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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosopher Shannon Sullivan presents an intriguing synthesis of some areas of scholarship that many have previously seen as incompatible, namely, pragmatism, phenomenology, critical race theory, and feminism. Most notably, Sullivan puts continental concerns into interaction with pragmatic basics including John Dewey's understanding of bodies as transactional. Sullivan's work seems to be most valuable for awakening some feminists, especially poststructuralists and standpoint theorists, to the advantages of using pragmatism as a framework for understanding truth, reality, social growth, and experience.

For Sullivan, as for Dewey, transaction designates “the dynamic, co-constitutive relationship of organisms and their environments” whereby each element both forms and is formed by the other (Sullivan 1). The mutual transformation entailed in this relationship erases sharp distinctions between the organism and the world, hence calling into question the role of skins. Given the leading role of skins in her title, I was disappointed that she only references skins during her exploration of transaction, rather than overtly confronting some of feminism’s skin-related questions. Also frustratingly, the racialized term ‘skins’ is never troubled, perhaps to the particular dismay of Native Americans still haunted by this word and its chromatically-enhanced cousin.

Central to the idea of transaction is an understanding of bodies as patterned activities that take on varying meanings in different contexts. As an activity, Sullivan proposes that ‘body’ is better understood as ‘bodying,’ which is never divorced from mind, thereby dispelling mind/body dualism and related problems of substance metaphysics. This noteworthy suggestion provides a new direction of focus, namely on the actual doings of bodies, considering real-life somatic experiences, and the ways in which they can be improved. The habits that compose and style ‘bodying’ are the organization and meaning of one’s bodily impulses, which are formed through one’s transaction with the world. Rather than mere repetition or the donning of masquerade, habits are complex ways of mentally and physically behaving which “effortlessly” constitute one’s identity (Sullivan 93). While for most people ‘habit’ can connote a stagnant trait, Sullivan counter-intuitively describes habits as will and capable of change. Lacking in Sullivan’s account of habits, their formation and their capacity for change, is input from anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, who are trained to identify and analyze the ways in which people style themselves, and, perhaps more importantly for a pragmatic account, the outcomes of their habits.

Sullivan puts her understanding of bodies as transactional to work, using it in the context of the poststructuralist/phenomenological debate over the possibility of pre- or non-discursive bodies. Most vital to unpacking Sullivan’s contribution is her proposal to understand discourse in terms of transaction. The debate over the existence of pre- or non-discursive bodies, is then more productively dissolved into attending to the influence of discourse on bodies in the here and now. In this regard, Sullivan supports Judith Butler’s call to stop dwelling on questions about the nondiscursivity of bodies, but pushes Butler to go farther in considering the particular ways in which bodies are currently constituted by discourse through looking at lived experience.

Sullivan uses habit in conjunction with Butler’s ‘performativity’ to rescue Butler from some of her critics. For Sullivan, habit is the stylized ordering of impulses that predispose an organism to act in certain ways, while for Butler, performativity is a repetition, the activity which styles and constitutes a person. For Butler, the constraining, patterned habits of gender can be productive, a possibility that Sullivan attempts to clarify by employing Dewey’s understanding of habit and transaction. Sullivan’s commentary on Butler is unique in that instead of talking about what is there, she talks about what is not, supplementing Butler’s performativity with habit in order to make it more robust.

The final chapter uses transaction and Deweyan pragmatism to improve Sandra Harding’s feminist standpoint theory. Sullivan rightly contends that Harding problematically adheres to a foundational account of truth as mirroring, despite her efforts to open it up to a plurality of perspectives, particularly – and starting from – those of the oppressed. Nonetheless, Sullivan supports the pluralist aspects of Harding’s theory, but warns that some of the strengths of pluralism are lost when Harding describes “background-revealing” elements of her standpoint theory. Sullivan also zeroes in on faults in Harding’s depiction of objectivity as “less partial and distorted,” though fails to discuss sufficiently Harding’s understanding of the view of ruling life as perverse insofar as it “systematically reverses the proper order of things: it substitutes abstract for concrete reality” (Harding 124). Examining this point would buttress and yet complicate her later claim that Harding may be replacing men with women in a hierarchy of privileged insight. Sullivan wants to use transaction so that knowledge is no longer a passive recording, but a way of ordering experience so that change can be effected. In this way, Sullivan links knowledge to satisfaction, and thereby epistemology to good living.

In her concluding remarks, Sullivan turns to critical race theory. She suggests understanding race and other identity categories in terms of transaction, rather than as “additive analysis” (Spelman 114). Throughout our transactions with the environment, Sullivan says that distinctiveness, and therefore race, is preserved because transaction works across a plane of connection and continuity. For Sullivan, because whiteness is a way of bodying, it will linger even though one strives to be antiracist. Beyond its simple fact of lingering, Sullivan issues a contestable claim that preserving whiteness can be worthwhile because it maintains a history that can be used consciously to improve race relations.

Much in the same way that she argues for a plurality of perspectives informing one another in her version of standpoint theory, Sullivan demonstrates a bringing together of a diverse, and at times seemingly contradictory, array of perspectives, shifting amongst them to fashion a view of the world and of good living that is itself flexible, fallible, and future-oriented.

Short Talks, by Anne Carson, is an intricately woven series of poetic meditations on small gestures, glimpses of stories, and subtly varying tones. The book begins, “Early one morning words were missing,” (9) and Carson evokes the central theme of the poems, absence. In drawing the reader into the world of her poetic understanding, Carson shows immediately that more is less. Eschewing the Freudian analysis in “Short Talk On The Mona Lisa,” she chooses water as a symbolic question to animate that elusive painting relationship:

The female body is a powerful signifier in these poems. "Short Talk On Sleep Stones" invokes the last thirty years of Camille Claudel's life in an asylum (Claudel was a French sculptor who worked from 1884 to 1898 as an assistant to Auguste Rodin). After noting that Claudel broke all the sculpting stone given to her, Carson writes, "Night was when her hands grew, huger and huger until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees" (34). Claudel's hands are both her own and not her own; they have grown through disuse and misuse. But the absence is discovered in the formless broken stones that are buried with these hands, now so gargantuan. In "Short Talk On Rectification," Carson depicts the infamous relationship between Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer: "Kafka liked to have his watch an hour and a half fast. Felice kept setting it right. Nonetheless for five years they almost married" (32). Ultimately, it is the body of Felice that overwhelms Kafka, for as Carson writes, "When advised not to speak by the doctors in the sanatorium, he left glass sentences all over the floor. Felice, says one of them, had too much nakedness left in her" (32). This signals the second most pervasive theme of these poems, the devastating plenitude of too much.

The voice of the poet is often the key to understanding the emotional contours and textures of a poetic project. In one of the most revealing poems of this collection, entitled "Short Talk On Defloration," Carson takes us deep into her voice:

Published in 1992, Short Talks was Anne Carson's first book of poems, and it signalled to the world of poetry that a new and distinct voice had arrived on the scene. Carson's later poetry, in books like Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours (for which she won the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize), The Beauty of the Husband, and If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, return again and again to the themes of absence and overwhelming plenitude that are nascent here. The last poem is entitled "Short Talk On Who You Are."