MASCULINIDANS-17

15 September 2011

Conversation between Kim Anderson and Sam McKegney in Ottawa, Ontario, at the home of one of Kim’s closest friends. The interview took place prior to the Ottawa launch of Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine at the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health.

KIM ANDERSON (Cree-Métis) is writer, educator, policy analyst, and scholar specializing in community-based research methodologies and gender. She is currently professor of Indigenous Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. She has authored two critical books, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood (Sumach/Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000) and Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine (University of Manitoba Press, 2011), and co-edited with Bonita Lawrence an anthology entitled Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival (Sumach Press, 2003). She is currently co-editing an anthology on Indigenous Masculinities with Robert Innes and Jonathan Swift, to be published by University of Manitoba Press.

SAM MCKEGNEY: You’ve dedicated much of your life to investigating women’s issues in Indigenous communities. What brought you to those concerns early on, and why have they occupied you so much in your work?

KIM ANDERSON: Well, I’ve always been interested in social justice. So when I left home to live in Toronto as a young undergraduate student, I started working in Native organizations in the city. I’ve always been active as a volunteer, and I was working with men when I first started in the community. I worked at the Native Men’s Residence as a literacy tutor when I was in school. And that happened because there were people in that agency who were interested in improving literacy, and I’ve always been really strong on the value of education. So I worked with men for a number of years as a teacher, literacy helper. I didn’t really think about women. Women’s issues weren’t really on the forefront for me.

I think it really shifted for me when I had my first child, when I went through that experience of being pregnant, giving birth, and then being a mother to this beautiful little boy. I was just so overwhelmed by the sacredness of the experience. And I was also overwhelmed by how the sacred experience of mothering isn’t valued or recognized by and large in the mainstream world, how so many women and children suffer from neglect and abuse—and here’s this beautiful, sacred medicine and no one’s really protecting it or honouring it in the way it should be. And it just so happened that right after I had my son, I was doing research that involved child welfare. I guess I was really hormonal or whatever after giving birth—I had my own newborn baby at home and I was doing research and interviewing people who were involved in the child welfare system and it hit me really hard. It was really hard to go into these situations where I saw women who were struggling with situations of poverty and neglect and abuse and all this kind of thing, and here I was, the mom of this little baby boy. It was hard for me to process all of that. It set off all these alarms bells in my system.

At that point I was doing my master’s and I had this research project to do. I was going to do stuff on gender and First Nations politics because I had been working in First Nations politics and I had seen a gender divide there, too, so it intrigued me. But my partner said to me, “Well, why don’t you do something for yourself?” So I went out with a desire to learn about resilience, resistance, and recovery of Native women in spite of all the stuff they go through, just to fill myself up with hope. So that’s how I started out doing research and writing about Native women. From there, it just became an area where people recognized it as something that I do, so they asked me to work more in it and speak with women’s groups, and that’s really how I ended up focused on women and women’s issues. It was an effort to hold up those things about women that are sacred that got lost in patriarchy and male dominance which results in the violence and crises that we see in our communities today.

SM: When I first read A Recognition of Being, I was really struck by how Indigenous women’s issues were issues around sovereignty, how seeking out models within the cultures themselves and asserting those models in the face of imposed patriarchy was a means of political resistance at the same time that it was validating the needs of women at particular moments. Did you see that connection as you were writing it? Was it intentionally a political book or was it more about seeking the resources that were actually in the community and seeing where they led you?

KA: I don’t know that I had a political intent setting out, but I had come from working in First Nations politics and seeing the fault lines. What I saw, of course, was leadership that was almost exclusively male and people working at the grassroots, community level who were female, and it was like this fault line between the two. I was troubled by the disempowerment that can come when we recognize this group with titles and not this other group who are actually doing the leadership work and the community building. So I had that as a background. And so, in trying to reassert some of the authorities of women, that may have been what was colouring my approach and where I wanted to go with it. But the initial part of it was really about my own healing and sense of hope that I needed. It came directly out of being a mom of a young baby and just feeling so, I don’t know, so emotional, but also so moved at what needed to happen. It was so real and immediate to me what had to happen in terms of supporting women and kids. I had this understanding that sovereignty and healing will happen if we reinstate the authorities of women. If we put all of those things back into place, we wouldn’t be looking at violence in our communities, was the way I saw it.

NOT INDIAN ACT GOVERNANCE OR NOT MÉTIS GOVERNANCE, NOT THOSE THINGS THAT ARE REALLY ABOUT MALE-DOMINATED SYSTEMS OF GOVERNANCE—BUT GOVERNANCE IN WHICH THE OLD LADIES TRULY HAVE A VOICE.

SM: And when you say, “put those things back in place”, can you give me an example?

KA: Well, I think in our governance structures, we can start there. Finding ways to give women voice and authority. As an example, last weekend I was working with the Women’s Secretariat of the Métis Nation of Ontario. They asked me to facilitate a gathering of women from around the province. They brought them in in March (2011) and again recently. And what they said was that women haven’t had a place in the official politics or governance of our people for a hundred and fifty years or so. It got knocked out with the Indian Act, with Métis politics, with patriarchy finding its way in, and so on. So, I think that finding ways for women to be engaged in the governance of our nations, in ways in which women do governance—not Indian Act governance or not Métis governance, not those things that are really about male-dominated systems of governance—but governance in which the old ladies truly have a voice. Those types of things. If we can reinstate those types of things in our communities in a real way—not just like, “Oh, we have a Women’s Council and we have our Elder Council.” But how much authority do they really have in terms of making decisions? So, that’s one thing.

I’m thinking about things I learned in writing my latest book (Life Stages and Native Women). One of the elders I interviewed, Rene Meshake, grew up in a community that didn’t get moved onto a reserve until the 1960s, so he knew more of a traditional homeland territory in northwestern Ontario. He talks about how it was the old ladies who ruled, who governed that community, and how he knew that because of the names they had. So you can read about that. But he also talked about the ceremonies, the rites, the puberty seclusions that women and girls went through. He talked about what it meant to him as a young adolescent male to see these girls come out of their puberty ceremony. They would go away for a while and then they’d come out. And when they came out, they were kitchi-kwê, they were the “great woman.” His reflection was on the respect that he had for them coming out of there, and what a difference that would make in our communities if we had those kinds of things reinstated—people’s sense of the sacredness and the authority, the power that we carried in a good way—how that would shift things. For him, it shifted the way he saw these girls who were now becoming the kihci-kwê. He talked about his own identity and the renewed sense of himself as Anishinaabe; how it made him reflect on being closer to the earth, and how she is the earth.

So I thought, if we have these things we can start to put into place, it’s not just about looking after the well-being and authority that the girls could have. It’s about bringing back an understanding of the sacredness of life and how we position ourselves around it as communities on the whole. It would be a totally different world if we worked in that way, right? As it was once, for us. You know, the violence against women is something that’s… it’s new for us. And so I think it’s in part due to the loss of these systems that were in place, governance systems that recognized stages of people’s development and systems in which women were in charge of the economies and managing the communities.

SM: So how does that filter into roles and responsibilities? The initiation ceremonies that you’re talking about, in many ways, seek not only to encourage a person entering a different stage of her or his life to be self-reflexive and think about her or his own development and identity but also to think through how they connect to others within the family, others within the community, their non-human relations: the responsibilities, then, that they have to the community and that the community has to them. Do you see there being a place for the reinvigoration of those ceremonies, whether it’s in a reserve community or in urban spaces or, even more broadly, beyond Indigenous Canada? Are those ceremonies that we’re hungering for as a species, that we need in order to be well?

KA: Oh absolutely, yeah. And it’s already happening. All along there have been people that have practised these ceremonies underground or have done whatever variations they had to do, which I also write about in the Life Stages book. I interviewed people that were going through these things in the 1950s. And, of course, it’s making a comeback. Puberty ceremonies are already going on in many places and more and more people are doing them. And I think those are really critical in terms of understanding your roles, your responsibilities, sacrifice, the responsibility community has to you and you to them, all those things that you’re talking about. I think it’s really critical. And just the reverence for life. Once you go through some of these things, you start to recognize how important they were for reminding you about that sacredness of life.

SM: There’s been quite a bit—not enough perhaps, well, certainly not enough—but there’s been quite a bit written on Indigenous women’s issues in the past fifteen to twenty years and there’s been comparatively little written on Indigenous men’s issues specifically. Why do you think that’s the case?

KA: I’m not sure. Are you talking about scholarly work?

SM: I guess that’s what I was thinking of initially.

KA: So if you’re talking about scholarly work, I think you can probably just look at the demographic of Native female scholars as opposed to Native men scholars and Native women in university as opposed to Native men, which I’m sure you’re aware of, right? I don’t know what it is, but the numbers are much higher of Native women in universities than Native men. So that would be one obvious reason. It’s just that there’s more Native female scholars. I think it also has to do with women being at the forefront of the healing movement in Indian Country, for whatever reason. Maybe women are more apt to work on identity and emotions and all that kind of stuff. They’re more apt to organize collectively around these issues. They’re more invested in social change, maybe, at the community level because of their investment with children. People will often talk about that—that women are doing healing work because of the kids; their whole motivation comes from trying to make it better for the children. I’ve written about women chiefs and they all talk about that, about how they’re doing it for the kids. So I think because of all those things women have been at the forefront of the healing movement, and therefore we’ve been more introspective in terms of our identity development, our own needs, where we’re going, looking around at what’s going on. So out of that, you have more literature, I think.

SM: When you’re talking about the interwoven nature of all of those insidious structures—governance structures that are inherently patriarchal, with capitalist economic structures being laid over those, and nuclear family models of social organization being laid over those… and then the colonial pressure to treat those structures as “natural” and “inevitable”—is the foregrounding of Indigenous women’s power perhaps a means of struggling against that series of coercive and disabling fictions?

KA: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, and reconstructing extended family and kinship systems, which also had to be dismantled in order to make colonial inroads. They had to break down those kinship systems and the way in which kinship is connected to the land—that stuff has to be dismantled in order to make colonial inroads. So then, how do we put that back together? Women’s authority and power is really a key part of that. It’s at the centre of it.

SM: Well, let’s bring this into your current research on Indigenous masculinities. What has led you into the research that you’re working on currently and where do you see it moving?

KA: Well, as you know, I’ve been working on women’s research and traditional knowledge for twenty years, and over the years people have asked me, “Well, what about the men?” Probably because I talk about the sacredness of women, the power of women, all these things, but what about the men? My response has always been, “Well, that’s not really my area and nor do I really see it as something that belongs to me. It’s really up to the men to do that and to find their own teachings and do their own work,” and so on. But as you know there’s been so very little of it—both in this academic world and also at the community level in terms of programming. So in the last four or five years I’ve started to have young male scholars ask me about that because I work in gender. Some want to work on men’s stuff and my response has been, “Yes! I’ve been waiting for you guys forever.” I realized that perhaps it’s time for me to work as a facilitator in this. In no way do I want to see myself as the scholar, or whatever. But rather somebody who can engage with a whole network of people to try to get the dialogue going forward. And I thought, I’m in a position to do that. I can do that while some of these younger scholars aren’t in a position to do that yet. So how about I crack it open and make way for some of these guys to come in and take their positions.

OUR FAMILIES ARE ONLY GOING TO BE AS HEALTHY AS OUR MEN ARE, TOO. SO WHAT REALLY DRIVES ME IS A VISION FOR HEALTHY FAMILIES AND HEALTHY COMMUNITIES.

So, that’s what started it. And the other part is realizing that we’ve been working so much with women, but our families are only going to be as healthy as our men are, too. So what really drives me is a vision for healthy families and healthy communities. Perhaps it’s time to pay attention to men who haven’t had as much of the focus. So that’s really just the other side of the equation that I’m working on now.

In terms of my own intellectual interest, I’d like to consider how men find their place in a non-patriarchal society. It’s a feminist approach to Indigenous masculinities, which a lot of masculinity studies take. But I’ve been working as an Indigenous feminist on questions of how to dismantle patriarchy, put women’s authority back in our communities, and now I’m wondering, “Where do the men fit in in this? What are their roles? How do we honour them?” And how do we honour them in ways that aren’t the ways men are typically “honoured” in Western society, which is around power, authority, money, all those things that make men up there in Western society. If not that, then what? We need to look at that.

So I’m one of many people, including yourself, who are working to open the dialogue and move this forward. I’m inspired from listening to Elders like Danny Musqua, who can talk about living in mid-twentieth-century communities that weren’t really patriarchal. Colonialism had these inroads and hooks into our communities, but the grandpas and the uncles were not fully working in a patriarchal system. I’m really fascinated by this and want to continue asking, “Okay, what did this look like, what did it mean, and what was the position of men in those societies? How were they honoured, what kind of authorities did they have, and how did they work in balance with their wives and their female kin?” Because these systems were in place, and the stories are there to tell us how.

It’s a relatively new thing in Indian country, patriarchy. We forget because it’s such a dominant system in the world. We forget that it really isn’t everything and everywhere. Our people weren’t living this way, even in recent history. So that’s my interest and where I’m going.

SM: I’m also concerned about shame and stigma as they pertain to the body. There’s been quite a bit written on these subjects with relation to Indigenous women and not so much about Indigenous men and the body. And I’m wondering if you have thought at all in your work so far about how Indigenous men are, I guess, taught to view themselves as physical beings (both by the mainstream and culturally).

KA: No, but that’s an interesting place to go because of course it brings to mind all the: “You’re supposed to look like a buff warrior.” So what does that mean, the physical stuff? It goes back to stereotypes that we have to struggle against all the time as Native people. What are the stereotypes of men, in terms of body and body image and what that’s supposed to represent—that warrior thing, instead of you’re maybe struggling with health and body issues.

SM: We’ve talked a little bit so far about the institutions that have undermined the connections within Indigenous communities and nations—and we can think about how insidious capitalism has been in separating people from the land and in deconstructing kinship relationships; we can talk about roles of the church; we can talk about the imposition of the Indian Act; we can talk about residential schools. What about institutions as vehicles for positive change? Is there a possibility that education, for instance, can be mobilized to create the kind of balanced gender relations that your work seems to aspire toward? Are there ways that new governance structures can be imposed—not imposed—can organically come into being that will foster that kind of wellness? Or is the whole institutionalized element a danger?

KA: I don’t think so. I mean, we could probably have a dialogue about how universities are corporations, white institutions, or whatever. But, I believe in education and post-secondary education. I think, as Bonita [Lawrence] says, for all their colonial logic, universities can be a good place for young Aboriginal people to be. So, it’s about those of us who are in the institutions being able to create a space where the shift can happen, either through what we’re studying or the way in which we make that happen. So absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s opening up more all the time.

As for governance structures, there’s no end to what could happen if we allowed a true shift. A number of years ago I was invited to this national Métis governance conference, co-sponsored by several Métis political organizations. It was supposedly about charting a new vision of governance. This was a two-day thing, and Maria Campbell was the only woman. So, at the end, we’re sitting there and we looked up at the front—they had all the people that had been teaching the last couple of days lined up at the front, and one of the women in the crowd says, “Well, I respectfully want to thank you for organizing this conference and stuff, but I’d like to ask, where are the women? Where are the artists? Where are the….” If we really want to shift things, we’re not going to do it by having only guys sit up there. And Maria yells out, “It looks like the goddamn Vatican up there!”

But what occurred to me when I watched that was: here were all these older men, many of them career politicians. They’ve been part of a patriarchal governance system for some time. But when they see the old lady get up and remark on the shortcomings of the business, they at least had to listen. I think it’s because they grew up in communities where they knew that their grandmothers had power. So even though they’ve gotten all this other power that Western society has granted—they have nice salaries and cars and things that are in part rewards for buying into some of those systems—they still know about different types of gendered power and governance, and they understand how that works at a certain level. So, I thought, well, what if we did this conference again and we said, okay, let’s bring in the old ladies and let’s listen to them. Let’s try to think about what it meant to have those systems of gender balance in our communities and let’s try to reinstate it. Let’s bring in the artists and the poets to push us. Let’s listen to the youth, the young women and young men. Those things are possibilities. I can’t say I see them happening in any big way in terms of Indigenous governance systems yet, but there’s talk about it. Maybe there’s room. Maybe we’re going to be shocked that things will all of a sudden shift and then people will be open to that.

One thing that inspires me is the work I’ve been doing with the Kizhaay Anishinaabe Niin program at the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres. This is kind of like a white ribbon campaign; it started out with men working to end violence against women. I went to a training for Kizhaay facilitators, and they had a Lakota man named Marlin Mosseau as their trainer. He talked a lot about patriarchy, how it came to our communities and how we all come from matriarchal cultures as Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. I wouldn’t say matriarchal, but wording aside, the point was that women’s authorities have been lost in our communities. What was interesting to me was how hungry the men were to learn more about this. They wanted to take it in and figure out how they fit in. They seemed happy to embrace being part of societies where women had power. I thought, “I’m seeing something here that I didn’t think I’d ever see!” So, you know, things are shifting. And I think that we have to keep up with that or maybe keep ahead of it, I’m not sure, those of us that work in institutions: make space for this shift, recognize it, see it coming, and support it however we can.

SM: How do you maintain attentiveness to the vision of what can be at the same time that you’re recognizing that, in a lot of communities, there are desperate day-to-day concerns that are going to take precedence for many within the community? Are there strategies to bring those things together, to be supportive of those day-to-day concerns that are all-encompassing for many and then use that in the service of radical change?

KA: I think one will serve the other; paying attention to one doesn’t come at the expense of the other—they serve each other. We need to address the crises around violence against women and kids. Sexual abuse, that kind of stuff, that’s going on. But when we do our Indigenous feminist work, we’re seeking insight into the gendered issues that underpin the violence against all of our community members, including men. Homophobia, all those things we have to work through in our vision and then frame solutions to the crises from there.

The Kizhaay campaign to end violence against women is strengthened and built by talking about patriarchy. In the training I attended, there was lots of talk about patriarchy and what happened and why we become involved in power and control issues, but also how we get back. I was really struck when Marlin Mosseau said, “When the Southern Cavalry invaded our communities, our people were just appalled by what they saw, which was drinking, rape, swearing, rough behavior. They saw these men that were behaving this way and they were just appalled.” And then he said, “Over time we’ve come through this,” and—he was talking about his own experiences as a batterer—he said, “So I realized at one point that I had become a Southern Cavalry man and that I needed to get back to being a Lakota man. I needed to find out what that meant.” And I was just like, wow! That’s really powerful. That’s the vision. He’s here facilitating this training to end violence against Aboriginal women, but it’s the vision that will allow us to shift things much more quickly. It’ll happen faster if we work with that, I think.

SM: I think it’s difficult for people to recognize the way that violence often comes from a place of weakness and a place of shame. Can the model of combatting shame in oneself be construed as a warrior ethic?

KA: Absolutely.

SM: And so instead of sensitivity being recognized as weakness, it becomes indicative of a form of strength. A lot of people have been talking with me about what imagining the warrior right now means because the warrior is so malleable a concept, even though it’s also often imagined in monolithic and overly simplistic ways. So I’m wondering if you might reflect on both the possibilities of fighting against violence as being a warrior ethic and then also different ways in which young men might model a nurturing manhood for themselves and for each other.

KA: I guess it’s like: what does courage and bravery mean? Does that mean facing your fears, going down into the deepest parts of yourself, in those dark places that we don’t want to work with? That’s courage. That is being a warrior. For me, I was thinking about the first time I fasted. It was so hard—not because of going without food or water or any of that stuff. It was that I had to go down to the dark parts of me that I hadn’t wanted to face, and a lot of it was related to trauma around my father, who had really a nasty end of life. I had stuffed all that away. So it’s pretty terrifying to have to go there, and you don’t have a choice when you’re out in the bush by yourself for four days and nothing else but you, right? So I think those are places of bravery and courage that maybe once we can face those things and go through them, we’ll come out triumphant. So people talk about that in terms of coming through their own healing, and all of us as Aboriginal people have to go through that, just as a result of our families and our communities and the states they’re in. So I think that’s a good way of reframing the warrior ethic. Because there’s nothing scarier than facing your own darkest self.

I THINK THAT’S A GOOD WAY OF REFRAMING THE WARRIOR ETHIC. BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING SCARIER THAN FACING YOUR OWN DARKEST SELF.

SM: I’m also curious about the attractiveness of gangs as potentially a form of kinship community where one has a role, has a responsibility, has a sense of empowerment, and has a recognizability to those around him. I’m saying it in the masculine but women can be in gangs, too, of course. Could you perhaps reflect on what draws people to gangs and then also consider if there are possibilities for gangs that are not corrosive to their communities but perhaps gangs that can benefit communities?

KA: At one time we had warriors’ societies, men’s societies, which were responsible for protecting. The attraction to gangs, I think it’s all those things that our men lost, which is kinship, community, mentors, older men, older boys and men who they can aspire to work up to, structure, rewards, recognition, all that kind of stuff.

The Globe and Mail did this thing on Indian gangs and they talked about the guy who started Indian Posse.1 He came from a really rough childhood, and they were kind of spinning it like a ballad of Jesse James, this romanticized thing. But this guy basically built a corporation. He ended up in maximum security and actually broke out of maximum security and went on the run for a while. So I was thinking, here’s someone who must have some kind of genius that was lost to our communities. He was brave—he had to be brave to do some of the things he did. Courageous. Strong—he had to be physically strong, right? He had to have his wits about him, know how to build teams. Entrepreneurial, all these things. What would happen if we had those kinds of things applied for the good in our communities? What if he had been the leader of some kind of a warrior society to protect the medicine or something like that? What a tremendous amount of potential. Or some kind of an entrepreneur that was able to do something to create economic development. I mean, he was creating economic development—employment, right—but instead of using it all in a way that’s so negative and so violent.

So at one time we did have societies. I don’t know much about them but maybe it’s the historical work we need to dig through and find out, find those avenues for men to belong. I think the military is another one that men have gravitated towards for the same reason. I met a young scholar a few years ago who wanted to talk to me because he’d been in the military and he’d been a cop and he talked about all those things that men look for in those places, part of which is a kinship among other men.

SM: Your work has been quite forceful in its insistence on the need for alliance between men and women. There’s that wonderful dialogue you have with Bonita [Lawrence] at the end of A Recognition of Being, when one of you stresses that for healthy communities “we need to talk about empowering our men. We need empowered families” (276).

KA: We’re all connected.

SM: But I’m wondering if, even in light of that assertion—the integral place of alliance and connection—does the need persist for discrete areas? So you say about the hunger among men for communities of men, is that something that groups and cultures and nations need to build into their societies—places in which women can be together, in which men can be together, or is there a danger then of an exclusionary or sexist ethic being introduced?

KA: We always had that in our traditional societies, right? They’re very gendered. There were places for women and places for men. Games, even languages, that men and women used—there was a women’s version of the language and a men’s version. And, you know, it was all about balance—maintaining harmony and balance and strengthening those two halves of the medicine wheel that we talk about. Absolutely, there’s a need for that. And I think we have to create those spaces that can work in a healthy way.

SM: And I guess the danger is when those separate spaces become hierarchized, right? Could you comment on the relationship between individual and collective healing?

KA: Well, the health of the individual is the health of the collective. You’re only as healthy as the collective, right? You are only as healthy as our Mother Earth, and all our relations.

1. Joe Friesen, “The Ballad of Daniel Wolfe,” Globe and Mail, 18 June 2011. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-ballad-of-daniel-wolfe/article1357474/ (accessed 5 September 2013).