Perspectives: Indigenous Scholarship and Feminist Writing

I have a marvellous book on my desk that I have only just started to read. Some time ago, I had blogged wanting to find out more on Indigenous critiques of white scholarship, especially of white scholarship on Indigenous issues. And indeed, there is a book on that very thing, by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, called “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism”. Now perhaps I am blogging about this book prematurely as I have not finished reading it, and I plan a future blog when I have finished the book. But it is such an interesting and important book that I wanted to comment now—as I am only starting to read through it.

I myself am a late-comer to the academic debates on feminism. It was not until starting my PhD studies in a mid-career/mid-life switch that I came stumbling upon feminist writing. I wondered, at the same time that I was hungrily devouring the writings, why it was that I had never come across it before. Certainly feminist perspectives were not offered to me in my own previous (Juris Doctorate degree) legal education. I knew about feminism because I knew of women’s rights and women’s issues in the real world. But the wealth of feminist literature—and the criticisms of it—that was all new to me.

I was introduced to it in a most unorthodox way—through chatting with fellow mid-life career switchers trying to get a PhD people at the local dog park. It was here I was first introduced to Critical Race Theory, and Critical Race Feminism. It’s not as if I was hiding from feminist literature. It is just that if you are not made aware something exists, it’s awfully hard to go looking for it. Finally, I became aware. Why was this literature so hard to find—why did it take so long? Why is so much in law that varies from certain conservative perspectives hidden, driven underground, never acknowledged? Again— you have to know it is there to go looking. I think in years past this sort of exercise was called consciousness raising. And I think we need some more of this in mainstream law and legal studies—consciousness raising!

And as I read, I also became aware of the debates within feminist literature about women of colour and white women.
A passage from Moreton-Robinson (pg 151) explains:

“...critiques of white feminism by black and Indigenous women challenge the universality of the subject position middle-class white woman in different but interconnected ways. These critiques are grounded in different experiences from those of white feminists, and they expose the reproduction of power relations between the white community and the Indigenous community within feminism. The priorities of Indigenous women are often in opposition to and are different from those of the white feminist movement and the nation state.”

I have had only a skimming, preliminary read of Moreton-Robinson’s book. I am looking forward to reading it fully and in-depth as there is much to be learned from it.

"Disrupting the Dialogue”? Who Speaks in the Garden of Academe?

A garden to be proud of

"We cannot talk to you in our language because you do not understand it... The power of white Anglo women vis-a-vis Hispanas and Black women is in inverse proportion to their working knowledge of each other... Because of their ignorance, white Anglo women who try to do theory with women of color inevitably disrupt the dialogue. Before they can contribute to collective dialogue, they need to ‘know the text’, to have become familiar with an alternative way of viewing the world... You need to learn to become unintrusive, unimportant, patient to the point of tears, while at the same time open to learning any possible lessons. You will have to come to terms with the sense of alienation, of not belonging, of having your world thoroughly disrupted, having it criticised and scrutinized from the point of view of those who have been harmed by it, having important concepts central to it dismissed, being viewed with mistrust.” ( original statement by Maria Lugones, quoted by Alison Jagger, quoted by Norma Alarcon)

This kind of discussion used to take place amongst scholars of feminist law. Who could speak, should speak, whose voice represented what. Whether the experience of a white woman was in any way relevant to the experiences of women who were not white. This discussion occurred at the same time of the growth of new ways of examining and discussing law through the embrace and explosive growth of offshoots of critical race theory. At least in American scholarly discourse, as critical race theory seems to have only recently tiptoed across the Atlantic to British shores.

There were and are lively discussions of colour-blindness and colour-consciousness. Terry Cross, the Executive Director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association has written a not to miss article on exactly what is meant by colour-blind and colour-conscious and how their operation in child welfare systems.

But the prior lively discussion and debate about voice, narrative, consciousness of culture and colour seems to be largely absent from much of the scholarship on indigenous peoples today. It might be that law has moved on from the scholarship and research themes that marked feminism and critical race theory and that these sorts of discussions are as out of date and fashion as a Sony Walkman. It might be that indigenous rights lacks the universality conundrum of feminism—no parallel question of whether a white woman can speak for non-white women. But here and there hints that percolate to brief visibility of a controlling academic hand over who speaks about indigenous issues and in what manner. There are articles by scholars who are indigenous Robert Wilson and Jeff Corntassel who detail being told not to write about indigenous issues from a certain angle or even at all if they valued progression in their academic careers. Whither academic freedom? Is this a colonisation of indigenous rights issues by a non-indigenous Garden of Academe—that wants to assert who speaks, when and about what—and that voices of indigenous peoples at the door are annoying and to be permitted only in necessary degree?

Gunther Teubner and Andreas Fischer-Lescano write stingingly of the “lie” of indigenous legal incorporation into British colonial laws: “The whole thing was a scam.... The trick was hidden in exactly this lie: indigenous or customary laws were not “rules that trace back to the habits, customs, and practices of the peoples” as had been assumed by traditional anthropologists, but were “constructs of European expansion and capitalist transformations” and therefore nothing more than a “myth of the colonial era.””

Which all begs the question—what is the dialogue going on in the Garden of Academe on indigenous issues—who is welcomed and who is not?