Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands, edited by Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack

Up until last week I thought my local library was only good for borrowing DVD’s, and stocking a non-fiction section that addresses the most cutting-edge issues of the early 1990’s. Imagine my delight when I saw among its new acquisitions a collection edited by Sarah Carter (she wrote The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915—a fascinating account of how fiercely guarded a particular idea of marriage and family [wa/i]s, and how central it was to Canadian nation-building).

The essays collected in this anthology are conscious that, as one such contributor specifically observes of Sara Riel, earlier writers of biography have only acknowledged women when they “[celebrate them] as an event in the life of a great man” (Erickson, 2011, 117). However, these authors take as their objective demonstrating how, “Aboriginal women, instead of fading into the background as traditional narratives of Western settlement suggest, remained at the forefront of their communities’ survival and persistence” (Burnett, 2011, p.158).
Given that traditional historical accounts are silent about the centrality of their female First Nations and Metis subjects, the contributors to this collection use multiple methods and rely on many sources of information. For instance, Susan Berry demonstrates how the information about artisan skill and style that one reads from an artefact might be read alongside HBC invoices and a traveller’s diary to extrapolate who the artist was. In uncovering these identities, Berry also fits these characters, and their stories (gleaned from HBC records, newspaper reports, etc.) into a travelogue that was originally silent about them. Moreover, she traces her subjects’ social location beyond their contact with the author of the diary to showcase the increasing marginalization of these highly skilled Metis women and their families with the progress of the Canadian state.

On the whole, this collection is full of well-written essays with authors whose use of sources is imaginative, innovative, interesting, and compelling. Additionally, several of the authors focus on the connection between first peoples and specifically their relatives who currently live in Scotland. Is this kind of diaspora much considered in the literature (I'm hardly a scholar of First Nations studies)?

The only suggestion I would have is if the reader is not familiar with Canadian history that s/he supplement this with a more traditional history resource. Indeed, it would provide needed context when the authors note an event like the Red River Rebellion but do not elaborate on it in detail.