â[Susanna] Moodie is writing about my relations while living on stolen land in an an enclave of white supremacy. She is both witness to and beneficiary of the violent dispossession of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg from our homeland. Her entire existence and that of her family are predicated on that crime, and she is willfully oblivious as she constructs Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg people as also willfully oblivious. This trumps any possible shared sisterhood Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg women might have with her as female. Carole Gerson writes, âpowerful as white but disempowered as female, Moodie and [Catherine Parr] Traill share with Native women some marginal space on the outskirts of frontier culture.â Genocide sets up a clear dichotomy in which, unless white women are willing to divest themselves of the power of being white, there is no shared marginal space with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg women. Describing interactions between white women and Mississauga women as âexperimental and not oppositionalâ is a fiction that exists in white womenâs theorizing themselves out of responsibility for benefiting from and replication of the gendered violence of colonialism through assumed allied spaces of women-to-women contact zones. Think about how Moodie so completely steals the self-determination of Indigenous women and recasts us as dirty and stupid, a recasting that I still live with nearly two hundred years later. She comprehensively steals and erases the bodies of Indigenous peoples and exerts an absolute power over Indigenous life as if this is her birthright. Think this is just in the past? Think again.â
Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done. While reading this, my mouth hung open through several pages. And then--
âThe ways in which Moodie negates Indigenous nationhood, obfuscates colonialism, and replicates the gendered nature of colonial violence that both informs and influences Indian policy cannot be dismissed and excused as the âracism of the times,â because it is these unexamined foundational beliefs about Indigenous peoples that were used and are used as justification for dispossession, residential schools, the Indian Act, and the violence against Indigenous women that is normalized in settler Canadian society, and for the continued paternalism of helping Indigenous peoples and dealing with the âIndian problem.â It seems to me that the point of the words âoriginal literary context [of Moodieâs book, Roughing It in the Bush]â is to provide a broad exoneration that fits seamlessly into the Canadian narrative of the past: Mistakes were made. Land was lost. Children were stolen. Cultures were adapted. Treaties didnât work out. We meant well. We tried our best. Progress is inevitable, and while it is regretful you didnât have the intelligence or fortitude to be successful, thatâs life. Maybe weâll try and be nicer and help more.â
I bolded the stuff I found particularly striking. Recently, I was asked to provide a letter of support for a white female colleague who, after reviewing a draft of my letter (something that I provided out of courtesy, but is not standard otherwise), asked if I could add something like, âI [the letter writer] believe [colleague] is the change needed in the white academy.â Snap judgment, but I was in disbelief for days. I ended up saying something like, âIâm uncomfortable adding this because for me, the academy is already steeped in white culture, itâs redundant, the change needed is a less white academy,â whatever. But it was a fresh reminder that white people -- and yes, white women -- excel at playing themselves when they reveal their lack of will to give up power. You could transplant that, âmaybe weâll try and be nicer and help more,â narrative to any situation where Black, Indigenous, people of color are gaining ground and thus need to be reminded of their subordination. Like, canât trust nobody.
