Negotiators of Change

Historical Perspectives on Native American Women

Nancy Shoemaker, Nancy Shoemaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136042621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Negotiators of Change covers the history of ten tribal groups including the Cherokee, Iroquois and Navajo -- as well as tribes with less known histories such as the Yakima, Ute, and Pima-Maricopa. The book contests the idea that European colonialization led to a loss of Native American women's power, and instead presents a more complex picture of the adaption to, and subversion of, the economic changes introduced by Europeans. The essays also discuss the changing meainings of motherhood, women's roles and differing gender ideologies within this context.

1

KATHLEEN M. BROWN

THE ANGLO-ALGONQUIAN GENDER FRONTIER

In 1607, when English colonists made their first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, many of the Algonquian-speaking peoples living in the Chesapeake Bay area belonged to an alliance of different tribal groups headed by the powerful Indian leader Powhatan. By the end of the seventeenth century, intermittent warfare between Virginia Algonquians and English settlers had resulted in the destruction of Powhatan’s confederacy, substantial loss in land and population, and the confinement of the few remaining Algonquians to reservations. Kathleen Brown’s article focuses on early Algonquian-English relations.

Recent scholarship has improved our understanding of the relationship between English settlers and Indians during the early seventeenth century. We know, for instance, that English expectations about American Indians were conditioned by Spanish conquest literature, their own contact with the Gaelic Irish, elite perceptions of the lower classes, and obligations to bring Christianity to those they believed to be in darkness.¹

Largely unacknowledged by historians, gender roles and identities also played an important role in shaping English and Indian interactions. Accompanied by few English women, English male adventurers to Roanoake and Jamestown island confronted Indian men and women in their native land. In this cultural encounter, the gender ways, or what some feminist theorists might call the “performances,” of Virginia Algonquians challenged English gentlemen’s assumptions about the naturalness of their own gender identities. This interaction brought exchanges, new cultural forms, created sites of commonality, painful deceptions, bitter misunderstandings, and bloody conflicts.²

Identities as English or Indian were only partially formed at the beginning of this meeting of cultures; it required the daily presence of an “other” to crystallize self-conscious articulations of group identity. In contrast, maleness and femaleness within each culture provided explicit and deep-rooted foundations for individual identity and the organization of social relations. In both Indian and English societies, differences between men and women were critical to social order. Ethnic identities formed along this “gender frontier,” the site of creative and destructive processes resulting from the confrontations of culturally-specific manhoods and womanhoods. In the emerging Anglo-Indian struggle, gender symbols and social relations signified claims to power. Never an absolute barrier, however, the gender frontier also produced sources for new identities and social practices.³

In this essay, I explore in two ways the gender frontier that evolved between English settlers and the indigenous peoples of Virginia’s tidewater. First, I assess how differences in gender roles shaped the perceptions and interactions of both groups. Second, I analyze the “gendering” of the emerging Anglo-Indian power struggle. While the English depicted themselves as warriors dominating a feminized native population, Indian women and men initially refused to acknowledge claims to military supremacy, treating the foreigners as they would subject peoples, cowards, or servants. When English warrior discourse became unavoidable, however, Indian women and men attempted to exploit what they saw as the warrior’s obvious dependence upon others for the agricultural and reproductive services that ensured group survival.

The indigenous peoples who engaged in this struggle were residents of Virginia’s coastal plain, a region of fields, forests, and winding rivers that extended from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay to the mountains and waterfalls near present-day Richmond. Many were affiliated with Powhatan, the werowance who had consolidated several distinct groups under his influence at the time of contact with the English.⁴ Most were Algonquian-speakers whose distant cultural roots in the Northeast distinguished them from peoples further south and west where native economies depended more on agriculture and less on hunting and fishing.⁵ Although culturally diverse, tidewater inhabitants shared certain features of social organization, commonalities that may have become more pronounced with Powhatan’s ambitious chiefdom-building and the arrival of the English.

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Of the various relationships constituting social order in England, those between men and women were among the most contested at the time the English set sail for Virginia in 1607. Accompanied by few women before 1620, male settlers left behind a pamphlet debate about the nature of the sexes and a rising concern about the activities of disorderly women. The gender hierarchy the English viewed as “natural” and “God-given” was in fact fraying at the edges. Male pamphleteers argued vigorously for male dominance over women as crucial to maintaining orderly households and communities. The relationship between men and women provided authors with an accessible metaphor with which to communicate the power inequities of abstract political relationships such as that of the monarch to the people, or that of the gentry to the lower orders.⁶ By the late sixteenth century, as English attempts to subdue Ireland became increasingly violent and as hopes for a profitable West African trade dimmed, gender figured increasingly in English colonial discourses.⁷

English gender differences manifested themselves in primary responsibilities and arenas of activity, relationships to property, ideals for conduct, and social identities. Using plow agriculture, rural Englishmen cultivated grain while women oversaw household production, including gardening, dairying, brewing, and spinning. Women also constituted a flexible reserve labor force, performing agricultural work when demand for labor was high, as at harvest time. While Englishmen’s property ownership formed the basis of their political existence and identity, most women did not own property until they were no longer subject to a father or husband.⁸

By the early seventeenth century, advice-book authors enjoined English women to concern themselves with the conservation of estates rather than with production. Women were also advised to maintain a modest demeanor. Publicly punishing shrewish and sexually aggressive women, communities enforced this standard of wifely submission as ideal and of wifely domination as intolerable.⁹ The sexual activity of poor and unmarried women proved particularly threatening to community order; these “nasty wenches” provided pamphleteers with a foil for the “good wives” female readers were urged to emulate.¹⁰

How did one know an English good wife when one saw one? Her body and head would be modestly covered. The tools of her work, such as the skimming ladle used in dairying, the distaff of the spinning wheel, and the butter churn reflected her domestic production. When affixed to a man, as in community-initiated shaming rituals, these gender symbols communicated his fall from “natural” dominance and his wife’s unnatural authority over him.¹¹

Advice-book authors described men’s “natural” domain as one of authority derived from his primary economic role. A man’s economic assertiveness, mirrored in his authority over wife, child and servant, was emblematized by the plow’s penetration of the earth, the master craftsman’s ability to shape his raw materials, and the rider’s ability to subdue his horse. Although hunting and fishing supplemented the incomes of many Englishmen, formal group hunts—occasions in which associations with manual labor and economic gain had been carefully erased—remained the preserve of the aristocracy and upper gentry.

The divide between men’s and women’s activities described by sixteenth-and seventeenth-century authors did not capture the flexibility of gender relations in most English communities. Beliefs in male authority over women and in the primacy of men’s economic activities sustained a perception of social order even as women marketed butter, cheese and ale, and cuckolded unlucky husbands.

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Gender roles and identities were also important to the Algonquian speakers whom the English encountered along the three major tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. Like indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, Virginia Algonquians invoked a divine division of labor to explain and justify differences between men’s and women’s roles on earth. A virile warrior god and a congenial female hostess provided divine examples for the work appropriate to human men and women.¹² Indian women’s labor centered on cultivating and processing corn, which provided up to seventy-five percent of the calories consumed by residents of the coastal plain.¹³ Women also grew squash, peas, and beans, fashioned bedding, baskets, and domestic tools, and turned animal skins into clothing and household items. They may even have built the houses of semi-permanent summer villages and itinerant winter camps. Bearing and raising children and mourning the dead rounded out the range of female duties. All were spiritually united by life-giving and its association with earth and agricultural production, sexuality and reproduction. Lineage wealth and political power passed through the female line, perhaps because of women’s crucial role in producing and maintaining property. Among certain peoples, women may also have had the power to determine the fate of captives, the nugget of truth in the much-embellished tale of Pocahontas’s intervention on behalf of Captain John Smith.¹⁴

Indian women were responsible not only for reproducing the traditional features of their culture, but for much of its adaptive capacity as well. As agriculturalists, women must have had great influence over decisions to move to new grounds, to leave old grounds fallow, and to initiate planting. As producers and consumers of vital household goods and implements, women may have been among the first to feel the impact of new technologies, commodities, and trade. And as accumulators of lineage property, Indian women may have been forced to change strategies as subsistence opportunities shifted.

Indian men assumed a range of responsibilities that complemented those of women. Men cleared new planting grounds by cutting trees and burning stumps. They fished and hunted for game, providing highly valued protein. After the last corn harvest, whole villages traveled with their hunters to provide support services throughout the winter. Men’s pursuit of game shaped the rhythms of village life during these cold months, just as women’s cultivation of crops determined feasts and the allocation of labor during the late spring and summer. By ritually separating themselves from women through sexual abstinence, hunters periodically became warriors, taking revenge for killings or initiating their own raids. This adult leave-taking rearticulated the huskanaw, the coming of age ritual in which young boys left their mothers’ homes to become men.¹⁵

Men’s hunting and fighting roles were associated with life-taking, with its ironic relationship to the life-sustaining acts of procreation, protection and provision. Earth and corn symbolized women, but the weapons of the hunt, the trophies taken from the hunted, and the predators of the animal world represented men. The ritual use of pocones, a red dye, also reflected this gender division. Women anointed their bodies with pocones before sexual encounters and ceremonies celebrating the harvest, while men wore it during hunting, warfare, or at the ritual celebrations of successes in these endeavors.¹⁶

The exigencies of the winter hunt, the value placed on meat, and intermittent warfare among native peoples may have been the foundation of male dominance in politics and religious matters. Women were not without their bases of power in Algonquian society, however; their important roles as agriculturalists, reproducers of Indian culture, and caretakers of lineage property kept gender relations in rough balance. Indian women’s ability to choose spouses motivated men to be “paynefull” in their hunting and fishing. These same men warily avoided female spaces the English labeled “gynaeceum,” in which menstruating women may have gathered. By no means equal to men, whose political and religious decisions directed village life, Indian women were perhaps more powerful in their subordination than English women.¹⁷

Even before the English sailed up the river they renamed the James, however, Indian women’s power may have been waning, eroded by Powhatan’s chiefdom-building tactics. During the last quarter of the sixteenth century, perhaps as a consequence of early Spanish forays into the region, he began to add to his inherited chiefdom, coercing and manipulating other coastal residents into economic and military alliances. Powhatan also subverted the matrilineal transmission of political power by appointing his kinsmen to be werowances of villages recently consolidated into his chief-dom. The central m...