Brenda Child. My Grandfather's Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe
Family Life and Labor on the Reservation. St. Paul: Minnesota State
Historical Society, 2014. Print.
The setting of Brenda Child's most recent book opens
with a devastating description of her historical focus, reservation life at the
turn of the 20th century. She reminds us that following numerous
cessions, removals and blatant land theft, the reservation could only be
described for many Ojibwe people as "the aftermath of catastrophic
dispossession, like a swath of land spared in the wake of a tornado or flood"
(3). Yet, as in the aftermath of any such catastrophe, we are reminded again
and again of the determination of families and communities to rebuild,
reconnect, and survive as some things stay the same, some are rebuilt stronger
and others become dear yet distant memories of that time before. For Child, she
chooses to tell the story of the reservation after the storm as "the place
where Ojibwe labor was reorganized and redefined" (3), a choice that brings
into focus the determination, strength and tough decisions that Ojibwe families
faced as their homeland was remade along with their relationships to it, to
work and to each other.
On its face, Brenda Child's book is an engaging
history of Ojibwe families' changing labor practices during the first half of
the 20th century, a period marked by many forms of dispossession and
removal, increasing state intervention in traditional economies, and global
disasters such as the influenza outbreak of 1918-19. It is also a deeply moving
tribute to her Ojibwe maternal grandparents and the Red Lake community, who
constitute the heart of a text that lovingly depicts the resiliency of everyday
Ojibwe people struggling to survive the targeted destruction of their way of
life by greedy and unjust officials, settlers and governments. Moreover, for this reviewer, Child's
attention to the gendered impacts of these changes offers Indigenous feminists
a nuanced history that effectively connects Ojibwe women's labor, status, and
knowledge at the nexus of ongoing dispossession and more importantly, ongoing
resistance.
By the end of her book, readers are left with a vivid
understanding why women in Ojibwe communities often stood to lose the most in
the transition from the seasonal round to a mixed economy that characterized
life on the reservation from the 20th century onward. At the same
time, however, Child summons Theda Perdue's critique of the "declension
argument" or the assumption that Indigenous women in modern history are always
in a space of perpetual victimhood and loss (185). Rather, she asks, in what
ways did women (and men) alter their relationship to work in order to address
the real challenges of reservation life and, at the same time, still maintain
cultural values distinct to an Ojibwe perspective and philosophy? What develops
in answer to this question is a measured and ever-fascinating collection of
life stories from her family and others that challenge the easy binary of
assimilation and traditionalism that too often over determines histories of
everyday Indigenous lives. Moreover, Child's methodological approach to place
alongside personal memory, family and community oral history, and more
traditional archival materials produces a masterful example of Indigenous
(feminist) historiography that, above all, is as compelling to read as it is
sound in its research.
The first part of the book is a mix of memoir and
family history as Child examines the life of her maternal grandparents Fred
Auginash (Nahwahjewun) and Jeanette Jones (Zoongaabawiik).
Opening with her Grandpa Auginash's story, Child is able to tell the history of
dispossession for Ojibwe peoples, beginning with the Treaty of 1837 and running
through to the allotment era for Northern Minnesota peoples. Grounded in her grandfather's
story of an allotment he never lived on and his subsequent removal from his
family home, she is able to give this well-known history meaning beyond
abrogation and policy decrees. Jeanette's part of her grandparents' story is
one that underscores the importance of Child's attention to the role of
patriarchal colonialism in women's lives at this time. Her investigation into Jeanette's
early life uncovers letters from Indian agents and school authorities concerned
over her grandmother's "fall from grace" as a Carlisle graduate, becoming
pregnant "out of wedlock" a few years before meeting and marrying Fred. Yet
what Child chooses to focus on in these letters is her grandmother's
determination to control her life choices and power of her own body. Beyond condescension, the agents note
Jeanette's refusal to marry her baby's father or deliver her baby in a
hospital. Child recalls the family stories that when the time came Jeanette
sought out her grandmother's care; years later, Fred would serve as Jeanette's
midwife in her subsequent births (32).
Fred's marriage to Jeanette brought him to the Red
Lake community and into a family still immersed in the seasonal round economy
characterized by trapping, hunting, sugaring, berry picking and rice gathering.
Yet, as Child demonstrates, the oncoming economic depression, war years, and an
unfortunate accident which left Fred unable to attend to hard labor such as
fishing, required her grandmother to enter into the world of social services,
wage labor through commercial fishing and the underground economy of alcohol
distribution. This practice led to her grandmother being given the affectionate
title of Shingababokwe or "Beer Woman" by her Red
Lake community.
The second chapter details Jeanette's and Fred's
"criminal" activities, including charges of public drunkenness and welfare
fraud respectively, two stories that underscore the surveillance of Indigenous
lives and the total lack of regard on the part of colonial agents for the pain
that underlie such "criminal" behavior. While the chapter's title suggests it
is about religion on the reservation, it is more about the impacts of settler
morality and attendant racism that made life more difficult though the
criminalizing of Indigenous bodies, former modes of subsistence and traditional
religion. In this storied chapter, we learn of Jeanette's struggle to overcome
the loss of three children, her father and father-in-law in a matter of a few
years, and the added burden of taking care of a family when Fred could not. At
the same time, we learn by way of court transcripts of one tribal judge's
seeming sympathy to Jeanette's depression and alleged alcohol abuse. It is
these stories that pull at Indigenous readers, myself included, as I recall
traces of my own family memories alongside Child's, a connection that is
bittersweet and profound.
The second part of the book moves into a more
traditional history of work and life on the reservation, yet does not lose
sight of the stories of everyday people. Specifically, it attends to three
forms of labor in the larger Ojibwe constellation of communities in the region,
though with a clear focus on Red Lake.
These three forms of work life include fishing, healing and the
cultivation of wild rice, all of which underwent major change in these years. Child's
decision to focus on these three forms of labor are obvious in the first and
final choice, but the chapter on healing is one that highlights a creative and
attentive insight to women's contributions and knowledge that characterizes her
perspective. It is this chapter that tells the story of healing through the
story of the proliferation of the Jingle Dress dance and a new crop of Ojibwe
nurses during this period.
Highlighting the resiliency of Ojibwe men, women and
children in protecting traditional resources and creatively addressing the
criminalization, loss of power and authority over activities they once did
without intervention, these three chapters also place into context Ojibwe
participation in commercial fishing, government programs during the war and the
development in tribal enterprises such as the Red Lake Fishery Association and
a wild rice cooperative that operated briefly at Cass Lake. Throughout these chapters, Child reveals
the corruption and collusion that seemed to characterize relations between the
State of Minnesota, game wardens, and others who came to regulate the harvest
of both fish and wild rice in ways that favored white middle class sports fisherman/hunters,
tourism and other settler enterprises. With each detailed set of stories, she
ends these chapters with a focus on a single person whose life story brings
home the human, legal and cultural costs of these injustices for Ojibwe
peoples. For example in the fisheries chapter, Child ends with the story of "Naynaabeak and the Game Warden." Characteristic of Child's
ability to beautifully weave Naynaabeak's story about
her efforts to gain a fishing permit to fish where she always has into a larger
narrative of both women and Ojibwe labor history, Child writes, "In Ojibwe
culture, water was a gendered space where women possessed property rights,
which they demonstrated through their long-standing practice of binding rice
together... part of an Indigenous legal system that marked territory on a
lake and empowered women. From every legal angle that mattered to Ojibwe women… Naynaabeak was
obliged to set her fishing net in the Warroad River, despite the difficulties
she faced in doing so by 1939" (122).
This excerpt and story resonates home in the end of
the last chapter, one that recalls the titular metaphor of the book,
Grandfather Auginash's knocking sticks. By the close of the first part of the
twentieth century, the impositions of settler economy, patriarchy and
moralizing had its impact in transforming what was once the domain of Ojibwe
women, the wild rice harvest, to the domain of Ojibwe men. At the beginning of the book, Child
recalls that in her early life her grandfather's knocking sticks led her to
believe that men were traditionally in charge of the harvest. In coming to know
her community and family history as an historian, she recognized that
"practices I considered 'tradition' were in fact new approaches to work" (12). In
this century, Child notes the continued and new challenges that face the sacred
food of the Ojibwe, including our people's changing relationship to it as a
commodity, as well as the very real threats of pollution, habitat loss, and
genetic research on the wild rice genome. However, Child concludes her careful
weaving of family and community labor history with the reminder that knocking
sticks, a technology once mocked by some newcomers to the region, are still
used by Ojibwe peoples in the harvest and these sticks remain much the same in
construction as her grandfather's—a fitting testimony to the endurance of
a people, their culture and ways of life.
Dory Nason, University of British Columbia