Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada by Jennifer Henderson

Abstract

3 5 0 W e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e f a l l 2 0 0 6 political equality for themselves, and, often through the use of sustained tex­ tual analysis, refute whites’ knowledge about them as politically self-interested misrepresentations” (51). Three of the book’s four chapters consider resistances to political crises occasioned by white appropriation of land. Konkle’s reread­ ing of the documents of Cherokee Resistance sees Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, and John Ross as asserting that the Cherokee nation is a “modernizing Indian nation that persists despite” US federal and state mechanisms (46). Her consid­ eration of the large oeuvre of William Apess reveals his trenchant “critique of racial difference” at a moment when science, politics, and political expediency combined to advance a naturalized idea of race (104). Turning from an emphasis on land and treaty rights, Konkle considers how six Ojibwe intellectuals represented themselves, their history, and their traditions as a resistance to white ethnological scholarship that transmuted their cultural history into “idealized, romanticized stories that described Native peoples as inhabitants of the distant past” and that, thus, “quite literally sup­ ported colonial control” (160, 167). Themes of land, politics, racialization, and intellectual self-determination come together in her concluding examination of how Seneca and Tuscarora intellectuals resisted Euramerican attempts to narrate the histories of the putative eclipse of the “mythical Iroquois ‘empire’” and of Red Jacket as the “last heroic, eloquent, vanishing savage” (228). WritingIndian Nations is an extraordinary book, first, for its sheer accretion of testimony drawn from the work of numerous Native intellectuals; second, for its demonstration that these writers, thinkers, performers, and scholars were in conversation not only with their Euramerican political opponents, but also with other Native intellectuals; and finally, for its demonstration that “Native political struggles and their ongoing effects” must necessarily still impact our scholarship on “racism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and imperialism, where they are often glanced over” (7). Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada. By Jennifer Henderson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 288 pages, $63.00. Reviewed by Connie Brim Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia Jennifer Henderson’s Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada offers a discursive analysis of first-person narratives composed during the period when Canada was a settler colony: Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) by the British liberal activist Anna Brownell Jameson; Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear (1885) by Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney, both of whom were held captive during the anticolonial Northwest Rebellion of 1885; and the Janey Canuck writings by Emily Murphy, the first woman magistrate in the British Empire (1916) and one of the five women responsible for successfully campaigning for Canadian women to be recognized as persons. B o o k R e v i e w s 3 5 1 The theoretical underpinnings of Henderson’s study are Foucauldian. From Foucault she borrows theories of govemmentality, while from historians she borrows the idea of the settler colony as a liberal laboratory, specifically Canada as a testing ground for liberal ideas. Rejecting the traditional representation of Canadian literary history “as the organic expression of a people, involved in a process of maturation akin to that of the hero of a Bildungsroman” and arguing against the well-entrenched idea that early Canadian women’s writing was the voice “of a colony in the process of becoming a nation,” Henderson analyzes the settler women’s narra­ tives in order to expose what she calls “the microphysics of power in a settler colony” and to argue for a historicization of Canadian women’s writing that goes beyond a study of origins (3, 4, 4). She positions the writings not as iso­ lated texts of individual woman’s self-representation, but as texts influenced by discourses such as population control, white slavery, political economy, racial hygiene, and assimilative pedagogy. Henderson devotes one chapter to each text, beginning with Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, a work that establishes “Upper Canada as an experimental counter-site ... for govern­ mental strategies bent on the practical...