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Native North American Women (Atlantic History)

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  1. Introduction
  2. Prior to the 21st century, I would not have been able to compile a bibliography of this length and depth on Native North American women in the Atlantic world. With a few prominent exceptions, ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians did not consider Native women to be worthy of scholarly attention until rather recently. Reflecting the growth of the fields of women’s history and American Indian history since the 1970s and their intersection with new areas of inquiry into gender, sexuality, sustainability, and (de)colonization since the 1990s, the body of scholarship about Native North American women in the Atlantic world is emergent and vibrant. Scholars have answered some initial questions: dispelling centuries of denigrating stereotypes, we generally agree that women had high status in most Native North American societies, which conceptualized gender roles as complementary, respected individual autonomy, and valued ethics of reciprocity. We continue to disagree, however, about the pace and extent of European colonization’s ultimate impact on Indigenous women. Some suggest the decline in women’s status was precipitous and swift. Increasingly, scholars emphasize the resilience of Native cultures and the ability of people to adapt and sustain traditional values, such as gender egalitarianism, well into the 19th century and sometimes even beyond it. Many historians of Native peoples in the United States and Canada would suggest that the most consistent and methodical assault on women’s status occurred in the assimilation era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period beyond the scope of this article. A few notes on organization: first, while most Oxford Bibliographies on the Atlantic world cover the colonial period through the end of the Civil War, I have included materials through the removal era of the 1830s, an end point that makes more sense when considering this literature. Second, I integrated scholarship about Indigenous women throughout those regions of North America that directly interacted with European and African newcomers through the nexus of the Atlantic. I have organized sources by region and included important works on Native women from the Gulf to the Great Lakes and east to the Atlantic in this article. Third, I consciously decided to include several sources written by Native women that discuss the early-21st-century impact of the historical processes discussed in this literature. As a non-Native woman and historian, I appreciate that the questions we scholars ask about status and survival, loss and change, and persistence and resistance are far more than intellectual exercises for Native people in the early 21st century. Their voices should be a part of any discussion we have.
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  4. General Overviews
  5. In a call to be useful to Indigenous women, published in the form of a literature review in the feminist journal Signs in 1980, folklorist Rayna Green asked, “While most of the studies of Pocahontas and her sisters [referring here to the trope of the Indian princess] focus on the ways in which they [the Native women to whom non-Indian scholars have devoted attention] helped non-Indians defeat their own people, where is the serious study of such women as cultural brokers, working to create, manage, and minimize the negative effects of change on their people. . . ?” (p. 266). Green’s not-so-subtle sarcastic analysis remains useful to familiarize readers with main themes. Begin with Green 1980, followed by Niethammer 1996, an at times uncritical synthesis of the first century of anthropological and ethnographic literature to which Green refers. Niethammer 1996 nonetheless serves well as a primer. Next, read Kugel and Murphy 2007 beginning with the general introduction and that to each section. Kugel and Murphy have collected excerpts from important works, most published in the late 20th century. This anthology thus starts where Green’s review stopped. Most of the scholars included are listed elsewhere in this article. In addition to work by Green on representation, readers can learn about Native women’s role as cultural mediators and symbolic centers of community, the origins of their traditionally high status, their varied roles as leaders, and their interactions with settlers through trade and missionization. Conclude with Scully 2005, a critical article calling attention to continued reliance on the “myth model” of welcoming young Native women whose cooperation legitimizes colonization. Scully suggests that these heterosexual origin stories of the “indigenous woman helpmeet” are unique to the Atlantic world and absent from other settler societies. She theorizes that we perpetuate them and appropriate Native women’s stories to obscure settler violence and fabricate Indigenous consent. Scully’s work thus calls attention to ongoing weaknesses in the literature and challenges scholars to consider the complexities of Indigenous experiences apart from European male migrations and relationships.
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  7. Green, Rayna. “Native American Women.” Signs 6.2 (Winter 1980): 248–267.
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  9. DOI: 10.1086/493795Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  10.  
  11. To provide context for contemporary scholarship, Green (with tongue in cheek) reviews academic and popular writing about Native women produced in the United States and Canada since the 17th century. Concluding that Native women have “neither been neglected nor forgotten,” Green identifies themes and questions important to non-Indians that have dominated the literature (p. 249). She concludes with a call for relevant, respectful research and engagement with Native communities.
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  16. Kugel, Rebecca, and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds. Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
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  20. Leading historians gathered classic texts by important scholars into this collection. They pair readings together in two sections. In the first, they focus on theories exploring identity, perception, gender roles, egalitarianism, and feminism. In the second, they elaborate upon methodology, emphasizing biography, gender studies, and oral history.
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  25. Niethammer, Carolyn. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
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  29. Niethammer, a journalist, drew her research from early anthropological scholarship. Niethammer challenges stereotypes and contextualizes women’s lives into diverse societies that accorded them security and independence. She organized chapters by life stage from birth through elderhood and then by themes including warfare, spirituality, and sexuality. Although not exclusively focused on peoples of the Atlantic world, Niethammer’s summary of dated anthropological literature remains useful.
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  34. Scully, Pamela. “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and the Myth Models of the Atlantic World.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6.3 (Winter 2005).
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  36. DOI: 10.1353/cch.2006.0022Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
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  38. In her comparative analysis of three Indigenous women, Scully draws attention to the continued construction of historical narratives of the Atlantic world as stories of heterosexual conquest in which Native people and homelands are feminized and penetrated.
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  43. Northeast
  44. This cultural region of North America extended from the Great Lakes, east to the Atlantic Ocean and south through the Ohio River valley. Scholars also refer to it as the Eastern Woodlands. Although some anthropologists would include the Great Lakes in this region, I (and many other historians) separate it because of distinct historical experiences distinguishing them and different themes predominating in historical literature. Dozens of distinct societies speaking languages in two families, Algonquian and Iroquoian, comprised the majority of the Native population. Scholars have documented variation among kinship systems, economies, and spiritual beliefs within this region. Reflecting this diversity, theories shaping scholars’ interpretations, and sources of evidence available, the literature includes vastly different arguments about Native women’s experiences and the impact of colonization on them. Fur 2009 and Plane 2000 emphasize the centrality of gender to Native peoples’ conceptions of themselves and settlers perceptions of them. Anderson 1985 and Anderson 1991 focus on Montagnais-Naskapi and Huron women to speculate on how the imposition of colonial economic, social, and religious systems dramatically and quickly undermined women’s status. Leacock 1980 provides an alternative interpretation emphasizing the persistence of some traditional elements of Montagnais-Naskapi gender roles. McBride 1999 explains that Wabanaki survivance reflected the commitment of women to traditional understandings of motherhood and interrelatedness with their homeland. Grumet 1980 emphasizes the persistence of women’s leadership and economic productivity among Coastal Algonkian people. In a study of Algonquian and Iroquois women trading in colonial New York, Waterman and Noel 2013 also notes the durability of women’s economic agency. Fur 2007 and Plane 2000 draw attention to settler interest in and, eventually, regulation of Native sexuality and marriage; Mandell 1999 discusses how intermarriage and evolving understandings of race shaped identity, family relations, and community formation. Because of the comparatively large body of scholarship on Iroquois and Powhatan women, I have created separate subsections about them.
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  46. Anderson, Karen. “Commodity Exchange and Subordination: Montagnais-Naskapi and Huron Women, 1600–1650.” Signs 11.1 (1985): 5–19.
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  48. DOI: 10.1086/494199Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  49.  
  50. Anderson asks what conditions subordinate women to men, and using the Montagnais-Naskapi and Huron as examples, she argues that changes in systems of material production necessitate changes in social production and reproduction, the latter having undermined Native women’s high status.
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  55. Anderson, Karen. Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France. New York: Routledge, 1991.
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  58.  
  59. Anderson drew evidence from reports written by missionaries to their governing body. After explaining that Huron and Montagnais people, two groups encountered early in the settlement of New France, conceptualized gender roles as egalitarian, she explains how warfare, disease, the disruption of traditional subsistence economies, and Jesuit interference created a system of gender oppression that had different but pronounced negative outcomes.
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  64. Fur, Gunlög. “Weibe-Town and the Delawares-as-Women: Gender-Crossing and Same Sex Relations in Eighteenth-Century Northeastern Indian Culture.” In Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America. Edited by Thomas A. Foster, 32–50. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
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  67.  
  68. Fur summarizes the account of Moravian missionary David Zeisberger’s visit to a Delaware (referring here to the Native nation and not the state) town populated by women and lacking adult men and compares it to the literature on gender variation among Native peoples. Fur then discusses the related use of gendered language and imagery for the Delawares in regional diplomacy.
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  73. Fur, Gunlög. A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among Delaware Indians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
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  76.  
  77. Fur begins by explaining how Delaware people defined gender in terms of labor or activities rather than biological sex, an aspect of their culture that fostered complementarity. Because of engagement in the colonial economy and Anglo-Indian politics, some Delaware men asserted themselves and redefined their identity in masculine terms reflective of European patriarchal gender norms. At the same time, traditionalists sought to maintain egalitarian relations.
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  82. Grumet, Robert Steven. “Sunksquaws, Shamans, and Tradeswomen: Middle Atlantic Coastal Algonkian Women during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, 43–62. New York: Praeger, 1980.
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  85.  
  86. Grumet focuses on culturally related but socially and politically distinct peoples living along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts Bay to Chesapeake Bay. This includes the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Narragansett, Niantic, Mohegan, Pequot, Delaware, and Powhatan, among others. All embraced and perpetuated female leadership and economic autonomy and productivity despite colonization and dispossession.
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  91. Leacock, Eleanor. “Montagnais Women and the Jesuit Program for Colonization.” In Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, 25–42. New York: Praeger, 1980.
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  94.  
  95. Leacock analyzed the contradictory ethnohistorical record regarding the status of Montagnais and Naskapi women of Quebec and Labrador and the pace and direction of change in their roles over time. She concluded that while egalitarianism traditionally characterized relations between men and women, Jesuit missionaries sought to subjugate women to men through marriage. Based on her fieldwork, Leacock concluded that they were partially but not completely successful in their efforts.
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  100. Mandell, Daniel. “The Saga of Sarah Muckamugg: Indian and African American Intermarriage in Colonial New England.” In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes, 72–90. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
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  103.  
  104. Mandell’s analysis of this Nipmuc woman’s two marriages to African American men suggests that bonds were formed through common experiences as marginalized peoples, usually laborers in urban seaports and on rural farms. The differing experiences of her two children, however, shed light on how race and gender intersected to shape relations with Native communities as racial lines hardened at the end of the colonial period.
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  109. McBride, Bunny. Women of the Dawn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
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  112.  
  113. McBride profiles four Wabanaki women over four centuries to explain their survival along the north Atlantic coast. The first three chapters will be of interest to readers of this article. Chapter 1 focuses on Molly Mathilde, who lived from c. 1665 to 1717; chapter 2 features Molly Ockett, who lived from c. 1740 to 1816; and chapter 3 emphasizes Molly Molasses, who lived c. 1775–1867.
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  118. Plane, Ann Marie. Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
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  121.  
  122. Plane delineates how Puritans documented, regulated, and increasingly criminalized traditional marriage practices among Native people in New England. The policing of Indigenous sexuality shaped household formation and forced Native adaptation.
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  127. Waterman, Kees-Jan, and Jan Noel. “Not Confined to the Village Clearings: Indian Women in the Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1695–1732.” New York History 94.1–2 (Winter–Spring 2013): 40–58.
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  129. DOI: 10.2307/newyorkhist.94.1-2.40Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  130.  
  131. Drawing evidence from account books documenting trade with Iroquoian and Algonquian women, Waterman and Noel conclude that Native women regularly engaged in the fur trade and that gender influenced what Native people bought. Notably, women were more likely to purchase cloth and alcohol and were as likely to trade pelts as agricultural products.
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  136. Iroquois
  137. The Iroquois Confederacy, comprising the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples (and, after 1722, the Tuscarora), dominated the Saint Lawrence River region in what is modern day New York, Ontario, and Quebec at the time of contact with European settlers. They are also referred to in the literature as the Haudenosaunee and the Five (eventually Six) Nations. Scholars have been studying Iroquois women for so long that revisionist works exist challenging earlier interpretations. In his pioneering 1851 ethnography League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (Rochester, NY: SAGE), Lewis Henry Morgan, an influential founder of the field of anthropology in the United States, concluded that Iroquois women were inferior to men. Scholars have remained focused on questions of status and power since then. Readers should begin with Noel 2011, a concise summary of major questions in Iroquois studies. For those interested in reading further in foundational texts, see Spittal 1996. Mt. Pleasant 2011 explains the agricultural abundance that sustained Iroquois villages; this prosperity was not lost on colonial officials like William Johnson who, as Danvers 2001 explains, benefitted from relationships with Iroquois women and men.
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  139. Danvers, Gail D. “Gendered Encounters: Warriors, Women, and William Johnson.” Journal of American Studies 35.2 (August 2001): 187–202.
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  142.  
  143. Focusing on William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs between 1756 and 1774, Danvers explains how he used his understanding of Iroquois gender roles to advocate for British interests. She argues that his manipulation of Iroquois women and men led to the loss of autonomy of the Iroquois, who increasingly deferred to their European allies.
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  148. Mt. Pleasant, Jane. “The Paradox of Plows and Productivity: An Agronomic Comparison of Cereal Grain Production under Iroquois Hoe Culture and European Plow Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Agricultural History 85.4 (Fall 2011): 460–492.
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  150. DOI: 10.3098/ah.2011.85.4.460Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
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  152. In this comparative analysis of Iroquoian corn yields and European wheat yields, Mt. Pleasant concludes that the greater productivity of Iroquois fields resulted from the high levels of organic matter in the soil, a result of the use of hoes versus plows. Mt. Pleasant explains this method was a product of women’s efficient, gendered, and communal deployment of their agricultural labor.
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  157. Noel, Jan. “Revisiting Gender in Iroquois.” In Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850. Edited by Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough, 54–74. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.
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  160.  
  161. Noel argues that the 18th-century Iroquois were “a very rare phenomenon: a nonpatriarchal people based on a genuine equilibrium in the prestige, rights, and responsibilities of women and men” (p. 55). She summarizes the main arguments and important themes in the literature on Iroquois women with attention to women’s roles in councils, motherhood, agriculture, and diplomacy.
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  166. Spittal, William Guy, ed. Iroquois Women: An Anthology. Ohsweken, Canada: Iroquois Publishing and Craft Supplies, 1996.
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  169.  
  170. Seven editions of this useful anthology were printed between 1990 and 1996. In it, William Guy Spittal, an independent publisher based out of Grand River, has collected ethnological and anthropological writing on the status of Iroquois women published between 1884 and 1989. It includes several germinal pieces of scholarship on Indigenous women that are out of print and otherwise difficult to find.
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  175. Mohawk
  176. The Mohawk are the easternmost member of the Iroquois Confederacy. Their name for themselves is Kanien’kehá:ka, a term appearing more frequently in scholarly literature. The core of their traditional homeland included the Mohawk River valley in what is now New York State, through communities including Kahnawake and Akwesasne along the Saint Lawrence River on the Canadian side of the modern-day border. Reflecting Mohawk importance to colonial-era diplomacy, trade, and warfare, scholars of Mohawk women have emphasized their roles as clan mothers and intermediaries. Carson 2001 provides the example of a prominent Mohawk woman’s rise to power, while Noel 2010 explains how common woman engaged in business as independent and autonomous agents. Conversion to Roman Catholicism provided another route through which some Mohawk women maintained status; Greer 2006 and Shoemaker 1995 discuss the most famous Mohawk convert, Kateri Tekakwitha, now canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Midtrød 2010 draws attention to emerging tensions, however, particularly within mixed-heritage communities, which created challenges for families engaged in commercial alliances and interpersonal relationships with European settlers. Elbourne 2005 concurs and adds that awareness of shifting power balances favoring the British prompted increased marital alliances between prominent Mohawks and whites in an effort to maintain British-Iroquois networks.
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  178. Carson, James Taylor. “Molly Brant: From Clan Mother to Loyalist Chief.” In Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives. Edited by Theda Perdue, 48–59. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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  181.  
  182. Carson offers Brant, a member of a prominent and prosperous Mohawk family and, eventually, the wife of William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the region, as an example of a woman who attained status in non-Native society. She was a skillful diplomat who broadened her network as a clan mother to include alliances with colonists.
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  186.  
  187. Elbourne, Elizabeth. “Family Politics and Anglo-Mohawk Diplomacy: The Brant Family in Imperial Context.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6.3 (Winter 2005).
  188.  
  189. DOI: 10.1353/cch.2006.0004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  190.  
  191. Elbourne connects changing marital patterns over generations among a prominent and powerful Mohawk family to shifting political and economic circumstances favoring British settlers. Spousal choices reflected personal preferences and goals but also familial strategies to retain power. Women, particularly daughters, were central to this process.
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  196. Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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  199.  
  200. Greer discusses Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th-century Mohawk convert to Roman Catholicism (canonized in 2012), in the context of the culture of New France. Greer uses Tekakwitha as a lens through which to focus on the process of colonization in Kahnawake, her community, and the ways in which Iroquois people, particularly women, incorporated Catholicism into their culture to maintain autonomy and identity while nonetheless engaging with the colonial world.
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  205. Midtrød, Tom Arne. “The Flemish Bastard and the Former Indians: Métis and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New York.” American Indian Quarterly 34.1 (Winter 2010): 83–108.
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  207. DOI: 10.5250/amerindiquar.34.1.83Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  208.  
  209. Midtrød analyzed relationships between Dutch men and Mohawk women. He focuses on three products of these relationships, two males and one female, to suggest that ethnic differences emerged in the period, and that Native societies were vulnerable to tensions resulting from the relationships of mixed-heritage peoples with their European kin.
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  214. Noel, Jan. “‘Fertile with Fine Talk’: Ungoverned Tongues among Haudenosaunee Women and Their Neighbors.” Ethnohistory 57.2 (Spring 2010): 201–223.
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  216. DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2009-061Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  217.  
  218. Drawing evidence from colonial records on both sides of the border in the Mohawk Valley, Noel proves that French, Dutch, and Iroquois women actively engaged in an illicit fur trade with autonomy and authority. Debunking myths of matriarchal princesses and downtrodden helpmeets, Noel demonstrates how colonial policies enabling women to travel without chaperones and control assets led to a vibrant commerce among female merchants.
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  223. Shoemaker, Nancy. “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood.” In Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker, 49–71. New York: Routledge, 1995.
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  226.  
  227. Shoemaker presents Tekakwitha as a contradictory example of the incorporation of Christianity into Indigenous communities. At the village of Kahnawake, socially and politically marginal people converted, but the church became more powerful. These Christians practiced Roman Catholicism in ways that evoked traditional Iroquois customs. Likewise, rather than embracing patriarchy, Iroquois women appropriated Christianity to assert themselves within their community.
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  232. Seneca
  233. The Seneca are the westernmost member of the Iroquois Confederacy. Seneca communities extend from what is now western New York, north to Grand River in Ontario. Like other Iroquois women, Seneca women enjoyed high status reflecting the value accorded their productive and reproductive labor; see Bilharz 1995. As explained in Rothenberg 1980, Seneca woman defended their rights against assimilationist threats and proved creative in fostering cultural persistence. The acceptance of the Code of Handsome Lake, from a Seneca prophet, as discussed in Mohawk 2003, demonstrates the sophistication with which Seneca women and men maintained communal beliefs and practices while responding to needs created by dispossession.
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  235. Bilharz, Joy. “First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women.” In Women and Power in Native North America. Edited by Laura F. Klein and Lilliam A. Ackerman, 101–112. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
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  238.  
  239. Bilharz summarizes the literature positing the traditional sources of Seneca women’s power as their control over production and children and then suggest that land loss, political centralization, and forced relocation undermined women’s status.
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  244. Mohawk, John. “The Power of Seneca Women and the Legacy of Handsome Lake.” In Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance. Edited by Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins, 20–34. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
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  247.  
  248. This Seneca historian challenges the correlation between the acceptance of the teachings of Seneca prophet Handsome Lake during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the decline of women’s status. Mohawk argues that Seneca families had already abandoned traditional multigenerational, matrilineal longhouses. United States imperialism was the greater threat, he insists, and followers of Handsome Lake proved to be the most conservative in maintaining communitarian behaviors and values that empowered women.
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  253. Rothenberg, Diane. “The Mothers of the Nation: Seneca Resistance to Quaker Intervention.” In Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, 63–87. New York: Praeger, 1980.
  254.  
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  256.  
  257. Rothenberg explains that Quakers engaged in assimilationist outreach to Seneca people following the American Revolution to perpetuate their “holy experiment” and influence public policy. Seneca women objected to Quaker proposals of benevolence that threatened to undermine their land rights and traditional division of labor.
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  262. Powhatan
  263. Most historians researching the history of Native women have addressed silences and omissions in the literature. In contrast, those working on Powhatan women in the Chesapeake region have had to challenge one of the most powerful, popular, and inaccurate myths in American history: the legend of Pocahontas. Rountree 2001, Townsend 2004, and Rountree 2006 respond to this founding fable with nuanced portrayals of a Powhatan girl growing into a woman during a tumultuous period. Rountree 1998 provides insight into the experiences of Powhatan women prior to contact; she emphasizes women’s agriculture labor and autonomy, two themes prominent in Brown 1995, an analysis of how gendered language and expectations shaped Powhatan interactions with Jamestown colonists. McCartney 1989 provides an example of how one female Powhatan leader mediated and manipulated those in her diplomatic relations with English colonial officials.
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  265. Brown, Kathleen M. “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier.” In Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker, 26–48. New York: Routledge, 1995.
  266.  
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  268.  
  269. Brown explains how gender informed Powhatan and English perceptions of one another; Powhatans considered English men to be weak, while Englishmen considered Powhatan women to be licentious and men to be idle. Brown then reinterprets the conflict between English settlers and Powhatans as gendered and ultimately culminating in the dispossession of Powhatan people explained through a masculine discourse of domination.
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  273.  
  274. McCartney, Martha W. “Cockacoeske, Queen of Pamunkey: Diplomat and Suzeraine.” In Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast. Edited by Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley, 243–266. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
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  277.  
  278. Cockacoeske, a female leader of the Pumunkeys, part of Powhatan’s chiefdom, for three decades beginning in 1656, cooperated with English colonial officials, but McCartney explains that she did so in ways that asserted her authority while maintaining alliances.
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  281.  
  282.  
  283. Rountree, Helen C. “Powhatan Indian Women: The People Captain Smith Barely Saw.” Ethnohistory 45.1 (Winter 1998): 1–29.
  284.  
  285. DOI: 10.2307/483170Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  286.  
  287. Drawing from archaeological and documentary evidence, Rountree reconstructs life in a Chickahominy village. She tells the story of one day in spring 1607. Rountree emphasizes work, social relations, and material culture, and she characterizes Powhatan women as having economic autonomy and social power.
  288.  
  289. Find this resource:
  290.  
  291.  
  292. Rountree, Helen C. “Pocahontas: The Hostage that became Famous.” In Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives. Edited by Theda Perdue, 14–28. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  293.  
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295.  
  296. Rountree critiques the popular myth of Pocahontas based on John Smith’s fictionalized story about her rescue of him. Instead, Rountree explains Pocahontas’s behavior, including her response to captivity and conversion, within the context of 17th-century Powhatan culture and gender roles.
  297.  
  298. Find this resource:
  299.  
  300.  
  301. Rountree, Helen C. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
  302.  
  303. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  304.  
  305. In this biography of Pocahontas, her father, and her uncle, written for general audiences in anticipation of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, VA, Rountree offers a revisionist narrative told from multiple Powhatan perspectives. She describes how Pocahontas’s opinion of and relationship with English colonists evolved from the enthusiasm of her girlhood, through mistrust during her captivity, and ultimately, to acceptance resulting from her marriage to John Rolfe.
  306.  
  307. Find this resource:
  308.  
  309.  
  310. Townsend, Camilla. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
  311.  
  312. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  313.  
  314. Townsend contextualizes Pocahontas within the Powhatan world, and she characterizes her as assertive, informed, and culturally flexible—if not the empowered princess of legend. Incorporating archaeological, ethnographic, and documentary evidence, Townsend creates a narrative that clearly separates Pocahontas from stereotype and myth.
  315.  
  316. Find this resource:
  317.  
  318.  
  319. Southeast
  320. Historians focused attention on Native women elsewhere in the Atlantic world before the Southeast. Since the late 1990s, however, scholars have generated a large body of work on Cherokee women, and the amount of research on Creek and Choctaw women is growing. I discuss this literature in the subsections. We await historical studies of Chickasaw, Seminole, and Catawba women—let alone of the dozens more smaller Native societies in the region. Considering current scholarship, LeMaster 2014 summarizes major themes in a comprehensive article on gender in the Native South prior to removal; start one’s reading there. Much of the general literature on women and gender in the Southeast that is not specific to one Indigenous nation explores the gap between reality and rhetoric. Scarry and Scarry 2005 emphasizes the extensive nature of female agricultural production and points out that European observers minimized it because it was the result of women’s labor. Likewise, Godbeer 1999 suggests that English colonists denied the frequency of sexual relationships between Anglo and Native people in the South while nonetheless documenting it. Such intimacy challenged Anglo gendered ideals, a theme developed in LeMaster 2012. Intermarriage and the creation of mixed-heritage families are also the focus of Perdue 2006. Miles 2002 reminds us that the emergence of Afro-Indian identity in the South potentially resulted from the unions of enslaved African and Indigenous peoples but also the sexual assaults of enslaved women by the Native men who owned them.
  321.  
  322. Godbeer, Richard. “Eroticizing the Middle Ground: Anglo-Indian Sexual Relations along the Eighteenth-Century Frontier.” In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes, 91–111. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
  323.  
  324. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  325.  
  326. Summarizing the documentary record created by government officials, missionaries, traders, and soldiers, Godbeer concludes that English colonists commonly had sex with Native people along the Southern frontier, and that this reality made many Englishmen profoundly unconformable. Intimate relationships—some violent and coerced and others consensual and pleasurable—“eroticized the middle ground” in the region (p. 105).
  327.  
  328. Find this resource:
  329.  
  330.  
  331. LeMaster, Michelle. Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
  332.  
  333. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  334.  
  335. LeMaster analyzes the rhetoric and reality of gender in the 18th-century South. She pairs discussion of the ways that men and women performed gender in Anglo settler and Indigenous societies with deconstruction of the ways that manhood and family bonds were conceptualized as tools to foster military and diplomatic relations.
  336.  
  337. Find this resource:
  338.  
  339.  
  340. LeMaster, Michelle. “Pocahontas Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Women and Gender in the Native South before Removal.” Native South 7 (2014): 1–32.
  341.  
  342. DOI: 10.1353/nso.2014.0002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343.  
  344. LeMaster succinctly summarizes the emergence of Native women’s history as a subfield, particularly emphasizing the centrality and influence of declension theory. LeMaster concludes that literature on Native women in the Southeast prior to removal instead emphasizes cultural continuity in women’s roles. At the same time, studies of gender suggest increasing change throughout the colonial period and growing tension between men and women.
  345.  
  346. Find this resource:
  347.  
  348.  
  349. Miles, Tiya. “Uncle Tom Was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery.” In Confounding the Color Line: The Black Indian Experience in North America. Edited by James F. Brooks, 137–160. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
  350.  
  351. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  352.  
  353. Miles comments on the widespread identification of Native ancestry among African Americans, and she discusses historical scenarios enabling black-Indian relationships while historical memory denies their existence. A section on black Indian woman emphasizes the widespread experience of sexual violence perpetrated by Native male slave owners on black Indian women.
  354.  
  355. Find this resource:
  356.  
  357.  
  358. Perdue, Theda. “‘A Sprightly Lover Is the Most Prevailing Missionary’: Intermarriage between Europeans and Indians in the Eighteenth Century-South.” In Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of Southeastern Indians. Edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge, 165–178. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
  359.  
  360. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  361.  
  362. Perdue explains how English colonists initially advocated for intermarriage as a way to prevent hostilities with Indigenous peoples. They assumed that Native women married to English men would assimilate. Perdue demonstrates, however, that intermarriage initially empowered women and their families by bringing resources into their communities and connecting military men and merchants into kinship systems upon which they depended for their success and survival.
  363.  
  364. Find this resource:
  365.  
  366.  
  367. Scarry, C. Margaret, and John F. Scarry. “Native American ‘Garden Agriculture’ in Southeastern North America.” World Archaeology 37.2 (June 2005): 259–274.
  368.  
  369. DOI: 10.1080/00438243500095199Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  370.  
  371. The Scarrys surveyed evidence from throughout the Southeast to argue that although cropping strategies varied, early European observers consistently underestimated the productivity and capability of Native agricultural systems. They suggest that gender bias against women was the primary reason for their dismissal. Archaeological evidence proves the widespread, although not universal, existence of extensive fields, large-scale production, and the storage of surplus.
  372.  
  373. Find this resource:
  374.  
  375.  
  376. Cherokee
  377. When English colonists began to settle what became Virginia and the Carolinas, Cherokees occupied much of the southern Appalachians. Because of the prominent role of Cherokee warriors in military campaigns, Cherokee planters in the emerging market economy of the South, and Cherokee politicians in the anti-removal campaigns, scholarship on Cherokee history has largely focused on the experiences and contributions of men. Ironically, historians who wrote about the early colonial period often noted the prominence and power of women (because it struck European visitors as odd), but the observation did not otherwise inform their analyses. Beginning with Perdue 1995 (cited under Labor), that changed. Since the 1990s, scholars of women and gender have thoroughly reconceptualized the master narrative of Cherokee history to include women, attention to whom has profoundly enriched our understanding of Cherokee survivance and persistence. The most comprehensive account is Perdue 1998.
  378.  
  379. Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
  380.  
  381. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  382.  
  383. This influential text launched the study of gender in the Native South. Perdue argues that “remarkable cultural persistence” characterized the lives of most Cherokee women through the colonial and pre-removal eras (p. 9). Emphasizing gender complementarity and the durability of women’s roles as mothers and farmers, Perdue demonstrates that precisely because of tremendous change, Cherokee women remained important in their traditional arenas of power.
  384.  
  385. Find this resource:
  386.  
  387.  
  388. Labor
  389. Historians of Native American women have concluded that the gendered division of labor in most Native societies combined with women’s control over food and household property resulted in comparatively high status. This is particularly true among Cherokee people. VanDerwarker and Detwiler 2002 makes plain the productivity of female farmers prior to European contact, and Dunaway 1997 and Hatley 2006 reveal how Cherokee women selectively adapted and continued to practice traditional methods to main their output and authority. Hatley 2006, Hill 1997, and Perdue 1995 tease out the specific ways in which women incorporated new technologies, foods, ideas, and resources into their households and domestic economies.
  390.  
  391. Dunaway, Wilma. “Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation: Agrarian Capitalism and Women’s Resistance to the Cult of Domesticity, 1800–1838.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21.1 (1997): 155–192.
  392.  
  393. DOI: 10.17953/aicr.21.1.75p10q417878l571Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  394.  
  395. Dunaway argues that historians have taken 19th-century politicians at their word in assuming the truth of Cherokee women’s willingness to assimilate. In contrast, she argues that most women resisted civilization policy, particularly the transition to agrarian capitalism. She posits that they consciously retained matrilineal traditions, continued to engage in gender egalitarian work, perpetuated extended family units, continued to value group decision making, and pushed back against missionary intrusion.
  396.  
  397. Find this resource:
  398.  
  399.  
  400. Hatley, Tom. “Cherokee Women Farmers Hold Their Ground.” In Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast. Edited by Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley, 305–335. Rev. ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
  401.  
  402. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  403.  
  404. Hatley centers his focus on Cherokee agriculture in this analysis of the impact of colonization. As the primary agricultural laborers and crop scientists, women successfully adapted to create four phases of Cherokee agriculture. It was the fourth, including the use of crops, techniques, and land use patterns learned from settlers, that resulted in decline and depletion but only in the 19th century, a trend common throughout Appalachia, in general.
  405.  
  406. Find this resource:
  407.  
  408.  
  409. Hill, Sarah H. Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
  410.  
  411. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  412.  
  413. Hill conceptualizes this story of economic adaptation and cultural persistence through the metaphor of basketry and organized the book into sections correlated with material used to make them. Students of the Atlantic world will want to pay attention to chapters 1 and 2, named after rivercane, a traditional material, and white oak, a resource that Cherokee women began using as they lost access to rivercane during the removal period.
  414.  
  415. Find this resource:
  416.  
  417.  
  418. Perdue, Theda. “Women, Men, and American Indian Policy: The Cherokee Response to ‘Civilization.’” In Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker, 90–114. New York: Routledge, 1995.
  419.  
  420. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  421.  
  422. This short essay explains the goals of the United States government’s civilization policy and how gender shaped Cherokee women and men’s responses to it. This essay is an abbreviated version of material covered in Perdue 1998 (cited under Cherokee).
  423.  
  424. Find this resource:
  425.  
  426.  
  427. VanDerwarker, Amber M., and Kandace R. Detwiler. “Gendered Practice in Cherokee Foodways: A Spatial Analysis of Plant Remains from the Coweeta Creek Site.” Southeastern Archaeology 21.2 (Summer 2002): 21–28.
  428.  
  429. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  430.  
  431. Focusing on a Cherokee town in the precontact period, VanDerwarker and Detwiler conclude that women and men’s spaces were not as clearly defined as expected based on the ethnographic evidence. In particular, women processed foods in public spaces, gendered male in the historic period by scholars.
  432.  
  433. Find this resource:
  434.  
  435.  
  436. Acculturation and Cultural Persistence
  437. Scholars have explored the many ways Cherokee women negotiated the complicated process of acculturation. Carney 2005 and Moulder 2011 focus on Cherokee women’s spoken and written narratives emphasizing cultural persistence. Nelson 2006 and Perdue 2001 use Catharine Brown’s conversion to explain how Cherokees adapted Christianity to meet communal needs. Miles 2008 discusses how Cherokee women sought to use the United States legal system to protect them, while Yarbrough 2004 explains how the Cherokee adoption of Anglo-American systems of governance and written law codes marginalized women. Miles 2009, Pesantubbee 2014, and Smith 2010, a critical reading of the documentary record, reveal the persistence of traditional communal and maternal values and suggest how they informed Cherokee women’s interaction with non-Indians.
  438.  
  439. Carney, Virginia Moore. Eastern Band Cherokee Women: Cultural Persistence in Their Letters and Speeches. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.
  440.  
  441. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  442.  
  443. Drawing evidence from Cherokee women’s own words as recorded in their personal writings and when documented by others, Carney emphasizes individual women’s perspectives (the book wants for analyses of overall themes). The first two and a half chapters will be of interest to readers of this article. In them, Carney focuses on women’s expression from the colonial through removal eras.
  444.  
  445. Find this resource:
  446.  
  447.  
  448. Miles, Tiya. “The Narrative of Nancy, A Cherokee Woman.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 29.2–3 (2008): 59–80.
  449.  
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451.  
  452. Miles tells the story of Nancy, an enslaved woman who sought emancipation in 1801 as a Cherokee person wrongfully enslaved as a girl. Miles uses Nancy’s testimony and the subsequent documentary record of the case to demonstrate the malleability of racial categories and existence of mixed race relationships in the Native South.
  453.  
  454. Find this resource:
  455.  
  456.  
  457. Miles, Tiya. “‘Circular Reasoning’: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns.” American Quarterly 61.2 (June 2009): 221–243.
  458.  
  459. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  460.  
  461. Miles adds a correction to the literature on white women’s reform movements, describing their work beginning in 1829 against Indian removal as unique and unprecedented. She then explains how Cherokee women had worked collectively to oppose removal through their political system in 1817 through 1819; an effort was successful in forestalling their dislocation.
  462.  
  463. Find this resource:
  464.  
  465.  
  466. Moulder, M. Amanda. “Cherokee Practices, Missionary Intentions: Literacy Learning among Early Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Women.” College Composition and Communication 63.1 (September 2011): 75–97.
  467.  
  468. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  469.  
  470. Moulder explains how Cherokee girls became literate in mission schools to empower their local communities and engage in politicized conversations about their common interests and welfare. This article suggests that much existing scholarship on boarding schools overstates students’ acceptance of missionaries’ views.
  471.  
  472. Find this resource:
  473.  
  474.  
  475. Nelson, Joshua B. “Integrated Circuitry: Catharine Brown across Gender, Race, and Religion.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 30.1 (2006): 17–31.
  476.  
  477. DOI: 10.17953/aicr.30.1.r35319333507pl50Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  478.  
  479. Nelson, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, argues that scholastic works, including Perdue 2001, have characterized early-19th-century Cherokee Catharine Brown’s conversion in opposition to her Cherokee identity and community, and created false binaries. He introduces a “circuitous systems model of identity and agency (p. 20)” in which Brown’s work with other women and as a teacher in her community suggests her ability to integrate multiple facets of her life as a means of resistance.
  480.  
  481. Find this resource:
  482.  
  483.  
  484. Perdue, Theda. “Catherine Brown: Cherokee Convert to Christianity.” In Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives. Edited by Theda Perdue, 77–91. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  485.  
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487.  
  488. Perdue explains how Brown, a teenage girl who enrolled in Brainerd Mission School in 1817, came to represent the successes and possibilities of Protestant efforts to convert Southeastern Indians. After her death in 1823, missionary Rufus Anderson compiled a book-length memoir that emphasized her acculturation, but Perdue’s critical reading emphasizes Brown’s syncretic adoption of Christianity.
  489.  
  490. Find this resource:
  491.  
  492.  
  493. Pesantubbee, Michelene E. “Nancy Ward: American Patriot or Cherokee Nationalist.” American Indian Quarterly 38.2 (Spring 2014): 177–206.
  494.  
  495. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  496.  
  497. Pesantubbee challenges the characterization of Cherokee Nancy Ward as a supporter of English colonization who betrayed her people. She instead argues that when Ward’s behavior is interpreted with an awareness of secular economic and political concerns and sacred obligations stemming from her role as a beloved woman and a member of her clan, Ward emerges as a highly esteemed leader acting from deeply patriotic and socially accepted values in Cherokee society.
  498.  
  499. Find this resource:
  500.  
  501.  
  502. Smith, Katy Simpson. “‘I Look on You . . . as My Children’: Persistence and Change in Cherokee Motherhood, 1750–1835.” North Carolina Historical Review 87.4 (October 2010): 403–430.
  503.  
  504. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  505.  
  506. Smith discusses traditional Cherokee conceptions of motherhood as a social, economic, and political role and then explains how missionaries sought to change it. Women selectively accepted outsiders’ ideas and resources, including schools, that they believed would benefit their children, but they retained both maternal authority and a belief in the role of mothers as responsible for the well-being of their children and those of the nation.
  507.  
  508. Find this resource:
  509.  
  510.  
  511. Yarbrough, Fay. “Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Social History 38.2 (Winter 2004): 385–406.
  512.  
  513. DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2004.0144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  514.  
  515. Focusing on laws passed by the Cherokee Nation’s council between 1819 and 1839, including multiple constitutions, Yarbrough asserts that increasing regulation was intended to control the behavior of women and restrict the rights of people of African descent. Cherokee legislators sought to privilege marriages with whites while penalizing sexual relationships with people of African descent. Likewise, laws more strictly regulated women.
  516.  
  517. Find this resource:
  518.  
  519.  
  520. Choctaw
  521. All three scholars who have written about Choctaw women concur that their status has declined since contact. The Choctaw homeland then occupied the eastern Mississippi River valley. Emphasizing the intersection of European imperial interests in the region, Pesantubbee 2005 points to the negative impact of warfare and slave raiding, which caused population loss and necessitated acculturation. Kidwell 1995 explains how adaptation to Anglo-American economic, political, and legal systems undermined Choctaw women’s traditional forms of power. Yarbrough 2011 concurs and specifically deconstructs marriage laws as evidence of this change.
  522.  
  523. Kidwell, Clara Sue. “Choctaw Women and Cultural Persistence in Mississippi.” In Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker, 115–134. New York: Routledge, 1995.
  524.  
  525. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  526.  
  527. Kidwell analyzes the experiences of Choctaw women in Mississippi since prior to European contact until the early 20th century to understand the impact of colonization on their status. She concludes that women lost access to property and formal governance by the removal era, but matrilineal kinship, matrilocal residence patterns, and female-centered labor patterns persisted and enabled Choctaw survival.
  528.  
  529. Find this resource:
  530.  
  531.  
  532. Pesantubbee, Michelene E. Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
  533.  
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535.  
  536. Pesantubbee, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, argues that Choctaw women enjoyed high status because of their roles as mothers and farmers and because women were central to the practice of Choctaw spiritualty. She suggests Choctaw participation in imperial wars and the slave trade caused a decline in women’s status and changed attitudes among Choctaw men, who increasingly adopted the misogynist views of their Anglo-American counterparts.
  537.  
  538. Find this resource:
  539.  
  540.  
  541. Yarbrough, Fay A. “Women, Labor, and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Choctaw Nation.” In Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850. Edited by Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough, 123–145. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.
  542.  
  543. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  544.  
  545. Yarbrough examines Choctaw marriage laws in the 19th century to understand how ideas about race and gender evolved. After explaining that Choctaw women’s traditional authority was rooted in their clans and division of labor, she describes how the adoption of written legal codes in the early 19th century marginalized women. While protecting women’s property rights, Choctaw men increasingly regulated marriage and reproduction in ways that negatively impacted women.
  546.  
  547. Find this resource:
  548.  
  549.  
  550. Creek
  551. At the time of European contact, the Creek (also referred to in the literature as Muskogee) people lived in autonomous towns in what are now the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Early literature on Creek people focused on the schism between the Upper and Lower Towns regions that deepened during the colonial period as communities, and sometimes families within communities, made different decisions regarding how to adapt to and engage with the English, Spanish, and French colonies surrounding them. Previous historians have emphasized the importance of slave raiding and hide trading, the adoption of chattel slavery, and the growing influence of mixed-heritage families with ties to colonial settlements. Braund 1990 began to integrate gender into this scholarship and suggests that the hide trade undermined Creek women’s status. Braund 2011 further suggests that women particularly suffered the loss of homes and fields and the dispersal of kin networks resulting from scorched earth warfare against towns during the Creek War. Sweet 2010, however, argues that some women gained power because of their involvement in colonial diplomacy and trade. Several scholars have written about Mary Musgrove, a Muskogee woman from the town of Coweta, who became a translator and advisor to James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia; Green 2001, Hahn 2012, and Morris 2005 emphasize the significance of Musgrove’s work as a mediator, but they disagree about how to interpret her behavior as evidence of her identity as a Creek, English, or bicultural woman. Miles 2014 points out that the story of Creek women rightly becomes more complicated and nuanced when Afro-Creeks are considered.
  552.  
  553. Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. “Guardians of Tradition and Handmaidens to Change: Women’s Roles in Creek Economic and Social Life during the Eighteenth Century.” American Indian Quarterly 14.3 (Summer 1990): 239–258.
  554.  
  555. DOI: 10.2307/1185653Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  556.  
  557. Braund explains how traditional Creek gender roles changed in response to engagement in the colonial deer trade. While emphasizing the persistence of some aspects of Creek culture that empowered women, she characterizes the hide trade as disruptive, particularly because of the influence of alcohol and separation of men from their villages, and therefore, their female clan kin.
  558.  
  559. Find this resource:
  560.  
  561.  
  562. Braund, Kathryn E. Holland. “Reflections on ‘Shee Coocys’ and the Motherless Child: Creek Women in a Time of War.” Alabama Review 64.4 (October 2011): 255–284.
  563.  
  564. DOI: 10.1353/ala.2011.0004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  565.  
  566. Braund reexamines the Creek War through the experiences of Creek women. In doing so, she explains the ways that Creek women participated in culturally sanctioned violence and experienced scorched earth warfare, resulting on the loss of life, economic production, and homelands.
  567.  
  568. Find this resource:
  569.  
  570.  
  571. Green, Michael D. “Mary Musgrove: Creating a New World.” In Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives. Edited by Theda Perdue, 29–47. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  572.  
  573. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  574.  
  575. Green explores the complexity of Musgrove’s identity in the context of Creek and colonial Georgian society. He suggests that Musgrove “mediated and merged” the gendered values and behaviors of both and deployed power based on her personal relationships and interpersonal skills (p. 46).
  576.  
  577. Find this resource:
  578.  
  579.  
  580. Hahn, Steven C. The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012.
  581.  
  582. DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813042213.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583.  
  584. Hahn situates Musgrove in Creek culture and the colonial world. Challenging simplistic views of Musgrove as poster girl for multiculturalism centuries ahead of her time, Hahn explains how Musgrove balanced self-interest with her concern for fellow Creeks and negotiated the challenges of competing interests in colonial Georgia.
  585.  
  586. Find this resource:
  587.  
  588.  
  589. Miles, Tiya. “The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country.” NAIS 1 (Spring 2014): 88–98.
  590.  
  591. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  592.  
  593. Miles comments on the questions raised by her research on a Creek woman who refused to remove to Indian Territory with her family. Through documenting the possibility of Battis having African (as while as Creek and European) ancestry and explaining hostility toward Afro-Creek women and Christian converts during this period, Miles argues for greater understanding of “multilayered identities, unexpected allegiances, entangled family ties, and sexual vulnerability” in Native history (p. 98).
  594.  
  595. Find this resource:
  596.  
  597.  
  598. Morris, Michael. “Emerging Gender Roles for Southeastern Indian Women: The Mary Musgrove Story Reconsidered.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 89.1 (Spring 2005): 1–24.
  599.  
  600. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  601.  
  602. Morris identifies Musgrove as exemplifying the individualized, selective acculturation that enabled Native adaptation to colonization while frustrating advocates of assimilation, particularly missionaries. He suggests that Musgrove’s multiple marriages and diplomatic service suggest the perpetuation of Creek cultural norms. In contrast, her accumulation of property, engagement in commercial agriculture, and investment in the hide trade reflect the influence of British culture on her.
  603.  
  604. Find this resource:
  605.  
  606.  
  607. Sweet, Julie Anne. “Senauki: A Forgotten Character in Early Georgia History.” Native South 3 (2010): 65–88.
  608.  
  609. DOI: 10.1353/nso.2010.0002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  610.  
  611. As the wife of Tomochichi, a prominent Creek leader, Senauki repeatedly appears in the documentary record at important moments. Sweet argues that attention to Senauki’s behavior and words demonstrates that some Creek women’s prominence increased during the colonial era as they engaged in diplomacy and facilitated trade.
  612.  
  613. Find this resource:
  614.  
  615.  
  616. Great Lakes
  617. Historical scholarship about Native women in the Great Lakes published since 1980 has corrected previous myopic characterizations of the fur trade as masculine, heroic, and white. Murphy 1995 and Sleeper-Smith 2015 gendered their analysis of the economic growth of the region and credited Native women’s productivity for much of it. As Marrero 2005 explains, women and their families challenged colonial power structures in defense of these resources and their rights to them. Spector 1993 cautions against accepting androcentric interpretations of the Native history of this region without critical analysis of the biases against women that have shaped previous popular and scholarly interpretations. Readers should note that literature in this section and the two subsections is closely related. Common themes appear throughout these readings, and many mixed-heritage/creole women descended from Anishinaabeg families. In other words, like the peoples of the Great Lakes, this literature is interconnected, and those seeking to learn about Native women in the Great Lakes should consider sources in all three sections.
  618.  
  619. Marrero, Karen L. “‘She is Capable of Doing a Good Deal of Mischief’: A Miami Woman’s Threat to Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Ohio Valley.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6.3 (Winter 2005).
  620.  
  621. DOI: 10.1353/cch.2006.0015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  622.  
  623. Using the dissolution of the marriage between Tacumwah, a Miami woman, and her French husband as a case study, Marrero explains how Native women existed at the center of competing systems of marriage and property ownership in the late-19th century. Miami leaders, including Tacumwah, used her case to confirm British recognition of Native women’s traditional rights to inherit, manage, and transmit property and, as well, Miami agency in colonial affairs.
  624.  
  625. Find this resource:
  626.  
  627.  
  628. Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. “Autonomy and the Economic Roles of Indian Women of the Fox-Wisconsin River Region, 1763–1832.” In Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker, 72–89. New York: Routledge, 1995.
  629.  
  630. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  631.  
  632. Murphy explains how Winnebago, Mesquakie, and Sauk women grew the market economy of the Great Lakes region in the mid-19th century through increased production for sale while perpetuating traditional village economies based on local consumption. By trading in commercial markets while continuing to control resources essential for familial and communal subsistence, these women retained traditional gendered power.
  633.  
  634. Find this resource:
  635.  
  636.  
  637. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. “The Agrarian Village World of Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley.” In Women in Early America. Edited by Thomas A. Foster, 186–209. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
  638.  
  639. DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479874545.003.0009Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  640.  
  641. Sleeper-Smith focuses on the Wabash River valley to explain how Native women consciously created thriving villages through intensive agriculture, selective gathering, and the skillful adaption of resources obtained through trade. Following independence, United States leaders sought to expand settlement into the Ohio country. They destabilized this region by brutally attacking prosperous villages and imprisoning and killing the women who created and sustained them.
  642.  
  643. Find this resource:
  644.  
  645.  
  646. Spector, Janet D. What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology in a Wahpeton Dakota Village. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1993.
  647.  
  648. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  649.  
  650. In this germinal text in feminist archaeology, Spector critiques androcentric archaeological methods and conclusions. Using evidence from the Little Rapids site near Minneapolis, she provides a model for identifying women’s presence and interpreting their roles within communities while collaborating with their Wahpeton descendants.
  651.  
  652. Find this resource:
  653.  
  654.  
  655. Anishinaabeg
  656. The term Anishinaabeg refers to culturally related but politically and socially independent Native nations surrounding the Great Lakes in both the modern day United States and Canada. Before contact with Europeans, the Ojibwe (also referred to in the literature as Ojibwa, Ojibway, and Chippewa), Odawa (also referred to in the literature as Ottawa), and Potawatomie had formed an alliance called the Three Fires, and scholarship often includes analysis of multiple interconnected bands among them. As an extension of their traditional roles, best explained in Child 2012, Ojibwe women were the primary social conduits through which pelts and trade goods flowed back and forth. White 1999 argues this about Ojibwe women while Sleeper-Smith 2001 makes this case for women among the Odawa and Potawatomie. Sleeper-Smith 2005 suggests how deeply interconnected these women remained with their Native kin and how they formed bonds with other women engaged in the fur trade modeled on the customs of kinship.
  657.  
  658. Child, Brenda J. Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community. New York: Viking, 2012.
  659.  
  660. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  661.  
  662. Child, a citizen of the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation, foregrounds the theme of persistence in her study. Child stresses women’s centrality as mothers, workers, and leaders, roles providing stability that enabled adaptation from the fur trade through the modern urban Indian resurgence in Minneapolis. Chapters 1 and 2, which focus on precontact society and the fur trade, will be of interest to students of the Atlantic world.
  663.  
  664. Find this resource:
  665.  
  666.  
  667. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
  668.  
  669. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  670.  
  671. Sleeper-Smith emphasizes the role of Native women, particularly among the Odawa and Potawatomie, in creating kin-based networks in the Franco-Indian fur trade that encompassed the Great Lakes in the 17th and 18th centuries. She argues that these women, who behaved according to the norms of their kin-based society, shaped the cycles and patterns of trade more so than market forces.
  672.  
  673. Find this resource:
  674.  
  675.  
  676. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. “‘[A]n Unpleasant Transaction on this Frontier’: Challenging Female Autonomy and Authority at Michilimackinac.” Journal of the Early Republic 25.3 (Fall 2005): 417–443.
  677.  
  678. DOI: 10.1353/jer.2005.0066Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  679.  
  680. Sleeper-Smith examines the complicated, varied experiences of three female fur traders—Elizabeth Mitchell, Magdelaine Marcot la Framboise, and Thérèse Marcot Lasaliere Schindler—during the transition from French to British to United States control of the southern Great Lakes. All were Ojibwe or Odawa, spoke one or more of those related languages, and remained connected to their families. Sleeper-Smith cautions against historical narratives that white wash them as settlers.
  681.  
  682. Find this resource:
  683.  
  684.  
  685. White, Bruce. “The Woman Who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade.” Ethnohistory 46.1 (Winter 1999): 109–147.
  686.  
  687. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  688.  
  689. White provides an overview of the historiography of gender and the fur trade. He then explains how Ojibwa women served essential roles not solely as participants in economic exchange but as the central members of the social networks linking fur traders to Native peoples and their resources.
  690.  
  691. Find this resource:
  692.  
  693.  
  694. Métis and Creoles
  695. Beginning in the mid-17th century, the trade in animal pelts linked European settlers and Native peoples from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts through the interior of North America. Relationships between male traders and trappers and Native women enabled economic exchange. By the time the fur trade collapsed two centuries later, generations of European men—mostly French, Scottish, and English—had married Native women from diverse societies, particularly those surrounding the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay. These men and women and their descendants established trading posts that grew into ethnic communities linked to Native villages but characterized by distinct cultures shaped by shared experience of the peltry trade. See Brown 1996, Murphy 2000, and Murphy 2014 for examples. The term “métis” with a lowercase “m” is often used to refer to these people through the mid-19th century. After that, the term “Métis” with a capital letter refers to mixed-heritage peoples in the western Great Lakes and prairies of Canada who coalesced into a distinct group in response to dispossession by the Canadian government and who rebelled twice during the late 19th century in defense of their communities and culture. The Canadian government has recognized Métis people as aboriginal since 1989. In the United States, people in the Great Lakes region of mixed heritage originating in the fur trade did not develop a sense of themselves as a distinct people. For this reason, historian Lucy Eldersveld Murphy has suggested the use of the term “creole” to describe those of mixed ancestry who were legally classified as white by the United States government but who continued to identify with their multiethnic Native ancestry. As explained in Murphy 2003, Racette 2005, Racette 2012, and van Kirk 1984, women’s reproductive and domestic labor both created and sustained these communities. Building on scholarship emphasizing the mutually beneficial and often affectionate relationships that characterized couples joined through the fur trade, such as Van Kirk 1980, historical works, including Denial 2013 and Marrero 2015, explain that some Native women skillfully deployed gender norms to enhance their social status and financial stature.
  696.  
  697. Brown, Jennifer S. H. Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
  698.  
  699. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  700.  
  701. Brown’s pioneering study compares fur traders affiliated with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, many of whom formed long-term relationships with Native women called country marriages. She explains how these mixed-heritage families created unique communities shaped by the ethnic background of the traders, company organizational structure, and the cooperation and resistance of Native women from diverse societies with their own gender roles and expectations.
  702.  
  703. Find this resource:
  704.  
  705.  
  706. Denial, Catherine J. Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 2013.
  707.  
  708. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  709.  
  710. Denial compares ideals and experiences of marriage among the diverse residents of the Upper Midwest between 1820 and 1845. Examining the rhetoric about and reality of marriage among Native, French Canadian, mixed-ancestry, white American, and African American people, she concludes that marriage was contested, varied, and central to the expansion of United States control in the region. Indigenous forms of marriage and kinship systems also proved resilient, however.
  711.  
  712. Find this resource:
  713.  
  714.  
  715. Marrero, Karen L. “Women at the Crossroads: Trade, Mobility, and Power in Early French America and Detroit.” In Women in Early America. Edited by Thomas A. Foster, 159–185. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
  716.  
  717. DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479874545.003.0008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  718.  
  719. Marrero explains how the women of prominent merchant families in the fur trade engaged in a sophisticated integration of gender norms enabling them to “optimize” their personal and familial success while “transgressing the boundaries” associated with European gender roles (p. 159). Including analysis of French, Native (Iroquoian and Algonquian), and mixed-heritage women in Quebec and Detroit, Marrero demonstrates the symbolic, social, and economic centrality of empowered women in New France.
  720.  
  721. Find this resource:
  722.  
  723.  
  724. Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
  725.  
  726. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  727.  
  728. Focusing on the lead mining communities of Green Bay and Prairie du Chen, Murphy demonstrates how Winnebago, Mesquakie, and Sauk peoples adapted first to French, then British, and finally United States intrusion into the region. She emphasizes the creation of intercultural relationships, not all of which proved durable or beneficial for Native women, and the struggle to retain autonomy.
  729.  
  730. Find this resource:
  731.  
  732.  
  733. Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. “Public Mothers: Native American Métis Women as Creole Mediators in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest.” Journal of Women’s History 14.4 (Winter 2003): 142–166.
  734.  
  735. DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2003.0011Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  736.  
  737. Murphy identifies mixed-heritage women from old fur-trading families as important mediators during the period of US colonization of the Great Lakes following the War of 1812. Deploying ideals of womanhood associated with generosity and charity that were valued by both Native-descended and Anglo peoples, these “public mothers” incorporated settlers into existing communal networks.
  738.  
  739. Find this resource:
  740.  
  741.  
  742. Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chen, 1750–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
  743.  
  744. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107281042Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  745.  
  746. In this community study of a Wisconsin town that originated as a center of the fur trade during the late French colonial period, survived colonization by the United States, and continues to exist in the early 21st century, Murphy explains how mix-heritage people adapted and how gender shaped experiences of settler colonialism. The families of men who retained access to land best endured economic shifts, while women enabled survival by creating bonds with newcomers.
  747.  
  748. Find this resource:
  749.  
  750.  
  751. Racette, Sherry Farrell. “Sewing for a Living: The Commodification of Métis Women’s Artistic Production.” In Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past. Edited by Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, 17–46. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2005.
  752.  
  753. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  754.  
  755. Racette explains how a female economy sustained the fur trade. The skilled work of women, some of whom were educated in mission schools, kept men and posts clothed. Racette includes attention both to functional clothing and decorative aesthetics, reading women’s needlework as a canvas upon which they expressed themselves.
  756.  
  757. Find this resource:
  758.  
  759.  
  760. Racette, Sherry Farrell. “Nimble Fingers and Strong Backs: First Nations and Métis Women in Fur Trade and Rural Economies.” In Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism. Edited by Carol Williams, 148–162. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
  761.  
  762. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  763.  
  764. Racette, a citizen of the Timiskaming First Nation, builds off the scholarship on women’s significance as wives of fur traders to identify another central role that women played: as paid and contracted laborers employed by trading posts. Trading company records document women’s compensated domestic work, including producing food, cooking, cleaning, and making and repairing clothing. Women also performed manual labor building and maintaining trading posts.
  765.  
  766. Find this resource:
  767.  
  768.  
  769. Van Kirk, Sylvia. “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. Winnipeg, Canada: Watson and Dwyer, 1980.
  770.  
  771. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  772.  
  773. Examining the relationships of traders working for the North West and Hudson’s Bay Companies with Native partners and wives and their mixed heritage offspring, van Kirk challenges depictions of these women as passive victims of non-Native and Native men. She explains both the important role women played in the trade and the depth of feeling that characterized many of these relationships.
  774.  
  775. Find this resource:
  776.  
  777.  
  778. Van Kirk, Sylvia. “The Role of Native Women in the Fur Trade Society of Western Canada, 1670–1830.” Frontiers 7.3 (1984): 9–13.
  779.  
  780. DOI: 10.2307/3346234Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  781.  
  782. Van Kirk suggests that Native women, particularly among Cree, Ojibwe, and Chippewyan people, sustained the work of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Rupert’s Land for two centuries. The fur trade was dependent upon access to women’s kin networks but also women’s skills in providing food, housing, transportation, and clothing.
  783.  
  784. Find this resource:
  785.  
  786.  
  787. Louisiana
  788. When they established the territory of Louisiana, the French claimed the homelands of hundreds of Native nations. Far larger than the boundaries of the modern-day state, colonial Louisiana included a huge swath of central North America from the Great Lakes in the north, south to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Plains in the west to the western boundary of the Appalachian Mountains in the east. French colonial settlements and interaction with Native peoples concentrated along the Mississippi River drainage basin and the Gulf and intersected with territories claimed by the Spanish in the New Mexican Borderlands and Florida and the English east of the Appalachians. As DuVal 2008 emphasizes, Native societies exerted power in this diverse and complicated region. That does not mean that all Native people did so, however, and the enslavement and trade of Native female captives generated profits for colonial settlements and provided domestic and reproductive labor for their men according to DuVal 2008. The regulation of métissage, the French term for the mixing of populations through marriage, evolved over time but remained a central concern of colonial officials and the Roman Catholic Church; Belmessous 2005, Spear 1999, and Spear 2003 discuss this. Most recently, historical works, including Leavelle 2010 and Toudji 2011, have emphasized women’s experiences and perceptions of intermarriage in this region.
  789.  
  790. Belmessous, Saliha. “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy.” American Historical Review 110.2 (April 2005): 322–349.
  791.  
  792. DOI: 10.1086/531317Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  793.  
  794. Focusing on the attitudes of French officials and their policies, Belmessous argues that the perceived failure of métissage to assimilate Native peoples led to increasingly negative racialized beliefs among French leaders. Although not a focus of her analysis, the persistence of Native women’s traditional gender roles and autonomy is taken as an uncontested truth in this article.
  795.  
  796. Find this resource:
  797.  
  798.  
  799. DuVal, Kathleen. “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana.” William and Mary Quarterly 65.2 (April 2008): 267–304.
  800.  
  801. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  802.  
  803. DuVal proposes an alternative to the predominant theme in literature on gender and Indian-French relations (shaped by scholarship on the Great Lakes), which emphasizes the importance of intermarriage between Native women and French traders. Explaining that Apalachee, Quapaw, and Choctaws formed commercial relationships with the French through other means besides marriage, she suggests that enslaved Indian women captured from other communities served as Europeans’ predominate sexual partners.
  804.  
  805. Find this resource:
  806.  
  807.  
  808. Leavelle, Tracy Neal. “The Catholic Rosary, Gendered Practice, and Female Power in French-Indian Spiritual Encounters.” In Native American Christianity and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape. Edited by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, 159–176. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
  809.  
  810. DOI: 10.5149/9780807899663_martin.11Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  811.  
  812. Leavelle uses Marie Rouensa, a woman from a powerful Kaskaskia family, as a case study explaining how female converts to Christianity among the Illinois used their new faith and its practices to expand their sphere of influence among their people. Leavelle balances analysis of ritual and symbolism to elucidate how Illinois people conceptualized Roman Catholicism through their Indigenous worldview.
  813.  
  814. Find this resource:
  815.  
  816.  
  817. Spear, Jennifer M. “‘They Need Wives’: Métissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730.” In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes, 35–59. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
  818.  
  819. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  820.  
  821. Spear emphasizes that settlers and soldiers often ignored secular leaders’ preference that French colonists marry among themselves. Elites believed this would lead to a stable, reproductive society. Religious leaders, however, encouraged métissage as an alternative to concubinage and a tool to promote conversion. Concerns about morality intersected with those about the transmission of property, and the latter ultimately resulted in settler men preferring European brides.
  822.  
  823. Find this resource:
  824.  
  825.  
  826. Spear, Jennifer M. “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana.” William and Mary Quarterly 60.1 (January 2003): 75–98.
  827.  
  828. DOI: 10.2307/3491496Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  829.  
  830. Spear explains the evolution of French policy regarding métissage. Native European sexual relationships alternately challenged and reinforced colonial policies, hierarchies, and conflicts. Laws often contradicted attitudes within settlements and demographic and economic realities. Native women are not the central focus of this article, but it does provide useful context to understanding the law in the French colonial Atlantic world.
  831.  
  832. Find this resource:
  833.  
  834.  
  835. Toudji, Sonia. “‘The Happiest Consequences’: Sexual Unions and Frontier Survival at Arkansas Post.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 70.1 (Spring 2011): 45–56.
  836.  
  837. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  838.  
  839. Toudji challenges DuVal’s conclusion regarding the scarcity of métissage between Quapaw women and French men. Analyzing records from a later period, she suggests that DuVal overlooked the persistence of Quapaw marital customs and the willingness of French men to conform to them. Likewise, Toudji uses records from the American period of expansion into Quapaw territory to document the commonplace claim of partial French heritage among the Quapaw.
  840.  
  841. Find this resource:
  842.  
  843.  
  844. Borderlands
  845. The region including modern-day northern Mexico and the US Southwest and southern plains and extending eastward into Louisiana comprised the Borderlands. From the Spanish perspective, the colony of New Mexico was the center of the region. Recent scholarship has decentered Spanish perspectives, however, and emphasized that Native peoples wielded significant power and at times dominated the Borderlands. Gomez-Galisteo 2011 provides an excellent example of that in a gendered analysis of Cabaza de Vaca’s memoir. Throughout the Borderlands, migratory hunters, traders, and raiders coexisted and competed with sedentary agricultural peoples. Themes about women and gender in this literature echo and complement those in the scholarship about Louisiana. Barr 2005, Barr 2007, and Brooks 1996 explain how Native peoples adapted diverse, preexisting systems of captivity to include the Spanish and French and meet their demand for slaves; while exploited for domestic and reproductive labor, Native women survived by creating relationships with other Native peoples and settlers. McDonald 2002 includes African and African-descent peoples in its analysis and, along with Gutiérrez 1991, explains how the regulation of marriage and reproduction served as an important mechanism through which the Spanish exerted control—although never completely—over colonized peoples.
  846.  
  847. Barr, Juliana. “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands.” Journal of American History 92.1 (June 2005): 19–46.
  848.  
  849. DOI: 10.2307/3660524Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  850.  
  851. Barr connects the experiences of enslaved and captive Native women in the Gulf Region and east Texas to the larger literature on slavery in the Spanish, French, and English colonies. Recognizing the range of experiences women had, she calls for an understanding of the diversity of slaveries, including agricultural, diplomatic, and sexual/reproductive labor.
  852.  
  853. Find this resource:
  854.  
  855.  
  856. Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
  857.  
  858. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  859.  
  860. Barr explains how Native constructions of social and political relationships were gendered and, in turn, shaped interaction with French and Spanish colonizers. In her focus on Native people in the Gulf region and east Texas, Barr refutes scholarship that characterizes the Spanish as dominant in the region and instead demonstrates how Native kinship systems ordered and provided meaning for colonial interactions.
  861.  
  862. Find this resource:
  863.  
  864.  
  865. Brooks, James F. “‘This Evil Extends . . . Especially to the Feminine Sex’: Negotiating Captivity in the New Mexican Borderlands.” Feminist Studies 22.2 (Summer 1996): 279–309.
  866.  
  867. DOI: 10.2307/3178414Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  868.  
  869. Brooks emphasizes that captive taking and trading were common among the Spanish and Native nations of the Borderlands. While the experiences of captive women varied, the creation of kinship ties with their captors provided a common means to the end of security and identity. Without romanticizing the exploitation inherent in this trade, he also identifies the ways in which captive women had agency.
  870.  
  871. Find this resource:
  872.  
  873.  
  874. Gomez-Galisteo, M. Carmen. “Subverting Gender Roles in the Sixteenth Century: Cabaza de Vaca, the Conquistador Who Became a Native American Woman.” In Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850. Edited by Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough, 11–29. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.
  875.  
  876. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  877.  
  878. Gomez-Galisteo analyzes the account of 16th-century Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca, at times explorer and at times captive, to provide insight into the roles of Native women in the Gulf and Borderlands regions. To improve his odds of survival, he took on roles ascribed to women, particularly healer and trader, when held prisoner. In contrast to other 16th-century European men writing about their experiences of Indigenous people, he deemphasized sexuality.
  879.  
  880. Find this resource:
  881.  
  882.  
  883. Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
  884.  
  885. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  886.  
  887. Gutiérrez uses marriage as a focus point in his analysis of social conflict, resistance, and change in Spanish New Mexico. He explains understandings and practices of marriage among Pueblo peoples and then turns to Spanish-imposed colonial systems that perpetuated inequalities while infusing new ideas of marriage associated with honor into traditional ones emphasizing obligation and reciprocity.
  888.  
  889. Find this resource:
  890.  
  891.  
  892. McDonald, Dedre S. “Intimacy and Empire: Indian-African Interaction in Spanish Colonial New Mexico, 1500–1800.” In Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Edited by James F. Brooks, 21–46. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
  893.  
  894. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  895.  
  896. McDonald explains how African and Indigenous people encountered one another in colonial New Mexico and how those interactions fostered martial, economic, and personal relationships that empowered them to resist Spanish exploitation. This essay includes a section on marriages between Native and African peoples.
  897.  
  898. Find this resource:
  899.  
  900.  
  901. Representation and Identity
  902. Particularly since the Red Power Era of the 1970s, Indigenous peoples have asserted ownership over their material culture and stories and have challenged inaccurate and ethnocentric depictions in popular culture, academic scholarship, and public historical presentations, especially museums. Their efforts have rightly prompted scholars to problematize memory, or shared recollections and beliefs about the past, and recognize the tacit endorsement of colonialism and anti-Indigenous bias that continues to shape non-Native perspectives about historical relations between setter and Native peoples. Anderson 2013, Kidwell 1992, Hudson 2006, Martin 1996, Miles 2010, Perdue 1997, and Tilton 1994 specifically deconstruct false representations. Other works provide alternative interpretations that privilege Native peoples’ views of themselves. This includes Brody and Holland 2006, Driskill 2016, and Pearsall 2015. In Indigenous studies, many questions about historical events are now asked in conjunction with debates about modern-day representations of them, including those ways in which Native peoples perform identities for personal, social, and sometimes commercial purposes.
  903.  
  904. Anderson, Kim. “The Construction of a Negative Identity.” In Gender and Women’s Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain. Edited by Margaret Hobbs and Carla Rice, 269–279. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2013.
  905.  
  906. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  907.  
  908. Anderson, a Cree and Métis scholar, pinpoints the origin of negative images of Indigenous women in the Canadian consciousness during the colonial era and comments on the reasons for the persistence of these stereotypes.
  909.  
  910. Find this resource:
  911.  
  912.  
  913. Brody, Jennifer D., and Sharon P. Holland. “An/Other Case of New England Underwriting: Negotiating Race and Property in the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge.” In Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, 31–56. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
  914.  
  915. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  916.  
  917. Brody and Holland discuss the construction of Afro-Native subjectivity through the analysis of a white-authored memoir of Elleanor Eldridge, a Rhode Islander, African American, and (likely) person of Narragansett descent. The text focuses on 19th-century constructions of race and memory and 18th-century intermarriage between African men and Native women in New England.
  918.  
  919. Find this resource:
  920.  
  921.  
  922. Driskill, Qwo-Li. “The Queer Lady of Cofitachequi.” In Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory. By Qwo-Li Driskill, 39–100. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.
  923.  
  924. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  925.  
  926. Driskill reinterprets the Spanish invasion of Cofitachequi to demonstrate how heteropatriarchy informed colonization and continues to shape our memory of it. Driskill argues that when creating records, colonists perceived all Cherokees to be deviants and overlooked those engaged in same-gender relationships. The leader of Cofitachequi, described as feminine and subservient in records and by historians, thus becomes re-storied as actively refusing to conform to the gendered expectations of the Spanish.
  927.  
  928. Find this resource:
  929.  
  930.  
  931. Hudson, Angela Pulley. “Imagining Mary Musgrove: ‘Georgia’s Creek Indian Princess’ and Southern Identity.” In Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Edited by Mary C. Carruth, 112–125. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.
  932.  
  933. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  934.  
  935. Hudson reinterprets the story of Mary Musgrove and deconstructs the way her legacy has been appropriated to legitimize the colonization of Georgia and the dispossession of Creek people. In contextualizing Musgrove in Creek culture rather than as an enabler of British settlement, Hudson peels away the legend rooted in the “good Indian princess” stereotype invented and perpetuated by settler peoples and their descendants.
  936.  
  937. Find this resource:
  938.  
  939.  
  940. Kidwell, Clara Sue. “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators.” Ethnohistory 39.2 (Spring 1992): 97–107.
  941.  
  942. DOI: 10.2307/482389Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  943.  
  944. Kidwell challenges the mythology relegating Native women to the role of perpetual helpmeet of settler men. She points out the presence of Indigenous women in nearly every encounter with settler peoples. Kidwell suggests that where the documentary record is largely silent, ethnohistorical methods can provide insight on women’s experiences. She reinterprets the stories of Pocahontas and Nancy Ward as two examples of the efficacy of her methodology.
  945.  
  946. Find this resource:
  947.  
  948.  
  949. Martin, Joel W. “‘My Grandmother Was a Cherokee Princess’: Representations of Indians in Southern History.” In Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. Edited by S. Elizabeth Bird, 129–147. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996.
  950.  
  951. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  952.  
  953. Martin demonstrates how non-Indian appropriation of Native stories and imagery and identification with Native peoples has evolved in five distinct periods. Although his analysis is not explicitly gendered, this essay offers explanations for why many white Southerners claim descent from an American Indian ancestress (usually Cherokee) despite the historical implausibility of such beliefs. This issue—of illegitimate claims of belonging—is a major concern of Native nations in the early 21st century.
  954.  
  955. Find this resource:
  956.  
  957.  
  958. Miles, Tiya. The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
  959.  
  960. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  961.  
  962. Miles uses micro-history—the study of the Vann family, particularly James Vann, his mother Wali, and his wife Peggy Scott—to explain how acculturation and the internalization of European ideas about race and gender shaped Cherokee behavior. Miles also reflects upon the portrayal of Cherokee women in public history presentations, specifically at the Chief Vann House historic site.
  963.  
  964. Find this resource:
  965.  
  966.  
  967. Pearsall, Sarah M. “Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution.” In Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. Edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, Julianna Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens, 57–70. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
  968.  
  969. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  970.  
  971. Pearsall critiques the exclusion of Native peoples in college-level history books. She then uses Iroquois women, particularly a reinterpretation of the story of Madam Sacho, during the American Revolution as a case study demonstrating how their inclusion corrects flawed interpretations and protects against ethnocentric triumphalism.
  972.  
  973. Find this resource:
  974.  
  975.  
  976. Perdue, Theda. “Columbus Meets Pocahontas in the American South.” Southern Cultures 3.1 (1997): 4–17.
  977.  
  978. DOI: 10.1353/scu.1997.0006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  979.  
  980. Perdue explains how Europeans sexualized the colonial project by analyzing men’s commentary on the bodies and behavior of Native women. She also discusses Native people’s critiques of European men as sexual deviants.
  981.  
  982. Find this resource:
  983.  
  984.  
  985. Tilton, Robert S. Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
  986.  
  987. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  988.  
  989. Tilton is not concerned with the historical person of Pocahontas but representations of her in art, literature, dramatic renditions, and historical scholarship by non-Indians from the colonial period through the Civil War. In tracing the evolution of romantic and nationalist interpretations, Tilton emphasizes that the meaning of Pocahontas’s life and actions have been interpreted in ways that reflect non-Indian agendas, ones often harmful to Native peoples.
  990.  
  991. Find this resource:
  992.  
  993.  
  994. Restoration and Self-Determination
  995. Indigenous scholars increasingly focus on restoring those components of their societies undermined by colonization. Many have pointed out that scholarship debating changes in women’s roles does not necessarily serve or benefit Indigenous peoples, and they seek to directly connect their analyses to efforts empowering the wellness of Indigenous people in the early 21st century. Anderson 2008, Jacob 2016, and Horn-Miller 2002 are for the intended audience of their communities and other Indigenous people.
  996.  
  997. Anderson, Kim. A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood. Toronto: Sumach, 2008.
  998.  
  999. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1000.  
  1001. Anderson, a Cree and Métis scholar, conducted interviews with Native women in Canada to explain how the process of colonization undermined the integrity of Native families and gender equity. In the second half of the book, she theorizes specific ways that Native peoples, especially women, can resist these negative influences. Her work makes explicit the outcomes on Indigenous peoples of the processes described in other scholars’ work in this article.
  1002.  
  1003. Find this resource:
  1004.  
  1005.  
  1006. Horn-Miller, Kahente. “Bring Us Back into the Dance: Women of the Wasase.” In Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. Edited by Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, 230–244. Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2002.
  1007.  
  1008. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1009.  
  1010. Horn-Miller, who is Kanien:keha’ka/Mohawk, wrote this essay to explain how women in her community responded to the modern-day crisis of youth suicide by reinvigorating the wasase, or war dance. This essay gracefully explains the negative and ongoing consequences of colonization, with an emphasis on the continued viability of Native cultures and the ability of Native women to heal their communities.
  1011.  
  1012. Find this resource:
  1013.  
  1014.  
  1015. Jacob, Michelle M. Indian Pilgrims: Indigenous Journeys of Activism and Healing with Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.
  1016.  
  1017. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  1018.  
  1019. Jacob, a citizen of the Yakama Nation, explains how Tekakwitha has inspired Native people to reclaim spiritual practice to protect the natural world, foster community, and regain women’s traditional high status in their societies. Critiquing what she calls “Styrofoam Catholicism,” Jacobs calls for the disruption of ongoing settler colonialism, and she sees models for decolonization in the subjects of this ethnography whose service to their communities has been inspired by Tekakwitha (p. 51).
  1020.  
  1021. Find this resource:
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