Subversive Spaces: First Nations Women and the City

Abstract

A number of researchers have explored how the Western city is gendered, racialized, and seen as an heterosexual space. There is little work which explores how the definition of the city, particularly in colonized countries, excludes indigenous peoples and cultures. In this paper, I wish to turn critical attention to the cultural meaning of urbanism by focusing on the complex geographies of identity and resistance which characterize the meaning of the term ‘urban’ in relation to First Nations women in Canada. I begin with a brief overview of the way colonial practices, which defined First Nations peoples and cultures as incompatible with urban life and First Nations people's negotiation of these practices, helped separate First Nations peoples and the city in imagination and in fact. I then describe the way colonial administration and policy established First Nations reserves as masculinized spaces. Last, I describe the alternative geographies of rights and identity imagined by urban First Nations women.