Being Again of One Mind: Oneida women and the struggle for decolonization (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Being Again of One Mind: Oneida women and the struggle for decolonization Mary Jane Logan McCallum Being Again of One Mind: Oneida women and the struggle for decolonization Lina Sunseri. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. Lina Sunseri’s book Being Again of One Mind analyzes nationalism in the context of Oneida of the Thames women’s struggle for decolonization. The book begins with a forward by Patricia A. Monture which places Sunseri’s work in the context of Indigenous scholarship and Haudenosaunee women’s roles as teachers. In the introductory chapter, Sunseri describes her perspective on Oneida nationalism, gender relations and colonialism, outlines her distinct methodology, and shares a short version of the Oneida Creation Story to orient the reader to the powerful roles women held in the nation. The core of the book is organized into five chapters. The first analyzes theories of nations and nationalism from modernist to Indigenous perspectives and the second looks at the history of the Oneida nation. The third chapter examines the governance structures of the Haudenosaunee League and the impact of colonialism on the Oneida nation through the lens of gender. This chapter focuses on the shift from a matrilineal, clan-based and egalitarian system to one that was patriarchal and afforded women relatively little authority. The fourth and fifth chapters explore how the experiences of colonialism have affected Oneida women and their vision for a decolonizing movement. Sunseri’s central argument is that within a decolonizing nationalist movement rooted in a history of nation that has been inclusive and based on gender balance, there is a possibility that nation and nationalism have not been oppressive for women… Their participation can influence and challenge any existing patriarchal and essentialist concepts of nation and may make it possible to establish an Oneida nation in which women’s roles and rights are ensured and realized. This would mean putting into place the founding principles of the Great Law of Peace, accommodating differences, and eliminating present divisions that exist in our community (5). In her concluding chapter, Sunseri describes Oneida women’s ongoing active participation in the formulation of discourses of nationalism and the decolonizing movement more broadly. Sunseri’s multi-layered critique of the Eurocentric secondary literature on nationalism is skillful, respectful and highly readable. She shows how Oneida is written out of nationhood by scholars of nationalism from Ernest Gellner to Eric Hobsbawm to Benedict Anderson. Next she outlines some of the limitations of postcolonial theorists of nations and nationalism with respect to Oneida nation including Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Franz Fanon and Edward Said. Sunseri also situates her analysis of nationalism alongside leading scholars of Indigenous nationalisms, governance and sovereignty including Taiaiake Alfred, Audra Simpson and Kiera Ladner. Her findings are that Oneida nationalism pre-dates, confronted, and endures colonization and that in this system, women held powerful political, social and economic positions. One of the key questions in Being Again of One Mind is how contemporary Oneida women are involved in and impacted by nationalism. To answer this question Sunseri developed a research methodology that is collaborative, reflective, relational and suited to Oneida, sociological and feminist intellectual disciplines. Sunseri’s own experience of nationalism, gender relations, and colonialism at Oneida of the Thames informs the discussion and her work relies on Haudenosaunee and Oneida stories and teachings as well as sources of knowledge that are mainly academic. She participated in ceremonies, teachings, workshops and conferences while she read and evaluated literature on nationalism, gender, colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonization, and Oneida and Haudenosaunee history. Sunseri’s approach is also shaped in part by working through postcolonial literature as a graduate student of Sociology. At a graduate workshop on diaspora and hybridity and a graduate class on gender, nationalism and ethnicity, she found that nationalism was primarily understood to disempower women and that Oneida women’s experiences were not well reflected in the theories. As such she was inspired to more fully examine questions of Oneida history and Oneida women’s involvement in nationalism. Sunseri grounds her analysis in collaborative narratives developed in separate interviews with twenty women who belong to Oneida of the Thames, who were involved in cultural and political activities, and...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".