IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FORTY YEARS since the publication of Maria Campbell's foundational text Halfbreed (1973) and Howard Adams's Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (1975). Both authors emerged out of Indigenous organizing movements and established themselves as articulate and persuasive Metis writers, activists, and leaders. Campbell and Adams provided pointed and powerful criticisms of the Canadian colonial milieu grounded in their respective local contexts and experiences. Both Adams and Campbell were featured on Indigenous media programs such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) radio show Our Native Land. Adams also gave comments to major daily newspapers; magazines such as New Breed; and films, including the National Film Board's Pow Wow at Duck Lake and The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian View of the Hudson's Bay Company. Campbell went on to write acclaimed children's books and translated Cree and Michif stories in Stories of the Road Allowance People. Through their activism, Campbell and Adams came to be leaders in both formal and protest Metis political movements, and they built bridges between the leaders of the previous generation and a new generation of Metis agitators.

While many in Indigenous communities will reflect fondly on both Adams's and Campbell's teaching, mentorship, and public appearances, both scholars ought to also be noted for their important intellectual contributions to understanding Canadian colonialism and theorizing Indigenous resistance. (1) With the exciting rise in Metis scholarship and Metis studies, the time seems right for a reexamination of both Adams and Campbell as intellectual leaders on whose shoulders many of us stand tall. Importantly, though, these works have a great deal to say to each other. In what follows, I start by arguing that, more than forty years after its publication, Prison of Grass continues to have the power to inform scholars and activists engaged in the study and practice of Indigenous resurgence as well as the politics of decolonization, colonialism, and settler colonialism in Canada. This appreciative critique, however, cannot abide one of the central theoretical failings of Adams's intellectual work: his colossal failure to adequately and appropriately address Indigenous gender and Indigenous gendered power dynamics within his explication of colonial domination. While Adams's thought remains useful as a tool both for Indigenous activists in community and for scholars in the academy, there is a pressing need to name, deconstruct, and then imagine and act otherwise about the sexism and the reproduction of heterosexual norms of life he advances in his thought. To this end, I contrast Adams's interventions with Maria Campbell's insightful engagement with gendered colonial violence in Halfbreed to demonstrate that Campbell understood better than Adams the gendered and intersecting dimensions of colonial power and violence.

The article is divided into three sections. In the first, I argue that Adams's interventions continue to have explanatory strength for Indigenous political struggles and the study of those conflicts. In the second, I work through Adams's failure on gender and contrast his theory with Campbell's. The problem created by this critical engagement is that it leaves much of the fight against gendered colonial oppression unfinished. Phrased differently, the critique that I offer here does not in itself substantially contribute to the building of a decolonizing politics attuned to gendered colonial violence. To address this, the final section takes up James Tully's call to act otherwise in struggles of freedom along with the calls of literary scholars to imagine otherwise. The aim of the final section is to offer a framework that at once harnesses a rich appreciation of Indigenous gender diversity toward creating an anticolonial politic, thereby combining the strengths of both Campbell and Adams. The way I approach this is to engage in an alternative imagining of the formulation of Adams's orientation to both gendered colonial domination and the way gender is animated in a decolonizing political movement.

Howard Adams as Foundational in Decolonizing Politics in Canada

This section outlines the continued relevance of Adams's contributions to Indigenous thought, politics, and the Indigenous experience in Canada. Adams's thought provides important elucidation of the underpinnings of colonial domination for Indigenous peoples in general and Metis people in particular. He accomplishes this by examining the psychological, economic, and political modes of domination that manifest in the historical and daily lived experiences of Indigenous peoples. Adams's work forces non-Indigenous readers to confront the icy reality that the just society they thought they lived in is in fact fundamentally unjust. For Indigenous readers, the work provides theory and empirics that relate to their daily lives. The result is that Adams's work makes several foundational interventions that have the power to continue informing Indigenous activists and scholars today. I will discuss two particularly key elements of Adams's contribution to the politics of decolonization: his elaboration of the deceitful and racism-laced mechanisms of Indigenous land dispossession in Canada, and his views on the colonizer's divide-and-rule tactics.

Adams's thought is deeply indebted to the anticolonial scholarship of Frantz Fanon and other anticolonial thinkers from the African context. (2) Like Fanon, Adams situates within the program of colonizing Indigenous people in Canada a need to dehumanize Indigenous peoples using profoundly racist logics. He identifies the roots of this dynamic in fur-trade history. (3) Adams argues that "white supremacy, which had been propagated since the beginning of European imperialism, became woven into Canadian institutions such as the church, the schools, and the courts, and it has remained the working ideology of these institutions" (8). Adams articulates a critique of the process of building Canada that laid down a fundamental and shocking (to non-Natives) element of Canadian life: deep-seated institutionalized racism. Adams traces the way this racism seeps into the minds of Indigenous people in Canada such that they come to see themselves as their colonizers do: lazy, dishonest, freeloading, and morally bankrupt (4-11). Adams sums up the power of racist oppression in writing published after his death. In his reflection on the range of tools at an oppressor's discretion, he argues, "As my absolute commander, oppressor and mythmaker, you screwed into my head all these distortions and myths. You used all your weapons so effectively: your schools, church, court, and parliament." (4)

For Adams, racist attitudes and history came to be institutionalized through Canadian efforts to subjugate Indigenous peoples. Following the destruction of the buffalo herds, Adams argues, the Riel Resistance in 1870 and the subsequent treaty process served as methods of Indigenous land theft in service of Canadian expansionist policy (64-67). Adams points to the steep power imbalance between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state in the nineteenth-century treaty processes and problematizes the ability for parties to come to equitable terms. He argues that conducting negotiations under conditions where Indigenous peoples faced starvation meant the resulting treaties were a means to first "legitim[ize] the imprisonment of native people under white agents backed by police and soldiers" (68) while making "Indian subjugation look honourable, or at least legal" (71). This effort to justify unjust relationships was key to the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands in order to facilitate the transfer of land from Indigenous hands into non-Indigenous hands. Adams argues that the core of this process was predicated on the belief that non-Native peoples are racially superior to Indigenous peoples (73).

This remains a helpful contribution to the political history of Canadian Indigenous relations. By first using the language of Fanon to expose the racist underpinnings of Canadian society on which Metis and other Indigenous peoples' subjugation is justified and then illustrating the manifestation of those perverse relationships of power in the lives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, Adams makes both theoretical and empirical interventions into the structure and operation of Canadian projects of Indigenous land dispossession. These interventions are key to students and scholars tracing the intellectual development of Indigenous resistance and Indigenous critiques of the settler state. Where scholars like Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, and others have made recent and important contributions to understanding settler colonialism as a structure rather than an event, Adams was engaged in elucidating a similar process in the early 1970s. (5) Like those who came after him, Adams saw this process as possessing a number of intersecting relations of power, with access to Native land as the centerpiece of building the settler state.

This is not to say that Adams should be seen as a proto-settler colonial theorist. Rather, my point in drawing out this element of Adams's work is to say that Adams's intellectual contribution to understanding Indigenous oppression continues to have the power to inform scholars in their engagement with the ongoing processes of Indigenous land dispossession with kernel contributions that predate settler colonial theory. Further, Adams's deployment of himself and his people's history within these examinations of power provides a helpful glimpse into some of the implications of the devastation he is illustrating north of the 49th parallel. Finally, his blunt rejection of the fairness and honesty within Indigenous-Canadian institutional relations also is a helpful educational tool in light of the desire by some to sanitize and then glorify Canadian expansion to the Northern Plains as a grand and just Indigenous/Canadian achievement. (6)

Adams also makes important contributions to understanding the Indigenous political landscape that remain instructive today. Adams might be most well known for his biting critique of "middleclass native elites [who] provide support for ... [imperial] administration" (180). Adams shows deep disdain for collaborator Indigenous leaders. He argues that their purchased acquiescence to the plight of their people contributes to the continuing conditions of oppression and poverty in Indigenous communities. Adams contrasts the wealth possessed by leaders of recognized organizations to the poverty faced by the general Indigenous population to emphasize both the relative unrepresentativeness of Indigenous political organizations and the inflated importance of formal leaders. For example, in the mid-1970s the Metis Society of Saskatchewan, which Adams led in 1969-70, represented approximately 2 percent of the Metis population in Saskatchewan. However, this organization inflated its relative importance and representativeness to protect the "personal position, prestige, and salary" (183) of its leaders. Despite the lack of broad representation, "governments continue to give recognition to these national and provincial organizations as the official voice of native people and grant them millions of dollars annually" (183).

Adams's examination of these entities provides a still salient critique of Indigenous political organizing in Canada. Indeed, key components of this orientation can be seen in the #IdleNoMore movement's effort to recenter power away from formal, recognized Indigenous political organizations in favor of broad Indigenous decolonizing political movements. (7) There remains an ongoing tension within Indigenous political organizing about whether formal, government-recognized political organizations are the best vehicles for agitating against the settler colonial state. Adams warns us that Native leaders who backstop their power and authority with government-subsidized salaries and recognition rather than their communities serve to forestall change within Indigenous nations. Not only do these organizations impart false hope to Indigenous youth clamoring for change, they alter none of the conditions of Indigenous oppression and thereby perpetuate the lived experiences of "poverty and wretchedness" (183) in Native communities.

As Indigenous youth continue to organize and challenge the conditions of their political surroundings, Adams's insights provide a still-useful lens to think through how one ought to engage colonial oppression. Adams's analysis cuts through the din of self-congratulating Indigenous political organizations to provide reasons for looking at government money and recognition suspiciously. This is healthy and, from the perspective of cultivating critically informed decolonizing action, desirable.

While Adams is probably best known for these critiques, he also set out a key explication of the challenges to broad Indigenous political unity:

Adams argues that successfully dividing the Indigenous political landscape hinges on Indigenous peoples not seeing themselves as part of a larger colonized and oppressed Indigenous world. In the 1960s and 1970s a great deal of emphasis was placed on the need for government-funded community development projects to "help" Native communities. Adams views these projects as government strategies to focus Indigenous people inward on their specific and contained problems, thus serving the program of dividing Indigenous peoples. This inward focus discourages Indigenous people from critically examining their plight within the framework of colonial oppression more broadly. Today, one would likely add to this intervention that it also shifts one's gaze away from the related struggles of one's kin in other Indigenous nations. (9)

The upshot of this tactic of divide and rule is that it can be used to fracture both intra-Indigenous politics and inter-Indigenous relations. When Adams returned to Saskatchewan in 1966 after completing his PhD at UC Berkeley, he arrived at a time when the Metis political movement was divided over the acceptance of government funding. In the south, the Metis Society of Saskatchewan wanted to accept government money, while the Metis Association of Saskatchewan in the north believed it should be shunned. This battle was said to have been highly divisive. (10) The two organizations ultimately united under the Metis Society of Saskatchewan's banner, with Adams as the president. However, the point here is that with only the threat of providing funding, the government of Saskatchewan fractured the Metis political landscape. Further, the government recognition provided to one group as the official voice of the Metis is used to first divide and then shut out other voices within Metis politics. (11)

Nor is this issue unique to Saskatchewan Metis politics. In the 1990s Sheila Jones Morrison argued that the question of acquisition, control, and disbursement of government funds had divided the Manitoba Metis Federation (MMF). (12) Indeed, more recently, similar fights have raged in British Columbia over which Metis organization is fit to receive government funding, the Metis Nation British Columbia or the BC Metis Federation. While Adams helps frame these conflicts over securing and disbursing government funds, it is his analysis of the emergence of a divided Metis political world perpetuating Metis oppression that continues to prove instructive to activists and scholars. Just as this dynamic is not localized to one place in the Metis homeland, neither is it exclusive to relationships between the Metis. Fights over government money also divide Metis and First Nations peoples. The point in all of this is to say that his interventions in 1975 continue to have purchasing power beyond the time they were written, because Metis and other Indigenous peoples continue to live with the violence of racism, land dispossession, and numerous forms of intersecting oppression. Adams's work contains contemporary lessons for those who walk in and between the worlds of scholarship and decolonizing community-based activism.

The Thought of Maria Campbell Teaches Howard a Thing or Two, or Three, or Four

Adams's articulation of colonial power operates in an overtly gendered and hypersexualized fashion. In Prison of Grass Adams gleans an insight into the way colonial power constructs Native people generally and Metis women in particular during an interaction with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in the fall of 1939 (37). Two Mounties drove him to work and ridiculed Metis women as depraved sexual beings. Adams recounts the conversation he had with the Mounties: "Although they seemed to have an obsessive interest in native girls, they were also implying that Metis girls were little more than sluts and too dirty for Mounties. One asked, 'Is it true that they'll go to bed with anyone for a beer?'" (37-38). When Adams threatens to jump out of the moving squad car to escape his tormentors, the Mounties turn up their racist and sexist hate speech:

As one can see from his reaction to this exchange, Adams is deeply hurt by the Mounties' portrayal of Metis women. (13)

This experience shows both the gendered element of racist colonial violence and the way Adams constructs his own gendered colonized mentality. Colonial power for Adams contains a troubling desire for whiteness that manifests in a decidedly gendered way. This desire is more than wanting to become white; it is a sexualized desire for white women alongside the spurning of Indigenous women. Adams enunciates this dynamic when reflecting on his relationship with his family. He states that his family was an unwelcome reminder that he was Indigenous. He states that his family "reminded me of everything that was halfbreed. I was making it in the white world and I didn't want anything holding me down. All my friends were white, especially girlfriends" (165, emphasis added). Adams expands on this "especially girlfriends" comment and explains that the desire for white women as lovers is itself an expression of colonial domination.

He describes his overwhelming attraction to white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed women and situates this within a desire for a white ideal that is imposed by white power structures. In the operationalization of this ideal, Native women symbolize oppression, and white women symbolize freedom (165). Adams said the white ideal made him hate those things and people that reminded him of being Native. He explains, "Every time I put my arms around a native girl I embraced oppression, but when I hugged a white girl I hugged freedom. I always felt that I would never have complete freedom until I had a white woman in my arms, in my life, in my bed. Until that day came my entire existence would be plagued with oppression" (165). Adams explicitly grounds this view in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. (14) Adams believed he and Cleaver experienced colonial oppression in the same way, where domination makes one's people or, more precisely, Native women ugly and undesirable.

This expression does not only stem from Adams's personal experience. Rather, this is an experience that Adams argues is generalizable to other Indigenous people and peoples. When bringing Bonnie, his non-Indigenous girlfriend, to his home community, he says he was convinced that all the other Native men in his life envied him for being with a white woman and that they all secretly lusted after white women (166). Putting a sharper point on it, Adams argues that "every native person has this inclination towards acceptance and success in white society.... The supposed splendour of whiteness and the ugliness of things non-white deeply affects native people in their thought and behaviour" (167). Adams sees sexual desire of whiteness as a feature of colonial power experienced by all Native people.

This formulation becomes even more problematic as Adams constructs Native male desire for Native women as a type of gauge for one's engagement with one's colonial mind-set. While at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Adams became steeped in the resistance movements of colonized people around the world. This education formed an important catalyst in his Indigenous anticolonial political awakening. Adams explicitly connects this consciousness to his new appreciation for the beauty of Metis women. He argues that "now that I was able to understand the white-deal and the profound effect it had on my life, I was able to appreciate the beauty of my own people. The women were indeed beautiful and they possessed a warmth and charm of which I had previously been unaware" (177). The operationalization of this framework means that the more Adams sees Metis women as beautiful (and this includes as objects to be desired), the more he engages with resisting the white ideal and, relatedly, successfully resists colonialism.

Adams and his thought are gripped by a particular brand of sexual power. On its face it is exclusively heterosexual; it is sexualized power that constructs women without political agency and with no heed paid to Native women as political leaders. Indeed, his relationship with Maria Campbell, an accomplished Metis political leader in her own right as well as an accomplished writer and committed activist, shows that Adams struggled to see her as a political figure in the resistance movement in which they both were engaged. Campbell talked about her interactions with Adams at the end of Hartmut Lutz's edited book Howard Adams: Our Thoughts and Prayers Are with You. She describes how Adams never saw her as a political person with ideas and unique contributions of her own. (15)

Campbell first met Adams in 1969 when they both were presenting to a Canadian Senate committee on poverty. Campbell was there on behalf of the Metis Association of Alberta. This context is key to their future interactions. Even though they were meeting in an explicitly political context, Adams did not see Campbell as a political person. Campbell recalls that some years later Adams invited her to speak to his class about the early Metis political movement, a topic Campbell is eminently qualified to speak about. However, in his introduction, Adams was exclusively focused on how pretty he thought she was. He recounted to the class that when he met Campbell in Ottawa years earlier she looked like she had just stepped out of a Vogue magazine. (16)

In contrast to Adams, Campbell works through the way colonial power manifests in a form that is horrendously violent and predatory in the lives of Metis women. In Halfbreed Campbell describes how gendered colonial violence is perpetrated through domestic violence, racism, and the exploitative sex trade. She captures the complex way this violence intersects along racial, gendered, and psychological lines in the lived experiences of Indigenous women. This includes a close engagement with what Adams would later call the desire for the white ideal among the colonized. This important intersection came together in vivid terms during a trip home to Spring River. Campbell had developed relationships of support and friendship while writing to inmates in Prince Albert Penitentiary's Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program. (17) As an act of appreciation for the relationships she cultivated, Campbell was invited to attend a conference at the prison, where she met the people she had been corresponding with. (18) This conference also afforded Campbell the chance to go home to Spring River and visit her family. While at home, she made a trip to the town of St. Michel, where she ran into her friend Smokey and was confronted by his relationship with two white, blonde-haired women. After visiting friends around the town with Smokey, Campbell "drove him home, his blonde-haired wives came out and listened to him say to me, 'Hell, some of us are lucky enough to have a white woman to make us feel we've moved up.' I went home, feeling like I wanted to get Daddy's rifle and go out and shoot everything" (149).

Campbell is identifying the way falling in love with a white partner comes to be thought of, in some people's lives, as a marker of social mobility and status. Key to this is the rage the experience elicits in Campbell. When placed in the context of her life in Vancouver and her treatment at the hands of Canadian hospitals, social services, and law enforcement, all of which are shown to be violently opposed to the presence and experiences of Indigenous women, this rage against the white ideal seems to also be rage against the marginalization of her people. This is not to say that the ideal does not have heterosexualized power attached to it--it does. Rather, the point is that Campbell illuminates the sexualized elements of the white ideal without needing to then sexualize the path to decolonization in the way Adams does.

Indeed, she is also able to explain the complex set of relationships this gendered violence creates between Indigenous women, on the one hand, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous men, on the other. Campbell takes her reader through the happy and difficult times in her life. She confronts violence at the hands of Indigenous men, non-Indigenous men, and drug addiction. After a lengthy period away from Native community, Campbell is helped by a community of Indigenous people in Arizona on her way back from being abandoned in Mexico. These Indigenous people shared what they had with her, and when Campbell left, the family's grandmother gave her a few dollars to make sure Campbell could get something to eat on the long journey home (123). This was the first occasion since leaving her community that Campbell had been back among Indigenous people, and she remarked that the expectation to help others within Native community made it hard for her to survive. Deepening and nuancing this thought, Campbell remarks: "There was a part of me that hated them as well. The drunken Indian men I saw would fill me with a blinding hatred; I blamed them for what had happened to me, to the little girl who had died from an overdose of drugs, and for all the girls who were on the city streets. If they had only fought back, instead of giving up, these things would never have happened. It's hard to explain how I felt. I hated our men, and yet I loved them" (123). This comment, which seems to have roots in her father's disillusionment with the early Metis political movement after its co-optation by government salaries and recognition (67), shows a great deal more complexity about the way domination impacts Indigenous women. Where Adams saw Native female attractiveness as a marker on the road to male decolonization, Campbell is pointing out that Indigenous men are both sources of violence and wells of potential strength for Indigenous resistance. Campbell's work is helpfully alerting us to how relationships of gender, Indigeneity, and colonial power intersect in complex and nuanced ways for Indigenous women.

In this same vein, during her return visit to St. Michel, Campbell deepens this relational intersection by working through the normalized and cavalier nature of gendered violence for Indigenous women.

Campbell captures the intense impact that gendered violence has on Indigenous women and children and its capacity to undermine Metis political resistance movements by creating states of despair in the lives of individuals. One of the consequences of Campbell's recounting is that the powerlessness and despair not only keep women in conditions of atrocious violence but also undermine the ability of the community to organize and fight back against these conditions of oppression. In this formulation, despair is disempowering. This proves to be a far more nuanced and robust explication of gendered colonial violence in the lives and politics of Indigenous women than anything outlined by Howard Adams.

These interventions lay bare one of the key distinctions between Adams's formulation of colonial domination and Campbell's. They are engaging women's experiences very differently. Adams's lustful heterosexual desire, along with its predatory overtones, renders the importance of women down to being objects of male desire along the road to decolonization. His framing not only normalizes a fundamentally unsafe state of predation and disempowerment on/of Indigenous women but also makes that state virtuous and decolonial. The position in which Adams places women also undermines the important role that women play in the political movements that Campbell and others are trying to build. (19) Campbell, on the other hand, forces us to confront the predatory and violent behavior endemic in St. Michel--she insists that it be seen. Recall that Campbell points out that "little children looked on as though it was all quite normal." This statement makes us see the normalization of violence while also alerting us to its potential to become intergenerational.

In all this, Campbell provides an account of colonial power that brings together complex struggles of resistance, psychology, gender, and indigeneity. Her work locates a bona fide rage against colonial oppression alongside the complex relationship that Indigenous women navigate in and between the spaces they move through. This complexity is marked by its resistance to colonial structures of power and by a powerful and insightful critique of Indigenous men. Taken together, she helpfully illuminates the contours of gendered colonial violence in the lives of Indigenous women. As Indigenous activists and scholars continue to grapple with violence against Indigenous women, these insights remain a grounded, salient, and helpful framework to understand and resist gendered colonial violence.

While Adams may very well experience colonialism in the terms he describes, the generalization of his consciousness to the whole of Metis people is neither compelling nor redeemable. For these reasons I do not believe Adams's views on the gendered dynamics of colonial power are recoverable. However, the critique offered above creates a new problem. In light of the contrast between Adams's and Campbell's works and the rejection of Adams's lustful decolonial consciousness, it is not clear where this leaves the potential for building decolonizing political action informed by the types of gendered considerations discussed by Campbell. In essence, the criticisms provided above do not in themselves contribute to a world where gender is treated seriously in decolonizing struggles.

The criticisms offered in this article need to be paired with imagining how one might envision alternative, gender-robust modes of decolonizing politics. Doing so requires drawing on both Campbell's and Adams's method of grounding their intellectual interventions in community experiences and activism. The strength of this approach lies in providing guidance to subsequent generations of Indigenous people about the ways in which research can be combined with action to inform the choices Indigenous nations are confronting in our complex world. My suggestion for achieving this is to practice imagining a political engagement in which the strengths of both authors are combined toward cultivating a politics attuned to the types of intersections that Campbell works through. To inform such an act of political imagining, I argue that combining two key decolonizing theoretical approaches, acting otherwise and imagining otherwise, takes the action-deficient state of the above critique and turns it into a springboard from which to launch decolonizing political action grounded in a deeply robust relationship with Indigenous gender diversity. In the next section, I work through the intellectual traditions of acting otherwise and imagining otherwise with the aim of using these interventions to inform a reimagining of a fictional Howard Adams confronted by the political complexity of gender politics in his fight against the Trudeau/Chretien 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy.

Imagine Howard Adams Walks into a Diner

James Tully offers a framework to think through Indigenous struggles for freedom and of freedom in the first volume of Public Philosophy in a New Key. For Tully, struggles for freedom encompass Indigenous peoples as peoples "resisting the colonial systems as a whole, in each country and throughout the world of 250 million Indigenous people." Despite these struggles being marked by vast power imbalances, Indigenous peoples have engaged in a range of activities for their freedom. From "appeals to the Privy Council in the seventeenth century to statements to the Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the United Nations today, their 'word warriors' have never ceased to declaim the illegitimate system of internal colonisation and proclaim their sovereignty and freedom." Indigenous peoples also engage in struggles of freedom in which "they struggle within the structure of domination vis-a-vis techniques of government, by exercising their freedom of thought and action with the aim of modifying the system in the short term and transforming it from within in the long term." As is characteristic of Tully's thought, each of these interventions operates through a series of logically constructed supporting lists and sublists of characteristics and properties. Common to these struggles is disrupting what Tully calls the dual colonial hinge propositions, which assert that, first, settler rule over Indigenous peoples' territories is argued to be effective and legitimate, and second, even if it is not legitimate, it is argued that there is no viable alternative. Tully offers that these two propositions can be efficaciously disrupted by Indigenous struggles and practices of freedom: "The multiplicity of immanent activities of challenging specific strategies and techniques by the available democratic means of dissent, insubordination and acting otherwise may not only modify this or that rule of the system, which is important in itself, but may also in the long run bring about the self-overcoming of the system itself." Tully believes that such activities done in struggles of freedom come to intersect with struggles for freedom. (20)

Within this framework, Tully's notion of "acting otherwise" possesses some important characteristics that might helpfully reimagine Adams in light of Campbell's work. By acting otherwise, Indigenous activists deploy their own contextually grounded norms of political engagement as a means to change the domination they experience. While I am open to this potential of acting otherwise, it seems that to productively intersect with struggles for freedom, there also needs to be work done to disrupt the cemented power relationships between Indigenous peoples and colonizers and between Indigenous peoples and nations. Tully's second hinge proposition is important because it circumscribes and truncates the universe of decolonizing possibilities. As such, imagining and dreaming about different modes and norms of relationality are key prior conditions to one acting otherwise and unhinging the proposition.

Several literary scholars have offered the potential to "imagine otherwise" as a robust theoretical intervention and scholarly engagement. Kandice Chuh argues in her critique of Asian American literatures that "to imagine otherwise is not simply a matter of seeing a common object from different perspectives. Rather, it is about undoing the very notion of common objectivity itself and about recognizing the ethicopolitical implications of multiple epistemologies--theories about knowledge formation and the status of objects of knowledge--that underwrite alternative perspectives." (21) Thus, for Chuh, imagining otherwise is also about interrogating what appear to be cemented power relations. Joseph Bauerkemper also pulls at this intellectual thread when he reflects on the theory-building work of Robert Warrior and writes, "The task of theory, then, is to illuminate the worlds in which we live, to enable us to imagine otherwise, and to encourage us to work toward the realization of alternatives." (22)

To this end, what I offer next is a preliminary, imagined otherwise experience for Howard Adams. Though Adams captures important elements of the lived colonial struggle for Metis people, one can learn a good deal more by imagining him, within his context, fully alive to the colonial gender relations that Campbell captures in her work. This turns my above action-deficient critique into a reimagining that is explicitly oriented toward unhinging colonial propositions at the intersection of struggles for and of freedom.

Howard walked into his favorite diner in Prince Albert. The place was exactly as he had seen it last, packed full of Metis talking both emphatically and intensely, with conversations interspersed with uproarious outbursts. All the usual suspects were there: his cousins Keith and Henry, his ex-lover Mert, her new beau, and a rash of other relations, friends, and enemies. But he wasn't here to see any of them.

"Howard! How the hell are ya!" bellowed Keith through his brother. "We didn't know you were in town. We'd a picked you up!"

"I'm in drumming up support to fight this goddamned Canadian White Paper," replied Howard. He hated uttering the name of that genocidal abomination in this place. "We gotta shut this thing down before it shuts us down. Is Billy here?"

No sooner had the words fallen out of his mouth than a voice cut through the din. It was a voice that sounded as though it had endured years of twice-daily gargling with rusty nails. "Well if it isn't the King of the Breeds, returned from the Tyndall Palace."

Out from behind the small order pick-up window, there she stood. Howard had seen her a hundred times, but every time there seemed to be something different about her that made the experience feel new. Her purple metallic hair sheened to pink as the angle of the light changed. Howard could never fully comprehend her bright blue eyeshadow and lashes that curved up from her eyelids to touch her bushy eyebrows. All of this set upon a weathered face with rail lines radiating out from the ends of her eyes and running truncated down her cheeks. It didn't matter how many times it happened, when Billy's gaze fell on Howard he could feel himself being pierced by those yellow eyes and hypnotized by the methodical movement of her Adam's apple.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Aren't you gonna give your aunty a hug!?" Billy stepped out from behind the kitchen order window, snapping something unintelligible to one of the servers, and made a beeline for Howard. She wrapped him in a hug so crushing that Howard's spine cracked from ass to head.

When they released each other from their embrace Howard was able to fill his lungs enough to get out "got time to talk?"

"Anything for you, Howard" Billy barked.

Billy marched back into the kitchen with her grease-stained apron brushing gently against her knees. She flipped two burgers and reappeared in the kitchen order pick-up window.

"Order up! Buffalo burger, extra fried onions on a bannock bun!" A young man dutifully scurried over, grabbed the plate, and rushed away, never making eye contact with Billy. Howard recognized this particular dance. Making eye contact with Billy might invite some biting remark about the young server's haircut or what he got caught doing after work last week.

Billy said something to one of the other cooks and reappeared outside the kitchen. Motioning for Howard to follow, Billy marched into a small, dimly lit office at the back of the diner with a No Smoking sign (complete with the Prince Albert bylaw number) hanging on the wall behind the table. A low-hanging ceiling light gave off a soft glow that didn't seem to reach any of the four corners of the wood-paneled room. They both sat down, and Billy lit up a smoke. She took a long drag, and just before she exhaled Billy used the ember end of her smoke to point to the No Smoking sign. "We don't take orders from them," she said and let out a long stream of exhaust.

And here they talked. Howard explained his struggle to fight the 1969 White Paper and expressed his concern that the government's policy was dividing Native peoples. Billy wasn't surprised at all by this. It had happened before. Billy told Howard about the deep need colonizers have to ensure Natives are divided. "Divided politically, but also divided internally. Keep the Indians fighting each other, and they won't be able to fight the real enemy." Billy then told Howard a story about missionaries laying the groundwork for Metis men to distrust anything but the most simple understandings of the world. "Hate women who speak, hate people who aren't men or women, hate following women. Our men had to learn that bullshit."

Here Billy trailed off and stared intensely into the dark corner of the room. Her yellow eyes glimmered as they made sense and shape out of the darkness. After a moment Billy snapped her head back toward Howard. "They've been doing it for a long time, and it starts with making us hate ourselves and then each other."

Howard and Billy continued to talk for some time. Their intense talk of strategy was interrupted by a knock on the door. The knock wasn't so much a sound as it was a request for permission to be a sound. Billy got up and whipped open the door.

"Umm, we're getting swamped out here, Billy," said the young server. Billy growled, and the young man bolted back to his duties. Howard could see Billy's perma-scowl slowly morph into a crooked, playful smirk. "We'll pick this up another time, Howard."

Howard's visit was over, and he knew it. He could either order something or get the hell out. Howard thanked Billy, and she cracked his spine back to the shape it was in when Howard had walked into the diner. Billy had given him a great deal to think about, and as he crossed over the threshold a cool, dry wind ran its fingers through his inkwell-black hair. He figured he had a plan.

In this account, the Indigenous world in which Adams engages with Billy offers a gendered complexity to Indigenous politics that is far more likely to lead to different understandings about the pathways and forms of Metis struggles for and of freedom. Though Adams, a heterosexual man, remains the central figure in this political agitation, there is a complex and normalized gender diversity to his world that is absent from Adams's 1975 work. This imagined Adams is uncomplicatedly engaged in complex kin relationships with a queer Indigenous relation. There is also added complexity to Billy's gender identity in the community as a Rougarou. Billy, a queer Rougarou, is situated simultaneously in and alongside Metis community as restoried by Campbell in Stories of the Road Allowance People. (23) This character is also imbued with an explicitly political orientation to her surroundings. The result is that this experience expands the gendered horizons of imagined Adams while providing an imagined alternative to retheorize Indigenous resistance to settler colonial oppression.

At the same time, the story continues to orient Adams to the devastation wreaked by divide-and-rule tactics among Indigenous peoples and suggests that he has the strength, called for by Campbell, to address it. However, here the method of division is neither self-evident nor divorced from gendered power dynamics. Billy explains that the divisions are built on a foundation of focused oppression of nonconforming gender identities. Further, in the diner, gender diversity is imagined and normalized into the present, thereby challenging the lived gender oppression of the real world. The result is that the diner and Adams's movement through it form a complex space that is deeply relational with an orientation to gender grounded in Metis community. All the while, this moment leads to a strategy that could inform acting otherwise in a struggle of or for freedom.

Returning for a moment to the contrast between Adams's and Campbell's lived experiences and the reimagined experience outlined here, one of the advantages of this act of imagining otherwise is that it empowers those who may have been disempowered in the authors' actual lives while also challenging the seemingly cemented power relationships they both moved through. For example, an aunty or relative may actually have sat Adams down to have a very similar conversation with him during his life. But gendered colonial power dynamics may have disempowered both that voice and that experience's relative importance in Adams's life. That is what Campbell is pointing out to us. These voices of Indigenous women and other relatives are not respected. Imagining otherwise takes Campbell's interventions and empowers those relations and those experiences, making them central to decolonizing action. Conversely, the experience of a normalized gender diversity, as imagined here, is difficult to contemplate in the real world in light of the role played by the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Metis communities. These religions contribute to Tully's second hinge proposition by circumscribing the ability of Metis to imagine an alternative to the cemented power relationship between Metis people/communities, churches, and church leaders. However, this imagined alternative also undermines that power dynamic by opening up new ways of relating that are not policed by priests and parishioners.

It is important to note that this is not a utopic exercise. Adams, a heterosexual male, continues to be the lead character in organized agitation confronting a manifestation of settler-colonial domination. This suggests that the work of challenging the power of gendered colonial oppression is not yet done. Importantly, though, fictional Adams answers Campbell's call to think more about the strength that Indigenous men possess in our political struggles. As Indigenous peoples grapple with the devastation wreaked by a multipronged system of oppression, this moment of imagination brings into existence an alternative emphasis of being grounded by close relationships with one's people, and that moment comes to inform creative political action.

Nor is this type of exercise without complications. It is not my desire in this reimagining to fully divorce Adams from his contradictions. One must be equally careful not to sanitize Adams's failings to try and save him from himself. The risk in imagining otherwise is that Adams's sexualized and gendered construction of colonial power comes to be made innocent of its transgressions. However, by placing Adams and Campbell in conversation with each other concerning the context and operation of gendered violence, my hope is to unlock and then animate the strengths of both authors' interventions. Doing so leads to very different understandings of the gendered dimensions of decolonizing politics and provides pathways for gender-informed and gender-diverse decolonizing action.

Conclusion

Howard Adams and Maria Campbell made important and lasting contributions to understanding being Metis in Canada. This work has argued that, forty years after publication, Halfbreed and Prison of Grass continue to have the power to inform scholars and activists engaged in the study and practice of Indigenous resurgence as well as the politics of decolonization in Canada. Adams's blunt yet robust enunciation of racism in Canada and its incorporation into the institutional mechanisms of land dispossession still proves useful for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers. Campbell provides thoughtful insight into the way colonial power intersects with gender and Indigeneity. Both works were published at a time marked by constitutional nation building in Canada and a desire to reinforce a supposedly just and unified Canadian community. Together, both works paint a portrait of Canada that captures the racist colonial project's effects on Metis families' psychologies, economies, and politics. Their works challenge Canada's image as a bright light of tolerance and inclusiveness in the global community advanced by successive Canadian governments. Their discussions of the white ideal, Indigenous political organizing and mobilization, and the risks of divide-and-rule tactics continue to have purchasing power more than forty years after publication.

Adams was personally and professionally gripped by the sexual power of colonial domination. His understanding of this power troublingly frames Indigenous women as objects of lustful desire rather than as empowered political people in our communities. My work here endeavors to show that one can find a significantly more robust understanding of the gendered nature of colonial violence in the thought and life of Maria Campbell. Campbell understands that there is a complex interplay between gender, psychology, and Indigeneity within colonial power that makes Indigenous men sources of violence and, potentially, wells of strength. Adams's work never appreciates this complexity. Instead, his thought contributes to an environment that is, at its core, unsafe and predatory toward Indigenous women, while Campbell's work demands that we see the violence and predation and address it head-on.

Indigenous peoples have suffered greatly at the hands of the intersecting power dynamics of settler colonial oppression. If we are to engage in struggles of and for freedom and imagine, act, think, and love otherwise, it might be helpful to spend some moments with our relations reimagining other ways of acting, thinking, and loving. As Avery Gordon reminds us, power manifests in obvious and invisible ways in our lives, and "it causes dreams to live and dreams to die." But "we need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there." (24) Adams and Campbell help us know more about where we live. The work of imagining and acting otherwise puts us on the road to living elsewhere.

DANIEL VOTH (Metis) is an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in the International Indigenous Studies program at the University of Calgary in the territory of Treaty #7 Peoples. In addition to this work in NAIS, his research has been published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science and the University of Toronto Law Journal.

Notes

I would like to thank all my blind peer reviewers for their thoughtful and generous engagements with this work. I feel deeply grateful to be part of an intellectual community that responds so generously when reading the work of others.

(1.) I use the terms "Indigenous" and "Native" interchangeably throughout this work.

(2.) Adams drew heavily from Fanon's work yet cited him sparingly. Many who have worked with Adams will recall his deep engagement with African anticolonial thought. Indeed, added to this should be Adams's close engagement with Marx. There is a pressing need for further research on these intellectual connections. However, teasing out these connections is beyond this article's scope and requires a different methodology than is being deployed here.

(3.) Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (Toronto: New Press, 1975), 8. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

(4.) Howard Adams, Howard Adams: Otapawy! The Life of a Metis Leader in His Own Words and in Those of His Contemporaries, ed. Hartmut Lutz, Murray Hamilton, and Donna Heimbecker (Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2005), 36.

(5.) Please see Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409; Lorenzo Veracini, "Introducing Settler Colonial Studies," Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 1-12; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 182; Glen S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

(6.) In his October 20, 2014, Killam Lecture at the University of British Columbia, J. R. Miller portrays the numbered treaty process as one rooted in kinship and laudable nation building between Canada and the Indigenous nations of the Northwest. His analysis inexplicably divorces Canada's betrayal and deceit, which has now been well cataloged in many of the numbered treaties. See Daniel Morley Johnson's PhD dissertation, "'This Is Our Land!': Indigenous Rhetoric and Resistance on the Northern Plains" (University of Alberta, 2014). For an insightful and critical view of contemporary treaty making in British Columbia, see Andrew Woolford, Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty Making in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005).

(7.) Interestingly, one of the things that made #IdleNoMore so successful among Indigenous peoples and their settler allies was its emphasis on nonviolent action. Adams, on the other hand, remarked in an interview with Hartmut Lutz that growing up with a life of violence made him never one to shy away from violent agitation. For the full interview, see "Interview with Howard Adams," in Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors, ed. Hartmut Lutz (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1991), 135-54.

(8.) See also Howard Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, 2nd ed. (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1989), 154.

(9.) For excellent examinations of these dynamics and robust theoretical approaches for their study, see Robert Alexander Innes, Elder Brother and the Law of the People: Contemporary Kinship and Cowessess First Nation (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013); Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

(10.) James M. Pitsula, "The Thatcher Government in Saskatchewan and the Revival of Metis Nationalism, 1964-1971," Great Plains Quarterly 17 (Summer/ Fall 1997).

(11.) Ibid., 222.

(12.) Sheila Jones Morrison, Rotten to the Core: The Politics of the Manitoba Metis Federation (Victoria: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 1995).

(13.) One year after this interaction Adams joined the Mounties and served with them for four years (1940-44).

(14.) Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

(15.) Adams, Howard Adams: Otapawy!, 242.

(16.) Ibid., 237, 242.

(17.) Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973), 146. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

(18.) It was at the conference that Maria received a gift of a painting depicting "a burnt-out forest, all black, bleak and dismal. In the centre was a burntout tree stump, and at the roots were little green shoots sprouting up" (ibid., 146-47).

(19.) Sam McKegney, "Remembering the Sacredness of Men: A Conversation with Kim Anderson," in Masculindians: Conversations about Indigenous Manhood (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014), 89-90; Kim Anderson and Maria Campbell, Life Stages and Native Women (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011).

(20.) James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 265, 276, 287, emphasis added.

(21.) Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), x.

(22.) Joseph Bauerkemper, "Indigenous Trans/Nationalism and the Ethics of Theory in Native Literary Studies," in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, ed. James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 405.

(23.) Maria Campbell, Stories of the Road Allowance People (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1995), 28-49; see also Warren Cariou, "Dances with Rigoureau," in Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations, ed. Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 157.

(24.) Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3, 5.