This is Why Academia Can’t Have Nice (Feminist) Things: A Review of Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined, by Cherry Smiley 

Review by WLRN Staff Writer, aurora linnea

Prior to getting her PhD, Cherry Smiley worked at British Columbia’s Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, where she provided front-line support to raped, abused, and assaulted women. A radical feminist artist/activist from the Nlaka’pamux and Diné nations, a member of the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, and a co-founder of Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry, Smiley has organized to end male violence in all its manifold murderous forms. Her richly experience-informed perspective as an anti-violence worker, a long-time feminist advocate and activist, and an Indigenous woman ought, by rights, to have been an asset as she wound through the labyrinth of academia’s hallowed halls, it ought to have commanded respect. Smiley should have had cache: “feminism” and “decolonization” are trending buzzwords, after all. And yet, alas, no. 

When Smiley decided to pursue a PhD in Communication Studies at Montreal’s Concordia University in 2015, she expected pushback. She had no illusions of academia as some wondrous bastion of gynocentric thinking, where her views would be welcomed and affirmed. Indeed, Smiley saw the academe for the hoary old manstitution that it is. Yet she was optimistic. She believed she could carve a place for herself; she believed there would be “wiggle room.” Hadn’t her Women’s Studies foremothers built that room of their own, and couldn’t she hold it open, perhaps even widen it, making space for something slightly more lively than mere wiggling? And so Smiley set out on her PhD journey well aware of the challenges ahead, but hopeful nonetheless. 

Coming out on the other side, however, after years spent trudging or else hounded through those hallowed halls, Smiley’s hopes were frayed, her final analysis unequivocal: “academia is terrible and I hate it.” And, as she concedes, “the general consensus is that the feeling is mutual.” The wiggle room she had anticipated had deteriorated into a torture chamber and so Smiley took her degree and ran, swearing off the ivory tower for good. Fortunately for us, Smiley’s agonizing relationship with the manstitution of scholarly excellence was by no means a fruitless affair, for from that ill-starred entanglement came the dissertation that she has adapted into her new book, Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined, released in April by Spinifex Press. 

Smiley started her PhD at around the same time that the status of Indigenous women in Canada was finally coming into international focus, as the Canadian government launched its 2016 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. By concentrating her research on an Indigenous feminist analysis of “the prostitution of Indigenous women in Canada as a process of ongoing colonization,” Smiley was determined to call attention to commercial sexploitation as a form of male violence integral to any national conversation about the harms done to Indigenous women by colonization. This is because, in Canada as in every other colonized region on earth, it is Indigenous women whose lives and bodies become the primary fodder for the sexual abuse industries. Smiley cites a 2005 study which found that 52% of women engaged in street prostitution in Vancouver were Indigenous, despite the fact that Indigenous peoples comprise a scant 2% of the city’s total population. 

From the colonial dynamics evident in prostitution, Smiley argues, one can begin to make sense of colonization itself as a “hierarchical sex-based process,” one with its humble origins in good old male domination and female subordination. Before white men went off on their various conquest missions around the globe, they’d long ago colonized the women at home; and wherever these men’s ships landed, they inaugurated the colonizing process by asserting their dominance over the women of each territory they claimed. Smiley explains how the colonizers sought to destabilize Indigenous nations by instigating the sexist devaluation of women within these communities, which worked to disrupt “matriarchal cultural transmission,” fragment family groups, and generally lay waste to Indigenous cultures. The devaluation of women was, and remains, central to the colonial project. Destroying cultures dissolves societies, and dissolving societies make for easy prey for plunderers. 

In her chapters on the history of colonization and male violence against women in Canada, Smiley writes that, before European men’s invasion, women in Canada’s Indigenous nations participated in society alongside men as peers and equals; many Indigenous cultures were matrilineal, with women in leadership positions and respected as life-givers; though these societies were not feminist utopias, there was nothing comparable to the “systemic mass violations of safety and dignity” that have been inflicted upon Indigenous women since colonization began. Everywhere European men landed, the lives of women took a rapid turn for the worse. As a key instrument white men wielded against Indigenous women, Smiley presents the example of the “squaw” vs. “Indian princess” dichotomy, a version of Man’s classic virgin/whore duality tweaked for the colonial context. This sexist taxonomy has been integral to patriarchal colonization. By assigning a savage hypersexuality to Indigenous women, the “squaw” label effectively normalized and legitimized violence against them, whether by white or Indigenous men. It proved especially efficient at ensnaring Indigenous women in prostitution, which the colonizers wasted no time instituting in their New World. Having dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands and lifeways, plunging them into ruinous poverty, the colonizers encouraged Indigenous women to trade their bodies and men to pimp their female relations in exchange for basic subsistence. The result: early forts and milling bases became the original hubs of Canada’s sex industry, with Indigenous women up for sale as the nation’s first sexual commodity. 

As male supremacy was written into law and women’s social exclusion became increasingly embedded in the nascent colonial culture, the violence against Indigenous women increased, their exploitation by men both white and Indigenous intensified—and so we race through history to the current, post-colonial, atrocious status quo for Indigenous women in Canada. 

Reasonably enough, Smiley turned to Indigenous feminism to form the basis of her analysis of this status quo. It was therefore an unpleasant surprise to discover that much of the material she was reading was not fit for purpose. In fact, an awful lot of Indigenous feminism revealed itself as not so feminist at all, particularly if it had been awarded academia’s big shiny gold star of approval. Indigenous feminism is not feminist, Smiley writes, when it distances itself from the feminist movement, from feminist history and feminist theory, from feminist literature and activism. Such is the case in texts that define their “Indigenous feminism” solely in contradistinction to “white feminism,” which, as Smiley notes, though it may be universally reviled, is rarely well-defined, seeming to exist primarily as a righteous gloss for the blanket dismissal of women’s liberation. 

Furthermore, Indigenous feminism is not feminist when it prioritizes and privileges men, because feminism is about women, and men are not women (even when they say they are). Indigenous feminists make this mistake when they minimize violence against women within Indigenous communities, or when they presume that “decolonization” can be achieved through a glorious return to Indigenous cultural traditions. That some of these great traditions may in fact be male supremacist goes overlooked. As Smiley observes, Indigenous feminism has been marked by a paralyzing reluctance to hold Indigenous men and the manmade cultures that have ossified since colonization accountable for their patriarchal tendencies, for fear that doing so will reinforce the racist stereotypes used against Indigenous males. Indigenous women are met with constant reminders of the injustices endured by Indigenous men, reminders containing a not-so-subtle subtext: “the reputation of Indigenous men is more important than your bodily autonomy, safety, and well-being.” Guilt-tripping women to deter them from challenging men’s violence is not feminist. 

Indigenous feminism is also not feminist when it adopts postmodernism and queer theory, as it is apt to do once it falls into academia’s clutches. Given that both of these are manmade thought systems, they offer little to those looking to liberate women, and when incorporated into “feminism,” they routinely lead “feminists” to embrace things that benefit men. Like prostitution, for example, which queer theory has revamped into empowering, rebellious “sex work.” Smiley’s chapter on sex work theory, its fallacies and consequences, in Canada is essential reading. Or then there’s transgenderism, a male colonization of womanhood that elaborate postmodern philosophical zig-zaggery has sculpted into the great destroyer of patriarchal “norms.” In both cases, men’s desires, feelings, and entitlements drift as if inexorably back to the fore, while women are turned loose to empower themselves in ways that won’t upset men’s status quo. 

Smiley offers a simple formula for assessing Indigenous feminism: whenever and however Indigenous feminism ranks race, racism, white supremacy, injustices against men, men’s feelings and men’s wishes above sexism, sex-based oppression, male supremacy, women’s lives and women’s needs, it is not actually feminist. 

Realizing the weaknesses of Indigenous feminism in its current state shifted the course of Smiley’s research. A new question arose: “What if we were to centre women in our definitions of colonization and decolonizing feminism?” Only when women are placed at the center can Indigenous feminism become truly feminist. Indigenous feminism, as Smiley redefines it, takes the material realities of women’s lives as its starting point. It draws from the history of women’s ideas and activism as its natural knowledge base. And it is proudly a part of “the historical and contemporary revolutionary work of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” Indigenous feminism, redefined, does not prioritize race over sex, or class over sex, or culture over sex, or sexuality over sex—though it absolutely does acknowledge the racial class, cultural, and sexual hierarchies that divide women, which it knows to be “rooted in male domination.” For Smiley, it is crucial that Indigenous feminism focus on women yet actively cultivate a holistic analysis of the interrelated nature of men’s oppressive systems. If women are to liberate ourselves, our work of ending male dominion must be as all-encompassing as men have constructed their machineries of oppression to be. Smiley attributes her insistence on holism in part to Indigenous worldviews, which emphasize relationships and interconnectedness—a sorely needed counter to the mind-narrowing compartmentalization imposed by the Western, masculinist mentality. 

Though Indigenous feminism, redefined, honors many Indigenous cultural traditions, it repudiates all those that reinforce male dominion. As Smiley writes, “decolonizing feminism celebrates cultural differences but rejects the woman-hating idea of ‘cultural relativism’ and refuses any cultural practice that restricts, limits, or discriminates against women and girls.” Smiley’s Indigenous feminism does not let Indigenous men off the hook for their complicity in the post-colonial subjugation of Indigenous women. 

Because the point of Indigenous feminism, redefined, is not to preserve men’s cultures, nor to protect or absolve men. It is to liberate women: “[d]ecolonizing feminism always prioritizes the collective liberation of Indigenous women and other women and names patriarchy as the central component of women’s oppression.” 

While I’m sorry that Cherry Smiley had to suffer through years of attempting to wiggle in the lame, cramped and ever-shrinking room that academia shut her up in, I’m not at all sorry that she chose to bust herself loose in the end. The academe’s loss is the global grassroots feminist movement’s gain. Reading Not Sacred, Not Squaws, it is achingly obvious why Smiley didn’t quite fit in amongst the ivory-tower crowd: though she takes her subject matter seriously and shows her profound care and concern for women on every page, she is never self-serious, never affected but instead wry, warm-hearted, approachable and accessible, her tone laced with an endearing Riot Grrrl mischievousness; she has no patience for bullshit and never muddles simple (if uncomfortable) truths in the clutter of manufactured “complexity”; she holds herself accountable to women and to feminism, not to careerist ambition. With her intellectual honesty and straight-talking insightfulness, her exuberance and empathy, the fact is that Smiley is just too good for academia. The venerable manstitution does not deserve her. Not Sacred, Not Squaws is a tremendous contribution to the Women’s Liberation Movement, to our understanding of the inextricability of colonization and sexual violence; it is proof that Smiley and her Indigenous feminism belong with us, on the ground and in the fray. We are so very lucky, and so grateful, to have her. 

Thank you to Spinifex for kindly providing a copy of Not Sacred, Not Squaws for this review. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.