New Directions in Indigenous Women’s History

Authors

Susana D. Geliga, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Margaret D. Jacobs, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

3-2017

Citation

Published in Gender & History, Volume 29, Issue 1 (April 2017), pp 198–210.

DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12288

Comments

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Used by permission.

Abstract

Review Essay:

Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 240. IBSN: 978-1-101- 56025-9.

Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), pp. 538. ISBN: 978-0- 8032-3825-1.

Andrae M.Marak and Laura Tuennerman, At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), pp. 232. ISBN: 978-0-8165-2115-9.

Mary Jane McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014), pp. 336. ISBN: 978-0-88755-738-5.

Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 232. ISBN 978-0-8166-9633-8.

The authors of five recent books in the field of Indigenouswomen’s history wish to restore Indigenous women to history, as Ella Deloria did more than seventy years ago. The voices and experiences of Indigenous women are so often muted and marginalised in standard written historical sources, but now historians of Indigenous women are intent on providing a more complete presentation of Indigenous women as multidimensional, complex and active agents of history.Most are pivoting away from histories that emphasise how non-Indigenous people viewed and victimised Indigenous women toward histories that centre Indigenous women within their own cultural contexts by designing and using new historical methodologies.6 Yet, as some of these new designs and methodologies collide with older approaches, conflicts of interpretation arise in the negotiation of this new space for Indigenous women in history. The inclusion of Indigenous voices in the interpretation of their histories however, not only aligns with an Indigenous perspective like that of Ella Deloria, but remains an underutilised resource to a more complete and fuller history.