<i>Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism</i> ed. by Carol Williams

In a recent editorial for Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez observed, “We still learn little of Native Americans in our history classes, and of Ndn [Indian] women, not much beyond Pocahontas and Sacagawea. Rarely is that history linked to living Native American women and their contemporary lives and struggles. Some historians, activists and Native American and Women’s Studies scholars are trying to change that and are beginning to teach the history and triumphs of the ‘invisible among the invisible’ of First Nations’ people” (“Women’s History: Native Americans,” Daily Kos, March 2, 2014, www . dailykos.com/story/2014/03/02/1280488/-Women-s-History-Native-Americans). The seventeen essays in Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, edited by Carol Williams, exemplify this trend and extend it to the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Specifically engaging the field of labor history, the collection challenges “the multitude of ways Indigenous women—as colonized workers, as Indigenous, and as women—were disciplined and paternalistically presumed by the respective settler nations as dependent and incompetent rather than economically or socially sovereign” (13). As Mohawk scholar-activist Marlene Brant Castellano notes in her preface to the volume, it makes “a welcome and valuable contribution to documenting the continuity and adaptability of Indigenous women’s work as wave after wave of change swept through their communities” (x–xi).Indigenous Women and Work developed from a 2008 workshop that convened leading anthropologists, historians, and Native American studies scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The contributors share a broadly historical approach and a commitment to ending the virtual invisibility of aboriginal women within traditionally male-centered settler narratives. Williams further dedicates the volume to the project of cognitive decolonization by framing the essays as a critique of “the universal assumptions of ‘Women’s History’” (2) as well as of the methodological and epistemological biases of Western history writ large. Hence her introduction features brief analyses of the cover art by Faye HeavyShield and the concluding short story by Beth H. Piatote. These “unconventional inclusions” (3) are meant to evoke both indigenous women’s unwaged labor and alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and communicating rooted in oral culture and lived experience. Williams does not reject scholarly research, of course, but rather calls upon practitioners to seek “meaningful reciprocity in the process of knowledge production and exchange” (3). The high quality of the work she has assembled here attests to the fact that historical scholarship can be socially conscious and politically engaged without sacrificing either intellectual rigor or academic integrity.Collectively, the essays survey indigenous women’s engagement with the interlocking forces of capitalism and colonialism from the early nineteenth century to the present. Although the omission of Latin America limits the anthology’s scope to Anglophone settler states, several chapters take a comparative or transnational approach. Joan Sangster’s opening piece sets the tone with an insightful discussion of the extant literature about native women and work on both sides of the 49th parallel. She advocates transnational study but cautions scholars not to fetishize that perspective, especially because of its potential to render the struggles of native women too abstract. Similarly, she applauds the “cultural turn” in historical writing about indigenous labor while warning against the uncritical celebration of agency, which can sugarcoat colonialism and signal acceptance of capitalist hegemony. The tension between agency and exploitation, autonomy and dependency, emerges as a recurring theme in the essays that follow.The rest of the collection moves chronologically and thematically through various sectors of indigenous women’s work, including unpaid and unfree forms that often escape the attention of labor historians. Although some essays defy easy categorization, roughly half the chapters focus on manual or resource-based work. To combat North American stereotypes of the “lazy squaw” and “squaw drudge” (149), along with their counterparts in the Antipodes, the contributors marshal evidence of female productivity, creativity, and adaptability under difficult circumstances. They introduce readers to Anishinaabeg women in the fields and factories of Michigan (Alice Littlefield), aboriginal women in the sealing industry of southern Australia (Lynette Russell), indentured Pacific Islanders on the sugar plantations of Queensland (Tracey Banivanua Mar), Lummi potato farmers (Chris Friday) and shíshálh hand loggers (Susan Roy and Ruth Taylor) in the Pacific Northwest, First Nations and Métis fur-trade women in eastern Canada (Sherry Farrell Racette), and Mono women in the agricultural economy of the San Joaquin Valley (Heather A. Howard). The authors’ shared mission, as articulated by Roy and Taylor, is to disrupt “Western dichotomies that distinguish women’s labor from men’s, subsistence from commercial, and traditional from modern” and that have been used to justify settler societies’ exploitation of both indigenous women and their homelands (115).The remaining essays examine native women as artisans, entrepreneurs, performers, domestic workers, educators, club members, and activists. Moving beyond nostalgic notions of women’s cultural production, we witness Navajo weavers shrewdly responding to international market forces (Kathy M’Closkey) and Anishinaabeg women using tourism to weather both economic change and federal policy (Melissa Rohde). Other authors explore the gendered consequences of colonization through studies of “diverted mothering” (179) among Native American domestic servants (Margaret D. Jacobs), the classification of New Deal programs for Indian women as unpaid “charity work” (Colleen O’Neill, 194), and native women’s employment as matrons and teachers by the Office of Indian Affairs (Cathleen Cahill). The contemporary push for decolonization receives consideration in the final three essays, which respectively profile the development of women’s clubs in Canada and New Zealand (Aroha Harris and Mary Jane Logan McCallum), the “politically purposeful work” (241) of Ojibwe women in postwar Minneapolis (Brenda J. Child), and the demands for Maori sovereignty that rocked New Zealand’s trade union movement during the 1980s (Cybèle Locke). Clearly linking the anthology’s aims with their struggle, Williams calls the Maori dissidents “outspoken and theoretically innovative critics of colonialism who pointedly denounce the racial exclusions enacted by contemporary settler feminism” (20).The contributors to Indigenous Women and Work are certainly innovative in overcoming the limitations that traditional historical sources place on the study of colonized peoples. Littlefield and Child, among others, use fieldwork and oral history to plug gaps in the written record and uncover the personal meanings native women have assigned to their labor. When words fail, scholars such as Roy, Taylor, and Mar turn to photographic analysis to help visualize the lives of indigenous women and expose “the ideological composition of the colonial project” (83). Such techniques are hardly new, of course, but they have not been widely applied to the study of native peoples within the field of labor history. They will be especially vital if historians ever hope to answer Littlefield’s call for “more fine-grained studies of work and gender relations in [tribal] enterprises to understand more general processes of accommodation, resistance, and class division within tribal communities” (58). The latter issue in particular has received little attention from scholars, presumably because of entrenched assumptions about the egalitarian nature of tribal cultures, the marginalization of indigenous people within urban-industrial economies, and the primacy of national self-determination as the goal of native activism. Here again, the inclusion of Latin American cases might have opened further interpretive possibilities, as would studies of indigenous women in Alaska and Hawai‘i. If the principal purpose of an anthology is to raise new questions and point out promising directions, though, this one has succeeded.Indigenous Women and Work is also notable for its intellectual coherence and caliber, a testament to Williams’s care in selecting, editing, and organizing the disparate essays. As with any collection, the pieces vary in degree of originality, depth of research, and clarity of expression. There are no truly weak links, however, and Williams’s introduction effectively ties them to major themes and questions in the historiography of several distinct fields. Most important, for the purposes of this journal, the anthology has staked a powerful claim for indigenous women within labor history. To paraphrase the slogan of Canada’s current native rights movement, they will be idle and invisible no more.

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