Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940-1980

Across four chapters organized both thematically and chronologically, [Mary Jane Logan McCallum] demonstrates how Indigenous women attempted, often successfully, to exploit for their own subjective purposes state-sponsored programs designed to assimilate First Nations peoples into Canada's general body politic, thus theoretically solving lingering problems related to Indigenous poverty and federal expenditures. Chapter 1 focuses on Indian education, Indigenous women's work in federal schools and hospitals, and Native domestic workers in private northern Ontario homes during midcentury. Here the author argues that the state virtually guaranteed that domestic labour would be the only viable career field open to Indigenous women. Chapter 2 discusses the Indian Placement and Relocation Program that the Department of Indian Affairs introduced in 1957 as a means toward integrating Indigenous workers into off-reserve wage-labour systems. Within that, McCallum focuses on Indian women hairdressers, while deconstructing their socio-cultural relationship to the wider realm of beauty culture. Next, Chapter 3 reveals how Native Community Health Representatives (chr) became important liaisons between First Nations communities and the Canadian state. In the process, McCallum reveals how Indigenous women chr's overcame sexism, racism, marginalization, and general condescension in their efforts at expanding Native people's roles in the delivery of health care.