Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs

Abstract

In this scrupulously researched study of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), Sarah A. Nickel challenges dominant historical narratives of Indigenous politics in British Columbia. Most significantly, she brings a gendered analysis to the narrative that is long overdue. The depth of her method drives the book, pairing dense archival research with detailed community narratives based on seven years of oral history work. Bolstered by Indigenous critical theory, she weaves two intricately related threads throughout the book: the challenge of pan-Indigenous unity, and the location of Indigenous women within it.Assembling Unity traces UBCIC’s constant negotiation between pan-Indigenous unity and the local autonomy of its constituent communities. Nickel navigates this artfully, negotiating this tension with impressive frankness and nuance. Crucially, she does not try to resolve it. The book shows that unity does not necessarily mean unanimity and builds a methodical argument against racist expectations of Indigenous uniformity that are all too common to Canadian politics (169). It further situates the problem of unity within the political moment of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the rise of Red Power, and the concurrent radicalization and bureaucratization of Indigenous politics through this period. In this context, UBCIC is constantly revising its position vis-à-vis the settler state.Here a second tension arises, between recognition and refusal. At different times UBCIC strategically engages with state process, refuses it outright, or does both at once. This comes to a head in the final chapter on the Constitution Express—a movement that constructed Indigenous sovereignty both in relation to Canadian federalism and outside it. While I sometimes wished for more on this point, and the nuances between refusal and resistance, I really appreciated Nickel’s ability to embrace the complexity of these decisions for UBCIC. By demonstrating that refusals “are not simply all or nothing” but “exist on a spectrum and can overlap and compete” (93), the book complicates the engagement/disengagement dichotomy that dominates social movement scholarship. It also shows these phenomena are not exclusive to Indigenous peoples’ relations with the state by featuring dynamics of recognition and refusal within and against UBCIC itself.Where this is most present is in the organization’s fraught relationship with Indigenous women. Women’s movements unfold not as a subplot to UBCIC’s political dynamics but as central to them. The book captures the way the masculinist sociopolitical structures of the settler state reproduce themselves in Indigenous politics, from watershed moments of women’s exclusion to quotidian moments of misogyny. Yet it does so in a way that is both critical and generative. Women both build and challenge unity within UBCIC, and their disruptions prove to be as important to its development as their support. Women’s perspectives weave throughout the book, particularly through the stories of the BC Indian Homemakers Association and BC Native Women’s Society. It is an analysis of Indigenous feminism that moves beyond its contrast to white feminism, contextualized instead within the movement for sovereignty and nationhood.Indeed, Nickel is exceedingly careful to avoid “settler-centric” narratives of Indigenous political action (19). Countering the popular perception that the modern Indigenous movement was born in reaction to the federal government’s 1969 White Paper, she instead traces its rise through a century of pan-Indigenous organizing in British Columbia. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I especially appreciated this insight as a caution against the lure of “myopic moments” which “collapse Indigenous politics” (8) with colonial plot points.Assembling Unity captures a great deal of complexity without undermining the achievements of UBCIC. Rather, it redefines the terrain of success as one that is fraught, nuanced, negotiated, and nonlinear. Historians and nonhistorians alike will appreciate its breadth of analysis and significant contributions to settler colonial studies, Indigenous feminist thought, political anthropology, and geography.