Lawrence (academic nonfiction)

[sage]

"Real" Indians and Others : Mixed-blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood by Bonita Lawrence

This book is a study of 29 individuals in the Toronto Native community identifying as mixed race. It's a good history of the (nutty) history of Canada's Indian Act and who legally qualifies to have Indian status (and therefore rights to land/money) and how that status has been systematically taken away from women band members and their children.

The participants had a broad range of Native phenotypes, so some looked very Native and others looked very white. Lawrence talks at length about privilege, resentment, self-image, the experience of people denying Indianness (as a cultural inheritance and as a beneficial legal status) to Natives who look "too" white, and the complicated problems of identity and racism faced by Natives with darker skin and hair.

The study is also a good ethnography of the experience of the children of Natives who were taken away and either placed into residential schools, where they faced various types of abuse and neglect, or who were adopted out into white families in the 1960s when social services removed 90% of Native kids from their parents' homes. Obviously, it's a hell of an eyeopener with regard to the systematic destruction of native culture in Canada.

Lawrence also addresses briefly the representation issues, wherein the organized First Nations do not include all the Indian bands, nor large numbers of mixed race peoples, despite some of these living as traditional an Indian cultural lifestyle as would be found on any reserve. All this, she says, is a result of Canadian law defining the limits of Indian identity, thus creating a mess of identity politics and competition for ever-shrinking federal resources.

I found it a fascinating contrast with Mexican history, where the pro-Mestizo movement worked to empower people and give them a positive identity. Being mixed race in Canada seems to separate a person from both the Native and the white communities, although the mixed race Native communities in urban areas are apparently making an effort to take up the cultural, if not financial/land benefit, slack.


Note: This book is out of print. My local library subscribes to NetLibrary, where I read it online.


eta: Just for the record, the author is part Mi'kmaq and undertook the study as part of her own attempts to understand and validate the range of urban mixed-race Aboriginal experience.

Comments

[agentotter.livejournal.com]

That sounds really interesting; I'll have to see if I can find a net.copy of that to read, as well. Thanks for the review!

[sage]

It really was. I'm fairly well-versed in Latin American history and the history of the Old West, but I had no idea how differently things happened in Canada. I was kind of shocked.

[agentotter.livejournal.com]

I was familiar with some of the things like forced relocations of Inuit bands to remote and unliveable areas, but I hadn't realized that Canada also had one of those "social welfare" programs that removed native children from their families. If you've got other recs on native history in Canada I'd love to hear about them, too. It's really difficult to find any sort of good histories of Canada, much less ones that address this sort of history.

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

I've just realized some of the things that happened in my own state (Vermont) to the Abenaki population. It's been an eye-opener.

[skirmish-of-wit.livejournal.com]

This is really fascinating to me because I know very little about Native cultures in either the US or Canada, but I had always heard that the US should treat Native populations more like Canada does. Sadly, it seems that despite perhaps more governmental support in name, in spirit much of the treatment of Canadian First Nations people looks similarly awful to US treatment.

I really like the idea of academic book reviews, incidentally.

[sage]

Yeah, now I need to read up on Native American policy in the US to see how it compares. Lawrence did say that from the beginning the US approached the Tribes as independent nations. There were treaties and then wars and policies to subjugate them, but it was considered less-bad than colonial Britain's overt policy of genocide toward Natives in Canada. The US said, in effect, jump in the melting pot, or else. British-ruled Canada said, if we kill all their buffalo, they'll starve to death, yay.

I really enjoy nonfiction -- I tend to read more fanfic than profic, but good nonfiction makes my day. :)

[tavella.livejournal.com]

There was definitely a period of cultural suppression -- "Indian schools" punishing children for speaking their own language, for example. And there were enough Indian children adopted out "for their own good" that the Indian Child Welfare Act (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/topics/ICWA.html) was later passed. But nothing like 90 percent, certainly.

[sage]

You're right. She said one third to one half of kids were put into care. The 90% figure had to do with alcoholism. My bad. :)

[tavella.livejournal.com]

No, no, I was just saying what I knew about American cultural suppression issues, not that Canada wasn't 90 percent. Though I'm glad to know it wasn't quite *as* high as that (though what existed sounded horrible enough.)

[nos4a2no9.livejournal.com]

And in another interesting layer, South Africa apparently modeled its apartheid practices on Canada's policies and treatment of aboriginal peoples.

Fascinating post, Sage! I'm definitely going to try to find a copy of this book.

[sage]

Colonial history is SCARY! Especially since I'd had this misconception that because Canadian history happened LATER than Latin American history, that Canadian history would be somehow less cruel to the native peoples. Of course, it doesn't help that I know way more about the Maya and Aztec and the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern US, which have different sorts of first contact stories than people in other areas.

Getting educated is hard work.

[agentotter.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting, because the US also had a very overt policy if killing the Indian food supply to solve the "Indian problem," and though programs like the Indian schools and adoptions that tavella mentions were widely used, it seems like the US policy was also very much geared toward genocide. It's interesting to find that Canada's policies were so similar because so many of the native tribes of the US traveled to Canada to escape the US government, and from what I knew (which wasn't much) it sounded like they had gotten a better deal in Canada. Obviously that's not the case. It sounds like Canada went more the route that Australia did, which I guess makes sense as they were both British imperial colonies.

David Quammen has a really interesting section in his Song of the Dodo, which is about island biogeography and extinction of species, where he essentially compares the way that British imperialists systematically destroyed species to the way they systematically destroyed Aboriginal culture in Australia. It was a stunning comparison because the methods and intent were exactly the same, and it illustrated very vividly how much the thinking toward native peoples classified them as so much less than human.

[sage]

*nodnodnod*

I'm under the impression that things happened at the state and local levels in the US that were not necessarily supported at the federal level, while in Canada, it was pretty much all ordered at the federal level. But I know a bit more about Spanish colonial history in the Americas (fighting Indians in the early 1500s) than I do later Native American history, so yeah. I've got a lot to learn.