Reconciling Feminism

Our visit with Margaret Jacobs in Lincoln represents the last interview of the project. Her newly published After One Hundred Winters has been our steady companion this summer over a lot of miles. I have a hard copy of the book in the van and also listen on Audible.  The call to white settlers to learn the Indigenous histories of their homeplaces is one I take to heart with a new urgency because the book’s documentary storytelling shows ordinary people enacting land-back repatriations and practicing right relations today toward a more just world.  Reconciliation is more possible than many of us realize, including myself.  It’s not an abstraction.

I have followed Margaret’s work in comparative settler studies. And “What’s Gender Got to Do with It?” an outspoken feminist call to the field of US West History, helped me imagine a friend when I felt alone in the saddle of this US West/settler Wests ride that takes one so far afield from feminist concerns. Or so it feels. I knew I wanted to talk to Margaret and have her character and thinking in the Living West project. I am thrilled she agrees to be interviewed.  

We’ve crossed paths along the way of scholarly lives, here at Rice University in Houston she gave a lecture. Looking back, we were both panelists during an important “Symposium on the Significance of the Frontier in Transnational History” at the Huntington Library in 2012, where Patrick Wolfe gave a keynote and settler studies moved to the center of how to understand the various settler Wests of which the US West is the case study. We had almost-dinner plans a couple of times at Western Literature Association meetings which Margaret attends occasionally with Tom Lynch, her husband, a colleague who is well known to WLA circles and to me. 

Margaret invites us to a very nice lunch place, the Hub Café. Later she will host us at her home and Tom will make us a great summertime dinner we eat outdoors.  We watch their dogs romp, fireflies come out to charm and the air is warm then humid. A huge storm lets down to wash the streets clean. Since 2020, Margaret has served as Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. What an unexpected treat that José and I get to walk the museum space on the Center’s first floor for the Contemporary Indigeneity exhibition.

The Where of Here

Krista
We are here with the much celebrated, Margaret Jacobs [both laugh]. But it is true. I was preparing for our time together, and you have a lot of projects and awards, and a number of new public projects, and there’s a fair amount to prepare.  I’m very grateful we have this time to talk.  

Let’s begin with “the where of here,” whatever way you want to talk about it.

Margaret
Well, Lincoln, Nebraska. We’re at a place called Pioneers Park, ironic, because so much of my work is about trying to question that category of the pioneer and use the term settler instead and then to also scrutinize what it means to be a settler. So it’s ironic to be here. But that’s what living in Nebraska is like because there is such a fetish, a fetishization of homesteading here and of white settlers. It’s an interesting place to live.

I’ve been here for 18 and a half years, that’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere in my life. I don’t think I ever imagined myself living in this place. But it suits me in a lot of ways. Lincoln itself is an extremely livable city, I feel like people have made a real commitment in the city to build a strong community, it’s a refugee resettlement area, it’s had a strong urban Indian community since the 1950s. And it’s been a surprisingly great space to live and work, especially for the issues that I’m really interested in around Indigenous people, settlers, and immigration too.

Krista
And we were just in the van – we got to drive over in the van together, that was very fun! Margaret’s the only person in the project except Kalenda who’s been in the van.

Margaret
Yeah!

Krista
You got to sit in the seat I usually sit in, check out the view.

We were talking on the way over about you thinking initially of doing an interview in Colorado Springs, since you were raised at least partly in Colorado Springs. You’ve written about Colorado Springs and the infamous Sand Creek Massacre as a way to think through what a reconciliatory or right posture of knowing one’s own place might be for the work you do with Indigenous people. Instead, Lincoln ultimately was the place you chose for our time together.  Can you talk about that choice?

Margaret
Yeah, there’s a bit of a disjunction in my life between where I feel most comfortable or where I would say I have a place identity, versus where I actually live. I grew up in Colorado from the time I was six to eighteen. And that’s always felt like home and it’s the person I was there, this very outdoorsy, tomboyish girl that feels like “the real me.”  That person who has an identity of living in the mountains and being a little bit rugged and being into the wilderness. But I don’t live in that place anymore. And yet, that identity is one that I claim, and feel.

But to be truthful, that identity also includes a settler, a white settler identity and I’m probing that right now. I’m writing a book called Playing Pioneer Woman. It’s a coming of age memoir. It’s about a lot of things. It’s about my mother and about my childhood, and about growing up in an area that had been the homelands of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapaho people, but never meeting a Ute, Cheyenne, or Arapaho person in my life until much later. The Indigenous people had been removed from that area. I know there were many Indigenous people who lived in Colorado Springs, but they weren’t visible to me as a child. And the community I grew up in is called Chipita Park. It’s named for a Ute woman. I lived up Ute Pass. But there were no Utes in the area. And there were very few non-white people. We had one Jewish family, one Chinese American family, one Japanese American family, one African American family, there were a number of Mexican American families, but many of them had Anglo last names. Growing up as a child, I didn’t recognize most Mexican American families as Mexican American.

So it was a very odd place to grow up, it was extremely white. And as I write this new book on Playing Pioneer Woman, I’m thinking about what it means to grow up in a space like that, where I was schooled in what it means to live there, schooled to believe that I was entitled to live in this place, and I was more entitled to live in that space than other people were.  I’m really enjoying working on this book, because, one, it’s fun to think about your childhood and where you gain a sense or how I gained a sense of a strong Rocky Mountain identity. But what comes with that is this settler privilege, this settler sense of entitlement.

Originally, I thought it would be interesting to do an interview there, because it’s a place that is so close to me. Yet, I haven’t lived there since I moved back to Colorado briefly in 1995, I lived there for about a year and a half, and then I moved away again.  I haven’t lived in Colorado for a very long time. My mom used to live there, we’d go back and visit her a lot. But Nebraska is my true home now. It’s taken me a long time to get used to this place. It’s so different from where I grew up.  And as I was saying earlier, there’s a fetishization of pioneers here.

What’s been rewarding to me living here is meeting and befriending Indigenous people in the area. When we first moved here, we moved from southern New Mexico, a very diverse place. I was concerned about moving to another place that was very predominantly white, and I wanted to make sure I met people beyond that demographic. So the first thing I did was to sign up for an Omaha language class that the university used to offer – they no longer do. It was a very interesting class. You can imagine not many people are taking this. There were about eight to ten people in the class. And we all took the class for two years together. And we met every day for the first year, five days a week. And then in the second year, we met for three or four days a week.

But I became close to my classmates, most of whom were non-Native. Our instructor who was adopted into the Omaha tribe would bring Omaha elders to class all the time and I got to know them. And it was a really formative experience to learn or to try to learn this language. I’ve since thought about the politics of non-Native people learning Native languages, but at the time, for me, it was an opportunity to get out of a white bubble. I enjoyed that a lot. And it helped me start to get an appreciation of this area through Indigenous eyes, through the Indigenous peoples who call this place home.

More recently, I co-founded a project called the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation project. We wanted to do that project in a way that wasn’t a bunch of academics, especially non-Native academics, “gathering information.” From the beginning, we’ve had a council of tribal community advisors. We have people from the Santee Sioux tribe, the Omaha, Winnebago, and Ponca tribes, which are the four recognized tribes in Nebraska, plus, the Pawnee, who were removed. One of the members is Pawnee. That’s been a great way to meet Native people in the state. And to take direction from them about what they want the project to do. What matters to them? How do they want information made public or not?

Krista
It’s about stories from people who went to the school, or is it more about family legacies?

Margaret
We’re trying to get all the government documents we can for the school, which are difficult to find.  They’re scattered about. We see it as repatriating records, through a digital platform. What we have right now are government documents, students’ applications, things government administrators wrote about the children which are often demeaning and horrible.  We’re moving into a new phase which is more oral histories with descendants about the meaning of the school to their family members.  We’re trying to supplement the record. 

In 2018, I approached a local journalist named Kevin Abourezk, who’s Rosebud, Lakota about doing a project together that we call Reconciliation Rising. And that’s been so incredibly satisfying and rewarding. We’ve been interviewing people, much like you and José are doing. We’ve been interviewing both Native and non-Natives who are working together in some way to kind of confront the abuses and crimes that happened in the past.  Not to just acknowledge them, but do something about them. We’ve interviewed a lot of people who are involved in returning land to Native people, non-Native people working with Native people and deciding to give back 10 acres or 60 acres or some bit of land.  For example, we’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of Pawnee people. Because one of the stories we did in a podcast and then made a short film about, The Return of the Pawnees, was how this German American man named Roger Welsh returned 60 acres of land to the Pawnee people.

Krista Comer
This story is where you end the After One Hundred Winters book.

Margaret Jacobs
Yeah. In Central Nebraska.

We interviewed Roger Welsh, and then went down to the Pawnee Nation and interviewed dozens of people about the meaning of this land return and the meaning of coming back to Nebraska after they’d been exiled from here in the 1870s. It gave me new eyes to see the beauty and the wonder of this place.  It’s been so layered over with GMO corn and GMO soy beans, and cement and asphalt and parking lots. Big stadium arenas and football stadiums.  Sometimes you can’t see the beauty of this place.

But hanging out with Pawnee people and most recently, a delegation of Otoe-Missouria people who came up to Lincoln and hanging out with them and going out into the prairies, to them, this is home. I remember talking to a young woman named Christina Faw Faw. We were up on a prairie near here, a beautiful spring morning and she said, “Oh, gosh, I just feel so at home.” It was very moving because it helped me to feel more at home here to see the beauty of this land through its original owners and occupants and stewards.  It’s been a slow process but I feel like I’m coming to inhabit, truly inhabit this place in a respectful, reverent manner. I still have the Rocky Mountain identity but I feel more close to this place than I used to.

Krista
What a rich response, so many things we could think about. Since we’re here, in Pioneer Park, I’d love you to talk about Playing Pioneer Woman. I assume the title is a play on “playing Indian.”

Margaret
Yeah. Well, you may know that that’s a book by Phil Deloria.

Krista
Yes.

Margaret
Right. And Phil and I have been friends since we were both in grad school. That’s an amazing book. In part, it is a play on that. There’s so much to that book. But one of the things my book is about is the role that play has in teaching us about our place in the world. I used to go down to the creek behind my house in where I grew up in Colorado and play pioneer woman.

Krista
Oh you would play pioneer woman?

Margaret
Yeah, I’d read Laura Ingalls Wilder, like so many people.

I’d go play down by the creek, and I’d pretend I was this pioneer woman.  As I’ve been writing this book, I realized that my mom was playing pioneer woman too. My father died when I was five. And she had three young children to raise. And-

Krista
She was gonna persevere.

Margaret
She was gonna persevere but she also she never remarried.  She wanted to be very independent. She had a strong sense of what I consider a Western pioneer identity, a sense that she didn’t need anybody else in her life, she could do it all herself.  I started to riff on that. And the book, it looks at everything from the myth I grew up on as a child. We sang this song all the time, “If I had a wagon, I would go to Colorado, go to Colorado, if I had a wagon, I would go to the state where a man can walk a mile high.” I don’t know if you know that song?

Krista
I do. [both laugh]

Margaret
That’s the first chapter, “If I had a wagon.” Then another chapter is called Native. You remember those bumper stickers they used to have in Colorado that say Native?  They have what looks like the license plate of Colorado and it says “Native.”  I used to go around in my mom’s VW bug and we’d see those signs everywhere. I was so mad, so mad that people have those because I was not a Native. And by that I don’t mean Native American, but I, I couldn’t claim being a Native to Colorado.

Krista
You were born elsewhere.

Margaret
Right! And I didn’t like it. I felt like I was excluded. It never occurred to me how grating that would be as a Native person to see those bumper stickers that were meant to say, “Hey, I belong here and…” but totally erased Indigenous peoples’ identity.

Krista
Right, right.  So what would you play?  if I could pursue this train of thought, what would you play down by the river? How would you play pioneer woman?

Margaret
I would make a little house and a little grove. I’d stack up some rocks and pretend I was making little stews.

Krista
You would domesticate.

Margaret
Yes. Yes.

Krista
In a nuclear family kind of way?

Margaret
No, I had no… there were no men. There were no people. [laughs] I had a really tough time with my brothers growing up. And given that my mom was single and so was my grandmother, my mother’s mother. There were two women authority figures, no male head of household.

My brothers were tyrannical with me. And often violent. So my little domesticated space-

Krista
Was “herland.”

Margaret
Yeah, it was this female space.

Krista
So you would make stews?

Margaret
I’d make stews, I would harvest wheat from grass stems. Sometimes I would dam up the creek, I loved to play in the water.

Krista
What would happen when you dammed the creek, did you look at the result of it or…?

Margaret
Yeah. I might wade out in it, if it was a hot day, or collect stones. I’ve started to write on this and it is interesting because I didn’t imagine any history of this place at all as I was domesticating it and playing a pioneer woman. I never imagined Indian people there, or any people at all.

Krista
It was wilderness.

Margaret
Yeah, yeah. The book also riffs on the very strong whiteness of this place, of attitudes toward immigrants where I grew up. It has a section I’m going to call Melodrama, which is about Cripple Creek. We used to go there all the time with visitors. I will get into some of the extractive economy in the area, the tourist economy. I’m having fun with that book.

Krista
I wanted to hear you talk about a sense of yourself as a feminist and how that came to be?  Is the solo behavior, being autonomous and outdoorsy, part of it? 

Margaret
My first feminist foray would be that autonomous, very individualistic, very angry, truly, about male privilege, male freedoms that I didn’t share as a child growing up. But that’s not where I remained as a feminist and . . .

Krista
No, of course not. But if we could stay here for a minute, because what I’m finding over a lot of these conversations is how formative that early moment is and how helpful it is not to hold it at bay. Speaking for myself here, too.  If you were willing to say a little bit more about being angry?

Margaret
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I grew up in the 70s. That was an incredible moment, as a child, to grow up, as a girl. I remember the TV show, maybe you saw it? Free to Be… You and Me.

Krista
I never saw it. But I know about it.

Margaret
It was really important to me. I asked my mom to get the book that went along with it, I still have it, it’s a purple book. I love that book. It had songs with it. And it was really important to me as a child. I’ve been looking for another book that I remember as a child called “Girls are People Too,” but I cannot find that book anywhere.

I saw my brothers and they seemed to have so many more freedoms than I did. I felt like my mom let them do things that she wouldn’t let me do. They treated me really poorly. I was angry that she didn’t stop them from doing that.

Krista
Can you share anything about them, without sharing more than you want to share?

Margaret
They’re probably not things that are unusual, other girls experienced it. But for example, my brothers were four and six years older than me. They were really close. We’d go out in the beautiful backyard area by the creek and they’d say, “Oh, you want to want to play hide and seek with us?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I would love to.”  They’d say, “Well you go hide, you go hide,” and I’d go hide, and they’d never come find me [laughs]. They’d do stuff like that.

Or we had a big swing in our area down by the creek, over a marshy area. We called it the bog. We had a picnic table on one side and we would take this big rope swing and stand up on the table and then we’d jump on the swing and go across the bog and come back. So one time one of my brothers says, “Hey, let’s swing together. You jump on my lap.”  So he stood facing the bog, and I stood with my back to it. And he said, ” when I say three, let’s jump together on the swing.” So when he said three, I jumped but he didn’t. He just let the swing go. And I got dragged through this bog, stuff like that.

One brother in particular was violent. He would hit me a lot, and I was so mad that my mom wouldn’t do anything about this. I think feminism was a little refuge for me as a child. That-

Krista
As a child?

Margaret
Yeah.  My mom did not identify as feminist, no women I knew as a child identified as feminist, at least-

Krista
Did you think of that term?

Margaret
No, not at all. I don’t know what term I would have used. Maybe women’s rights or I don’t know…

Krista
But you identified it as a something, a consciousness or a something.

Margaret
Yeah. Finding those two books was really helpful to me to think that it wasn’t an experience that was mine alone, but it was something many women had experienced. I remember even reading Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique when I was in high school.

Krista
Independently?

Margaret
Yeah. Because I was searching for a way to understand this world around me, which seemed to restrict women so much but give so many freedoms to men. I was so angry about it.

Krista
So would that have been a library book? How would you have found that book?

Margaret
Oh, yeah, it was a library book.

Krista
So you were a library book reader?

Margaret
I was really into the library. Maybe that’s part of it. I was a very nerdy girl. I was smart. But being a smart girl was an impediment.  So again, I was searching for some sense of affirmation or something like that.

Krista
So you were both nerdy but a tomboy. Playing Pioneer woman. Very interesting, those two don’t often go together. Can you think of an early story about yourself as a feminist? Before you become the feminist you are today?

Margaret
Well, I was thinking about this, you gave me questions in advance. So to give you a bit of background, I went off to college, where I found a lot of other people, other women, who were like myself.

Krista
In the early 80s?

Margaret
In the early 80s. It was a wonderful moment because there were a lot of young women of color and I got really close to them both as friends and as activists. We published a feminist newspaper together. We took classes on women’s history or women writers of color. What I mean is that, in that early period of the 80s, feminism was very multicultural, very multiracial. That was extremely important to me, a formative part of my life.

Right after college, I got a job with a group called Clergy and Laity Concerned. The group started during the Vietnam War, against it. I had moved up to Eugene, Oregon. I’d gotten a job with them as, of all things, a development director. Here I was, like 22, 23, but I didn’t know the first thing about how to raise money. I wanted a job and I wanted to work for a nonprofit progressive organization. By the time I joined their staff, their primary focus was anti-racism. It wasn’t anti-war. They had done a remarkable job of creating a multiracial coalition. This was not one of those white groups that had a token Black person or token Indigenous person. They truly had done incredible work and had a multiracial staff, multiracial advisory board.

When I started working for CALC, as we called it, Clergy and Laity Concerned, we were taking stands, even though our main focus was on anti-racism.  We were asked constantly to take a stand on this or that, whatever the issues were of the day.

One day, we got a letter from a women’s group in town that had asked us to come out in support of abortion rights. I felt very strongly that we should do that. I believed very strongly that we should have reproductive justice and I assumed our organization would do that, because we were taking progressive stances on everything. Well. [sigh]

I brought it up at a staff meeting, I said, “Has anybody answered this letter? Are we going to join them?” And this silence came over the group. One of my colleagues on the staff, a woman I adored, her name was Guadalupe but we called her Lupe, I was trying to remember her last name. She was Mexican American and a devout Catholic. She was very upset that we would consider taking this position in support of abortion. But I was adamant that we should do something even though you know, I was 23 or 24. Lupe was probably in her late 30s, and Marian, who was the director, probably in her late 40s by then.

Krista
But in the center of reproductive lifecycles.

Margaret
Yeah. A couple other staff people said, “Why don’t we bring it to our board?”  We did, and it became the most divisive thing you can imagine. Lupe quit. Some people on the board felt as strongly as I did that we should be supporting this, other people thought, no we can’t do this, because we’re a coalition of people from many different religions, and many different racial backgrounds. Not everybody agrees on this issue.

I was so torn up about it. It was formative because it pitted my strong commitments and passions against racism against my strong commitments and passion for reproductive justice and feminism. I don’t know if I would react differently now than I did then. I may now be more compromising about it and realize that every part of my life doesn’t have to be a place where I support abortion rights. But I don’t know, maybe I would feel just as strongly.  But it was a really tough time. I hated that Lupe felt she had to leave the organization because we had started discussing abortion and she didn’t feel like it was a safe place anymore. That was an important moment when it made me doubt or think about: was I imposing my views as a white feminist on different women who had different views?  Who were people I loved and adored and respected greatly and admired.

Krista
What ultimately happened?

Margaret
They didn’t take a stand on the issue, Lupe quit. I went back to graduate school and they did not resolve it at all. A lot of other people were pulled out of the organization because of the issue. I think the organization rebuilt itself. Marian kept it going.

Krista
In many ways that was a stymying moment across organizations and for feminism generally. I wonder today if a figure like Lupe would have taken the same position? Knowing what we know all the more clearly about reproductive justice especially for women of color? And what the absence of it costs.

Margaret
Well, it was, an interfaith organization.

Krista
Right, it’s so interesting to think of interfaith organizations able to do coalitions around anti-racism and yet not center what we might think of as a fundamental civil right for women.

This moment is one that stays as a strong memory more so than the earlier one of being at Stanford and doing a newspaper together across differences?

Margaret
Feminism has been or became for me very much about a commitment to the liberation and transformation and emancipation of all oppressed people. It was easy to be a feminist at Stanford with a small group of people who shared values. We were committed anti-racists, and also committed to reproductive justice and spoke out against violence against women.

But after Stanford, I realized that there were tricky things about being a feminist and feminism had been and could be used as a weapon against people of color. That moment, which happened a year or less before I went back to grad school to study women’s history, was influential because I realized that people who have a shared commitment to justice might have these wedges. They might have places where they couldn’t agree on everything. That challenge was interesting to me, it was something that’s harder to do. 

I feel like I’m still doing that hard work of trying to find where people have long standing disagreements or conflicts but want to create spaces where they can dialogue and come together.

Krista
Speaking of wedge issues, I wonder what your thoughts are about the tendency to identify “white feminism” or “white feminist history” with white-reformer-good-deed-policy-doing action, when there are lots of women of color who lead in issues of reproductive justice? 

Margaret
Absolutely, the leadership.

Krista
I don’t know if you want to think aloud with me about that a bit? The way in which “the wedge” attaches to a sense of white feminist cluelessness? Or about the fact that lack of abortion rights might be a problem for women of color?

Margaret
Yeah. Well, things have changed immensely since then. We don’t just use abortion rights or pro- choice language anymore. We talk about reproductive justice, because we realize that involuntary sterilization which happened against Latinx women, Indigenous women, and Black women so much, is a form of restricting women’s reproduction and their rights as much as restricting abortion is.

I come across so many women of color now who are taking primary leadership roles on reproductive justice.

Krista
Yes, the Women’s March organization is very self-consciously forwarding that leadership in all of its major public moments.

Margaret
Yeah. So that’s an old tired cliche, that abortion is a white women’s issue. You know?  But at that earlier moment in my life, it very much seemed to be.  There wasn’t yet that kind of growing consciousness about how reproductive justice is a much broader issue and something that greatly affects women of color and Indigenous women.

Krista
Is there’s anything you’d like to talk about, that we haven’t talked about?

Margaret
I think some of those early experiences in childhood, college, and right after college, had a lot of impact on my scholarship. When I went back to get my PhD in History, I knew I wanted to do women’s history. But I didn’t really quite have a sense of what, though probably American history. My first seminar was with Vicki Ruiz, and she was teaching a class on the New Western history as it was called then. This was 1990, at UC Davis.

One of the books she assigned turned out to be influential for me, Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue.  In that class, I decided to study Western history.

Krista
I mean, New Western Historians made such a case for it, that’s what it was for me anyway, the case they made.

Margaret
I never thought I’d study it, or think of it as a “field.”

Krista
But the New Western history made it a desirable thing.

Margaret
Yeah. Sexy.

Krista
Right. It was sexy in a certain kind of edgy and pissed off way.

Margaret
Yes. And Patty Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest was also important. Both books made me realize that I wanted to study this fraught question of women and race in history. Vicki was just such an amazing mentor, she helped me so much attach my interest to something very specific.

And another really important person from that era who is still is an important person in my life is Annette Reed. She’s a Tolowa woman from Northern California, and she was in my cohort. And I loved being in class with her. She would bring up stuff about American Indian history that I’d never learned. As a history major at Stanford, I never learned a thing about Native Americans. So it was so incredible for me to learn from Annette. I started to realize I was very interested in this history. I used the term white people and Indigenous peoples and their “encounters” at the time. I used that innocuous term.

Only later was I able to find other frameworks like a settler colonial framework to understand the nature of these relationships. 

Krista
When did settler studies come in for you, was it with Patrick Wolfe?

Margaret
It predated Patrick Wolfe; it was through two feminist scholars from Canada and the UK, Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, who edited Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in 1995. They were writing in the early 1990s about settler colonialism and feminism and women and gender. But Patrick Wolfe is who is really known from Australia. I love his work, it’s super important, but he never had a real strong gender or feminist approach.

Krista
And I think settler studies still is not really particularly gender-conscious.

Margaret
Right?  Ironic given that these Canadian scholars were doing this early work from a feminist perspective. But I got really interested in the phenomenon of white women’s interactions with Indigenous people. Then I expanded that to looking comparatively at Australia and Canada and that’s when I discovered the settler colonial framework and how useful it would be to have it in an American context.

Krista
So I have a thought, a question, if you would entertain it with me?

What do you think is good about white women’s relations with one another?  I’ve been thinking for a while about the way that white women understand themselves as being allies to Others, but what about being allies to one another? In the Living West project, one piece of the “feminist rest area” concept is to have white women talk to one another about whiteness.

We were talking before we turned on the tape about having a “rest area” for white women. You talk in One Hundred Winters about the need for white settlers to learn reciprocity and responsibility and that those reckonings bring gifts, they are not by definition forms of humiliation, they’re forms of . . …. relief is the term I would use, like accountability or responsibility is a different form of freedom to build the future without trying to run away from settler legacies, which is not possible. I do think that would be a good conversation among white women, though we’re still at a place where you have to convince white women that they’re white, white feminists.  I wonder, rather than talk about all the difficulties of that kind of conversation, where do you NOT have that experience? Because that would be the place to build.

Margaret
Yeah, that’s a really important point.

Krista
I thought about our project as having principles of reconciliation coming from anyone who wants to contribute them, and it would be helpful to have specifics for white feminists.  There are lots of Indigenous protocols for reconciliation or participation in different national contexts. We need something more so that white women are not apologizing for vague things that don’t give anybody relief from historical profound wrongs. And what people carry from them.

Margaret
Yeah, the scholarship I’ve done, I feel like white women have a lot to be accountable for. Maybe not actions now. But actions in the past that white women took in the name of like, being feminists or maternalists.

It’s interesting that you ask this question because I find it really uncomfortable and in fact I intentionally avoid all-white groups. I feel like if as a white person I am hanging out almost entirely with other white people, something’s wrong.  I bristle. Of course, it used to be it was comfortable to be around other white people, and not so comfortable to make an effort to go into a non-white space or a mixed space.

But I think you’re right how important it is for white women to have these discussions with each other. But not “oh, let’s get together. We have a lot in common.”  No, but “what does this mean to be white?  And what is the proper feminist response to whiteness?”  I think that could be an incredibly rich conversation if it’s done with people who are serious and intentional about wanting to dismantle racism and challenge white supremacy.

Krista
Coming back to the feminist rest area concept, and to conversations about  “care” and “maternal thinking” we were having off-video. You used the term “taking care” of “being careful” with one another. 

Margaret
I remember somebody telling me about “care ethics” was the term maybe, early in the 80s. Nel Noddings’ work on the feminist ethic of care, and other people since then built on her work. There’s been critiques of that strand of work, but I do think part of the work of reconciliation is about deep respect for one another, deep care for one another, and a real commitment to make connections and form relationships. That’s so much what we need in this world right now.

There was an album Testimony I used to listen to all the time in college by Ferron, a Canadian feminist singer, songwriter. I heard that album again recently and became re-acquainted with a song, ‘Our Purpose Here.’ And one line goes, “It’s a woman’s dream, this autonomy where the lines connect, but the points stay free.” I love that because I feel it’s a great expression of a certain kind of feminism. That it’s still about women’s bodily autonomy, integrity, but it’s also about this connection. And how important that is.

It is important white people don’t get defensive and that we’re open to critique. But it’s frustrating to see grandstanding among white people about who can be more anti-racist. That’s where a kind of carefulness comes in. Of taking care or being careful.

Because white people sometimes want to get points or stars, “You’re a good, good white person!”  Instead of being willing to interrogate themselves, and to see that we’re all complicit. Many of us are struggling too and trying and wanting to do something different.

It’s funny. I would very much claim to be a feminist, but I’m also extremely critical of aspects of feminism. And I don’t think I’ve ever used the term “feminist West.”  I can’t wait to see how you think about it and work and use it. Because for me, West has come to mean something more like settler colonialism.

Krista
Oh, yeah.

Margaret
Yeah. So feminist settler colonialism, when you call it that, it, it’s so complicated.

Krista
Yeah I wouldn’t want to call it that. It’s like the term “white feminism” as stand in for mainstream feminism. I use the term white feminist as a descriptive term for myself but I do not stand for a politics of white feminism.  But these teasings are the necessary work.

And I have retained that term “West,” from the very beginning of my scholarly writing, It has put me at odds at times with friends, some of whom even wrote blurbs for my first book, like José David Saldívar. He didn’t work in US West Studies as much as (at the time) he worked in Borderland Studies.  But I have been of the opinion that we shouldn’t sacrifice or concede the term “West” to people who want to make it a triumphalist achievement.

I want to work with “West” as a provocation.

Margaret
I have to think more on that. The West is a space of conquest. The West is a settler colonial site. What does it mean to be a feminist in that site? I’m really truly thinking about these issues with the Playing Pioneer Woman book about being so into things like Laura Ingalls Wilder and trying to act that out in my play and the kind of feminism that was.