Masculindians

Sam McKegney's new book tackles Indigenous masculinity.Sam McKegney’s grandmother taught him at an early age that “justice is his responsibility.” While reading some popular texts written by Native authors, such as Eden Robinson’s Blood Sports and Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water, for example,  McKegney wanted to find a theoretical background for representations of masculinity within those texts. Despite patriarchy’s stronghold on Western gender binaries and academic structures, there are actually very few theorists writing about masculinity and even less writing about Indigenous masculinity. McKegney’s research began as a humble project for his own interest, but eventually developed into a much more generative collaboration. Masculindians: Conversations About Indigenous Manhood was eventually published by University of Manitoba Press and is comprised of a series of interviews that deal with masculinity, gender, sexuality, and the “sacredness” of men in Native communities.I attended the launch for Masculindians on Friday, March 7th, 2014 at Another Story Bookshop. McKegney invited two guest speakers to participate in the open discussion, including writer, performing artist, and educator Lee Maracle and celebrated playwright Daniel David Moses, whose Almighty Voice and his Wife is a must-read for Canadian theatre enthusiasts. Moses performed several of his poems, such as “A Barn off the 401” and “The Orchard Song,” which often used rhyme and nature imagery to capture the tranquility and serenity of his childhood home on Six Nations territory. After sharing his poetic memories with us, the conversation took a more critical turn as Sam McKegney read three excerpts of Masculindians and the speakers took turns addressing the pressing issues couched within the pages of the book. McKegney explained that his book aims to generate conversations of value around gender relations; however, he was careful to point out that he was wary of re-asserting (colonial) patriarchal structures when speaking about masculinity. Whereas patriarchal knowledge has asserted a male-female gender binary, Native understandings of gender are more open and complex and include “two-spirited” individuals within their non-polarizing schemas of gender. As I discussed in my earlier post about the Indigenous Women Book Launch and Fundraiser, many Native communities have been put in a precarious position where maintaining traditions and strong familial bonds has been rendered extremely difficult at the hands of colonialism. McKegney mentioned an anecdote at the beginning of the launch where he was discussing Native gender politics with academic Kim Anderson. She found that when faced with feminist arguments many men felt impelled to say, “Well, what about the men?” Anderson’s response was simple: Native families will only be as healthy as their men are. Colonial institutions such as Residential Schools have created a situation where positive Native male role-models have been replaced by assimilatory examples of Western masculinity. Over the past several hundred years the notion of “Native masculinity” has been clouded by urgent struggles such as poverty, violence, assimilation, prejudice, and environmental issues.McKegney read three excerpts from Masculindians, starting with an interview with Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair where McKegney asked him to reflect on what he saw in the book and what themes were especially prevalent. Sinclair offered a very thoughtful analogy for the issue of Native masculinity and discussed the ritual of making fire. In Native communities, building a fire is a sacred act where the man must call on his “Grandfather” and employ perfect timing and skill to invite, welcome, and nurture Grandfather at the right time. If the environment isn’t suitable, if the implements aren’t authentic, the fire will not survive. Sinclair notes that one can never earn a fire through a match and that lighting a match is the “problem” of Indigenous manhood. Maracle and Moses then spoke to “protectorship,” which dictates that one earns the responsibility of taking care of families and communities. It became very clear that Native masculinity was not an entitled or privileged position. The word “earned” kept coming up, and building a fire is one of several ways through which boys earn their right to be called men. Moses reflected that when he went to Winnipeg, a “mainstream” society in contrast to his Six Nations home, he was shocked at how a friend’s mother would stop her ironing to bring them food while they watched the game on TV. Moses couldn’t understand why these able young men were being waited on by a woman with more important things to do. Such male “entitlement” was not a part of Moses’s experiences growing up. Maracle’s children took ten years to build a fire. Maracle wanted them to build it the way her brothers did, with moss, flint, stones, and sometimes a bow. Men’s ability to maintain these traditions, however, becomes more difficult as colonial structures strangle the ease with which inter-generational interactions can occur. Maracle, however, was not pessimistic. She rejected the notion that Colonialism “simplifies” everything into an “us-versus-them” dynamic. To Maracle, colonialism is about economics and land and the fact that they’re after “us.” To Maracle, “us” includes Native people but also women of all ethnicities as they are hit the hardest during an economic recession. That being said, Maracle says she doesn’t need to remember that men are sacred because she never forgot. To ask about the men is to ask: “Who’s writing about them?” and luckily McKegney has finally offered an answer.The notion of complexity also arose in the second excerpt of the book, taken from an interview with Jessica Danforth, founder and Executive Director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network.  Danforth argued that “woman” is the first environment (according to Native knowledge) but that Western colonialism has instituted a system of “underwear policing” where conversations about gender are mostly applied to patriarchal control over women’s sexualities and bodies. Under colonialism, the elimination of midwifery has been a purposeful act. In Inuktituk, “midwifery” means “nation-birthing” and so the colonial powers that have striven to eliminate Native practices of midwifery could be seen as an attempt to stifle the growth of Native nations and communities. Danforth asks why we have separated land and reproductive rights when, for Native people especially, the issues are so closely connected? When we lose one area (gender) lots of problems are created and therefore Native masculinity is very important to talk about because it corresponds to issues of land ownership and identity. Maracle chimed in and said that we want simplicity because our lives are complicated. Colonialsim doesn’t seek to simplify but to “make colonial.”The last excerpt McKegney read was from an interview with Daniel Heath Justice where he discussed the “signals” he’s been receiving from pop culture about male bodies. Striving to answer the question, “What does real intimacy mean?” Justice found that the male body is seen as only capable of violence, harm, and corrupted power. The media represents the male body as a receiver of pleasurable acts and not as a source of pleasure for others (be it sexual pleasure or the pleasure of kindness). Men are slotted as assaultive or extractive and that is a “catastrophic failure of imagination.” It is “crippling to the soul” to think that bodies are just for harm. For Native communities, the “Warrior’s Act” comprises of knowing what needs to be done and doing it boldly and fighting against shame for love. Over the past several decades of media-soaked culture it is clear that “masculinity” has been overdetermined to connote the negative and aggressive. Historically, Native masculinity has been charged with “savagery,” ruthless violence and the notion of the “warrior” has been perverted into the threat of the “other,” a far cry from the realities of Colonial power.The launch for Masculindians was a triumphant example of the ways in which communities can come together to discuss literature and politics while embracing inclusivity and not pedagogy. Audience participation was strongly encouraged and several people had their own interpretations of Native masculinity. While a launch usually aims at authorial celebration, I must applaud McKegney for taking the spotlight off of himself and for demonstrating that these conversations around Native masculinity have only just begun.We as readers, writers, academics, Native and non-Native patrons of the arts have a long way to go before we establish a complex enough discourse with which to approach the complicated issue of gender relations and representations in Native communities. McKegney is smart to take his book outside the University campus and discuss Native masculinity as not only a theoretical issue—in the sense that academics have yet to develop a substantial field of study to treat the subject—but also as a socio-political issue whose effects are being felt in the present day. McKegney's work, as well as that of Maracle and Moses, demonstrates that Native communities are still recuperating from colonialism both through lived experience and through representations in literature and other media. Although many have adopted the “post-colonial” label to discuss our current cultural moment, Masculindians clearly testifies to the perpetual spectre of colonialism that looms over Native culture and disseminates in multitudinous ways. These colonial knowledge structures can be obvious and easy to identify, such as the institution of Residential Schools. Other structures are far more subtle, and dangerous, for they disguise themselves as culture, as media, as the ways in which the West defines normative gender identities and relations.