Lawrence’s first book, “Real” Indians and Others, was widely read when it was released in 2004. She has always worked at the boundaries of place, peoplehood, and recognition, and this book is no different.
Lawrence’s first book, “Real” Indians and Others, was widely read when it was released in 2004. She has always worked at the boundaries of place, peoplehood, and recognition, and this book is no different.
Turning towards the inner divisions between Indigenous (Status, Non-Status, m/Métis) political organizations in the traditional homeland of the Algonquin Nation Lawrence charts the fault lines that have emerged around issues of belonging and identity. Lawrence sets her work within a larger critique of the politics of recognition in which Indigenous peoples are forced to appeal to the Canadian state for the administration of their Aboriginal rights.
Through an exploration of how these issues have manifested in the Algonquin Land Claim process Lawrence demonstrates that this fracturing is a colonial imposed project whose design is to eliminate Indigenous presence through a splintering of political cohesiveness. At the heart of this work is the question of whether or not Algonquin (and by extension Indigenous) sovereignty can ever be achieved from within Canadian state structures? Is the Canadian legal system fundamentally incapable of escaping its own system of categorization?
On another note, does Lawrence’s use of “fracturing” present a similar narrative as White’s “shattering?” Does it imply an historical wholeness that may in fact be more elusive? Or, does it succeed where White faltered?
Another tangent: How do we think with the importance of Algonquin Park to the Group of Seven (who in turn have been positioned as the quintessential Canadian painters) and the park’s erasure of Algonquin presence?
Hi all,
Thanks for your interesting questions, Dane—I found this book to be really engaging, and I’m looking forward to discussing with you all!
Although we might get here naturally on Tuesday, I wanted to think about Indigenous modernities (again) in Lawrence’s book. The contemporary forms in which recognized or non-recognized Algonquin lifeways are maintained through “non-traditional” means (types of hunting, casinos, etc) seem to constitute a form of Indigenous modernity that flies against expectation for authenticity and cultural purity. Is the indigenous modernity offered through Lawrence’s account therefore an inclusive rendering that posits a shared “leap” into modernity, or could we see Algonquin temporalities here as interacting with and affecting, but not subsumed under, settler time? How does thinking through legal processes and settler-colonial control and maintenance of life and identity complicate these questions? (Though maybe we are tired of hammering out the Deloria vs Rifkin debate.)
Another smaller thought: although this is not a “history” book, how might we incorporate recent histories and “the present” into historical analyses? Where do we draw the line between history and political science or sociology? This question may be, in some ways, connected to the question of temporality and historicism discussed above.
Hellooooo!
Lawrence’s book, as Elspeth and Dane have both highlighted, weaves together many of the themes we’ve been tackling in our discussions. For me, ideas around strange-ness and absurdity surfaced again while reading. Like a flag pierced into the earth as proof of ownership, or the recent acquittals we’ve seen in the news, I can’t help but see the state’s legal framework, such as what defines Indigenous title (e.g. continuity between present and pre-sovereignty occupation, that occupation must be exclusive), as absurd (is there another word for it?). So perhaps this might lead us into a question about absurdity and strangeness: in what ways can we make-strange these logics in historical practice? What kind of work does re-framing these colonial legal narratives as absurd do? What does it risk, or what are the stakes of this work (e.g. what happens when we make “nationhood” absurd)?
And if we see this absurdity framework as a particular form of refusal, maybe we can ask: for whom is refusal available? How do we trace the possibilities and limitations of refusal in our own historical work?
I also wanted to ask what people thought about this book’s messaging overall: is this a pain narrative? What type of work does framing the Algonquin homeland (and people) as “fractured” do (or not do)? How does Lawrence both perpetuate and resist the pain narrative in her work? How does her methodology enable her to do both (or does she do both)?
Lawrence shows present day effects of the traditional/modern binaries we have been discussing the past few weeks. It’s interesting to consider along side Deloria. Deloria focuses primarily on how settler society saw Indigenous peoples, and how settlers erased and silenced Indigenous people from settler public conscious. Lawrence, on the other hand, addresses how settler colonialism created silences and erasure within Indigenous communities. How can considering these books side-by-side deepen our understanding of how traditional/modern binaries have been forced upon people and silenced histories?
I’m also interested in considering how oral interviews are used in this book relative to other works we have read this term. Do you guys see this as an example of blurring the line between primary and secondary material? Or are oral interview quotes used more as evidence to be analyzed rather than analysis in its own right?
Lawrence’s study demonstrates how Canada’s policies about Indigenous peoples produced new and fractured existing identities. Communities that were once connected to both their territory and each other were divided by the state into m/Métis, status, and non-status, as well as by the imposition of provincial boundaries.
I’m wondering how this complex reality fits within the broader agendas of decolonization and reconciliation upheld by many scholars of Indigenous history. Given the diversity of agendas, economic circumstances, and relationships to land that the legacy of Canada’s colonial policies has produced, how can historians, and especially non-Indigenous historians, work towards and conceive of decolonization and reconciliation? If, as Lawrence and Coulthard argue, engaging with the Canadian government about recognition and land claims legitimizes and perpetuates the subjugation of Indigenous peoples by a colonial government, how should historians work with communities that desire state recognition?
Picking up on Dane’s question around “fracturing” versus White’s “shattering,” I’m interested in the ways in which Lawrence uses interviews as a means of pulling out some of the specific fractures and they ways they are interconnected to fracturing from land. In terms of how successful Lawrence is presenting the elusiveness of a “whole” Algonquin identity, she does state early on that she was unable to gain access to the Quebec Algonquins and thus her study does somewhat re-enforce the state-created divide fractured by boundaries drawn between them. Although Lawrence is up front about this, what do folks feel like is missing from the overall narrative by the re-enforcing of the divide in her approach? Does it re-enforce the divide? I appreciate how Lawrence uses this as an example in which colonial dispossession has shaped Indigenous identity and she comes back to this point throughout the book, really clearly connecting the colonial systems with the modern identity dialogue. I am also curious as to how folks saw (or not) the pressures from the ongoing land claims process that was underway while Lawrence was interviewing and writing, as coming through in the text? I had difficulty parsing out where it might have occurred unless Lawrence herself directly pointed it out.
Excited to talk more about this book on Tuesday!
Hi all! Everyone’s questions are so engaging, and I feel like there are certainly common threads throughout the texts we’ve read that we’re all pulling together. I feel like all my questions are derivative from the last several weeks, but perhaps that means we’re getting somewhere?
In your questions, several of you brought up the ways in which Lawrence addresses ‘modernity’ and ‘continuity.’ In particular, how they align or diverge from the ways in which other authors we’ve read this term have addressed them. I’d like to bring another concept into the mix and talk about how Lawrence addresses ‘adaptation’ and how it relates to understandings of modernity and continuity. In the conclusion she writes, “It is important to conceptualize these experiences of forced adaptation not as countless individual aberrations from Algonquinness but as part of federally unrecognized Algonquin experience (281).” How might adaption relate to the claims Lawrence makes about continuity and modernity? What are the ways that individual agency and pure necessity relate to this discussion (particularly in how Deloria and Hill address adaptation)?
Another thought I’m having as I read this text is what factors and structures influence who can and can’t possess (lay claim to?) a history, and what are the ongoing political and social implications of this. Lawrence writes, “The reality is that how a person is identified determined which histories he or she can access and make claims on” (281). Firstly, what does it mean to ‘make a claim on’ history? Secondly, how does Lawrence’s discussion of how statusless Algonquin First Nations were denied the right and ability to make this claim compared to their federally recognized neighbors relate to larger discussions about the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been viewed as not having history or as only existing in the confines of pre-history.