Book challenges women's roles

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A powerful new book by first-time author Kim Anderson will help Native women resolve identity issues and renew their connection with their personal power.

Although Anderson, 35, is a Cree/Metis academic with a social and health policy development background, she hopes her book, A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood will be accessible to women outside of universities. She also sees it as "a gift to Native men, women and children," in her quest to help "decolonize" Native womanhood and promote a "healthier future for all Native peoples."

The book explores, through interviews with 40 prominent and respected Native women, the position of Native women in traditional Aboriginal cultures prior to European contact and after. Anderson points out that Native women became subjugated by the views of the colonizers who had made their own women subservient, with no right to property, decision-making or even self-expression. It was a model for womanhood that got transferred to Aboriginal men.

A Recognition of Being examines how women keep their power and either maintain their identities or form new identities in the face of oppression, and how the negative feminine traits ascribed to them by the colonizers has affected their roles and their sense of self-worth.

Anderson strives to "seek balance by reconnecting" women and men. She avoids the trap of male-bashing that has afflicted some other women's-point-of-view literature.

While she has clearly heard and acknowledged the pain of colonization from the 40 women she interviewed, Anderson's conclusions point to a future of renewed Aboriginal society where co-operation rather than antagonism rules the day. This will result from a renewal of respect and admiration for Aboriginal women who increasingly are rejecting imposed definitions of womanhood and reasserting themselves at the heart of community-building.

Anderson has sought information about identity formation not only from Aboriginal women but from other oppressed peoples. She borrowed from the thought of a black woman writer, Patricia Hill Collins, whose agenda was re-empowering black women who are dealing with negative stereotypes of themselves.

The four-fold "identity formation process" Anderson recommends for Native women is summed up as resist, reclaim, construct and act. That is, resist others' negative definitions of who you are; reclaim your Aboriginal tradition; construct a positive identity by infusing your tradition into contemporary life; and act in accordance with the identity you have claimed in a way that sustains and uplifts your community.

"You have to construct (a new reality) in the year 2000 where you find yourself," said Anderson, "which for me means being a Cree person that's living in Guelph, Ont." Anderson said she started the book from her personal experience as an urban Native to ask questions about what it means to live outside her traditional territory and away from her people.

She is not afraid to challenge ideas about what tradition means when filtered through a few centuries of grafted-on ideas of the dominant culture either. The final chapter of Anderson's book is an honest and revealing dialogue between herself and Bonita Lawrence, a scholar of Mi'kmaq and European heritage, wherein they explore the meaning of traditions and how they can be adapted to modern life.

"I like the way the book is not suggesting a knee-jerk way of taking in the traditions . . . There is a tendency now to follow the teachings so literally . . . do we have to follow traditions by rote?" Lawrence said. "When you're living a life that doesn't have much room for attending teaching circles or ceremonies . . . maybe it is more important to spend the time with your friends or family and build your family's strength together as you are. . . . I like this book because it encourages that approach if you need it."

Anderson said she made a deliberate effort to make the book for Native people, "because here's so little out there in the first place. There's very little that's written by our own people and very little written that's for our own people." She said most literature about Native people, including scholarly work, is still largely dominated by non-Native writers. Even so, Anderson hopes her book will have appeal to non-Native readers.

"I think it could be a kind of interesting visionary piece for a lot of different people," she said, "because it offers a bit of a different vision of a society that is still by and large existing in a lot of our communities."