Life Stages and Native Women

Kim Anderson

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780887554162
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Studien der amerikanischen Ureinwohner

A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities. The process of "digging up medicines" - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities. In Life Stages and Native Women, Kim Anderson shares the teachings of fourteen elders from the Canadian prairies and Ontario to illustrate how different life stages were experienced by Metis, Cree, and Anishinaabe girls and women during the mid-twentieth century. These elders relate stories about their own lives, the experiences of girls and women of their childhood communities, and customs related to pregnancy, birth, post-natal care, infant and child care, puberty rites, gender and age-specific work roles, the distinct roles of post-menopausal women, and women's roles in managing death. Through these teachings, we learn how evolving responsibilities from infancy to adulthood shaped women's identities and place within Indigenous society, and were integral to the health and well-being of their communities. By understanding how healthy communities were created in the past, Anderson explains how this traditional knowledge can be applied toward rebuilding healthy Indigenous communities today.

1

Weaving the Stories

This book represents a weaving together of stories from multiple sources, both written and oral. Whereas the foundation of the book is the oral history that I gathered from the historian participants, I have also used materials that I’ve read in books and articles to add depth and context. My aim was to put all of these sources together to build a rich and multilayered story.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from working on this book is that the process of doing oral history work is as important as what is produced at the end. Whereas the gathering of written sources was a process of collecting information that would develop and support a historical profile of Algonquian women, the process of collecting oral history was much more of an exercise in learning about how story medicines can work, and gradually finding my place within that work. Because this element is so important, I have devoted this chapter and the next to describing the sources I drew from, the process it involved, and how I wove it all together. I begin with a quick glance at the written sources before getting into considerations about Indigenous oral history.

Written Sources

Although there is very little in terms of focused literature on life stages of Native women, it was possible to glean some information by combing through many different sources, disciplines, and literary genres.

I began with the history books, but soon found that in spite of the increasing production of women’s history since the 1970s, the lives of Indigenous women are still largely invisible in that genre of literature. There are some exemplary historians who have written about Algonquian women’s lives in the fur trade era and up into the nineteenth century,[1] but histories about the distinct experiences of northern Algonquian women in the twentieth century are generally lacking. When I read twentieth-century history about mainstream North American women and girls, I often think about how different the lives portrayed in the literature seem from what I know of Native women’s lives during the same time periods, and I think about what we are missing in our North American history texts as a result. Where are the stories of kokum (granny) teaching the four-year-old how to hunt; the depictions of infants in moss bags watching siblings and female relatives pick berries or Seneca root; the puberty fasts; the fiddle dances and the Sun Dances; the women’s councils; the old woman doctoring with plant medicine? Many of these things were going on in Native girls and women’s lives, even up to the time when mainstream teens of the 1940s danced the jitterbug and 1950s housewives grappled with “the feminine mystique.”[2]

If you are looking for information about these distinct Indigenous worlds, it would be better for you to go to the ethnographic and autobiographical literature. Although the earliest autobiographical works that cover the pre-reserve and early settlement period are written by men, one can mine them for information about women’s lives.[3] Later autobiographical works written in the 1970s provide information about mid-century Cree and Métis communities through the eyes of Aboriginal girls.[4] Northern Algonquian voices also come through in edited collections of oral history. Freda Ahenakew, for example, has been prolific in recording and publishing stories of Cree elders. Ahenakew’s material offers rich information about women’s lives in the first half of the twentieth century, and there are other collections of northern Algonquian oral history that are informative in this way.[5]

Ethnographies offer the most explicit sources of information about the life cycle of Algonquian women, especially those that were researched and written during the early twentieth century.[6] While these ethnographies were typically written by outsiders and must be reviewed as such, they are nonetheless built out of interviews with “informants,” many of whom were the oral historians of their early-twentieth-century Indigenous communities.[7] Because of the urgency to document the cultures they believed to be dying out, these ethnographers often interviewed elders, asking them to speak about “traditional” societies. One must take male bias into consideration, given that many of the anthropologists during this period were males who spoke exclusively to male informants. There are works by a number of female ethnographers, however, and several ethnographies contain information from female informants.[8] Many of these stories can be historically situated within the late pre-reserve and early reserve era.

I was able to find a fair amount of information in the ethnographic material related to the work that women did in land-based societies, and these depictions of “women’s work” provided a backdrop for writing about middle-aged women. There was also a fair amount of information in the ethnographic literature related to marriage, family structure, and kinship obligations, and there was some information about the roles of older women. These roles included working as herbalists and midwives, looking after children and being teachers of the younger generations. Information about children often focused on their contributions to community in terms of work and child-rearing practices and styles. I was surprised to find that there was also plenty of information in the ethnographic material about ceremonies for infants and girls, particularly naming ceremonies and puberty rites. After years of yearning for more information about these ceremonies, I realized that there are descriptions in the ethnographic literature! Of course, there are people who carry this knowledge and continue to do the ceremonies, but documentary information can be helpful and perhaps more accessible to those who don’t have teachers in their own circles.

My review of all this material reinforced what Maria Campbell has encouraged me to do in terms of working with literature. As Maria describes in her preface to this book, the late Anishinaabe Elder Peter O’Chiese always stressed to her how important it is for Indigenous people to sift though ethnographic literature because it can be helpful to us as we put the pieces of our cultures back together. The message is to read as much as you can, while being aware of the limitations. I always bear in mind the lesson from my friend the Sto:lo Elder and healer Dorris Peters, who remembers her uncles telling the craziest stories that they made up on the spot to have fun with the anthropologists who came around in the 1930s! For this reason, it is important that we work with our elders and oral historians at the same time as we read the literature. As I demonstrate in the next section, this work with oral history involves much more than collating information and checking for “facts.” It is about working with story medicines.

Purpose: Listening for Stories that “Work like Arrows”

Clearly, Indigenous oral histories do not abide by conventional disciplinary boundaries. They are about relationships and generational continuity, and the package is holistic—they include religious teachings, metaphysical links, cultural insights, history, linguistic structures, literary and aesthetic form, and Indigenous “truths.” —Winona Wheeler, “Decolonizing Tribal Histories”[9]

As Winona Wheeler indicates, Indigenous oral history contains many elements that take it beyond the goal of showing “how it was.” There is often an overt sense of purpose to oral history work, and this book is definitely built on that element. I share my sense of purpose with a number of other Indigenous scholars who have framed the writing of Indigenous history as a project in decolonization.[10] With reference to how Cree oral history works, for example, Neal McLeod writes, “Cree narrative memory is an ongoing attempt to find solutions to the problems we face today, such as breakdown of families, loss of language and general loss of respect for ourselves and others.”[11] According to this approach, oral history serves our communities by providing insight and vision and inspiring change for the better.

In addition to providing insight and vision, one of the primary characteristics of Indigenous oral history is to delineate the world view of the people it serves.[12] Rather than offering a chronicle of events, Indigenous oral history typically works to confirm identity and remind the listeners of the social and moral code of their society. “History,” writes ethnohistorian Raymond Fogelson, “is not something that happens to Indians; it might better be conceived as a potent force that they actively utilize to refashion, and manipulate as a survival mechanism.”[13] This point is demonstrated by Dakota historian Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, who gives the example of how this played out in the work she did with Dakota historian/Elder Eli Taylor. Although she originally set out to record a “Dakota historical perspective on specific events,” it soon became apparent that the material was more significant for the information it provided “about the meaning of being Dakota.”[14] The truths we seek in this work are thus more about the truths of who we are and want to be as a people, rather than the “truths” about “what happened.”

Whereas academic historians may be reluctant to engage in this kind of history-telling, anthropologists have been recognized and rewarded for their Indigenous oral history work. Anthropologist Julie Cruikshank is often cited for the work that she has done with Elders Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned in the Yukon. Cruikshank has written about how she originally went looking for narratives about events (in particular, how the Klondike gold rush affected women’s lives) and was confounded when Elders provided traditional stories instead. She later realized that the Elders’ allegorical stories underpinned the narratives and events of their own lives. Their traditional stories provided a code by which one could live a good life, a “life lived like a story.”[15] According to Cruikshank, the Elders might say that stories “are not even really about facts or events.” Rather, “they are about coming to grips with the personal meanings of broadly shared knowledge and converting those meanings to social ends.”[16]

In the field of linguistic and cultural anthropology, Keith Basso has been recognized for his award-winning books that explore this function of story among the Apache. Basso has documented how Apache stories often “work like arrows,” acting as piercing missives, sent out to “make you live right.”[17] He demonstrates how many traditional Apache stories are connected to particular places, allowing the land to continuously remind people of social and moral code even when storytellers are absent or deceased.[18] Basso also explores the notion that “what matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when.”[19]

I offer these considerations because, as a historian working with Indigenous oral history on this project, my aim has been to foster healing and decolonization by delineating a world view and creating a sense of identity and belonging. Judging from the standards of conventional history, some might find both the individuals’ stories and my overarching narrative too idyllic. But one must bear in mind that my intent was to create a story that “works like an arrow,”[20] or, in Neal McLeod’s words, allows us to “conceive of a different way that people might live together.”[21] What I have provided for the reader are glimpses and threads of a world in which identity and belonging were fostered and nurtured in childhood; where women had authorities that were rooted in cultures that valued and respected equity; and in which “old ladies” ruled. The reader will not find stories of violence and abuse here, although these things were also happening in northern Algonquian communities from the 1930s to the 1960s. There are other works that tell stories of domestic violence, fallout from residential schools, and communities in crisis. Although such works are important to consider for the truths they tell, this is not the focus of the stories in this book.

Building on Relationships

Another important lesson I learned in this oral history work was about the significance of relationships.[22] I had been doing qualitative research with Native peoples for about fifteen years as a community-based consultant, scholar, and researcher prior to beginning this project, and was therefore quite familiar with conducting interviews on a variety of subjects. Based on this experience, I figured I would need to interview about forty people to do the book I had in mind. When I made this suggestion to Cree scholar and historian Winona Wheeler she responded, “Forty is way too many! Try six.” Winona then made the distinction between doing grounded theory (within social science) as opposed to oral history. Whereas the latter can be built out of one-time meetings and interviews, it can take much longer to build the types of relationships that Indigenous oral history requires. Winona did not say much more at the time, leaving room for me to discover this distinction for myself. Yet her words corresponded to what Maria Campbell had also been teaching me over the years; that the quality of oral history is based on the quality of the relationship between the teller and the student. Maria had also advised me that it was better to work with fewer people, but to do more interviews.

Of course, I didn’t listen to my teachers at first, and set off in search of an indefinite but plentiful number of oral historians. I was driven by curiosity and a concern for seeking out the “truth.” I wanted to find out, for example, how widespread some of the lifecycle ceremonies had been at mid-century. Because of this I felt compelled to interview a larger number of people— certainly more than six. But as Trickster would have it, I was limited in the number of historian participants because I had a hard time finding individuals who were keen to be interviewed. This led to other considerations about doing Indigenous oral history. When I shared my woes with Mosôm Danny, he suggested that elders might feel intimidated when...