by Patricia Harms
Brandon University
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Our understanding of the fur trade, the role of women within Aboriginal communities, European-Aboriginal relations and, in fact, the very foundation of Canada was fundamentally altered with the 1980 publication of Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870. Sylvia Van Kirk’s work explored the histories of the fur trade from the intimate perspective of marital relationships or long-term partnerships. Van Kirk successfully demonstrated that the lives of Aboriginal women mattered and were critical to the success of the Aboriginal-European trade system. As editors Brownlie and Korinek argue, by “inserting women into the story of the trade….[she] showed how the whole enterprise was founded on women’s economic and social labour”(p. 12). In turn, Van Kirk conclusively revealed the limitations of previous fur-trade histories as male dominated domains.
The significance of both the book and Sylvia Van Kirk’s career is explored in Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada. This volume of articles honours the historiographic transformation that followed the landmark publication of Many Tender Ties and the many new historical fields that have followed. However, the book also makes several other significant contributions. In the course of their discussion about her ground-breaking historical analysis, several of the contributors also discuss Van Kirk’s experiences within the academy itself. It will come as no surprise to many that her insistence that Aboriginal women were significant historical actors was met with resistance by a historic field dominated by men. Furthermore, this resistance extended to a male dominated academy undergoing a rapid transformation that included women as colleagues and historical subjects. In so doing, this collection contributes to the stories of women’s inclusion within the academy itself in much the same way Van Kirk did with Aboriginal women and the fur trade. As a result, this book is revealing on multiple levels.
The book is structured as an edited volume. It contains twelve chapters, and its contributors include friends and colleagues, former students, fellow researchers and scholars in Native-Newcomer relations, Canadian Western and Women’s histories. It is at once both a love letter honouring this influential female scholar, and the story of a group of scholars who first asked new historical questions to uncover the multifaceted roles of women. Essentially divided into two sections, the first highlights the personal side of Sylvia’s career with chapters by scholar and friend Jennifer S.H. Brown, colleague Franca Iacovetta, and former student Valerie Korinek. Each of these writers highlights Van Kirk’s warmth and scholarly generosity, as well as her patience and hard work on innumerable university committees. As a peer with similar contributions to the field, Jennifer Brown’s recollections of their early friendship and shared conviction about the historic significance of the personal lives of Europeans and Aboriginals Peoples in the fur trade is of particular interest.
The second part of Finding a Way to the Heart explores the various historic influences of Van Kirk’s work. Elizabeth Jameson highlights the significance of her historical analysis on Native American histories spanning several centuries in the western United States, and its influence on colonial and post-colonial studies. Through the lens of her own work on an ethnically diverse, transnational Douglas- Connolly family, Adele Perry explores the influence of Many Tender Ties and its continuing resonance. In so doing, Perry addresses important critiques of Van Kirk’s historical methodology.
The remainder of the second part of the book contains articles linked by a common focus on women, intimate relationships, and kinship ties, as they relate to broader stories of trade, colonial and post-colonial trading networks, and the intricacies of Aboriginal communities. Angela Wanhalla explores interracial conjugal relations between the Maori people and traders in colonial New Zealand. Here she delves into comparative questions about the resulting mixed-race children and the Métis in Canada. Robert Innes picks up on the theme of family and kinship to explore the cultural complexities of Aboriginal prairie groups, demonstrating the importance of kinship in the formation of bands. Patricia McCormack explores the fur trade in similar ways to Van Kirk and highlights its regional variations, conclusively pointing out how the northern fur trade far outlasted the southern. Mirroring the concerns of Van Kirk to include Aboriginal perspectives within her work, Jarvis Brownlie explores the colonial discourse on race, including both British colonizers and Aboriginal voices. Victoria Freeman offers a counter discourse to Van Kirk’s work by focusing on the more coercive and destructive nature of conjugal relationships between Aboriginal women and Europeans in a transnational study that includes Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. Kathryn McPherson picks up the story about race and gender relations in the fur trade where Van Kirk leaves off, focusing on the early years of agricultural settlement on the prairie west. In a landscape recast, where white women are the symbol of respectable civilization, many European men abandoned their Aboriginal wives and families. Finally, Katrina Srigley finishes the volume with an exploration of colonial legacy on Aboriginal identity from her own perspective as an Anishinaabe woman. These contributors, all of them noted scholars in their fields, make Finding a Way to the Heart a deeply rich text, which extends far beyond a celebration of one woman’s academic accomplishments.
This book will be of interest to scholars and non-scholars alike. While deeply rooted in historical methodology, its writers have created a highly accessible series of articles, honouring Van Kirk’s insistence that histories must be written for everyone and not just specialists. Its discussion on the emergence of women in the academy also carries a poignancy that will extend its significance beyond Aboriginal histories. Readers will find Sylvia Van Kirk’s early experiences in the academy similar to the stories of other female academics who struggled to make a space for themselves as women, and for their female subjects. Therefore, this work not only justifiably honours Sylvia Van Kirk and her contributions; it celebrates the growing inclusivity of the academy, both in its subject matter and for the people who create these histories.
As a young scholar, I stand on the shoulders of women such as Sylvia Van Kirk, Jennifer Brown, and my own mentors in Latin American women’s history, and this book is a tender reminder to its readers that we all do. Finding a Way to the Heart celebrates the many achievements of women in the academy and the contributions of Aboriginal women. It challenges us to continue including new historical questions and new identities in our own work and in the academy in general.
Page revised: 7 January 2018
