Book Review: Claiming Anishinaabe: decolonizing the human spirit

Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit

Reviewed by Deanna Marie Therriault

Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit, is the latest publication by Indigenous academic and activist Lynn Gehl. It offers an informative narrative inviting the reader to join her on her journey toward becoming “fully human.”

For those unfamiliar with Gehl, she spent decades challenging federal government policies that denied her “Indian Status”, because of her unknown paternal grandfather. She was thus denied membership to a First Nation. After decades, she recently won her legal challenge and has been granted “Indian Status,” as per Federal provision in the Indian Act. Knowing something of Lynn’s long struggle to achieve recognition as an “Indian” within the colonial constructs of Federal policy, I was struck by the irony of a quest to now decolonize and assert her Anishinaabe self outside the recognition she spent decades fighting for.

Claiming Anishinaabe is comprised of four parts with essays related to the topic of decolonization. It is at times harshly critical of the euro-centric frameworks that dominate our Indigenous existence and affirms that Indigenous knowledge concepts and ways of being are no less important than colonial concepts. Gehl reiterates the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of being as the key to a fully human existence throughout this literary offering. We know colonization as the process of overt and covert domination that has encompassed every aspect of Indigenous lives. We know it has usurped lands, languages, traditional knowledge, teachings, and ceremony. It has destroyed entire cultures and eliminated races of people. Colonization has redefined who we are and reinforced the power and control dynamic between Anishinabek and the ruling state (Canada) for hundreds of years. Yet in spite of the deeply rooted discriminatory structures of settler colonialism, Indigenous people continue to embrace the concept of decolonization through reassertion and reinvigoration of our traditional knowledge systems as a means toward collective self-determination and through her offerings, Lynn too, is working through her own process of self-determination.

As mentioned, the book progresses through several distinct phases, offering an easily digestible and accessible narrative lead by Gehl as she documents her journey towards Mino-Bimaadiziwin, the Anishinabek conceptual standard of living based on balancing the four prominent elements of the self: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Although the process and concepts have oft been written and discussed, this particular offering is far more personal, far more relatable, feeling at times as though you are reading Gehl’s personal journal entries. For this reason, I think Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit, may be just the kind of read many are looking for.