Toward a Feminist Perspective in Native History SYLVIA VAN KIRK University of Toronto This paper is intended to provide a basis for discussion about the way in which a feminist perspective can help to illuminate what should be some vital areas in the field of native history. My concerns have arisen out of my own work about the role of women in the history of the fur trade in western Canada. Increasingly I have found that what I call "a feminist perspective" has given me a new and fruitful way of approaching traditional data and ultimately situating women, both native and white, in this historical con­ text. What I would like to do here is to express some of my ideas about how women's history and native history should intersect and to consider some questions about issues which are crying out for more investigation. Both women's history and native history are two quite new specializa­ tions within the discipline of history, and there are some interesting parallels in their development. Both have emerged in the last two decades or so be­ cause of the rise of corresponding movements for political liberation. Both the native rights movement and the women's rights movement seek to throw off the yokes of oppression and discrimination experienced by their respec­ tive constituencies; phrases such as "autonomy", "self-determination" and "economic opportunity" are watchwords of both movements. In this pro­ cess, history has become an important tool, not only in seeking explanations for the roots of domination, but also in the effort to reclaim a past which has been ignored and considered irrelevent to the development of the Canadian nation. I am sure that practitioners of both specializations would agree that to date neither women nor native people have been accorded their rightful place in Canadian history, and that they would further insist that until this is done, we will have failed to understand the real shape of Canadian 377 378 SYLVIA VAN KIRK history and society.1 With such similar backgrounds and common political concerns, one might assume that the findings of one field would readily be incorporated into that of the other — that scholars of native history would be sensitive to the feminist perspective which insists that gender must be a primary category of analysis and that scholars of women's history would be sensi­ tive to the perspective that ethnicity is a crucial variable in determining a woman's experience. While the latter process is by no means complete, it is the lack of substantial progress in the former that I wish to focus on in this paper. Like Canadian history at large, most native history to date suffers from the lack of a feminist perspective. If one samples most of the major works in the field of Indian-white relations (Ray 1978; Fisher 1975; Upton 1968), for example, one see that while they do provide significant insights into the impact of European contact upon Indian people, there is virtually no discussion of the fact that the sexes were affected quite differently by this process. Yet this is a dimension of considerable significance in the cultural adaptation and dislocation that has been experienced by all Indian societies. Indeed, it can be argued that a study of the role of women in pre-contact native societies is a vital foundation for any historical study of native peoples' response to European contact. In analyzing such failings in the literature to date it can be said that one of the problems is that so little research on native women in a historical context have been done. This unfortunately is true and this paper is partly a plea for this situation to be rectified from a truly ethnographic and feminist perspective. In 1982, Kathleen Jamieson was able to put together quite a comprehensive bibliography on native women in Canada (Jamieson 1983), but it was disappointing for its lack of contributions by historians. Much of the historical analysis to date has been attempted by social scientists, and while their pioneering efforts are very much to be applauded, I hope it will not seem ungenerous to express my reservations about their lack of sensitivity to the specifics of historical time and place. One anthropologist noted for her study of the Montagnais (Leacock 1980), for example, feels entitled to leap from a discussion of that tribe in the mid-17th century to the mid-20th as if the experience of the two centuries in between is somehow irrelevent. We need much more detailed study of the changing historical role of Indian women, differentiated by tribe, with a careful pin-pointing of the varying responses to the intrusion of differing aspects of European JThe failure to integrate recent scholarship in native history into the mainstream of Canadian history has been pointedly demonstrated by James Walker (1983). I have discussed a similar lack of progress in women's history elsewhere (Van Kirk 1984). FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE 379 society. An Indian woman's response to the economic technology offered by a fur trader, for example, might be quite different from her response to the socio-religious programme imposed by a missionary. In our attempts to reclaim the historical experience of native women, the feminist model provides a further useful perspective in insisting that we situate women as actors on their historical stage. We need to understand that, however, limited an Indian woman's options may have been, she did in fact act within that frame of reference and that that frame of reference might be different from that of her male counterpart. This "active agent" model is an important antidote to the "passive victim" model in native his­ tory which in the final analysis only insults native people themselves. The feminist perspective does not ignore the issues of class or racial oppression but it does provide a framework for understanding the specific female ex­ perience within this larger context that carries us beyond the insights that Marxist scholarship has so far had to offer. The feminist perspective, for example, is a useful qualifier to the Marx­ ist enthusiasm for the egalitarian nature of pre-contact native societies in Canada. Anthropologist Eleanor Leacock claims that hunting and gath­ ering societies such as the Montagnais-Naskapi were egalitarian because the women made an essential economic contribution to the survival of the band, they had an important voice in the decision making process and en­ joyed considerable autonomy in domestic and reproductive concerns; his­ torian Ron Bourgeault (1983) makes an even more extravagant assessment of Chipewyan society where the idyllic nature of pre-contact sex roles was apparently destroyed by the fur trade. A feminist perspective demands that such statements be examined with caution and that the scholar guard against translating what are really relativistic claims into absolute ones. The assumption that the woman's essential economic role is a guarantee of high status and social equality is dubious. ~/Even though in hunting- gathering societies women contributed a good deal both in food and labour, it appears that the high status occupations were the male ones of big game hunter and warrior. As a Chipewyan derisively told fur trader David Thompson in the late 18th century: "What is a woman good for, she can­ not hunt, she is only to work and carry out things" (Van Kirk 1980:25). Among the Haida, only men could be carvers, an artistic endeavour which was held in greater esteem than the basketry and weaving of the women, although this too involved a great deal of skill (Mitchell and Franklin 1984). Much attention has been paid to the high status that accrued to Iroquoian women because of their role as agriculturalists, but this does not mean that the men considered them their equals; many Indian males were reluctant to take up agriculture because they considered it demeaning to do women's work. While native women might have their own quite elaborate ritual life, 380 SYLVIA VAN KIRK in many native societies the powerful taboos which excluded women from male ceremonials and councils emphasized the inferiority and polluting na­ ture of women. Bourgeault's claims for the equality of Chipewyan women are based on their economic role, and he ignores various social customs which point to the ways in which female autonomy could be seriously cir­ cumscribed. Women were often the prizes in wrestling matches among the men and, according to Samuel Hearne (1958), they had a wonderful way of making the women comply through fear. Among the Carrier tribe of northern British Columbia, a widow owed a year's service to her husband's family while carrying his ashes on her back; and among the Plains Indi­ ans, a husband could exact severe penalties for a wife's adultury (cf. Van Kirk 1980). This brief catalogue should be sufficient to illustrate that the "golden age" of equal relations between the sexes is probably not to be found among the pre-contact tribes of Canada. I agree with anthropolo­ gists Marjorie Mitchell and Anna Franklin who in their pioneering article on the history of Indian women in British Columbia (Mitchell and Franklin 1984:19) find an inherent tendency toward male dominance, even in such societies as the matrilineal Haida. Although it questions the likelihood of absolute equality for Indian women in pre-contact times, the feminist model can accommodate the con­ cept of relative equality. This, I think, is one of the exciting contributions that the feminist perspective can make to native history. A convincing ar­ gument can be made that relatively-speaking pre-contact Indian societies were less oppressive with regard to women than the European societies which subsequently sought to impose their own patterns of sex roles and values on native societies.