Masculindians: The Violence and Voyeurism of Male Sibling Relationships in Recent First-Nations Fiction

Abstract

Growing up 'Indian' in this country is very much about not having power to define yourself or your own reality. It is being denied right to say, 'I am!' - instead finding yourself saying 'I am not!'1THIS ESSAY EXAMINES A CRISIS OF MASCULINITY ENGENDERED, at least partly, by projection externally constructed, dehumanizing, and incongruous models Indigenous masculinity on FirstNations communities and coterminous corrosion viable masculine roles and responsibilities within communities themselves. The Metis writer Kirn Anderson argues that [Native] men's responsibilities have been greatly obscured by colonial process, adding that is more difficult for men than it is for women to define their responsibilities in contemporary setting and reclaim their dignity and sense purpose.2 The Mohawk activist Sakej Ward contends that, although Native people try to bring back roles and responsibilities, [...] we always fail to bring back role that encompasses half our people: male population.3 Thus, in words Timothy Sweet, expressed project for Native communities of 'recovering feminine,' [. . .] must be complemented by an endeavour to recover masculine.4 This essay argues that understandings Indigenous masculinity (or, better, masculinities) have been problematized by rhetorical and semiotic configurations Native-ness as either impossibly masculine or impossibly feminine, neither which supports, validates, and undergirds male lived experience. Many young Indigenous men are thus drawn in conflicting directions by images that either exclude them or misrepresent their experience in same moment those images claim to identify what Native-ness is. Young Indigenous men can be thus shown by semiosis Native-ness to be not masculine enough or not feminine enough and all while not Native enough.On one hand, young Indigenous men are subject to hypermasculine images Hollywood Indian, which identify Native-ness through a closed system masculinist traits, from emotionless stoicism to rugged virility to rage, fury, and bloodlust. According to Brian Klopotek,For at least last century, hypermasculinity has been one foremost attributes Indian world that whites have imagined [...]. Indian tribes are populated predominantly by noble or ignoble savages, wise old chiefs, and cunning warriors. These imagined Indian nations comprise an impossibly masculine race.5Such images - products a settler imagination - dehumanize, even as they offer potential feelings empowerment for men in short term, they are radically one-dimensional, humourless, and tied to a simulated past. The Kanien'kahaka scholar Taiaiake Alfred told me recently in an interview: There's living with [the image Hollywood Indian], it's not meant to be lived with; it's meant to be killed, every single time. They're images to be slain by white conqueror.6On other hand, young First Nations men are subject to a postcolonial or traditionalist response to European patriarchy that holds aloft femininity or gynocratic power as core Indigeneity. In The Sacred Hoop, Laguna /Sioux writer Paula Gunn Allen argues that traditional tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic than not and they are never patriarchal.7 As a result, Dine critic Laura Tohe argues that there is no need for feminism in Indigenous societies, because our matrilineal culture.8 In Canadian context, Cree writer Tomson Highway has depicted colonization Americas as the killing one religion by another, [...] killing God as woman by God as man.9 Each these Indigenous intellectuals champions feminine as integral to Indigenous lifeways in a manner that de-emphasizes masculine. And although these are, in many ways, strategically essentialist responses to particular conditions colonial domination, they can lead young Indigenous men to wonder, as a Cree student asked in one my classes, Where am I in all this? …