MASCULINIDANS-20

20 October 2011

Conversation between Jessica Danforth and Sam McKegney at J.M.’s Restaurant and Lounge in the Ambassador Hotel in Kingston, Ontario. Jessica had been invited by Sam’s daughter Caitlyn to speak on social justice at the high school leadership gathering she was co-organizing.

JESSICA DANFORTH is the founder and executive director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, a grassroots organization run for and by Indigenous youth that is dedicated to bodily, reproductive, gender, and sexual justice in the face of ongoing colonialism on Turtle Island. Danforth has spent more than half her life mobilizing individuals, families, and communities to reclaim their ancestral rights to self-determine decisions over their bodies and spaces. She has authored numerous articles, blogs, and monologues on activism and sexual health, and she is the editor of two books: Sex Ed and Youth: Colonization, Sexuality and Communities of Colour (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2009) and Feminism For Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011).

SAM MCKEGNEY: What drew you to the issue of sexual health for Indigenous people as a crucial element of both sovereignty and community well-being? Why is sexual health so important?

JESSICA DANFORTH: I think that “sexual health,” firstly, seems a very clinicized, medicalized term. Sexual health to me inherently means rights over body and space and how integral and crucial those rights are to our very existence, not just as Indigenous peoples but peoples in general. Often people see sexual health as something to do with a problem, as disease control—like HIV prevention, for example, or other sexually transmitted, blood-borne infections—but I would say it’s more “sexuality.” And to me the way of life that we are creating, or that we’re working on, in terms of sexuality and sexual health, is a reclamation. Not only is it foundational to our existence as Indigenous peoples, but that’s really where we all came from, you know? In the broadest of senses, that’s what unites humanity. Everybody got here because of that.

But I think even more than that, a lot of my worldview and a lot of the information that I receive comes from midwifery knowledge. Traditional forms of medicine and health all centre around people’s sexuality, which is really their bodies and their bodily rights, their bodily sovereignty. And autonomy, really, because when we lose control of our bodies, we lose control of our nations. There’s a saying that we need land for the people. We need people for the land, as well.

Sexuality is not just having sex. It’s people’s identities. It’s their bodies. It’s so many things. A lot of elders that I work with say that you can actually tell how colonized we are as a people by the knowledge about our bodies that we’ve lost. The fact that we need systems and institutions and books to tell us things about our own bodies is a real problem. If we don’t have control over our bodies, then what do we have? If something like body knowledge no longer belongs to community and is institutionalized, then what does that really mean? If we have young people, for example, who are getting educated about sexuality and their parents can’t teach them that same knowledge for many crucial reasons, that’s a strong indication of colonialism. These are the implications of not having sexual health and sexuality knowledge as an integral place where nations can be strong and centred.

SM: What are the implications of that disjuncture you’re referring to—where forms of colonial education have actually limited the knowledge of a generation and then that same colonial system takes ownership over the education of the subsequent generation and their understanding?

JD: It’s a complex relationship. If we look at the context of residential, mission, boarding, and industrial schools, in North America and in Australia and New Zealand, then we know that the very thought of sexuality was purposely taught as shameful. And, certainly, the incidence of sexual abuse was so rampant and purposeful. So coming from that generation and then you have this generation who, if they are getting sexual education—and that’s a big if—they get it in schools. It’s a complex relationship because there is that forbidden era. Even if parents or caregivers didn’t go through residential schools, there’s many other things that they could have been involved in. Whether it’s the sixties scoop, whether it was being apprehended by child welfare, whether it was just living in Western society. Western society is not an open society for sexuality. Western settler society brought over sexual shaming. If you look at all laws related to people’s bodies: those were colonial impositions. There were no colonial laws related to abortion or who could marry whom or birth control or anything until settlement and creation of the Confederation of Canada and the Constitution of the United States.

But at the same time, there’s the reality of what youth experience. There’s the reality that we didn’t have things like HIV in our communities fifty or one hundred years ago. It’s very recent. I just came from Alberta and there’s a huge so-called “outbreak” of syphilis again, but that’s not something that’s “Indigenous” to the area. And the reality also is that Indigenous peoples—and most acutely Indigenous youth and Indigenous women—experience those statistics at much higher rates. Throughout the world, incidence of not just HIV, but gonorrhea, chlamydia, and other STIs are going down, but in the Indigenous population in North America, it’s rising. And doctors have been comparing HIV “epidemics” in Africa to what’s going on here in provinces like Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. So, that’s what makes that relationship complex.

Underlying this issue is the fact that the knowledge is often no longer community-based because it’s been taken away from communities and families. One of the slides that we often use at the Native Youth Sexual Health Network when we do education with service providers calls the ABC method of prevention colonial. Because the ABC method of prevention for sexual health says, “All your problems should be solved ABC.” So, A: Be abstinent. So that’s just supposed to work. B: Be faithful. So you should only have one partner. It has to be a heterosexual, monogamous partner. And there’s all kinds of public health campaigns in North America that say, “You are less at risk for something if you only sleep with one person,” which is so misleading, especially when you consider the amount of rape and sexual assault and violence in our communities. It’s such a false portrayal of reality. You could be with one person your entire life and be at risk or not be safe. So that’s ridiculous. Then the C is buy a condom. If A and B don’t work, everything can be fixed with a condom. And I would say that that ABC method is further colonialism. That’s the recipe for prevention from the state—that’s the federal government’s version of sexuality education, of sexuality knowledge. And we are always—I don’t want to say at war—but we are always struggling, we are always butting heads with public health because that’s their party line.

Even if they say, “Well, we know that in the case of sexual violence, being faithful isn’t going to work,” or that “just saying no” isn’t actually effective, their materials and education practices keep forwarding that ABC agenda. The reality is that at any point, somebody could pick up that material and it’s colonial, it’s imperial, it’s really an imperial form of prevention. And it’s obviously not working. Not just with the rates and the statistics, but even through the direct feedback that we hear from young people around sexual health.

SM: What do you see as alternatives to that colonial model?

JD: I see a bunch of things. The crux of our work is to decolonize from that model. We call a lot of our work reclamation because we don’t think that we’re actually doing anything revolutionary. We always joke that we didn’t wait for Christopher Columbus to come teach us about sex. We absolutely believe that our ancestors were intelligent and had body knowledge. At the very minimum. And there’s so much evidence, especially with midwifery knowledge. Midwifery knowledge is really tokenized as being only about birthing babies when traditionally midwives—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—will tell you, it’s about the full circle of life. Midwives are only legally allowed to birth babies, but midwifery knowledge is really about centering community knowledge. Because woman is the first environment, as Katsi Cook often says.

When we say “woman” as Indigenous peoples, I don’t think that translates properly in English. I think that we get very body-focused—or what I call “underwear policing”—around, “That must mean vagina, breasts, whatever,” and it doesn’t. In so many Indigenous languages, there are no gender pronouns. There are only two genders in English, which really limits understandings. So I want to make that very clear that even when we say “woman,” it’s not just tied to body parts or underwear policing.

TO PLACE SEXUAL HEALTH OVER HERE AND LAND RIGHTS OVER THERE IS A VERY COLONIAL, IMPERIAL WAY OF THINKING. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IS OVER HERE, REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE IS OVER THERE.

But, let’s say, the uterus is the first environment. Even with the advancement of reproductive health technology, a uterus still has to be involved at some point to carry a pregnancy to term. The limiting of midwives to the birthing of babies and the eradication of midwifery knowledge was strategic and premeditated. Midwives also carried knowledge about “abortion.” Abortion, I think, is a very harsh word in English rather than it being about reproductive control, spacing out families, stopping pregnancies at different times when there was rape or famine or drought or war. And midwives have that knowledge. Midwives are also there to intervene in families, so you have midwifery knowledge around if there was a complication in the home, for example. There’s a really awesome quote that I heard recently from Nastiq Kango. She’s an Inuk midwife from Iqaluit. I was working with her recently and she was saying, “A midwife births a nation.” So in Inuktitut, “midwife” translates to “nation-maker.” And so-called “leaders” cannot tell midwives what to do. If a midwife births the leader, then the leader can’t tell her what to do.

To place sexual health over here and land rights over there is a very colonial, imperial way of thinking. Environmental justice is over here, reproductive justice is over there. We have really paid the price for that. And our work seeks to indigenize by making full cycles tangible so that people can directly see the violence against the land and the violence against our bodies and the different roles that we have to play. Which is why the area of Indigenous masculinities is so important because everybody has a specific role to play, and when we lose one area or one person or one gender in the gendered universe, it creates problems for other things.

Residential schools, boarding schools: not only did they kill the Indian and save the man, but they also deemed Aboriginal women unfit for child rearing. If that’s not a clear eradication of midwifery knowledge, I don’t know what is. Saying that our ways of child rearing and child bearing are not valid or credible or safe? It also instituted patriarchal gender roles, saying, “You will learn to become a man this way. And you will learn to become a woman this way.” And I don’t know that that’s been interrogated enough. Yes, everyone knows residential school was bad, but what about its effect specifically on gender roles. Where did Two-Spirited children go when they went to residential school? There was only a girls’ and a boys’ dorm. Youth from different nations—where did they go? So they learned Eurocentric gender roles: “You’ll learn to sew to be a good Canadian or American woman. And you’ll learn to farm to be a good man.” And that’s further exacerbated by the sixties scoop, but also, the child welfare system today. We do a lot of work with Cindy Blackstock and the First Nations Child Caring Society of Canada on the number of Indigenous children who are in care. And there are currently more Indigenous children who are in state child welfare than were ever in residential schools at their height in the 1950s. In 2011, it’s almost three times that number. I mean, the list just goes on. It’s ridiculous.

WHAT BETTER WAY TO COLONIZE A PEOPLE THAN TO MAKE THEM ASHAMED OF THEIR BODIES?

But what it means, though, is that the eradication of midwifery knowledge and sexuality knowledge was a purposeful nation-state creation that is tied to the existence of Canada and the U.S. What better way to colonize a people than to make them ashamed of their bodies? Which is why the decolonizing project is so important and why gender justice, for example, has to be incorporated. To decolonize and nation-build with each other, we need to acknowledge and understand culturally- and community-based principles of harm reduction. For example, a lot of our elders tell us stories, but in the stories, they’re not telling us what to do; they’re not saying, “Okay, by the end of the story, you should only do this or that.” They’re giving us information and knowledge so we can make our own decisions. And that is the ultimate form of non-interference and, really, harm reduction. Reducing harm in any situation is dependent on the wellness of an entire community.

We have to stop referring to ourselves as in the past. There’s been this revitalization of rites of passage and coming of age ceremonies. A lot of where my centering comes from is seeing that this is possible. Another alternative is language revitalization, which I see happening in a lot of different communities. But that’s why it’s important to know that language revitalization isn’t just about learning cool words in a language. It’s literally about the survival and the sovereignty of a people. To not have to rely just on English, and the fact that English is tied to the state and it’s tied to colonialism. It’s even about sexuality. One of the things we make sure of is that during processes of language revitalization sexuality knowledge isn’t exempted. Making sure that words for people’s bodies are part of the revitalization, which hasn’t always been the case for different reasons in different places. And sometimes having to make new words. We’ve had to make new words for things like a condom or a dental dam. We’ve had to make new words for that, but it can be done. And it is done.

SM: And all languages are adaptive, right? All languages are constantly in process.

JD: And evolving. Not only are Indigenous people constantly referred to as bound to the past but there seems to be a presumption that we were never going to evolve, which is false. We are constantly evolving. Things were always going to change, which is why I think it’s important, especially for young people, to look at creating new traditions. I know a lot of people are very: “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” but the word “traditional”—even in language and even when it comes to masculinities—I’ve seen everything from tradition being used to oppress to tradition being used to empower. So the language of tradition is really important because what does “traditional” mean? And who decides? Is everything pre-Christopher Columbus traditional? Or is last week traditional? Is it elders who decide?

By traditions, I don’t mean totally changing ways of thinking—it might be that for some people—but I also mean songs. If we don’t create songs about our time, who’s going to sing about us in the future? Who’s going to know about us if we’re not doing these things of our time? We’ve been forced to change and things have come into our communities without our permission. So, I’ve heard things like, it’s not traditional for a man to be x, y, z. And then I always wonder, what does a man even mean? And who decides what tradition is? And when it’s hurtful or harmful to somebody, how can it then be traditional? That internalized colonialism that we deal with, that internalized racism and oppression is such a huge issue. We still don’t know how to deal with it, if you will. You can’t really go up to someone and say, “Okay, you’ve internalized a little bit of colonialism there.” And we can get into the lateral violence, especially when it comes to so-called traditions, because it often involves a policing of traditions, especially around masculinity or what it means to be a man. Or was the definition of a “man” only really started with European invasion, and if that is the tradition of roles and responsibilities, is such manhood really traditional?

IF WE DON’T CREATE SONGS ABOUT OUR TIME, WHO’S GOING TO SING ABOUT US IN THE FUTURE? WHO’S GOING TO KNOW ABOUT US IF WE’RE NOT DOING THESE THINGS OF OUR TIME?

SM: Is there a need to reclaim maleness that is not just defined biologically? And connected to that, is there a way to validate those who want to say, “I’m a man and manliness means a specific spectrum of things,” while at the same time protecting fluid notions of gender?

JD: Well, I would say that that’s like resisting policing, right? There’s been so much internalization of policing, and I don’t just mean the RCMP. Policing comes from “policy.” As regimented or imperial schools of thought are created, people police them. And that type of policing has grown to the point where we’re pointing at people’s gender parts, biological parts saying, “this is” and “this isn’t.” I think that a way to resist that is by reclaiming roles rather than looking just at body parts or underwear policing. And really, interrogating that policing impulse. And that’s where being Indigenous is so awesome because I understand that gender is a universe and that we’re all stars in the universe. That’s how infinite it is.

That image of being a star in the universe of gender means that you shine, but it also means that people can look at you knowing that there’s infinite other possibilities. You’re still shining and bright and awesome, but you’re not by yourself up there, right? Which is why explaining gender in English is one of the hardest things to do. Even the word “trans” in English—and I want to make it clear: we are very supportive of transgendered communities and gender non-conforming communities and peoples—but many friends and family that I know in trans communities also say that even “trans” is a difficult word because it assumes that you’re only transitioning from one gender to another rather than being neither, or both, or several, and again, it being so biologically and medically focused. So I think we need to really understand that many teachings are about roles. For example, people often say that midwifery knowledge comes from so-called women, but that doesn’t mean that so-called men didn’t prepare certain things for birthing to happen, that they didn’t, in some communities, help support the woman in a fetal position while she was literally in labour. Whatever role was needed, people had to take it up. You might have a more masculine role or a more feminine role, and the awesome thing about being Indigenous is that I don’t get confused. I really am not confused if I think Indigenously about gender and sexuality. I think it makes so much sense.

Every time I hear people say things like, “Gender fluidity or the Kinsey scale of sexuality is so revolutionary,” I get really frustrated. Not that I think everyone should go, “Indigenous people, you guys are awesome,” but that erasure has direct influences on not just the mainstream population but Indigenous people ourselves. The more we call that “other people’s stuff,” or we don’t own it as our own, the more we become alienated from ourselves. I’m not knocking Kinsey, but that so-called revolutionary first sex anatomy book actually erased so many pre-existing and less complicated and problematic ways of understanding gender and sexuality.

SM: The ongoing erasure of Indigenous knowledge…

JD: …which has real-life impacts. Even to this issue of Indigenous masculinities: If people are made to think that being trans or being Two-Spirited or being gender non-conforming is not Indigenous, then where did that come from? If our versions or our understandings of gender and sexuality aren’t credible, then we’re losing it. That’s appropriation, that’s stealing. Do I expect Kinsey to have quoted every Indigenous person in the first book on male sexuality? No. But I think what that did was just—I don’t want to say rendered us invisible—it invalidated ways of knowing beyond itself. And it made it harder for us to see ourselves. I’m not confused about Indigenous sexuality or gender at all. I think it makes so much sense. The attempt to understand Indigenous masculinities in a Western theory, such as this, is hard because the measures, or the tools, still don’t do it justice.