Power is understood to be manifested in a multiplicity of ways: through cosmology, economic control, and formal hierarchy. In the Native societies examined, power is continually created and redefined through individual life stages and through the history of the society. The important issue is autonomy - whether, or to what extent, individuals are autonomous in living their lives. Each author demonstrates that women in a particular cultural area of aboriginal North America had (and have) more power than many previous observers have claimed.
Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,7 (A-), Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Institute for American Studies), course: Native American Indian Stimulations and Philosophies, 32 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: When Europeans first set foot on the new continent they discovered that it had al-ready been settled. At some point ethnographers became interested in those aborigi-nal cultures. They intended to "cultivate" the "savages". During those times hardly anyone was interested, let alone wrote about Native American women and the not unimportant part they played in this unknown culture. If women were mentioned at all, only their duties in the household were described. It is exactly this lack of interest that today makes it hard to get valid information about the life of Native American women at that time. This ignorance caused the white society to form a distorted picture, where the role of American Indian women matched the rather passive one white women had in their own society. They did not comprehend the importance the family represented as the central institution of society, nor the part women played outside the family, or the freedom they had and the rules they needed to obey. It was only in the 1920s, when the image of the "vanishing race" was created, that more material was collected about American Indian women. Stereotypes developed, because the information about America's indigenous peo-ples was presented to us by a third person. This "medium" described the object of interest in his or her own Euro-centric terms and with a certain intention, in this case the want for the land the Natives inhabited. Then the information got generalized and eventually produced an image that mostly had nothing to do with the original object. The question therefore is: "How did and do Native women, along with others, cre-ate Native America?" (Klein & Ackerman: 3)
Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans. Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles. Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.
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.
As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures. Yet attempts to find current role models in these historical figures sometimes distort and oversimplify the historical realities. This book provides an objective, comprehensive study of Native American women-men and men-women across many tribal cultures and an extended time span. Sabine Lang explores such topics as their religious and secular roles; the relation of the roles of women-men and men-women to the roles of women and men in their respective societies; the ways in which gender-role change was carried out, legitimized, and explained in Native American cultures; the widely differing attitudes toward women-men and men-women in tribal cultures; and the role of these figures in Native mythology. Lang's findings challenge the apparent gender equality of the "berdache" institution, as well as the supposed universality of concepts such as homosexuality.
This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.
Theda Perdue examines the roles and responsibilities of Cherokee women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of intense cultural change. While building on the research of earlier historians, she develops a uniquely complex view of the effects of contact on Native gender relations, arguing that Cherokee conceptions of gender persisted long after contact. Maintaining traditional gender roles actually allowed Cherokee women and men to adapt to new circumstances and adopt new industries and practices.
"American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies, including at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries-removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands-forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society."--Back cover.
