Recollecting
Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands
Description
This rich collection of essays illuminates the lives of late-eighteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century Aboriginal women, women who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West.
Some essays focus on individuals—a trader, a performer, a non-human woman. Other essays examine cohorts of women—wives, midwives, seamstresses, nuns. Authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories. Exploring the constraints and boundaries these women encountered, the authors engage with difficult and important questions of gender, race, and identity. Collectively these essays demonstrate the complexity of "contact zone" interactions, and they enrich and challenge dominant narratives about histories of the Canadian Northwest.
Awards
- Winner, Willa Literary Award in the area of Scholarly Nonfiction, presented by Women Writing the West. 2012
- Winner, Best Book in Aboriginal History Prize presented by the Canadian Historical Association. 2012
- Winner, Best Book in Aboriginal History Prize, Canadian Historical Association. 2012
- Winner, Best Scholarly and Academic Book presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. 2012
- Winner, Willa Literary Award, Scholarly Nonfiction, Women Writing the West 2012
- Winner, Armitage-Jameson Prize, Western History Association and the Coalition for Western Women’s History 2011
- Winner, Armitage-Jameson Prize presented by the Western History Association and the Coalition for Western Women’s History 2011
- Winner, Best Scholarly and Academic Book, Book Publishers Association of Alberta 2012
Reviews
“More than emphasizing an active role for Aboriginal women in history, Atkinson, Barman, and their fellow contributors offer highly readable biographies showcasing hybridity, resiliency, contradictory historical experiences, and, above all, the diversity of Aboriginal women’s identities.”
- BC Studies
“The fact that the best essays rely not on journals or books written by women (which would thus make them elite and somewhat unusual) but on varied sources that discuss them or that they left behind, such as dictated reminiscences, makes these articles more thought-provoking and impressive. Even when the book focuses on more famous representatives, such as Catherine Auger, Frances Nickawa, or Anahareo, the essays present them as multidimensional figures who changed over time and embraced and rejected cultural norms.”
- Montana, The Magazine of Western History
“This collection’s introduction and twelve articles can quite rightly be seen as one grand recovery mission, a giant step toward increasing dramatically the complexity of western/colonial history through the lives of Aboriginal women.”
- Western Historical Quarterly
“Sarah Carter and Patricia McCormack unsettle the dominant, white-settler narrative of Canadian history while also contributing in a unique way to the genre of women's historical biography.”
- Prairie Forum
"An exciting new collection that spans over 200 years of Canadian history…. The central themes are primarily the negotiation of fluid identities within a changing and dynamic context and the importance of looking beyond the archive to recover what, the authors argue, lies beyond the colonizing gaze. […] Recollecting provides a thoroughly readable trove of information and includes some useful illustrations of many of the individuals and of some of the handiwork under discussion. The well-researched articles as a whole, remind us as researchers to seek diligently to capture voices present in objects, in stories, and in recollections not found in any traditional textual archive.”
- The Canadian Historical Review