Order Up! The Decolonizing Politics of Howard Adams and Maria Campbell with a Side of Imagining Otherwise

Order Up!The Decolonizing Politics of Howard Adams and Maria Campbell with a Side of Imagining Otherwise Daniel Voth (bio) it has been more than forty years since the publication of Maria Campbell's foundational text Halfbreed (1973) and Howard Adams's Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (1975). Both authors emerged out of Indigenous organizing movements and established themselves as articulate and persuasive Métis writers, activists, and leaders. Campbell and Adams provided pointed and powerful criticisms of the Canadian colonial milieu grounded in their respective local contexts and experiences. Both Adams and Campbell were featured on Indigenous media programs such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) radio show Our Native Land. Adams also gave comments to major daily newspapers; magazines such as New Breed; and films, including the National Film Board's Pow Wow at Duck Lake and The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson's Bay Company. Campbell went on to write acclaimed children's books and translated Cree and Michif stories in Stories of the Road Allowance People. Through their activism, Campbell and Adams came to be leaders in both formal and protest Métis political movements, and they built bridges between the leaders of the previous generation and a new generation of Métis agitators. While many in Indigenous communities will reflect fondly on both Adams's and Campbell's teaching, mentorship, and public appearances, both scholars ought to also be noted for their important intellectual contributions to understanding Canadian colonialism and theorizing Indigenous resistance.1 With the exciting rise in Métis scholarship and Métis studies, the time seems right for a reexamination of both Adams and Campbell as intellectual leaders on whose shoulders many of us stand tall. Importantly, though, these works have a great deal to say to each other. In what follows, I start by arguing that, more than forty years after its publication, Prison of Grass continues to have the power to inform scholars and activists engaged in the study and practice of Indigenous resurgence as well as the politics of decolonization, colonialism, and settler colonialism in Canada. This appreciative critique, however, cannot abide one of the central theoretical failings [End Page 16] of Adams's intellectual work: his colossal failure to adequately and appropriately address Indigenous gender and Indigenous gendered power dynamics within his explication of colonial domination. While Adams's thought remains useful as a tool both for Indigenous activists in community and for scholars in the academy, there is a pressing need to name, deconstruct, and then imagine and act otherwise about the sexism and the reproduction of heterosexual norms of life he advances in his thought. To this end, I contrast Adams's interventions with Maria Campbell's insightful engagement with gendered colonial violence in Halfbreed to demonstrate that Campbell understood better than Adams the gendered and intersecting dimensions of colonial power and violence. The article is divided into three sections. In the first, I argue that Adams's interventions continue to have explanatory strength for Indigenous political struggles and the study of those conflicts. In the second, I work through Adams's failure on gender and contrast his theory with Campbell's. The problem created by this critical engagement is that it leaves much of the fight against gendered colonial oppression unfinished. Phrased differently, the critique that I offer here does not in itself substantially contribute to the building of a decolonizing politics attuned to gendered colonial violence. To address this, the final section takes up James Tully's call to act otherwise in struggles of freedom along with the calls of literary scholars to imagine otherwise. The aim of the final section is to offer a framework that at once harnesses a rich appreciation of Indigenous gender diversity toward creating an anticolonial politic, thereby combining the strengths of both Campbell and Adams. The way I approach this is to engage in an alternative imagining of the formulation of Adams's orientation to both gendered colonial domination and the way gender is animated in a decolonizing political movement. Howard Adams as Foundational in Decolonizing Politics in Canada This section outlines the continued relevance of...

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