Birth, Labor, and Indigenous Feminism

First: How does one come to identify as an Indigenous feminist? As made clear by this special issue of Hypatia, the practice of Indigenous feminism is now richly established and growing, but this was not the case in my earlier years as a scholar. In 2005, when Anishinaabe scholar Cheryl Suzack asked me to write a chapter on my Indigenous feminist practice for the collection Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (Suzack et al. Reference Suzack, Huhndorf, Perreault and Barman2010), I titled it “Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist” because it still felt like a position in need of defending. I started the chapter by identifying some of the negative reactions to feminism among Indigenous women: a presumed focus on equality that implies sameness with men; the perception that feminism excludes men from our overall struggles as peoples; the view that feminism is about rights vs. responsibilities with an emphasis on individual autonomy; and the feeling that it represents an attack on “traditional” responsibilities, including mothering (Anderson Reference Anderson, Suzack, Huhndorf, Perreault and Barman2010, 81). As Andrea Smith has noted, there were some “foremother” Indigenous scholars and writers who identified as Indigenous feminists early on, including Lee Maracle, Emma Larocque and Paula Gunn Allen, but in the mid 2000s “it was typically argued that Native women could not be feminists” (Smith Reference Smith and Grande2015, 221–22). I wasn't opposed, but I hadn't identified myself as an Indigenous feminist prior to Cheryl's request because, although we were on the cusp of seeing collections devoted to the issue (Green 2007; Goeman and Denetdale Reference Goeman and Denetdale2009; Suzack et al. Reference Suzack, Huhndorf, Perreault and Barman2010), there wasn't a substantial body of self-identified Indigenous feminist literature to situate myself in. But I had been doing work with and about Indigenous women for over a decade and it was feminist work—work that had chosen me because of one other area of home management where I had run into a sense of my own limitations: mothering.

I was thirty years old in 1995 when my first child was born, and I remember feeling daunted and challenged as never before. It was the sense of direct and unrelenting responsibility for someone else's life that made me realize what an undertaking it is to mother—and then the realization about how undervalued and invisible this work is. At the same time, I was struck by how sacred it was, starting from an embodied place in the early years of pregnancy and nursing. I might have addressed my sense of personal inadequacy by reading parenting books (though what sleep-deprived parent has time to read parenting books?), but I was more intrigued by societal inadequacies: factors that surely made mothering even harder for those who didn't have all my socioeconomic privileges. Perhaps because I was ten years into thinking about how to reclaim Indigenous ways of being (what we might now call “decolonizing myself”), it seemed to me that Indigenous knowledge might offer some answers. My inclination was to turn to community. I recall presenting tobacco to an Elder/Auntie and asking for “traditional knowledge” about parenting.Footnote ¹ She merely smiled and mentioned that mothering is like going on a long fast—that is, making endless sacrifices but also being richly immersed in an education like no other.Footnote ² And so that first heartbeat of my Indigenous feminism came out of the fear and worry and love and relationship I was experiencing in that intensely new, life-changing way of mothering.

By now I have many things I could teach my thirty-year-old self about Indigenous mothering, (mostly about trying to encourage a sense of Indigenous responsibility to people and land), and that has come through experience and multiple auntie/mentors along the way. But it's also come from Indigenous feminist work in academic spaces, and one of those spaces was the master's program I started when my son was four months old. Going in, I didn't have any background in feminist scholarship, nor was I inclined to do research with what we might now call an Indigenous feminist method (Goeman Reference Goeman and Andersen2017). But after writing a course paper on Indigenous child welfare, I found myself hungry for more information about Indigenous female empowerment (including but not limited to mothering), and that led me to an exploration of Indigenous female identity.Footnote ³

My master's program gave me time to think about how Indigenous theories about the “lifegiving” capacity of women referred to both literal and metaphorical powers to create, nurture, and govern in Indigenous communities. In my thesis and the book that followed (Anderson Reference Anderson2016), I documented how the Indigenous women of Turtle Island (North America) historically had authority as leaders in their families as clan mothers, or as the “old lady” heads of extended kin networks. I discovered that Indigenous-centered creation stories speak to a feminine power of creation, and thought about how this extended metaphorically to capture how women organized and ran their societies. I considered the meaning of societies in which women were in charge of distributing resources and ensuring that everyone in the collective was taken care of. Through my doctoral research that came later (Anderson Reference Anderson2011), I shared stories about how women managed wellness in their communities, as teachers, healers, medicine people, and spiritual leaders. I wrote about the general reverence for life, which meant that pregnancy, birth, and mothering were supported through community responsibility. My understanding of Indigenous “home management” thus evolved through scholarly work that framed it as a practice in which collectives of Indigenous women have a governing role in all aspects of their communities. This, I understood, was a power nested in Indigenous ideologies of mothering (Anderson Reference Anderson and O'Reilly2007; Reference Anderson2016, 147–51).

Indigenous ideologies of mothering and, more broadly, a sense of Indigenous women's responsibilities have thus guided me over the years toward an Indigenous feminist vision of how we might rebuild our communities. As I write this article, I am grateful for calls to further complicate our feminist analysis from scholars like Mishuana Goeman, who says, “Gendered analysis needs to move beyond early framings of ‘loss’ of status and present a much more complex, intersectional assessment of pivotal issues in Indigenous communities” (Goeman Reference Goeman and Andersen2017, 189). In recent years, Indigenous feminism(s) have been articulated as “those theories that make substantial advances in understandings of the connection between settler colonialism and both heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill Reference Arvin, Tuck and Morrill2013, 11). Queer Indigenous theories have provided a critical new lens for us to begin to dismantle the gendered roles, responsibilities, and identities traditionally associated with men and women (Driskell et al. Reference Driskell, Finley, Gilley and Morgensen2011). Indigenous feminists are moving away from the gender binary that has been part of the “constructing of a normative biological idea of womanhood” (Goeman Reference Goeman and Andersen2017, 189), and as a result, I am trying to sort through how to work with gendered, embodied identities while at the same time taking them apart. But at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I will use the rest of this Hypatia musing to circle back on questions of “women” and “home” as I contemplate moving forward.

The Trouble with Home Management

Knowing how to feed people, how to raise healthy children, how to create and manage a home environment in which everyone can grow and thrive—these things are foundational to healthy societies. Metis Elder Maria Campbell has told me that “the elders say the most political thing you can do is raise your kids”Footnote ⁴, which we both might argue involves not only giving them a nutritious bowl of porridge but also a good dose of critical thinking. My hope is that we will see upcoming generations of Indigenous children nourished in all ways, and that homemaking will increasingly be shared among multiple genders. I find hope in Indigenous feminist home management, the everyday of it and the ways our capacities to make a healthy home can translate to things like social justice, peace, good governance, and indeed, sustaining our global home (the planet).

I also appreciate that my early Indigenous feminist scholarship brought me into a community of critical motherhood studies, activism, and publishing—formidable feminist work that is found in spaces like the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) (http://motherhoodinitiative.org). In addition to providing insights about contemporary determinants of well-being, this work and feminist historical work has helped me to reflect on another issue that pertains to the department where I have landed: the discursive proximity of my work to early feminist equations of mothering and governance. I've had a particular interest in settler maternal feminists and “Mothers of the Nations” in North America; that is, white women who sought to translate their gendered skills and knowledge to larger questions of governing in the public domain. Given my current position, it's important to point out that such women were also the midwives of “domestic science.” But as I take my place in a Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, and while recognizing that the founders and like-minded women did make feminist advances, I am mindful of how incongruous they were to Indigenous home management.

First, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when maternal feminists were fighting to find spaces of gendered authority, Indigenous women still largely had it. Indeed, the matrilineal and matriarchal cultures that supported an empowered position for Indigenous women inspired first-stage white feminists in the United States (Jacobs Reference Jacobs1999; Wagner Reference Wagner2001). A more salient point for me, however, is this: maternal feminism and social reform were white-supremacist projects, key mechanisms in colonial violence and displacement.

It was maternal feminists, social reformers, teachers, nurses, social workers, and of course, missionaries (or wives of) who operated as the handmaidens of colonization. Their work involved an attack on Indigenous kinship systems, gender roles, and the home; their influence was underpinned by notions that white women had something to teach Indigenous women about home management. With a focus on the American Southwest, for example, historian Margaret Jacobs has documented how early twentieth-century moral reformers working as schoolteachers, field matrons, and missionaries were deployed to Indigenous communities to school Indigenous women in heteropatriarchal domesticity that involved teachings around Christian morality, while remaining blind to the matrilineal organization and complementary gender roles of the societies they sought to transform (Jacobs Reference Jacobs1999). Jane E. Simonsen and Rose Stremlau have written about the “civilization” of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indigenous communities within the United States through an imposed domesticity that positioned middle-class white women's ways as the epitome of civilization (Stremlau Reference Stremlau2005; Simonsen Reference Simonsen2006). In Canada and other British colonies, field matrons and missionaries played the role of benevolent white mothers to Indigenous women who presumably needed their attention (Rutherdale Reference Rutherdale2002; Perry Reference Perry, Pickles and Rutherdale2005; Jacobs Reference Jacobs2007; Reference Jacobs2011). Nurses were sent out “to give talks on sanitation, nutrition, homemaking and childcare,” at a time when settler women were still reliant on Indigenous women for assistance with midwifery and other forms of medicine (Burnett Reference Burnett2010, 149). Starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing for more than one hundred years, Indian residential and boarding schools were replete with teachers and teachings aimed at reordering the gender and sexuality of Indigenous women to make them more compliant with heteropatriarchal nuclear family expectations (Fiske Reference Fiske, Miller and Chuchryk1996). The extended family and the power and leadership it afforded to Indigenous women came under brutal attack through all these means.

Reform of the “home” not only involved breaking down extended family kinship systems, but the physical transformation of the home as well. Multiple-family dwellings or spaces that failed to divide domestic spaces were considered “hotbeds of vice” in nineteenth-century British Columbia, and the shed houses of the Coast Salish, with “as many as a dozen families” living together, challenged “the universality of the nuclear family and monogamy” (Perry Reference Perry2003, 592). As Adele Perry has pointed out, “too many unrelated bodies” signified not only a problem of overcrowding but also one of sexuality (592). Housing reform was thus tied to creating norms of gender, respectability, health, and cleanliness, with attempts to instill in Indigenous women a “European style domesticity” that included textile work and “those small disciplines of the Western home that gave nineteenth-century definitions of femininity so much of its meaning” (597–98). Citing the work of Pamela White, Perry notes that Indigenous women in the prairies were also subject to negative judgment due to racist connections between poor health, a presumed lack of cleanliness, and supposed flawed morality brought on by life in the tipi (White Reference White1987). In western Canadian newspapers and other sites of settler colonial discourse, Indigenous poverty was reframed to cast Indigenous women as lazy and inadequate in hygiene and home management (Carter Reference Carter1997). Early domestic scientists liked to speak of “euthenics” —the idea that “social change could be produced by individuals acting decisively to alter their environment” (Stage and Vincenti Reference Stage and Vincenti1997, 27).

Then there was mothering. The heyday of “scientific motherhood” during the first half of the twentieth century (Commachio Reference Commachio1999) produced mothering manuals like the 1925 “Canadian Mothers’ Book.” These resources enforced racist standards of “how to best maintain a house and a family in a moral way” (Green Reference Green2017, 60), and accompanied a movement in which “Anglo-Protestant, middle-class women aimed to educate women they deemed inferior in the best practices of childrearing” (61). Eugenics was introduced into the curriculum of the Macdonald Institute (forerunner to my current department), as it was elsewhere in the early twentieth century (Snell Reference Snell2003; Stote Reference Stote2015). Indigenous women were among the involuntarily sterilized—a practice that extended for them well into the 1970s in Canada and the United States, and long after it had been ruled out as a practice for white subjects (Torpy Reference Torpy2000; Ralstin-Lewis Reference Ralstin-Lewis2005; Stote Reference Stote2015). As Indigenous people were dispossessed of their homelands, imperialist nationalism in Canada was promoted through a “Mothers of the Nation” discourse, which Heather Green has noted is “impossible to isolate from the eugenics movement” (Green Reference Green2017, 52).

As a university professor, I am mindful that post-secondary institutions and the professions they produce have played a critical role in all of this reform work. As the twentieth century unfolded, and while missionaries and teachers carried on in residential schools, professionally trained social workers, for example, took up the neocolonial work of breaking down families by scooping children into the child-welfare system—a child-removal process that continues to disproportionately affect Indigenous families today (McKenzie et al. Reference McKenzie, Varcoe, Browne and Day2016). But what about home economics? My interest in that question so far has turned up the work of Rima Apple and Joyce Coleman, who have written about social reform as a founding principle and practice in early twentieth-century home economics, but they note that there was generally a move away from reform as the discipline evolved through the twentieth century (Apple and Coleman Reference Apple and Coleman2003). There is yet more to the home economics story, as I discovered in Megan Elias's “No Place Like Home: A Survey of American Home Economics History”; she concludes, “In looking at how Americans spread a particular version of domesticity, home economics historians must also return to race. A need exists, particularly, for a study of the racialization of domestic advice” (Elias Reference Elias2011, 103).

I look forward to more late afternoons sitting on a couch, eating sandwiches, and reading about the history of home economics—not only because of my current position, but also because of what it might tell me about my own beginnings. And this brings me back to the deeper ironies I alluded to in the introductory section. For although I identify as Indigenous (Metis), I am also the daughter of a white woman who graduated with a home economics degree from the University of British Columbia and, in 1961, enlisted as one of the first Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO) volunteers. She was sent to Ghana, presumably to apply her new professional skills as a colonial white subject and teacher of home economics. There she met my father, a young Metis man who had left Manitoba to work as a surveyor, first in Labrador and eventually in West Africa, Egypt, and Alaska. I don't know for sure, but I suspect most of my dad's labor facilitated projects of extraction that were also in themselves problematically colonial! Such is the messiness of my Indigenous feminist beginnings and indeed, whether we identify as settler or Indigenous, the messiness we must face as we make efforts to decolonize. There are plenty of intersectional grey zones—in my case of class, race, gender, profession—and all we can do is keep trying to make sense of it, to keep piecing it together in the new spaces and places where we land, which, for me, happens to be in the Director's living room within the model apartment wing for home management.

Kinship and Landing

While waiting for an appointment recently at Juddah's Place, an Indigenous health center at Six Nations of the Grand River, I spotted a poster that advocated “revillagization.” The poster depicted a grey-haired woman in traditional Haudenosaunee clothing standing and extending her arms toward a dark-haired Haudenosaunee woman holding a cradleboard. Among other things, the text on the poster stated that when we are “no longer living in fear of out-dated genocidal policies and legislation, we will then start the process of re-villagization.”Footnote ⁵ I was taken with the image and accompanying text because it validated my thinking about Indigenous feminist praxis: that healthy villages are organized and governed by grannies and aunties; that we need to reconceive ourselves and, in the process, “all our relations” outside of colonial patriarchal models. For Indigenous women it's a responsibility that just keeps growing.

Problematics of an embodied womanhood aside, what I have learned from spending time with elders, and from documenting the grandmother stages of Cree, Metis, and Anishinaabe women (Anderson Reference Anderson2011) is that once you are beyond menopause you acquire new power, authority, and responsibility. These responsibilities include being a teacher to younger generations, exercising leadership through community organizing and oversight, overseeing the health and well-being of the community, and creating safe space where people can grow, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In other words, home management. And as the university happens to be one of my current landing places, I ask myself: Is it possible to model home management, Indigenous feminist style, in such a space?

I'll start with the “auntie” responsibilities for teaching younger generations, because, happily, this is part of my day job. I'm grateful that the 2019 version of our department provides opportunities to teach about histories, policies, and ongoing practices of colonialism, especially as they apply to the social, educational, and health “helping” fields that many of our students are preparing to enter. I am hopeful that students may get more critical teaching as we work at “Indigenizing” the curriculum. I also hope Indigenous faculty like me and others might inspire Indigenous and non-Indigenous students with material about the Indigenous feminist foundations within our cultures. Perhaps by offering a glimpse of the original nonheteropatriarchal societies of these lands, we will provide them with opportunities to imagine how folks of all genders can collectively shape our futures.

Of course, teaching goes beyond the lecture hall; it includes mentoring, modeling, and nurturing. The university still isn't a safe space for many—this I know from listening to students who come from various departments to sit at the “kitchen table” in my office, drink tea, and unload about racist or heterosexist campus experiences. I value and honor this role, while being aware that mentoring and emotional support typically falls to women (Amani El-Alayli, Hansen-Brown, and Ceyna Reference Amani, Hansen-Brown and Ceyna2018) and that for marginalized faculty, including black, Indigenous, and women of color, this work becomes an invisible and inequitable service burden (Zoledziowski Reference Zoledziowski2018).

Being an academic auntie also involves working with younger Indigenous faculty and staff, although it's really a question of how we support and learn from one another. When you put Indigenous women of multiple generations, ages, and stages of academic and professional careers together, we get busy. We take turns at fostering various visions and leading activities. On our campus, and in the two years since I came in as part of an Indigenous cluster hire, an informal women's council of Indigenous female faculty and staff from the Aboriginal Resource Centre, including Brittany Luby, Lianne Leddy, Cara Wehkamp, Maria Shallard, and Chelsea Brant, has coalesced to organize several artivist projects. We have gotten hundreds of people out onto the football field to make a human medicine wheel to raise awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada; we've done performance art in resistance to celebratory projects around Canada's sesquicentennial (https://shekonneechie.ca/videob); and we have co-curated an exhibition at the Guelph Civic Museum that speaks to the transformative possibilities when “women of compelling Indigenous agency” come together around issues of wellness, community, and environmental justice (see Konnón:kwe at guelphmuseums.ca). We see these things as part of our work to educate and make social change, but we also find community in the doing.

Our artivist projects on and off campus have explored questions of who determined the use of space in the past, and what we might do with it now that we have opportunities. We have used our bodies to explore and create temporary, moving spaces, and will continue to do so because such space-making can be nimble enough to address particular events, places, or times that call for attention. While we do this, we are also dreaming and planning more permanent spaces: spaces that will advance revillagization. As the University of Guelph is situated in the historic homelands of the Atawandaron, our day-to-day worksite is literally grounded in a place of longhouse cultures and villages, where men moved in and out of spaces that were organized and governed according to extended families of grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters and daughters. This understanding feeds into our vision of creating a centrally located research hub where, as Indigenous scholars, we might collectively train and engage “a village” of students across disciplines, host workshops on food, family, and land-based cultural practices, and foster and model Indigenous women's leadership.

In the meantime, and drawing on my own experience of learning through “kitchen table methodologies” (Farrell Racette Reference Farrell Racette2017), I am working with the university to build a Grannie's cabin/Nokum's house in a wooded area of campus. There we have a fuller environment to do what is currently going on in my office, that living room space where we now meet under the Indigenous art of Christi Belcourt and Rene Meshake, where we hold research lab/kitchen table discussions, do ceremony, cook and eat, nurture one another, plan and organize toward social and environmental justice. This works for now as a repurposing of historic space where training for the “duties of the average housewife” once took place, but our proposed cabin at the edge of the woods will offer a better home for the land-based learning, research, and community-building practices we bring to campus. For as nice as the (boarded up) fireplace in my current office is, we need a sacred fire location outside so we can do ceremony, and we need to be close to our gardens.

Finally, now that I'm in the autumn of my work, I'm fortunate to be part of research that enhances kinship and relationships to land, people, and spirit. One example is a research project involving intergenerational gatherings of Indigenous men and male-identified people who gather at a sacred fire site to conduct ceremony, learn about Indigenous men's responsibilities (including ceremonial firekeeping), and discuss uptake of Indigenous masculinities in ways that move away from patriarchy and toxic masculinities. This initiative is supported by local Indigenous women leaders (aunties and grandmothers) who have identified a need for training opportunities for their young male helpers. On another project, we are training helpers around food. With a team led by Hannah Tait Neufeld, community partners, and traditional knowledge-keepers, we have been growing food and medicinal plants in the university arboretum. Our intention is to offset Indigenous food insecurity by engaging students in food preservation and sending them home with jars of produce (including our own homemade marinara sauce) along with stories from the visits with our teaching elders. So, roll over foremothers, because last fall I participated in my first canning workshop, which we held in the teaching kitchen space in our building, a space that reminded me of grade seven home economics. Only this time, it was way better.

All my relations.