13 August 2013

A Conversation over Skype between Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Sam McKegney in Kingston, Ontario.

NIIGAANWEWIDAM JAMES SINCLAIR is Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) and an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba. He is a regular commentator on Indigenous issues on CTV, CBC, and APTN, and his written work can be found in the pages of The Exile Edition of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama, newspapers like The Guardian, and online with CBC Books: Canada Writes. Niigaan is the co-editor of the award-winning Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (Highwater Press, 2011) and Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories (Michigan State University Press, 2013), and is the editorial director of the Debwe Series with Portage and Main Press.

NIIGAANWEWIDAM JAMES SINCLAIR: I’ve read this manuscript a few times now and it’s been interesting to watch it change, develop, and culminate. Accompanying you from the original envisioning of this project to now, I’ve watched this research evolve and shift alongside your findings. While no doubt you had your take on these issues from the beginning, this book was really driven by the many people you interviewed and the many miles you logged. It’s remarkable work. I can’t get over how it’s so readerly now—like an ongoing conversation. In earlier drafts, you could read the interviews in pretty much any order and get basically the same experience. The way you have constructed it now gives the reader both an idea and a pathway, like a call and response. For instance, when Lee Maracle raised the notion of a “warrior,” there was Daniel David Moses and Taiaiake Alfred addressing what this might mean. When Janice Hill raised the issue of sex and sexual violence, here came Tomson Highway, Louise Halfe and Jessica Danforth to discuss it. When Warren Cariou and Alison Calder brought up the influence of place and geography in men’s lives, I suddenly realized that Ty Tengan had already opened up my thinking on the subject. And so on and so on. It was almost like one voice would lead me to a question and another would answer it, personally and indirectly.

I found it very compelling how all of the pieces gestured to or framed what healthy Indigenous malehood—rather, malehoods—might look like. I’m thinking about Basil Johnston’s point that young men are shaped by grandmothers, Tommy Thrasher’s idea that the land teaches kindness, and Kim Anderson’s centralization of courage and bravery. Some really foundational work is offered by Brendan Hokowhitu and his brilliant theoretical centralization of sport as a teaching conduit for health and collectivity through responsibility and honour. So many interviewees brought up the continuing role of ancestral languages, pop culture, and fatherhood. There is much involved in describing healthy Indigenous malehoods. Thinking about them now, there’s too many to list. They’re interwoven too, like a spiral.

I was also intrigued by how some speakers contradicted one another. As they say, the number one thing Native peoples do well is disagree. [Laughter] There was Taiaiake Alfred offering rather harsh critiques of Indigenous art and literature, for instance. Then, and almost in response, we had Daniel David Moses and Joseph Boyden talking about the empowerment of Indigenous identities and communities through writing. I also found interesting the ways in which raising children—and specifically young men—was represented differently from say Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm to Neal McLeod and how this contrasted an experience like the one Daniel Heath Justice bravely shared. Reading the back-and-forth between Adrian Stimson and Terrance Houle was both hilarious and jarring too.

I found listening to all of these remarkable voices very pleasurable and of course very educational. As someone who’s researching and writing in this relatively new field of scholarship, Masculindians provided an opportunity to experience a real Indigenous spectrum across Kanata, Turtle Island, and the globe. There are certainly other areas that could have been included in the conversations, but with any book you have to make choices; you either work forever or you actually finish it.

SAM MCKEGNEY: A number of things stuck out for me as exciting and somewhat surprising as I went about conducting the interviews, a couple of which I’m wondering if we can reflect on together. The first was the number of times protectorship came up as a principle or an ethic. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm speaks about reclaiming what’s good about being a protector and about protectorship as a role that men can take on that not only gives them purpose but also serves the family, the community, and the nation. Richard Van Camp talks about protectorship frequently in his work—he talks about the protector in him as an uncle, about warriors as protectors, and even about protectorship and sex, noting that being a good lover means protecting and honouring the gift of sexuality (which is an interesting way of thinking about it). And Joseph Boyden grapples with what it means to protect and be protected in his novels. So I’m wondering about your thoughts on the idea of being a protector because popular North American culture often valorizes the idea of the protector through hypermasculine tropes that ultimately disempower the protected—often women and children who become reconceptualized as the objects of the protector. But that of course isn’t the only way of being a protector and that’s not the type of protectorship these writers are seeking to reclaim. Do you see being a protector as a valuable subject position or ethic for Indigenous men to pursue, and what are the safeguards that prevent it from being conscripted into patriarchy?

NJS: Many interviews identified protection as an element of warriorism, fatherhood or some notion of virility, but I think the way men support, secure, and bring health to community is what most were really talking about. Understanding the multiple ways Indigenous men are and can be connected to community—in both good and bad ways—is perhaps the biggest challenge Indigenous men face today. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm said it best when she said: “There are so many men who don’t know what their role as a man is anymore.” I think this point really emphasizes how important it is to define protectorship, for to do so is to assist Indigenous men to uncover some of the many gifts they can bring to the table.

One of the legacies of colonization has been the separation of men from their roles within families, communities, and nations. What’s replaced these are hegemonic forms of corporate, neo-liberal individualist identities that ossify cultures and replace meaning with a one-size-fits-all Lockean chant of: “Pick up your bootstraps and get on with the business of making money, buying a house, and consume, consume, consume.” Indigenous masculinity is so much more than this.

When I think about protectors I think about my grandfather. Raised on our traditional lands near St. Peter’s, he was removed to residential school and, like many, brainwashed through a demeaning process that included replacing your name, language, and identity. He was also taught from a very early age that being Indigenous was backward, savage, and heathen and that everything associated with protecting that was wrong. Residential school therefore not only physically removed him from community but ideologically separated him from experiences of love, kindness, and beauty that would have grounded him and kept him connected.

He rarely spoke about this—I mean, who would—but the horrifically violent sexual, mental, and psychological abuse residential school students endured is well documented. His answer to this experience was to lie about his age to fight in World War II with his buddies. Can you imagine that? He’d rather face bullets than priests. Well, the army had this habit of sending Indian soldiers to the front lines. After many of his friends were killed and he himself was injured, he returned an enfranchised Indian with no support, no rights, and completely isolated. At the same time, he had no high school diploma. Trying to support a young family, he worked up north in the mines and performed labour in Winnipeg, returning to see his family sporadically on weekends. What he had been taught in school and was now put in the position to do was to work, compete for jobs, and “progress”: live the good old-fashioned Western dream of being a “man all on your own.” Soon, however, with war injuries and wear and tear on his body taking hold, this way of life was unsustainable. And, when he lost my grandmother—the only woman he would ever love—shortly after she gave birth to my uncle, Grandpa really had a hard time.

For a long time he had struggled with drinking but after this it consumed his life. I imagine what inspired much of this was a long history of loneliness, both imposed and self-imposed. He found isolation at residential school, at war, in the mines up north. This was no doubt very frustrating, and when Grandpa drank he wanted to fight, so he did. He fought my uncles, my dad, my aunt, and pretty much anyone else he could find. Soon he had pushed everyone away, he was literally all alone. For many years I judged him harshly, but now I think I understand him. I can only imagine the challenges he faced trying to make a living in a world that exploited, abused, and rejected him. Closer contact with his family, community, and nation would have facilitated a sense of protectorship in the institutions and relationships that he came from.

The cool ending to this story though is that my grandfather did learn to become a protector in his own way. Just after I was born—and in large part because my father told him that he could never come around his grandson while he was drunk—he quit drinking. He chose a relationship with me and his other grandchildren instead. I cannot imagine anything more brave, dignified, or warrior-like. I can honestly say that I never once saw him drink and only knew a loving, sensitive, generous man. He was also one of the funniest people I have ever known. It took him a very long time—and many unforgiveable acts—but he became a protector of me, my cousins, and our family, inheriting something that had been waiting for him his entire life.

PROTECTORSHIP IS SOMETHING YOU EARN. INDIGENOUS MEN DON’T START OFF AS PROTECTORS; THEY INHERIT IT THROUGH WORK, MENTORSHIP, AND BEING RECOGNIZED.

Protectorship is something you earn. Indigenous men don’t start off as protectors; they inherit it through work, mentorship, and being recognized. Being given the position of being a protector is a gift that begins via modelling and mentoring. There’s a ceremony Anishinaabe do just about the time you hit puberty. It involves your uncle—and sometimes your father but not always—taking you out for a fast, a vision, or some time in the bush. The men share in camaraderie, stories, and teachings while learning about community, their bodies, and the hard work it takes to have healthy relationships with everyone and everything around them. When they return to community, they often come back changed, grown up a little, and interested in enacting the senses of connection they learned while out on the land: They are initiated into manhood.

Traditionally this happened on the land but, like most events today, even this has changed. I’m reminded of Joseph Boyden in this book talking about grabbing a case of beer and sitting on the back porch or Richard Van Camp describing youth camps. For me my first initiation happened when my uncle took me to the A&W in Selkirk. There was no fast here—only onion rings and root beer [Laughter]—but my uncle spent hours talking about sex, how to drive a car, school, fatherhood, love, and dreams. I’ve been on some more traditional trips but this first initiation ceremony was really sacred and formative.

SM: Are there any parts to Indigenous manhood that you think are especially gained

from being on the land today?

NJS: When I was much older, I received and experienced one of the most important teachings a man can ever be given: how to earn a fire. I’ve returned to this whenever I think about what we might call Indigenous masculinity. You can learn everything you need to know about being a man by building, making, and nurturing ishkode, a fire. Ishkode is our grandfather, a sacred gift-giver. From the preparation, welcoming, singing, striking, and care a fire requires, everything you need to know about Indigenous malehood is given through this relationship. You never earn a fire through a match. Lighting a match is the exact problem of Indigenous manhood.

Lighting a fire via a match and some wood at 7-Eleven might cut down on time, but it’s truly the most meaningless possible way of beginning any fire. You haven’t collected the flint or dry grass, you haven’t created the spark, you haven’t fanned it to make it light or sung the right welcoming song or placed the young flame into just the right place in the kindling. To really nurture a fire into being takes inviting and welcoming your grandfather in, making him comfortable and nurturing him so he feels welcome. A fire requires sensitivity, care, and concern, as well as patience and understanding. If you’re not aware, gentle, and swift at the precise moment he arrives, he may leave and you have to start all over again. You’re literally frozen until you learn how to make the healthiest and most complete space for that fire to thrive. You can’t have warmth, you can’t cook food, you can’t continue—well, I guess you could, but that’s what you would call the “hard road.”

When we’re talking about protectorship, what we’re really talking about is earning the responsibility of belonging to a family, a community, a nation—because being recognized as part of all of those networks necessitates that you build, maintain, and care for relationships and keep ties strong. Being a man involves constantly building, nurturing, and protecting the fires that warm, feed, and help grow the world around you. If you let these fires go out or, worse, don’t build them in the first place, a web of relationships might break, grow weak, or perhaps never even exist.

YOU NEVER EARN A FIRE THROUGH A MATCH. LIGHTING A MATCH IS THE EXACT PROBLEM OF INDIGENOUS MANHOOD.

SM: One of the moments in the collection that I find significant but also challenging conceptually is when Lee Maracle points out that I’m misusing the idea of a role. When I ask what her role as Wolf Clan Stó: lo entails, she insists, as I understand it, that I am mistaking what is truly an identity for a discrete set of tasks. “It’s not a role,” she says. “We are that. It’s not a role. I’m not a role. I’m a Wolf Clan, backward and forward visionary.” It reminds me a bit of Sakéj Henderson’s rejection of the idea of “culture” because it oversimplifies and carves existence into a discrete set of concepts; he uses the word “worldview” instead to honour the whole, the “unified vision.” I’d like to ask you about the idea of “inheriting a role” because, especially at this stage in Indigenous masculinities studies, we’re talking a lot about “male roles and responsibilities” and it becomes something of a mantra—maybe it’s useful, but maybe we’re not interrogating it enough or not thinking it through in sophisticated enough terms. Do you consider the framework of “male roles and responsibilities” to be limiting or utilitarian as a means of conceiving of and navigating personhood or identity?

NJS: I always find it odd that when I go to ceremonies there are certain activities that are classified as “man” jobs—fire is often one, cutting wood is usually another, carrying certain pipes, singing certain songs, and so on. When I hear the word “role,” I often hear: “Here’s the five things men have to do and here’s the five things women have to do” in order for these roles to be maintained. These of course can be platforms for important kinds of work like facilitating uncles mentoring young men, for example, but they are often couched in physical essentialisms that fall apart under scrutiny. When roles are considered in terms of them being “jobs,” it reduces them into acts minus purpose. As I see it, any act is a stage for the establishment, maintenance, and extension of relationships. The word “role” in English kinda misses this. So, returning to my last example, let’s say that men carry the role to build and maintain fire for a community. Well, after this good work is done and ceremonies are over, we return to our jobs and well-built homes and the question arises: what is the firekeeping then? How is a garbageman a firekeeper? How is a lawyer a firekeeper? How is a father playing Snakes and Ladders with his daughter a firekeeper? How does firekeeping fit into a world that values matches and wood from 7-Eleven? And, one of the most important questions today: Who cares for fire when men are absent, have forgotten how, or refuse to do it? It is precisely when we think of traditional “roles” in these contexts that our cultures suddenly appear archaic and outdated.

What I think Lee was getting at was that Indigenous identities are irreducible to fixed jobs, tasks, or actions. Indigenous identities reside in times, places, and in relationships with the world around us. Like our animal relations in the clan systems she cites, we make do with what we have, using what we know and understand about the world and ourselves. Nothing in the world is arbitrary; everything is an opportunity, a gift, to understand how you as a man, woman, animal or clan member, and so on, relate to an infinite universe.

So, in certain situations—particularly when Indigenous men have abandoned their homes and children, and left fires smouldering—women have had to create and protect fire. At the same time, men have also at times had to care for the water. All of these moments have not collapsed Indigenous senses of gender but rather strengthened them to show that networks of relationships—communities—are ongoing and dynamic vessels of Indigenous continuance. It’s our responsibility to grow, strengthen, and care for these communities in which manhood and womanhood are parts, not vice versa. Roles—if we are going to use that word—are not jobs at all, they can be anything that shows how we carry ongoing ties with multiple beings, human and non-human, throughout the universe. Caring for fire is not a role, it’s a way of being.

There are so many different ways you could learn about being an Anishinaabe-inini, an Anishinaabe man: by looking at the sun, spending time with the earth, but I learn about it best by looking at our animal relations. Our animal relatives were the ones who offered to care for us when we arrived, nothing about this has changed. They still teach us. By examining the interrelationships among animals and Creation, we can learn all we need to know about how to live with dignity and respect and understanding. Their roles, of course, aren’t fixed.

Animals are always resilient and flexible. Nikaak, geese, right now are travelling south and every morning I watch them travel and think about how they get to this moment every year. Niigaak are very territorial, especially when birthing and feeding, but when they need to be—when they need to migrate, for instance—they join together in groups to get that work done. In other words, there’s a time to work together in community and there’s a time to separate and raise a family. There are roles within family and community, and these reside in specific purposes and places and times and geographies—they’re always shifting. I think that roles can be useful when they involve articulating and affirming the multitude of responsibilities Indigenous men carry within larger networks. Keeping those networks strong and healthy provides platforms for understanding the many gifts we carry.

SM: So for roles to be of value within those specific contexts, they need to be characterized by malleability and senses of reciprocity and—as many discuss in the interviews—accountability to the larger community?

NJS: I think “accountability” is a tricky word within our field of Indigenous masculinity studies because it brings with it negative connotations—that there is something to be accountable for. It reminds me of a crime. If we’re talking about the responsibility of being a father, that for me is not about being accountable at all; it’s about a life-long journey and trying to understand how at every moment you have someone else to think about. Being a father constitutes every part of my being, every word I write, every step I walk, and it illustrates to me how every action I take involves another life. That for me is not about accountability, it’s about ethics.

SM: I guess accountability can carry with it an almost punitive connotation. It’s also an economic metaphor because it implies a sense of indebtedness, which complicates things further. But I wonder if accountability can also speak to a sense of acknowledging integral connections beyond the self—an honouring of selflessness and responsibility as a way of understanding oneself. I mean, you can hold yourself accountable to your own values in a way that isn’t only disciplinary. It can be a way of articulating your responsibility to the larger network so that, as you were saying earlier, the web doesn’t break. But I see what you’re saying about it perhaps implying that Indigenous men always already have something to atone for, which is problematic.

NJS: Yeah, that was my exact response when you said “accountable.” The time I felt most uneasy in reading the collection was when interviews lapsed into a judgemental tone, sounding like: “Young men have to do such-and-such a job that I remember doing and they have to live up to this idea that I have for them.” It’s always problematic to take your circumstances and project them onto another. In fact, it’s somewhat romantic too because our memories almost always cut and paste, replace and erase. I think this kind of rhetoric also obscures the very nature of Indigenous communities, which were based in seasonal, mobile, and dynamic principles. We have to be really careful about being prescriptive about what people ought to be and ought to do. Here I’m reminded of when Tomson Highway tells us about writers and artists being curative magicians in the way they can shift perspective. We in the field of Indigenous masculinity studies have to become like magicians; we have to think about where Indigenous men have come from, where we are going, and the way we continue to face ongoing assaults on our identities, our sexualities, our bodies, and try to figure this all out in a world that won’t let up. We really have to gain perspective and context before we start creating ideals that Indigenous men have to live up to.

That might be where we will have to sit for a while, trying to figure out what’s happened. So much research needs to begin with: How did we get to this point? Why is it that in the early nineteenth century Ojibway missionary Peter Jones goes on a hunting trip with other men—which is supposed to be a beautiful and empowering moment in his life—and witnesses the men around him get drunk and pass out? The entire experience is a formative nightmare. As he awakes he realizes he has no fire, he’s hungry, and he’s literally frozen; so he deduces: “Well there’s a real problem with tradition here” and turns towards Christianity. I think this moment doesn’t provide us with a forum to judge him—as so many scholars have—but to think about why he made that decision and what choices were available in his context. Our research needs to address Indigenous men without tossing them on the proverbial scrap heap; it needs to really seek to understand what they were facing and why they might have made the choices they did. This is not to forgive egregious acts, not at all. It’s to figure out our relations and the gifts—good and bad—they have left for us.

SM: That kind of nuanced understanding of the complex conditions that inform decision-making and behaviour comes up in the work of many of the authors in this collection. I’m thinking of Louise Halfe’s portrayals of the father in Blue Marrow, for instance, or the opening section of Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever or Richard Van Camp’s work. As Joanne Arnott says, we need to have “a feeling of generosity toward our real human limits.”

Looking to the work that needs to be done and the work that is ongoing, do you feel as though there’s enough effort towards envisioning alternative horizons of possibility? Do you see the necessary creative energy and vision or is too much of the work on Indigenous masculinities confined to interrogating what has informed contemporary conditions? Is it maybe more about diagnosis, according to a Western model, than about creative engagement that offers alternative imaginings?

NJS: I’m a little biased because I spend most of my time reading and writing literature, so I personally find the most exciting critical moves going on in the work of some of our creative writers. I can’t get enough of Richard Van Camp’s work, which is constantly pushing the idea of what beautiful and healthy male relationships look like. In so many depictions of male interactions in fiction we get violence and, if it’s anything else, critics quickly label other male relationships homoerotic. Richard resists these safe reading strategies and instead challenges the reader. I’m thinking of the short story “Dogrib Midnight Runners,” which asks: Why can’t we have naked men going for a jog and that being about health, safety, love, respect, and honour? How can we have discourses about male love that are not irreducible to just bodies and sex and instead are about embracing our inheritances and responsibilities as men, as fathers, and as brothers? These are some exciting interventions.

Thinking back to the interviews, Tomson Highway and Joseph Boyden and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm all talked about how mentorship is crucial to the creation of healthy Indigenous men. There is never enough talk about how patience, honesty, kindness, and love set the stage of rich senses of Indigenous malehood. It’s much easier to write about the despair Indigenous men have endured and the harsh reality that has come out of this—substance abuse, absent fathers, poverty—than it is to write about beauty. Violent relationships are much easier to write about than healthy, nurturing ones. I think that’s where our field needs to go. I don’t see enough writing about healthy relationships with the men in our lives. I include myself in this criticism too.

Writing about positive male-male interactions is risky. It’s tough. Mainstream culture loves violence, rape, and shock value. At the same time it might involve more work; few really write about complex, beautiful Indigenous men without romanticizing or sexualizing or using them as a foil against other, awful images. There’s also admittedly a lot of absent fathers, gang members, and men in prison from our communities who have done some awful things. We also have this cult of male individualism that so pervasively affects Indigenous men in the public eye—chiefs, political leaders, cultural ceremonialists—men who dance and sing songs about family and community but then do horrible things to women, use and abuse and exploit the people around them.

I think our field has an opportunity to really uncover, identify, and perhaps even define the complex gifts Indigenous men inherit and have to give. It’s worth considering. And indeed our field could make contributions to healing some of the cycles Indigenous men find themselves in by theorizing what Indigenous men do and have done to make this world a respectful, honourable, and beautiful place. What are the precipitating factors and outcomes of communities where Indigenous malehood is recognized, talked about, and debated in healthy and positive ways? Do we have to dream about this or can we ascertain examples and disseminate this information so others can know about it? That for me is what our field could do while still working to uncover some of the ugly stuff. That could be a great contribution.

SM: In their recent book chapter on Indigenous masculinities, Rob Innes, Kim Anderson, and Jonathan Swift do an excellent job of mapping out three strands of work needing attention for Indigenous masculinity studies to develop into a field with purpose and positive impact at the community level. These involve interrogating the history of disenfranchisement, dispossession, and social engineering that informs contemporary conditions—that’s the first strand; the second strand is looking to elders, knowledge keepers, and those with experience of other Indigenous ways of being in order to “dig up what we can about healthy Indigenous masculinities”; and the third strand involves using that knowledge and critical awareness in imaginative ways that might engender a variety of possibilities for non-dominative yet empowered Indigenous masculinities, which in turn might work in the service of balance, health, and empowerment within communities and nations. And your comments just now show how those strands need to be braided together in a visionary way, and perhaps how literature is already actively doing that.

NJS: I agree with all that, but for me it’s all about where this work is grounded. All the gifts that we need to survive and endure and create and imagine are here—everything’s around us. You don’t need anything more. We have a tendency within Indigenous studies to be as human-centred and gender-centred as the institutions that surround us. We sometimes don’t centralize the other gifts that are available around us.

I told that one story of watching the geese go overhead, and another story about fire as a being, fire as a grandfather. There are so many more stories I could tell but they all have to do with how the world teaches us, and it’s our job to read, listen, and interact with Creation, not vice versa. It’s not that any of those three categories you listed off lack this, but I’d like to hear more work from Indigenous researchers about how we can look to the cycles and seasons and animals and earth and water for solutions to problems we have created for ourselves. Ironically, it has precisely been when we have ignored or run against the natural gifts that the universe provides us with that we have gone so terribly wrong. I hear a lot of people say that Mother Earth is our teacher and so on, but not enough about how the world actually teaches us in our work. If we want to be truly healthy in our relationships with one another, then we have to interact with the world in a healthy way. This is exactly the problem with pollution, and in particular water contamination. Take oil fracking in Saskatchewan and Alberta, for example.

When we think in human-centred ways, the world will teach us that we are ignoring most of the rest of Creation. Sometimes we need a harsh lesson and the world might have to teach us by killing us. It’s simple. When we think of ourselves as the primary gift-givers to Creation and not dependent receivers of its gifts, we do things like fracking. When we think of ourselves as a nephew to the sun, the moon, the water, and as part of a great cosmological family, we don’t. This is exactly the problem with Indigenous men. We too often think of ourselves as independent, supreme seekers of the great capitalist dream and make choices without humility. When that changes, that is truly when we will begin to understand the possibilities of healthy Indigenous masculinities.

IT’S SIMPLE. WHEN WE THINK OF OURSELVES AS THE PRIMARY GIFT-GIVERS TO CREATION AND NOT DEPENDENT RECEIVERS OF ITS GIFTS, WE DO THINGS LIKE FRACKING. WHEN WE THINK OF OURSELVES AS A NEPHEW TO THE SUN, THE MOON, THE WATER, AND AS PART OF A GREAT COSMOLOGICAL FAMILY, WE DON’T.

SM: You were pointing to some areas that are perhaps not fleshed out enough in the interviews in this collection. Are there other ideas, areas of discussion, or arguments that you were surprised didn’t crop up or were underdeveloped?

NJS: I don’t see the collection as lacking because that implies that there is a list of ten things that need to be talked about, and that’s something that happens when you’re at a more established point in the field. When you have a critical mass of scholarship, then you can say, “Well, you’d better have these three theories in there.” The problem, as Lee Maracle puts it, isn’t that there aren’t theorists, it’s that “they just haven’t been published.” There are men and women with this knowledge and experience, but they’re not working in universities.

If there was something that I wish there was more of in the book, it’s what Gregory Scofield talks about as “claiming.” There is lots of reaction to experiences with fathers, oppression, and policies, and discussing these is definitely important. At the same time though, sometimes when we focus on problems—the social production of hypermasculinity, for instance—we fall into the position of presuming: “If we only get rid of this, we’d be fine.” Meanwhile, what’s left to fill the vacuum? I found Gregory Scofield’s interview to be the culmination of a thread in the book around claiming the erotic, the body, and the complexity of sensory experience. He talks about liberating himself through validation: “Here’s what I know” and “here’s what I experience.” I really appreciated that honesty and that bravery. And there’s no question about the truthfulness. It’s the essence of claiming a position, a territory, and a meaning.

A second area might be more discussion about what economic conditions are necessary for a healthy and responsible Indigenous manhood. What kinds of economic production are we imagining when we think about communities with ethical Indigenous men? For instance, we are often in conflict with forces around us that seek to reproduce us as individualized corporate beings. This might get us thinking about the role of educators, of artists, of writers, and how these allow a certain measure of freedom in producing healthy Indigenous masculinities while at the same time confronting rampant individualism. Publishers are constantly looking at what sells the most, for instance. How might a responsible Indigenous construction worker or lawyer or investor look in today’s world? We need more talk about how Indigenous men can build a life based on cultural teachings within an increasingly globalized world. And I’m not just talking about urban environments; the biggest influences today on reserves are television and video games.

SM: A number of interviews broach questions of economics, but there’s more work to be done to analyze the larger economic structures in which systems of gender are embedded. Joanne Arnott talks about how poverty is stigmatized alongside race and gender, and Taiaiake Alfred talks about the influence of the capitalist rewards system on forms of masculine aspiration. I was really struck by Alison Calder’s argument that socio-economic conditions actually create the circumstances in which particular forms of activity coded as “masculine” become attainable, whereas other socio-economic conditions make other forms of masculine performance desirable or attainable. What serves as capital in specific gendered spaces is incredibly context specific. So in the context of any individual experience of manhood, different socio-economic matters will come into play. Here I’m referring to the level of immediate lived experience, but as you were suggesting earlier, the broader socio-economic structures actually affect our capacity to have these conversations about masculinity in the abstract at the level of discourse. Funding structures influence what is published and what is broadcast and what kinds of research projects have success at the institutional and national levels. And coming back full circle to the immediacy of quotidian realities, when you can’t get food into your mouth or the mouths of your children, then the question “What does masculinity mean?” perhaps becomes irrelevant. It becomes a luxury. On the other hand, maybe, as Terrance Houle suggests, that moment has everything to do with what it means to be a man. Perhaps the actions taken in that moment are the creative and imaginative embodiment of those meanings and responsibilities that theory is endlessly seeking to understand and make legible. Maybe those actions are the theory.

NJS: I once witnessed an act in a Cree community that speaks to this issue. These two men bagged a moose and they brought it back to the community. In their backyard they were skinning the moose. They were cutting it up, and they got to the point where their freezer was full. It was the dead of winter, and there came a point where they started walking down the road and began delivering moose meat to the people on the road—I was staying a couple doors down. What they said was that there was no storage, no ability to store all the meat. And one of the elders where I was staying said, “Well, that’s what we used to do in the old days.” So everyone had moose meat that winter. Interestingly, what happened the next winter is that these same young men caught a bunch of muskrat, and they started doing the same thing, delivering it down the road. This started a chain reaction where young men became suppliers for all of the elders living on their road. Now, there’s an entire network and body of relationships that has been forged on this one road in this one Cree community as a result of one single act.

Perhaps, it might have started through a lack of storage, but it turned into an act of kindness. It was a gesture of kindness and sharing, and if I were to say anything about what Indigenous men should be, it would be that. It’s the gesture of kindness that is a choice. In that moment of choice, a community formed that lives on years later. We can talk about how that existed hundreds of years ago, and that’s all fine and good, and we can talk about how it should be like that in the future, but all I can say is what I saw and what I felt, which was based in a specific time and moment: A choice. And, that the moose meat tasted amazing! If I saw these young men today I’d go up and shake their hands, see how they’re doing, and ask if they’ve gone hunting lately. I don’t know anything other than that—I don’t know anything really beyond their names and their families and that that gesture of kindness is something that changed an entire community.

SETTLERS FROM VARIOUS SOCIO-ECONOMIC, GEOGRAPHIC, AND CULTURAL POSITIONS NEED TO BE INTERROGATING HOW OUR IDEAS ABOUT GENDER CONTINUE TO BE CONDITIONED BY SETTLEMENT AND THE DISPOSSESSION OF INDIGENOUS NATIONS.

SM: Is that act something you would describe as a claiming in the way that Gregory articulates it?

NJS: Absolutely. It’s the claiming of being a good neighbour, a good relation. Every part of Indigenous cultures—if we’re talking about anything pan-Indian—every single ceremony that I’ve ever been a part of is about being a good relation. There’s nothing more simple than that, or more essential. A good relative is not always an idealized romantic image either. It’s sometimes where you have to stand in front of a bulldozer. It’s sometimes where you have to stand up for the water or you have to remind others of the sacredness of the Earth. It’s sometimes where you have to make food. It’s sometimes where you have to open a door. Every single part of being an Indigenous person, in the most meaningful way that I know, is about being a good relative and about thinking of somebody or something other than yourself.

SM: That highlights for me the urgency of decolonizing settler masculinities as well, because that celebration and honouring of interconnectedness that you’re talking about is not often discussed in the context of mainstream North American masculinities—especially beyond one’s nuclear family, in a sense that incorporates the land, the water, and the other-than-human entities around us as agentive beings. The economic systems that support and are guarded by the Canadian and U.S. nation states—in terms of global capitalism and resource extraction—are intimately involved in the production of mainstream ideas about gender. And those economic and gender systems undoubtedly influence Indigenous masculinities—not in a programmatic way, of course, because Indigenous masculinities are not created by those systems, but those systems exert pressures that have consequences; there is dynamic interplay at work. So I think that settlers from various socio-economic, geographic, and cultural positions need to be interrogating how our ideas about gender continue to be conditioned by settlement and the dispossession of Indigenous nations. We need to be aware of how settler masculinities were forged historically in the arena of conquest, which, as Qwo-Li Driskill suggests, required a masculinity that rapes and murders.

At the same time, we need to be aware of the variety of masculine models available to settler men today—and to women—and the variety of economic, popular cultural, and educational influences on contemporary settler masculinities. The disparate forms of social and economic capital available to different settlers in different settings indicate that we need to avoid simplistic assumptions here as well, and we need to be imaginative about how we leverage that capital in the service of decolonizing gender. For example, the forms of social capital to which I have access as a settler scholar are different in a university classroom than at a community gathering or in a hockey dressing room or at a bar or in my parents’ backyard, and the onus is on me to interrogate the kinds of privilege those manifestations of social capital enable, to understand that they emerge from the history of settler colonialism, and to seek out ways of performing my own gendered identity that denaturalize settlement, destabilize privilege, and pursue justice. I guess what I mean is that we need to maintain contextual specificity and to avoid easy answers in order to do the work that needs to be done—both for Indigenous and settler masculinities. We need to take Brendan Hokowhitu’s advice and always court complexity.

NJS: Oil fracking doesn’t exist unless you internalize conquest, control, and domination over the land. It’s the most violent, destructive, and abusive act one can do to the land and the water, but it goes beyond that. It’s suicidal. How many days can anyone survive without water? With uninhabitable land? With no animals because you’ve murdered all your relatives in the soil? Fracking is the most inane and nonsensical way of living in the world this side of the atom bomb. You only invent fracking to destroy yourself, and an economic system built on this foundation is self-destruction. It’s as simple as that. So much of fracking, resource exploitation, and conquest has always been tied up in what manhood means in settler culture. To control, to manipulate, and to settle is such a stereotypical male trope that lives throughout novels, movies, and sporting events. American football to me is the essence of this: The conquest of another’s territory and the romanticization of settling another’s land, all performed through hypermasculine posturing and the cult of individualism.

IF WE CENTRE OURSELVES ON GESTURES OF RELATIONSHIP—BOTH BY PRODUCING HEALTHY WORK AND BY ASSISTING IN THE CREATION OF HEALTHY MEN—WE WILL REALLY BE DOING SOMETHING LONG-LASTING.

SM: What do we need to commit ourselves to so that such corrosive masculinities give way to more balanced and responsible ways of being? How can this conversation connect with and enliven other conversations about Indigenous masculinities? How do we nurture this fire in a good way that might serve to warm and sustain our networks of relations?

NJS: This work is being pursued very strongly within Canada—and also, I believe, in New Zealand and Australia—but this is an opportunity for us to reach out to our relatives south of that great forty-ninth parallel, to Native Americans who may have a lot to teach us about what they’re doing. The second thing is to really investigate connections with the work researchers and writers in queer studies have been doing for decades now. Queer studies and Indigenous studies have long been engaged in similar work and masculinity is a potential intersection. I’m thinking about Craig Womack’s work around the ways in which gendered positions often fall apart when engaged in poetry and song and dance but reassemble themselves in moments like Creek stomp dances. I think more cross-investigations in these paths would lead to exciting findings and pathways forward.

The last thing I’d suggest is to bring these discussions back to the grassroots. Right now we’re talking on Skype as two professors, and most interviewed in this book are funded, trained, and supported by universities. We don’t want to leave out our brothers and uncles who are not in these places when we have these discussions about what it means to be an Indigenous man. One thing we do have access to in universities is young people. This book will probably end up predominantly in the hands of university students but I’m thinking how this work could also reach out to other youth as well. I’m interested in how this work can reach into places like the Manitoba Youth Centre, a youth correctional facility I have worked at. The young men I worked with there are all former gang members and know intimately the processes that have constructed them as sons, uncles, and fathers. They know much about experiences with abuse and poverty, policy and law, and how they have overcome these forces—some good, some bad—through senses of loyalty, the formation of families, and resistance. They just don’t use the same language we do to describe what this means. And many of them can’t read and most can’t write. I think these young men, however, have a hell of a lot to share that would dialogue in complex ways with voices in Masculindians. If we don’t reach young men like these and include them in our conversations, if we don’t engage them in some way about what it means to be a responsible and ethical man within a family, community, and nation, we’re really not getting very far in our work.

If we can engage Indigenous men in discussions surrounding where they come from, help them define for themselves and for us what it might mean to be an Indigenous man today, and join together with them in a collective vision about where Indigenous masculinities might be headed, then we are doing this work in a good way. If we centre ourselves on gestures of relationship—both by producing healthy work and by assisting in the creation of healthy men—we will really be doing something long-lasting. But if we have conversations only amongst ourselves, we’ll be doing neither the work nor our communities any service. We’ll not really be creating a field, we’ll be creating a fad. However, as the voices and the spirit in this book demonstrate, we are already beginning to eclipse these limitations, and I hope we retain and reaffirm our commitment to building in these crucial directions together.