Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism edited by Carol Williams, i–xiv +299 pp, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2012, ISBN 9780252037153 (hbk), $117.00.

Colleen O’Neill, one of the authors in this excellent book, succinctly describes the state of knowledge about the history of indigenous women’s labour: ‘we know that women worked too. But unlike their male counterparts, women’s work remained marginal to the bigger story of economic transformation’ (p. 194). Scholarship has been undertaken in the past to understand the significance of indigenous women’s work and this book builds on this scholarship to specifically understand what the work meant at particular times and places, but even more importantly, how it relates to the social and economic transitions that were occurring both for indigenous people and the larger society.

The book covers a wide time period associated with European contact and colonialism (from 1830s until the 1980s), and includes diverse geographical areas. In a book of 15 chapters dealing with labour in specific places, nine are associated with the United States with the remaining six dealing with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It also has a very helpful overview by Joan Sangster in the first chapter and a short, interesting lesson in beading at the end by Beth H Piatote. Throughout there are excellent photographs illustrating the work being examined. Each chapter is relatively short and many have been worked up from research available from previously published material by the authors.

The strength of this volume is in the way it situates the work in the specifics of time and place as well as in relationship to government policies. This results in sophisticated insights that go beyond the ‘awfulisation’ that can occur when talking about the painful transitions in indigenous societies as they came under the influence of capitalist colonial regimes. This is not to say that awful things did not happen, because of course they did, but equally significant is what is shown about how women managed to cope with changing employment conditions within a society that was not only racist, but also patriarchal. In this sense the book also goes beyond an emphasis on cultural preservation (the tendency of current historians, according to one author) or the processes of erasure in the face of colonisation and tries to understand the significance of women’s labour as entire economies changed and indigenous peoples were engaged in the production and maintenance of both their own and Newcomer communities.

Particularly helpful in understanding the transformation in the work of indigenous women is the different types of experiences examined – sealing and plantation work in Australia’s early history, mining and seasonal fruit picking in California, logging and the fur trade in Canada, and service sector work including school teaching in Oklahoma and the more recent work in casinos. The examples touch on women’s participation in the industries that were either dominant or crucial in particular places and demonstrate how women’s paid labour was an essential part of survival for indigenous populations.

The earliest periods, by necessity, rely almost exclusively on the information provided by either colonial administrators or employers, such as information about the aboriginal women who worked in the sealing trade in Tasmania and those in the fur trade in Canada. The migration of female south sea islanders who worked on sugar plantations as indentured servants in Queensland from 1868–1906 relies on general information about plantation work, government documents and diaries, but most of the information about the work itself, primarily in the fields, comes from the analysis of photographs of women working. The main value of this is that it shows that women worked under the same brutal physical conditions as men.

A major theme in the book is the way that women were either prominent in or dominated certain types of income-generating industry, but as economic conditions were transformed their work was frequently undermined. This was particularly true in the agricultural work of Lummi women in the Pacific West Coast, the blanket weaving of Navajo women as the wool economy changed, the Anishinaabe women in Wisconsin who worked in tourism, which was a notoriously volatile industry. Also significant were the impacts of industrialisation and the general shift of populations from rural to urban areas, particularly in response to government policy and the decline in local opportunities. This is most comprehensively explored in Alice Littlefield’s chapter on the Anishinaabe women in Michigan and the distinction in the work and location of people in tribes that were officially recognised by government and those that were not. Throughout the book a special effort is made to show that women were active agents in both their own lives and in bringing about change in their communities.

The book’s editor, Carol Williams, is to be congratulated for bringing together such a stellar group of scholars on a subject that has not received the attention it deserves. As she notes, the information in this book contests the homogeneity of male-dominated national development narratives. Altogether, it challenges the ‘structural amnesia’ (p. 75) in most historical accounts of indigenous work in an exceptionally readable and informative way. Its insights are ideal for teaching, but the book is also an inspiration and should encourage further scholarship on the work of Indigenous Women.

Marjorie Griffin Cohen

Simon Fraser University