In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms ed. by Sarah Nickel and Amanda Fehr (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms ed. by Sarah Nickel and Amanda Fehr Sarah Deer (bio) In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms edited by Sarah Nickel and Amanda Fehr University of Minnesota, 2020 IN GOOD RELATION bridges the divide between activist sensibilities and academic interrogations by considering how Indigenous feminisms intersect with other academic and artistic principles. The book provides a fresh critique of the sometimes-fraught application of gender equity to the liberation of Native people. This anthology cultivates a fresh perspective on this topic due to the editors' selection of authors/artists, including junior scholars. The academic pieces are interspersed with contributions from artists, activists, and poets, making the anthology more widely accessible. The third section ("Multi-Generational Feminisms and Kinship") is exceptional. A synergy between Native women and Two-Spirit people's struggles is tied together by their relationships to people and places. Zoe Todd's stories of her great-grandmother, Caroline LaFramboise, who was a Métis matriarch, are inspiring. Parenthood and intergenerational conversations are explored in two pieces. Ojibway poet waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy in conversation with her teenage daughter Aja Sy explores the complexities in parenting a Native child who is also racially coded as Black, struggling to help her deal with anti-Black racism in both the white and Indigenous worlds. Omeasoo Wāhpāsiw's pregnancy and journey into parenthood forms the backdrop for an insightful conversation with her mother, Indigenous poet Louise Halfe. Lindsay Nixon explicates an "Indigenous Relational Aesthetics (IRA)" (196) as a specific Indigenous artistic method to bring Indigenous people back to a foundation of ethical love. Nixon applies the IRA within the context of a touring exhibition curated by Nation to Nation. Nixon challenges us to make space and resources for Indigenous artists "whose work represents the love that . . . Indigenous art is capable of embodying" (204). The first section, "Broadening Indigenous Feminisms," includes two chapters exploring historical events and two contemporary pieces challenging the typical approach to academic Indigenous feminisms. Madeline Rose Knickerbocker provides a historical analysis of the May 1976 Stó:lō occupation of Kw'eqwá:lith'á (Coqualeetz), a gendered cultural site that was subject to settler appropriation for over one hundred years. Stó:lō women initiated and led the occupation, which allowed Stó:lō women to reassert their power. Sarah [End Page 179] Nickel's contribution explores the nascent development of Native women's activism in Canada by tracing the development of Indian Homemakers' Clubs—a settler-colonial tactic to limit Native women's roles to cooking and cleaning. Although these clubs were initiated as a tool of colonialism, Native women transformed them into powerful Native women's organizations. Sámi scholar Astri Dankerstein, providing a thorough overview of Sámi feminism, explores how Nordic Indigenous people conceptualize gender and social inequities in ways that are consistent with other struggles of Indigenous women across the world. Filmmaker Tasha Hubbard's conversation with the young Indigenous women who collaborated on Hubbard's documentary, 7 Minutes, explores how young Native women navigate violent colonial spaces in their everyday lives. The second section, Queer and Two-Spirit Identities, invites the reader to engage in ongoing dialogues about how the recent revitalizations of the concept of "traditional" gender roles in tribal communities has created exclusionary experiences for twenty-first-century Two-Spirit people. Kai Pyle reminds us that efforts to reclaim traditional roles often create a man-woman binary that can reinforce heteropatriarchy and thus further marginalize contemporary Two-Spirit people within their own communities. Two-Spirit scholar Chantal Fiola takes the reader on her journey as a Two-Spirit person who is deeply immersed in Anishinaabe culture and ceremonies, highlighting the influence of four prominent Two-Spirit activists and scholars whose writings and other contributions have helped her to find solace and acceptance of herself as a Two-Spirit intellectual. Aubrey Jean Hanson's contribution links sovereignty and the erotic by analyzing Chrystos's 1988 poem "Ya Don Wanna Eat Pussy" in the context of a twenty-first-century Two-Spirit erotic ethic, providing a cogent argument that Indigenous feminisms must "honour the erotic as a site of sovereignty...