the Negotiation of Colonialism and Capitalism for Reservation-era Lummi
• 6. “We Were Real Skookum Women”: The shíshálh Economy and the Logging Industry on the Pacific Northwest Coast
• 7. Unraveling the Narratives of Nostalgia: Navajo Weavers and Globalization
• 8. Labor and Leisure in the “Enchanted Summer Land”: Anishinaabe Women’s Work and the Growth of Wisconsin Tourism, 1900–1940
• 9. Nimble Fingers and Strong Backs: First Nations and Métis Women in Fur Trade and Rural Economies
• 10. Northfork Mono Women’s Agricultural Work, “Productive Coexistence,” and Social Well-Being in the San Joaquin Valley, California, circa 1850–1950
• 11. Diverted Mothering among American Indian Domestic Servants, 1920–1940
• 12. Charity or Industry? American Indian Women and Work Relief in the New Deal Era
• 13. “An Indian Teacher among Indians”: Native Women As Federal Employees
• 14. “Assaulting the Ears of Government”: The Indian Homemakers’ Clubs and the Maori Women’s Welfare League in Their Formative Years
• 15. Politically Purposeful Work: Ojibwe Women’s Labor and Leadership in Postwar Minneapolis
• 16. Maori Sovereignty, Black Feminism, and the New Zealand Trade Union Movement
• 17. Beading Lesson
• Contributors
• Index
• Back matter