Strong Hearts, Native Lands: The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism by Anna J. Willow (review)

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 133 SIGNA A. DAUM SHANKS Strong Hearts, Native Lands: The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism by Anna J. Willow University of Manitoba Press, 2012 BLOCKADES ARE MADE of a complicated set of circumstances, including one important matter: some party is breaking a set of laws. If someone disagrees with the blockade, she or he will mention a country’s regulations to justify any complaints about it. If a person thinks the blockade reveals an issue of “injustice ” or a set of laws that were pushed aside for other regulations, the blockade can be understood as legal. And, of course, various opinions that represent a mixture of these views also surface when debating whether a blockade should continue or be taken down. So with such a variety of components within them, what’s a researcher to do when deciding to tell others about a particular location where a blockade is part of that place’s history? Anna Willow, an anthropologist, decided events in the last decade at Grassy Narrows First Nation in northern Ontario deserved attention. Willow also found, when learning about events there, that presenting about one place meant challenging a number of methodological and content concerns she has noticed in other efforts to research Indigenous peoples and Indigenous communities. Strong Hearts, Native Lands: ­ The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism is her effort to introduce a location while also contemplating why some qualities about the place are not yet part of how we think about land use, Indigenous history, modern Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations, anthropology, and ecology. Willow decides that she first must give some overarching information about how land is typically used by Indigenous peoples in the area now known as northern Ontario and by the Anishinaabe culture there in particular. While introducing information about landscape and the contributions of ethno­ historians, Willow also delves into what I consider a very difficult topic, the issue of understanding time. Is it spatial? Does a chronological presentation do justice to a region’s evolution? If an Indigenous nation has moved over the years, how do we evaluate their understandings about being a region’s original peoples? In shifting quickly to modern circumstances, how can an author justify jumping through decades within one paragraph or one sentence? Of course, it is impossible to imagine single answers for any of these questions, but Willow nevertheless presents information that shows how to compare Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 134 the past to current circumstances. In jumping to what she considers the “Native Rights” movement within the Canadian legal system, Willow clearly imagines Grassy’s circumstances as a product of externally imposed regulations that do not correlate with how the community could easily exist. The reserve invented to place Anishinaabe families on was justified by Canada through reference to the Indian Act and Treaty 3. But throughout the decades after the treaty’s implementation, Grassy people took frequent exception to the Crown’s interpretation of the document. By providing this information, Willow shows how the theme of confronting Canada has occurred for years among those who call Grassy their home. By the time Willow gets to 2002 in her timeline, she has convincingly shown how the blockade “did not arise in a vacuum” (69). In challenging the incredible implications of clearcutting, the people of Grassy have continued to tell legislature, Parliament, and the world that when trees fall without much thought, water systems are destroyed, lands do not function properly, and economics shrivel, so peoples cannot do much more than develop a dependency on government welfare systems. In a deftly structured section called “Blockade Life,” Willow reveals how her contacts in the community help bring local knowledge into the academy, while she challenges what previous anthropologists have done. Regardless of whether a physical structure exists to keep people out, Willow has told a story here to show how “the blockade is still there” (205). It is wrong to consider this book a historical study. Certainly, the book includes many references to the past, and the author clearly believes context is imperative when deliberating modern activities—particularly when a clash occurs...

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