Indigenous Women, Work, and History

1940-1980

Mary Jane Logan McCallum

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780887554322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

When dealing with Indigenous women's history we are conditioned to think about women as private-sphere figures, circumscribed by the home, the reserve, and the community. Moreover, in many ways Indigenous men and women have been cast in static, pre-modern, and one-dimensional identities, and their twentieth century experiences reduced to a singular story of decline and loss. In Indigenous Women, Work, and History, historian Mary Jane Logan McCallum rejects both of these long-standing conventions by presenting case studies of Indigenous domestic servants, hairdressers, community health representatives, and nurses working in "modern Native ways" between 1940 and 1980. Based on a range of sources, including the records of the Departments of Indian Affairs and National Health and Welfare, interviews, and print and audio-visual media, McCallum shows how state-run education and placement programs were part of Canada's larger vision of assimilation and extinguishment of treaty obligations. Conversely, she also shows how Indigenous women link these same programs to their social and cultural responsibilities of community building and state resistance. By placing the history of these modern workers within a broader historical context of Aboriginal education and health, federal labour programs, post-war Aboriginal economic and political developments, and Aboriginal professional organizations, McCallum challenges us to think about Indigenous women's history in entirely new ways.

CHAPTER ONE

Sweeping the Nation:

Indigenous Women and Domestic Labour in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada

Figure 1.1. Cartoon from The Forgotten People, Summer 1972.

Used with permission of Denise Rudniki.

In a 1972 issue of The Forgotten People—the national newspaper of the Native Council of Canada (now the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples)—a comic strip depicts Digger, a long-haired, bell-bottom-clad Indian with a feather in his hair, encountering a Red Power poster featuring a clenched fist and the message: “The Indians are sweeping this country!!!” In the next frame, you see him scribbling away on the wall beside the sign so that by the third frame, beside “The Indians are sweeping this country!!!” it reads, “That’s the only job they can get!”1 Like many comics, its wit lies in its ability to hint at many concepts in a sketch and few words. It speaks to a range of issues at the forefront of Indigenous resistance movements in the twentieth century, including limited access to education, discrimination in the workplace, and state policies that severely limited career options. Indigenous people, especially women, had reason to be cynical of their prospects for employment in mid-twentieth-century Canada. As Digger’s graffiti suggests, one of the few jobs readily available to them was domestic labour.

The Department of Indian Affairs’ industrial and boarding schools, with their labour-based curriculum, were training grounds for domestics. At the same time, Indian agents and school staff were engaged in the placement of Native domestic labour, matching youth on reserves and students in residential schools with jobs. In addition to training, recruiting, and contracting domestic labour, the DIA was also involved in its supervision and regulation through correspondence with domestics and employers. By examining the domestic training Indigenous youth were subject to in residential schools, as well as an experimental domestics placement program operating in Ottawa from the early to mid-1940s, this chapter shows that the DIA guaranteed that domestic labour was, indeed, one of the only jobs Native women could get.

Indigenous Women and Household Labour

Historical scholarship has acknowledged two main forms of Indigenous women’s domestic labour. The first is the celebrated domestic work of Indigenous women who oriented the disoriented in Indigenous territory, especially during the fur trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in the “Canadian North” in the twentieth. Women’s work in the fur trade has not always been acknowledged by historians. In fact, it has been part of the historical interpretation of the fur trade only since the early 1980s, thanks to the groundbreaking work of historians like Jennifer Brown and Sylvia Van Kirk. Their work, and that of others since, has shown that Indigenous women’s labour was crucial to the trade. Women’s activities included the provision of food, including pemmican, fish, rice, maple sugar, berries, and small game; women also made clothing, moccasins, and snowshoes; cleaned and dressed furs; made canoes and paddled them; and acted as guides, interpreters, and diplomats in trade. Relationships with Indigenous women—formalized by Indigenous custom—were sometimes the only way traders could access female labour, secure trading ties, and communicate in the customs and languages of Indigenous people. Considering the myriad tasks performed by wives in the domestic sphere, including child rearing, it is clear that “custom of the country marriages” were the fundamental social relationship through which fur trading societies developed in North America. Joan Sangster and Myra Rutherdale show that such work did not cease in the twentieth century: Indigenous women were essential guides, helpers, companions, and translators for white women who worked in the North as missionaries and nurses.2 Native people will sometimes point to this type of work as the unacknowledged but essential labour of helping strangers to adapt to their territory.

Sometimes this early domestic labour is cast as part of a cultural and spiritual conversion to Christianity, especially in Jesuit and Church of England historical accounts. While an earlier emphasis on cultural and religious assimilation or conversion (i.e., the success or failure of the mission) put conflict and loss at the centre of many historical accounts, newer work focuses on the impact of cross-cultural encounters on the status of Indigenous women, notions of women’s respectability, and Indigenous women’s connections to female reform work through their contributions to church organizations, preaching and evangelizing, and household labour.3

Unfortunately, in much of the literature about Indigenous women’s history, Indigenous women’s labour often appears as static “women’s roles,” and women themselves feature as remote economic figures with neither a social nor a political historical context.4 In fact, what is sometimes called “traditional” Indigenous women’s domestic work in the fur trade and mission contexts contrasts significantly with the ways in which domestic labour is perceived in the modern era. At this point, Indigenous women’s “traditional” domestic work becomes pathologized and the assimilation of Indigenous women to Euro-Canadian standards became a priority. In this era, domestic labour and the home were targets of colonial policy; it was in the home where cultural norms were to be reformed, produced, and reproduced. Scholars such as Paige Raibmon, Victoria Haskins, Jane Simonsen, and others have shown how domestic assimilation was indelibly linked to colonization and white settlement. Indigenous homes were imagined as the locus of backward and pathological Indigenous cultures, and as such were targets of sexual, moral, and social regulation that implicated white women as activists, workers, and employers. Likewise, schemes to reproduce model European homes for Indigenous inhabitants sought to reconfigure the social relations of Indigenous families, like residential schools policy did. The notion that European-style homes and domestic skills in Indigenous settings were valuable tools for cultural assimilation continued to dominate perspectives on Indigenous women’s labour through the twentieth century.5

This chapter focuses on two modern forms of domestic labour that were prominent in the twentieth century. The first is Native women’s work at federally run, segregated Indian schools and hospitals and the homes of the non-local and mostly itinerant workforce of church and government officials. This waged work was made invisible as expected, as essential, and as a natural transition from manual training in school. It is important to look at this labour in this era because it is so obviously related to troubled Indigenous economies resulting from the colonization of homelands and coercive federal Indian policies. Ideally closely supervised, housekeeping work at residential schools and in the homes of government and church staff was thought to be especially beneficial for Indian girls. It was seen as a continuation of educational objectives to instill work ethic and discipline and to provide practical experience of modern, Canadian gender roles, and the idealized domestic sphere.

The second form of Native women’s domestic labour occurred in private homes, hotels, and tourist resorts, non-Indian hospitals, and homes for the elderly. This work was obtained either through the state (most often the DIA) or by Indigenous women themselves. While some historians have assumed that it was relatively rare, in fact, this form of domestic labour was quite common. Perhaps its everyday place within Indigenous social history has made it appear somewhat unremarkable. This form of waged labour could, for some workers, be distanced somewhat from church and state surveillance; however, the state managed to maintain a considerable investment in recruiting, contracting, and disciplining this labour force. This was especially clear when domestics contravened or outright rejected idealized norms. Both of these forms of Indigenous modern domestic labour here have an important place in our histories. Economically, women’s, like men’s, waged labour was often part of a multi-faceted economic strategy that included hunting, trapping, gardening, the sale of handicrafts, and other cottage industries. For many, it was a means of escaping or alleviating the pressures upon exhausted family economies.6 Young women’s help at home was often counted on by multigenerational families, and it was when family resources were strained that wage work as a housekeeper, farm labourer, waitress, secretary, or department store clerk, for example, was sought.

Interestingly, women’s own histories suggest that they did not necessarily identify closely with a history of domestic service. For example, trying to get women in my own family to talk about domestic work in detail was extraordinarily difficult. It seemed to them that my interest in the history of domestic service was misplaced, and that there were far more important subjects I should be examining. Moreover, stories about Native women and domestic work are often told in relation to family responsibilities, other forms of work or activism, family violence, poverty, scarcity, and welfare (or a lack of it), rather than in terms of the history of wage labour. For example, a significant number of the women elders interviewed as part of a Sandy Bay, Manitoba, history project mentioned cleaning houses, hotels, and hospitals both “in town” and “around the reserve” as part of a longer list of jobs that included babysitting, digging Seneca root, working at fisheries, hoeing sugar beets, haying, threshing, stoking and other farm labour, cutting wood, picking berries, waitressing, working as a cook, and selling eggs, weasel, and smoked fish.7 Domestic work was also associated with “hard times,” particularly for those who started working very young because their families could not afford to support them. Lilly Harris was one of the Tobique women who organized in the mid-1970s to challenge discriminatory Indian Act legislation that was harmful to living conditions for women and children. She recalls finding domestic work in the 1930s in the U.S. by word of mouth, starting at the age of fourteen. When she was younger, she had picked berries and fiddleheads, and after working as a domestic, she got a job hand-sewing moccasins (which, she recalls, was considered a man’s job, but during the war they hired women to do it). Another Tobique woman, Ida Paul, also had to start working at the age of fourteen. She went to work for an older woman who made baskets on the reserve, cleaning house and washing floors and clothes.8

Domestic work was often associated with a social, travelling stage of life. It was often first pursued in young adulthood, and was, for many, their first paid job. Domestic work could widen women’s social circle, and work could be readily obtained by them in areas both far and near. As it was highly in demand, domestic work also involved a certain degree of choice and was widely taken as both a stop-gap measure and a short-term stepping stone to other kinds of work. Thus, domestic work could be, depending on your point of view, evidence of the economic, social, and physical impacts of imperialism and colonial policy on Indigenous women; manifestation of the efforts of Native women in one generation to hold it together for the next; or an entirely ordinary thing for women to do. It could also be all these things at once. Indigenous women’s histories of domestic work amount to an important body of knowledge about the Indigenous twentieth century.

Closer examination of Indigenous women’s domestic labour in federal institutions and private establishments can also broaden our understanding of the ways that domestic labour has been gendered, racialized, and colonized in Canada. While early feminist Canadian labour history helped to situate domestic work as feminized working class labour,9 newer studies on immigration and migration have shown how women’s household labour was also imbued with notions about race, colonization, and nation-building.

Studies of immigration policies and programs can illuminate how the labour of domestic servants, and the Canadian labour market more generally, was influenced by racial hierarchies and the priorities of white settlement.10 For example, Adele Perry’s and Lisa Chilton’s work on imperialism and domestics adds to our understanding of how white women’s domestic labour was put to the service of imperialism and settlement. Chilton’s focus is on the British societies that managed female migration from Britain to Canada and Australia and the women who ran them, the “agents of empire.” These women attempted to control, indeed “improve,” the types of women who were settling in the colonies and make migration safer and more respectable.11 Perry demonstrates that domestic servants from Britain were encouraged to immigrate to British Columbia in the nineteenth century. She argues that they were seen as a social panacea to “myriad gendered and racialized dilemmas” in colonial B.C. They would be a stabilizing presence for white men otherwise perceived to be part of a footloose, rough, homosocial backwoods culture, compelling them to normative standards of hetero-masculinity, respectability, and permanent settlement. Additionally, immigration of white women domestics was meant to tackle the widespread problem, as imperial advocates saw it, of mixed-race marriages. As symbols of imperial authority, immigration programs for domestics privileged ordinary working white women as they defined the boundary between races. As her work aptly demonstrates, the processes of dispossession and settlement were not discrete, but mutually dependent and deeply entwined.12

Anti-racist feminist scholarship on citizenship and non-white immigrant women domestic workers has shown that the workforce was not always straightforwardly permanent.13 In uncovering the uncertainties associated with non-white domestics’ citizenship, such work has been helpful in drawing out similar uncertainties around Native women’s labour status as wards of the state. Canadian citizenship was, in many ways, seen as something that protected the labour of “real” Canadians, compelled the labour of non-Canadians, and rewarded the labour of “new” ones. While the history of domestic workers is also almost always depicted as a story about women coming from elsewhere, in fact, as many as 36 to 57 percent of Aboriginal women participated in the domestic service labour market between 1920 and 1940. For Indigenous people until the 1960s, enfranchising meant a loss of Indian status, treaty rights, and band membership. Single and widowed women could and did apply for enfranchisement (married women would have been subject to their husbands’ status), a process that involved applying to the federal government and, if successful, receiving a per capita share in the band funds, which, depending on the band, could be considerable. Enfranchising also required that enfranchisees cut all ties to the band, revoke band membership, forfeit annual treaty annuities and rights, and give up access to community resources and services. This option was chosen at considerable risk by Indigenous women. However, as a study by Robin Jarvis Brownlie shows, for Anishinabe and Mohawk women in southern Ontario, enfranchisement was an economic decision, and to many, an attractive one. Brownlie finds that between 1920 and 1940, one-quarter of the enfranchisement applications came from women, and of the twenty-eight women in Brownlie's study, at least sixteen were employed as domestic servants.14

Historians of African-American and Latin-American domestic workers have shown how in a domestic’s workplace—the home—relations of race, class, and gender are all played out.15 This is true also for Native women domestics. It is unfortunate that this scholarship has developed so completely separately from the literature on making Native space. Agnes Calliste points out in her studies of migration schemes for Black domestics how economic demand, political concerns, and prevailing ideologies worked together to restrict Black immigrants in the early twentieth century. Despite a strong, continuing demand for domestic service, fuelled in part by factors such as the expansion of wartime industries and the migration of women to cities, the continuing low status of domestic labour meant that anyone with other opportunities would not be attracted to do it. With a diminishing supply of British domestics, Black domestics were seen as a cheap, intelligent, industrious, and devoted alternative. Their “moral character” was the ideological clincher for restrictive policies. Morality was a defining feature of racialized women’s domestic labour, whether white British, Black Carribbean, or Indigenous.16

The regulation of domestics’ migration and placement has been a central source of information for historians of women and labour. But I have found that white women’s feminist orga...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Tables and Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Sweeping the Nation: Indigenous Women and Domestic Labour in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada
• 2. The Permanent Solution: The Placement and Relocation Program, Hairdressers, and Beauty Culture
• 3. An Early Labour History of Community Health Representatives, 1960–1970
• 4. Gaining Recognition: Labour as Activism among Indigenous Nurses
• Conclusion: The Wages of Whiteness and the Indigenous Historian
• Notes
• Bibliography