Sam McKegney is an author and associate professor of English and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. His most recent book, published earlier this year, is Masculindians:
Conversations about Indigenous Manhood (University of Manitoba Press), a collection of interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood.
Today, Sam speaks with Open Book about masculinity in Indigenous literature, engaging in conversations rather than interviews and where the term "masculindians" comes from.
Open Book:
Tell us about your new book, Masculindians.
Sam McKegney:
Masculindians is a collection of twenty-two conversations with some of the most influential Indigenous thinkers today on the subject of manhood and masculinity. The book examines how gender is conceived traditionally in a variety of North American Indigenous cultures, the influence of colonialism on those conceptions and the spectrum of issues affecting Indigenous men today.
A central element of colonial policy in North America was to force patriarchy upon non-patriarchal Indigenous nations. Many of these nations were traditionally matrilineal; many Indigenous languages don’t employ gender pronouns; and many Indigenous cultures conceive of multiple genders beyond simply male/female. Colonial policy attempted to replace Indigenous understandings of gender with a two-gender system in which women are subordinate to men. This is why residential schools paid such attention to separating boys from girls, why the Indian Act of 1876 barred Indigenous women from voting in band elections and why prior to 1985, Indian Affairs only recognized as “Indian” the offspring of Indigenous men. In these ways, the Canadian government attempted to destabilize traditions of gender fluidity and balance in Indigenous communities.
It is widely understood that these impositions have negatively affected the lives of Indigenous women. Masculindians is the first book to consider in depth the affects of these interventions on Indigenous men. To explore this important issue I turned to Indigenous artists, activists, academics and elders and invited them to share their thoughts about men and masculinity. These thinkers lay bare the complexities of this history—not only how colonial power has attempted to alienate Indigenous men from traditional roles and responsibilities, but also how Indigenous men have resisted, retained their traditions and creatively envisioned alternative means of expressing masculine power. The result is a collection that is at turns hilarious and harrowing, that is rich with knowledge from a variety of Indigenous cultures and that looks back to the past while reaching forward into the future.
OB:
Could you explain the term “masculindians” to us? Where does it come from?
SM:
Both “masculinity” and “Indian” are imprecise concepts. What might be considered masculine at any given moment is culturally and contextually specific; it will shift over time and over territory. Even within a homogenous group of people, different behaviors will be called masculine in, say, a classroom than in a coffee shop or a locker room or a worksite. So there is no stable definition for masculinity and nothing that innately binds ideas of masculinity to biological maleness. The term Indian, meanwhile, emerges from a colonial history of misidentification. It comes from European explorers arriving in what would come to be called The Americas and believing they had arrived in India. As such, the term Indian speaks less about the actual identities of Indigenous peoples than it does about European desires to control Indigenous people through language.
When I first used the term “masculindians” a few years ago, I was attempting to draw attention to the constructed nature of stereotypes about Indigenous men in popular culture. Depictions of Indigenous men in film, literature and the media tend to conform to hypermasculine stereotypes of the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘bloodthirsty warrior.’ Look at Chingachgook and Magua from The Last of the Mohicans or Kicking Bird and The Toughest Pawnee from Dances With Wolves or media representations of Indigenous gangs or of the Mohawk warriors at Oka—to borrow from Brian Klopotek, these depictions “comprise an impossibly masculine race.” And as Mohawk theorist Taiaiake Alfred explains in Masculindians, “there’s no living with” these stereotypes because they’re “not meant to be lived with; [they’re] meant to be killed, every single time. They’re images to be slain by the white conqueror.” By bashing the words “masculine” and “Indian” together, I tried to show the dangerous falseness of these images.
However, despite initially coining the term as a tool simply to critique misrepresentations by Anglo-North Americans, I’ve become increasingly convinced of its more positive potential. Because “masculindians” highlights the inability to pin down masculinity and Indigeneity, it might help open up alternative visions of Indigenous masculinity that aren’t limited by colonial patriarchy. Ultimately, patriarchy doesn’t own masculinity, and just as many Indigenous people have reclaimed the term “Indian” for their own purposes, the term masculindians might gesture—in a small and irreverent way—to the sovereign right of Indigenous nations, communities, and individuals to define for themselves what masculinity and Indigeneity ought to mean and how they ought to be lived and expressed.
OB:
In what ways do the continued effects of colonization and Western notions of gender influence and harm Indigenous manhood?
SM:
It’s hard to look past the long shadow of the residential school system when thinking about the ongoing influence of Eurocentric notions of gender on Indigenous manhood. In some cases three, four and even five generations of families were forced to attend these institutions and were thereby separated from models of manhood in their communities. For months—sometimes years—at a time they were robbed of the influence of their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, as well as their mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers. As Anishinaabe elder Basil Johnston describes in Masculindians, they were “never given the love for which a child’s spirit yearns: never hugged, never caressed when they wept, never told ‘I love you.’” And what they learned about gender while they were there conformed to patriarchal principles and was taught to them by supposedly asexual clergy, some of whom abused their power in violent ways. The affects of this social engineering on understandings of manhood can’t be overstated.
However, it’s crucial not to imagine these institutions as wholly successful in their aims and to ignore the ongoing agency of Indigenous people to enact other forms of manhood. As the men interviewed in Masculindians attest, Indigenous teachings about gender haven’t been extinguished and alternative understandings of manhood and masculinity are being reclaimed and reimagined. This process of reclamation is really difficult because the overarching North American context is conditioned by individualism, capitalism and patriarchy. As Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm explains in Masculindians, due to the influence of individualism and patriarchy, “as soon as you say ‘power,’ for a lot of people that means power over something. Power to bend something to your will.” In this model, men achieve power by taking it from women and others. Daniel Heath Justice describes it this way: “If the male body isn’t giving harm, it’s taking pleasure.” Yet, according to many Indigenous worldviews, power is generated collaboratively; men’s power supports and is braided together with women’s power and vice versa. So the difficulty is finding ways to express masculine power that don’t fall into the individualist model that dominates North American mainstream culture. Many of those interviewed in Masculindians strive to articulate masculine power as a way of demonstrating the individual’s responsibility to a broader kinship community that includes women, other men and other elements of the natural world.
Yet when the mainstream media speaks about “the way forward” for Indigenous communities, what do we often hear? We hear that Indigenous people should join the global economy, privatize land, exploit natural resources, earn economic wealth and thereby gain particular forms of individual social capital. We don’t hear about kinship and we don’t hear about responsibilities to the community and to the environment. The kind of masculine power being lauded in such models is individualist and patriarchal and it serves the capitalist system. It’s also not so different from the ideas around gender fostered in residential schools. That’s why Idlenomore is so significant. Idlenomore is a radically democratic collective struggle to uphold responsibilities to the earth, the water and to generations yet to come. It’s a movement led by Indigenous women in which many Indigenous men participate in ways that I think honour some of the ideas about masculinity shared by interviewees in Masculindians.
OB:
What drew you to exploring this particular subject matter?
SM:
As someone who studies and teaches Indigenous literature, I was drawn to questions about Indigenous masculinity by the literature itself. I was struck a number of years ago by a recurrent theme of surrogate brotherhood in recent novels by Indigenous authors. In Eden Robinson’s Blood Sports, Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, for example, fatherless and socially awkward protagonists attempt to navigate the worlds in which they find themselves with the help of charismatic yet violent surrogate brother figures. I wondered at the time if these novels might be exploring the consequences of colonial attempts to erase Indigenous traditions of masculinity and the dangers of conforming to mainstream models of masculinity.
To pursue this line of thinking, I tried to seek out writings on Indigenous masculinity, only to learn that there really wasn’t much available. Although there have been several important books written on Indigenous women’s issues and Indigenous feminisms, there hasn’t been much written on Indigenous masculinities. As Lee Maracle clarified for me, this “doesn’t mean there aren’t bodies of work. A body is a person. There’s lots of men who can speak to this issue. They just haven’t been published.” But the lack of published work on Indigenous masculinity makes sense. If a central objective of colonial policy has been to impose patriarchy on Indigenous nations, then focusing on male-specific issues always risks re-affirming the very systems of patriarchy against which Indigenous nations are struggling.
Yet it seemed to me that writers like Robinson, Van Camp, and Boyden were seeking to inspire readers to dig more deeply into questions around masculinity and manhood. As a settler scholar, I thought that one way I might do this would be to speak with Indigenous thinkers on the subject. Masculindians is the product of those conversations, and it is offered not as a means of providing final answers but as a tool for generating further valuable conversations on gender and masculinity in Indigenous families and communities.
OB:
Could you describe the interview process you undertook while writing Masculindians?
SM:
My goal for the interview process was to allow each interviewee to guide the discussion in the directions she or he thought it should go. I wasn’t trying to extract information through pre-formulated questions but rather to open up space for the interviewees to share their thoughts, experiences, insights and concerns about gender and masculinity. My hope was to engage in “conversations” rather than “interviews.” I am fortunate to call many of those included in Masculindians my friends, which lent to several of the conversations an air of comfort and intimacy, and for the most part the discussions grew organically.
We engaged in the conversations wherever would work best for the participants, whether that was in a kitchen or an office or a coffee shop or a car driving down the 401 or in a sunlit park while the participant’s children played on the swing set. Unsurprisingly, the conversations took on lives of their own, ranging from Janice Hill’s heartfelt monologue, which required no questions from me whatsoever, to the rapid fire back-and-forth with Brendan Hokowhitu who eventually, by the conversation’s close, began to interview me! When the conversations were completed, they were transcribed and each participant was given the opportunity to determine which of her or his words would be included in the publication and which would be omitted. They were also encouraged to add to their comments if they so desired. It was crucial to me that the published book honor each participant’s gift of wisdom, and to do that I felt that the participants needed complete control over their words.
OB:
What are you working on now?
SM:
As a critical companion to Masculindians, I’m currently working on a book called Carrying the Burden of Peace’: Imagining Indigenous Masculinities through Story. I’m still a couple chapters shy of finishing it. And I’ve been teaching a course at Queen’s University for the last two years on hockey, literature and Canadian national mythologies that has led me to think in greater depth about the place of Canada’s national winter sport in its ongoing colonial history. When I complete Carrying the Burden of Peace, my next project will explore race, gender and nationhood through the ideologically laden vehicle of hockey.
Sam McKegney is the author of Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community After Residential School and numerous articles on Indigenous and Canadian literatures. He is an associate professor of English and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.
For more information about Masculindians please visit the University of Manitoba Press website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
Post new comment