Erin Dolmage

Participatory research is now a central approach for shaping relationships between the academy and marginalized communities and people. Somewhat less developed has been the concern for ensuring that participatory processes have research products that are inclusive and accessible as well. Participatory video has emerged as a key tool in putting together process and product in ways that provide avenues for marginalized communities to participate in both forms of self-research and ways of self-representation. In this essay, the authors discuss the development and progress of two participatory video projects underway with Métis communities in British Columbia. The conditioning factors for the degree and distribution of control over self-representation within participatory video are at least as complex as those within participatory research itself, but none the less doors are opening for marginalized communities via new digital technologies.

This article is a commemoration of the late Myra Rutherdale, Associate Professor of History at York University, who presented a version of this essay at a Canadian Studies conference in Jerusalem in the spring of 2013. Her graduate student Erin Dolmage and colleague Carolyn Podruchny extended and completed the essay to honour Myra’s dedication to scholarship and social justice. Erin and Carolyn thank Robert Rutherdale and members of the History of Indigenous Peoples (HIP) Network at York for their helpful feedback.

Water is political. It nourishes us, connects us, and separates us. Water is especially political in Canada: almost nine percent of Canada is covered by fresh water, annually Canada’s rivers discharge seven percent of the world’s renewable water supply, and Canada holds 25 percent of the world’s wetlands.[1] But we forget the power of water sometimes when stories about water become stirred into other stories, especially about Indigenous women’s bodies. The mingling of stories about water and about Indigenous women seems obvious. Indigenous women in Canada have long had special connections to water. In the Haudenosaunee tradition, Sky Woman built the world as we know it out of a primordial sea on the back of a turtle. Four women (three of them Indigenous and the fourth an ally) founded the Idle No More Movement to protect Canada’s waters, as well as Indigenous rights, from Stephen Harper’s government. The mainstream English Canadian media, however, began to conflate the Idle No More movement with Indigenous women’s bodies, focusing on objectification, discrimination, and violence. The desiccated imagery in newspaper reports of scorched Indigenous women’s bodies left us wondering what happened to the water that the Idle No More Movement set out to protect?

What makes an individual Aboriginal is an ongoing political, legislative, and personal issue in Canada. For many of Canada’s Métis, descendants of distinct communities that grew from the families of the First Nations and European traders, Aboriginal heritage was buried by years of racism and denial. Proof of their Aboriginality was found in the research of genealogists such as Edmonton’s Charles Denney. Denney’s archive of the genealogical data of Metis families is shaped by his idea of what constituted ethnic identities and families, the way he applied these ideas in thousands of individual cases, the papers and documentation he chose to save, and how these bits of information came together to form a collection at the Glenbow Archives. Although the work of genealogists has been crucial to defining membership in Métis communities, very few scholars have critically examined the meanings, limitations, and biases of the genealogies themselves. Critically engaging in archival research, as Anne Laura Stoler notes, moves research from simply accessing archives as a source, to approaching archives as a subject.  In other words she urges us to look at archives as more than repository but as body of work worthy of study and a site in which identities were formed and power wielded. Perceptions of archival collections, like genealogies, have changed dramatically in the last twenty years. In exciting work coming out of South Africa, India, Canada and other colonized countries, archival collections are being seen as colonial actors. Archives, according to writers like Stoler and Carolyn Hamilton et al, help to establish and uphold the power  and aid in colonizing narratives.  Here I suggest we give the same treatment to genealogy. To date, historians have understood genealogy to be a method of research and a source of information. I argue that we should also see genealogy as an actor and producer of colonial knowledge. Today I hope to contribute to the debates about Métis community membership, as well as to the methodology of using genealogies in historical research, by examining genealogy as an historical actor with the power to colonize, decolonize, structure, and mediate Métis self identifications and group collectivity.