Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival is exactly what its title claims: narratives by strong Aboriginal women in Canada for future visions of community well-being. The book consists of seventeen entries divided into three parts: Coming Home, Asking Questions, and Rebuilding Our Communities, each section taking a slightly different angle to the theme of Native women playing a crucial role in the recovery of Aboriginal societies across the country, including urban communities.

While the anthology’s contributors come from various backgrounds - ranging from arts, journalism, education, research, community activism and development, music, counseling, and traditional healing - they all share a common goal: to tell their personal stories and hard-lived experiences of struggles and achievements in their communities on a path toward reclaiming themselves and transforming their current circumstances for a better future. Though a few of the writers have an academic background, the book has a very clear grassroots emphasis, aiming to inspire its readers, particularly other Native people, to find new ideas and perspectives to meet the contemporary challenges facing First Nations and Métis people and communities.

One of the most interesting and recurring themes in the anthology is the complicated relationship between Native women, tradition, and sexism. Although all contributors recognize the role of traditional values and teachings in the process of healing and transformation, many women also take a critical look at the ways in which traditions may have become inscribed by patriarchy. For example, many Native women question the common argument that only men are allowed to play the big drum (or powwow drum). As Rosanna Deerchild writes, women are expected to sit or stand behind the men, singing, because, so the explanation goes, “that’s the way it’s always been done.” This has led many women to wonder, however, whether this is a reflection of sexism and learned patriarchy rather than tradition (100, 102; see also Maracle).

Drawing upon Dakota/Ojibwa artist Lita Fontaine’s controversial and challenging art, Deerchild suggests that addressing colonial, racist, and sexist influences in Native societies is almost a taboo for some people. In a similar fashion, Dawn Martin-Hill discusses the way in which some male authorities in Native communities, such as the local police, have “perverted tradition to suit their own needs and to protect their own interests.” As a result of colonialism, Martin-Hill argues, Mohawk cultural beliefs and values have been fragmented which has made the notion of tradition “vulnerable to horizontal oppression – that is, those oppressed people who need to assume a sense of power and control do so by thwarting traditional beliefs” (108).

Strong Women Stories also addresses other topics that have not yet received much critical attention. Bonita Lawrence, for example, explores the relationship between the aging of Native women and resulting changes in sexuality. Demonstrating the openness and willingness of older Native women to talk about sex, Lawrence argues that such honesty reflects the larger healing process of Native peoples after residential schools and other scarring experiences. The open dialogue and teachings about sexuality by older Native women is also urgently needed in contemporary adolescent family planning, as suggested by Kim Anderson who considers the rupture between traditional and contemporary perspectives and practices of Aboriginal family planning and the problems it causes among adolescents in particular. She contests the assumption that it is the Native tradition to have large families and, instead, points to the direction of the strong influence of Christianity and its teachings.

Some of the contributors to Strong Women Stories explicitly identify themselves as advocating what is called either ‘tribal’ or ‘Aboriginal feminism.’ For many others, feminist discourse is an implicit undercurrent informing their analysis. Given recent feminist critical efforts in indigenous contexts, I believe the analyses in this collection could have benefited from dialogue with such work. A reader unfamiliar with such debates will not be offered much guidance in this regard: while one writer explains tribal feminism as a practice of Aboriginal women picking up the drum, another contributor who employs the term Aboriginal feminism merely refers to a standard definition of feminism taken from a reference book by a male author. Perhaps it was a conscious decision on the behalf of the editors to leave ‘theoretical debates’ out from a book intended to address and serve grassroots and community concerns and needs. I believe, however, that such considerations would advance these goals by enriching our understanding of the complex nature of oppression and also by dismantling false and counterproductive dichotomies between theory and practice.

Interestingly, Strong Women Stories is concluded by a young Native man. For some, this gesture of giving the last word of a women-centered and -edited anthology to a man may appear strange if not inappropriate. The editors note that many Native women’s ceremonies are accompanied by a male firekeeper, a metaphorical role of which they wanted to give to the writer of the closing chapter. Personally, I am not bothered by the idea of giving the last word to a man, but I fail to see how the ‘firekeeper’s’ words make a genuine contribution to a collection that is already so strong.

All in all, this anthology should be mandatory reading for anybody seeking a fuller comprehension of the complex issues and often painful histories characterizing not only Native societies but the relations between First Nations and Canada.