What does it mean to make space? In the concluding pages of this newest and most welcome third edition of a classic, whose preceding editions have offered such indispensable, insightful and reflexive responses to this question for the purposes of Indigenous feminisms, editor Gina Starblanket gives us an essential starting point: appreciation for the fact that “making space isn't a neutral project” (p. 316). By my own understanding, this is to say that while making space for Indigenous feminisms may look and feel differently across places, peoples and times, resistance to settler colonial heteropatriarchy requires not just the absence or cessation of further harm, nor even the active pursuit of such as an objective, but also commitment to the continual and attentive practice of shaping worlds and relations anew.

Making space for Indigenous feminism looks like the active refusal of settler colonial heteropatriarchy, whether as violence, limitations or externally imposed attempts to categorize or make legible Indigenous political life. It is, as so many of this volume's adept contributors infer, also a discursive practice of making and unmaking, a persistent process of building, strengthening and deciding what to make work, what to contest and what to leave behind. Far from offering essentialized accounts of Indigenous feminisms that look solely to return to any imagined precolonial past, this is a work by nuanced authors committed to pluralism, who emphasize critically the significance of community, tradition and relational obligations, without framing either renewal or reanimation as a simple return to what once was.

Beyond rejecting the possibility of anticolonial and antipatriarchal passivity, refusing the neutrality of making space foregrounds two essential insights that weave between and through each of this book's invaluable chapters: the impossibility of knowledge removed from (or as) practice and the necessity of taking relational specificity into account. In other words, Indigenous feminisms as they are presented here are not an epistemological hat, to be worn and removed at leisure, but specific lived realities and practices impossible to perform without taking good relations with life, land, wind and sea (p. 194) into account, a practice which itself demands attentiveness to the specific ways that colonialism was never not a gendered project.

Given the ubiquity of settler colonial heteropatriarchy, it is difficult to accurately capture the breadth and depth of the chapters on offer in so little space as this review allows. They cover, to name only a few, such subjects as discrimination against women in the Indian Act, violence targeting Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit people, Black and Indigenous solidarities, and even constructions of madness as a tool of oppression. The contributions are divided into four sections, examining themes of identity, institutions and representation, care/love and relations with land, and decoloniality or futurity, respectively. All told, this book is a mosaic that weaves together insights from many of the brightest Indigenous scholars active today, speaking from a wide diversity of stages in terms of both life and career, in full knowledge of the dangers of the utopian as destination rather than process.

For readers unfamiliar with Indigenous feminisms or politics, many of these chapters will be plunges into the deep end, but the accessibility of the writing makes many of those same contributions excellent and well-organized starting points for further exploration, which I would be happy to assign to students of varied backgrounds. It's accessible without centering the perspectives or priorities of non-Indigenous peoples. For those already well-versed in the conversations that this book progresses and sustains, the book also presents welcome original contributions. Both Kelly Aguirre and Billy-Ray-Belcourt make, for instance, much-needed interventions regarding the importance of the poetic and the metaphorical to decolonial politics, with the former especially engaging with the substantive consequences of thinking through what it actually means to refuse decolonization as metaphor (as Tuck and Yang's seminal 2012 article suggests). Aguirre asks, importantly, I think, what is lost and gained in that refusal. I would also argue that scholars of Canadian political science especially should take note of Joyce Green's deeply personal, moving and reflective chapter on identity and what it means to live as an Indigenous feminist working in the academy. She offers so many incisive reflections on the realities of working as an Indigenous scholar in Political Science as a discipline that will speak deeply, I think, to the experiences of many Indigenous scholars working in the field today. At the very least, this was my experience. It was heartening to feel not alone but seen.

The predominant issue featured both in Canadian public discourse and Indigenous studies that is not treated in significant depth here is that of false claims to Indigenous identity, a problem currently plaguing institutions, academic and otherwise, across Turtle Island, with real consequences for Indigenous political life. Personally, however, I welcomed this choice, as, I would argue, the issue of fraudulent claims to Indigenous identity is not a problem to be resolved by Indigenous peoples, but by the settlers who continue to perpetrate this harm. Simply put, this is a settler issue, not an Indigenous one, and would be unnecessary to centre in a book about making space for Indigenous feminisms specifically. Beyond noting this absence (if that is indeed what it is, for these issues are gestured towards in the text), I can offer few relevant criticisms of any great strength save one: The book is and could only ever be too short.

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism's third edition offers interventions as essential today as those made by its preceding editions were necessary to their time of publication. It is a book of astounding breadth and depth, that I will be returning to as one would an old friend, in future, and that should be considered essential reading for any persons even remotely interested in Indigenous politics, feminisms (Indigenous or otherwise) or coloniality (either as a way of knowing or being). Indeed, I would suggest that readers should consider this third edition not merely as a new incarnation of an older text but as a distinct intervention of its own places and times, not replacing, but in fact enriching the discourses the earlier editions began.