Dancing, Marching, Theorizing, and Writing: Native Women’s Histories and Futures
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For generations, Native women have been working to restore their personal and tribal autonomy in the aftermath of colonial violence and dispossession on a variety of fronts. Some of this work has been visible only to family and tribal members, while some of this work has been on a global stage.1 Most recently in the United States, the fruits of their labors can be seen in the wave of Indigenous women elected in the 2018 and 2020 elections as local, state, and federal representatives making critical strides toward Indigenous self-determination.2 In the arena of federal Indian law and policy, Native women’s activism and scholarship have forced a reckoning with boarding school abuses, Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, limits to tribal jurisdiction, and settler claims to unceded lands.3 Indigenous women are also working within the academy to more deeply articulate, historicize, and theorize their pasts, presents, and futures in a variety of disciplines.4 American historians have not always shown themselves receptive to such methodological and narrative interventions.5 Nonetheless, the field of Native women’s history has reached a zenith, and it is this reviewer’s hope that the same is true for Native women’s futures and the rest of us in it.
Two recent books embody the maturing field of Native women’s history with distinct yet overlapping studies of Indigenous women’s efforts to retain and revitalize ceremonial and medicinal knowledge and practices centered on menstruation, birthing, and reproductive health more broadly. While each stands alone with particular aims and methods, they should be read in [End Page 159] tandem as narratives that inform one another. Cutcha Risling Baldy’s We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies is a powerful and personal analysis of the Hupa Flower Dance that is focused on the relationship between decolonization and Native feminisms in articulating a sovereign future for tribal nations. Baldy’s approach is emblematic of the theoretical and interdisciplinary approach that is Native & Indigenous Studies. Brianna Theobald’s Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century is a study of Crow women’s strategies in retaining and insisting on reproductive health and justice within and beyond their reservations that similarly draws on Native feminisms and decolonization, but is far less explicitly theoretical and reflects the influence of historians of gender and empire as much as Native and Indigenous Studies. Each appears in a series devoted to Native Studies: University of Washington Press’s Indigenous Confluences, and University of North Carolina Press’s Critical Indigeneities. To fully appreciate the praxis and the practice of Indigenous women’s history, readers should look to Baldy first as an orientation to the field and to the political and spiritual significance of decolonization—not merely a method, but a mindset and a mission—and then look to Theobald for detailed examples of such work throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
We Are Dancing for You begins with Baldy’s personal accounting of the significance of Hupa revitalization that makes this work particularly resonant for undergraduate readers who might relate to Baldy’s story of isolation and abuse while away from home for college. Her story also identifies the emotional and psychic value of decolonization that is sometimes lost in studies centered on law and sovereignty. Baldy makes this connection even clearer throughout her introduction and first chapter, which read as a survey of Native feminist theory and decolonizing methodologies. Here, readers encounter the influence of Native Studies phenoms deployed with tremendous dexterity. As someone who read many of these works incrementally as they...
