Spring 2020 Colloquium Series

When US scientist Marie-Claire King first located and named the BRCA cancer risk-conferring genes, she named them after French neuroscientist and anthropologist Paul Broca, whom she credited with first exploring a hereditary link to breast and ovarian cancer in the 19^th century. By diffractively reading King’s BRCA research through Broca’s work on cancer, race, and evolution, I explore the operations of race, gender, and property in the formation of biological models of inheritance between science and anthropology in the nineteenth century. I then read against the grain of this biological property model through Haitian anthropologist and politician Anténor Firmin’s critiques of Broca’s racialist research, which he presented to Broca’s school of anthropology in his 1885 treatise The Equality of the Human Races. Through a close reading of Firmin’s work alongside other Black Atlantic thought in the late nineteenth century, I go on to ask: what possibilities emerge when we decanonize anthropological and scientific approaches to inheritance and relation by turning toward Firmin and away from Broca?

BIO

Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She co-authored (with Sherine Hamdy) Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution, the debut graphic novel of the ethnoGRAPHIC series at University of Toronto Press which won the 2018 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. She is currently working on a monograph Biological Property: Race, Gender, Genetics which mines the epistemological relations between genetic understandings of relation and property-based models of inheritance. Nye’s work has been published in such journals as Social Text, TDR: The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Global Public Health, and ADA: A journal of gender, new media, and technology. In 2017, she edited a special issue of Performance Matters on “Science and Performance.” 

An adaawak told or an adaawak read has great influence on its listeners and readers. It is the nature of the knowledge found within Nisga'a adaawak that make it so universal. An adaawak deconstructed can work in different ways. One single adaawak can be used in a geological study, an architectural history, or an ethnography. An adaawak in bits and pieces are only part of the story. In the telling of adaawak, according to tradition, it is related in person, in full, and in an oral speech. It is it's own complete history. In working with adaawak in a doctoral dissertation, should this also be in person, in full, and in an oral speech?

BIO

Allison Nyce is Nisga'a and Tsimshian from the Gisbutwada, Blackfish/Killer Whale Clan, of Waap Niist'axok', House of Niist'axok', and was raised in Gitwinksihlkw learning from her parents and father's family Wilps Hleek, House of Hleek, in particular from her grandmother, Sigidimnak', Matriarch, Emma Nyce. She is a SFU Independent Interdisciplinary PhD student working within the fields of Indigenous History, Oral History and Anthropology. She is a funding officer and sessional instructor for Wilp Wilxo'oskwhl Nisga'a Institute, the Nisga'a University-College, located in the Nisga'a Village of Gitwinksihlkw.

This paper utilizes Indigenous knowledges (Coulthard 2015; LaRocque 2010, McGregor, Restoule and Johnston 2018; Simpson 2014), Indigenous feminist perspectives (Acoose 2016; Green 2018; Kuokkanen 2011; Maracle 1997; Suzack et al 2011), and decolonizing methodology (Kovach 2012; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; S.Wilson 2008) to place Indigenous experience at the centre of analysis while examining how colonial powers (social, institutional, state) shapes the everyday experiences of Indigenous women engaged in precarious and seasonal salmon cannery work in pacific northwest of British Columbia.

Utilizing Indigenous theories and concepts while highlighting the standpoint of Indigenous women workers is particularly necessary given the invisibility of Indigenous women workers’ experience in sociology and in Canadian society generally. The paper argues that to grasp the nature of Indigenous women's paid work, which is exceedingly precarious, it is necessary to consider how it is shaped by a host of social, political, environmental and economic forces. In particular, the paper illustrates how provincial and Canadian neoliberal policies that developed during the past few decades have amplified the vulnerable status of Indigenous women cannery workers. Neoliberal discourses of active (worthy) and passive (unworthy) citizens embedded in social policies powerfully shape qualification requirements to programs such as Employment Insurance and Income Assistance while individualizing social inequalities experienced by Indigenous women. This study provides valuable insights into the everyday experiences of Indigenous women salmon cannery workers. Beginning from the standpoint of Indigenous women allows an examination of how colonial processes move through organizational and institutional practices at various levels and filters through lived experience.

BIO

Dr. Jeannie Morgan is from the Nisga’a Nation.  She received her M.A. in Sociology from Simon Fraser University and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Sociology from the University of British Columbia. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of First Nations Studies, cross-appointed with the Labour Studies Program.

Morgan is an Indigenous feminist activist who brings over 20 years of experience working with Indigenous communities in the public and private sector. She has worked with various organizations including the First Nations Health Authority, Vancouver Status of Women, and the Vancouver School Board, merging her academic expertise with community-based initiatives.  

With educational training in Sociology and Gender Studies, her work specializes in the examination of federal and provincial policies and how these shape the intersecting experiences of health and wellbeing and work for Indigenous communities. Morgan has received several awards for her research and has twice been named a Pacific Century Scholar from UBC.