One thing I’ve been thinking about over these last few days (especially around the issue of First-Nations culture and identity in Canada, and also around the things we’ve been talking about in Anthropology, including this mornings documentary One Big Hapa Family) is the ways in which people construct themselves by choosing to identify with a particular label.
Talking about First Nations history in Canada has really brought home the power of labels for me. Reading parts of Royal Proclamation of 1763 this week for history I was struck by all the different labels First Nations peoples were grouped under. Terms that ranged from “Indian” to “savages” were applied to people of many different tribes from many different nations in the Proclamation, and it struck me that white immigrants to Canada could often choose their labeled identities as they pleased. At first there were mainly British and French Canadians, but as time went on and other national backgrounds began to cross the ocean, the idea of what constituted “Canadian” began to encompass other European nationalities as well. But these people had the choice of whether to identify as Polish-Canadian, German-Canadian, and so forth. They could also choose to simply identify as Canadian.
The legal language of “Indian” erased nationalities, and the residential school system was another strong step towards cementing the idea in the Canadian mindset that being an “Indian” from a nation on the coast of British Columbia was no different from being an “Indian” from the interior. While the term First-Nations makes some improvement, recognizing the multinational nature of Canada’s indigenous peoples, it is still too often used as a convenient blanket term. Furthermore, “First Nations” still carries a lot of the stereotypes that “Indian” has held in the past, simply due to the poor education about the diversity of First Nations cultures. The reality is, a lot of white Canadians still have nebulous notions of what Canadian indigeneity looks like, mostly comprised of clips from Disney’s Pocahontas, and some aesthetic ideas about dream catchers, intricate bead work, stylized images of killer whales, totem poles and painted drums.
In a culture that would rather think about stereotypes and would prefer to simplify many diverse peoples into one monolithic group called “First Nations people” self-identifying as being from a certain nation, a distinct tribe, and a particular family is a truly radical act.
So when Niska chooses, in the face of white people labeling her both “Indian” and a problem, to leave residential school and live in the same manner as her ancestors; when she curses a man so blinded by her being “Indian” that he cannot understand her humanity, a man who honestly seemed to think that having sex with her in a church would allow him to somehow steal her “powers”; when she continues in the tradition of being a windigo killer in the middle of colonized Canada, she is defying the Canadian convention of what an “Indian” is. Because Niska isn’t being a stereotype, she is simply being herself.
Living in a country in which her self-chosen identity is eclipsed by her heritage, Niska’s decision to choose to continue to self-identify as Cree is a deeply political act. But what is important isn’t really the statement that she is making- the importance lies in that she is able to be who she chooses to be, regardless of what others might try to make her instead.