First Generations, page 8
The degree to which agriculture sustained Native American life on the East Coast varied. In the northernmost regions of what is today Canada, hunting remained central to the Indians’ survival. In southern New England, where women continued the earlier hunting culture’s traditions of setting up and breaking camp and taking home the game killed by males, their planting, harvesting, and foraging actually provided 90 percent of the calories consumed in their villages. In the Middle Atlantic areas, Algonquins of the Iroquois tribes combined farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering in a life geared to the seasons and in settlement patterns geared to the waterways of their region. In the Southeast, as in the middle region, agriculture was the central economic activity, dominated by women, but not without cooperative activity by men and women. Here men helped clear land and plant corn—just as, in the English settlements of the Chesapeake, women joined male family members in the field at planting and harvest time—although women weeded, tended the gardens, gathered the firewood and wild foods, and prepared the meals.
Another captive, Mary Jemison, left a vivid account of women’s labor among the Seneca, the tribe who adopted her and whose life she embraced. Work, she wrote, was not severe, nor were a woman’s chores any more repetitious than the chores that filled a colonial housewife’s days. Household duties were simple and Seneca women, unlike English wives and daughters, were not slaves to the spinning wheel or the needle. In summer, the women went out each morning to the fields, accompanied by their children, to work cooperatively and in the company of friends and relatives, planting and tending the corn, beans, and squash at a pace geared to their individual rhythms and skills rather than to the demands of an overseer. They moved from field to field, completing the same tasks in each before returning to the first.
Women were not simply the agricultural labor force within Indian societies. They controlled the tools of production and, in most cases, the land as well, and they determined the distribution of the food they harvested. Because extra foodstuffs often constituted the only surplus wealth of their societies, women’s control over the underground silos in which crops were stored brought them clear social and political power. For example, men of the Iroquois could not undertake war if Iroquois women refused to unlock the treasury of cornmeal needed to sustain their raiding parties or armies.
Particularly among the Iroquois, woman’s primacy in agriculture appeared to some observers a sign of her primacy in political and social spheres as well. Both contemporaries and historians of this powerful and influential confederation of Indians have gone so far as to call its culture matriarchal. One eighteenth-century French commentator effectively argued the existence of an Iroquois matriarchy. “Nothing,” he wrote, “is more real than this superiority of the women. It is of them that the nation really consists; and it is through them that the nobility of the blood, the genealogical tree and the families are perpetuated, all real authority is vested in them. The land, the fields and their harvest all belong to them … they have charge of the public treasury … the children are their domain.”
Much of what European observers wrote would ring true to Iroquois women and men. Where they might demur would be in the universality of women’s power and the degree to which it was directly wielded. Not all Iroquois women enjoyed the power to distribute public resources. This fell only to matrons or elderly heads of households. Formal and institutionalized political power belonged to these clan matrons as well.
It is the evidence of women’s formal political power, even by a small elite, that was most striking to Europeans. Iroquois matrons nominated the male candidates for chief, and they could initiate a chief’s removal if he did not meet their standards of performance. Thus, Iroquois women served as watchdogs over the behavior of male leaders, much as the Puritan women of New England monitored the righteousness of their ministers. Although no woman could sit in the highest governing body of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Council of Elders, women could address that body through a male speaker designated as their voice in its deliberations.
Women’s political power was thus well established, but its character was more reactive than active on the tribal and confederacy level. Women policed behavioral boundaries, they were a legitimating authority and an interest group to be heeded; but men acted directly on diplomatic and military issues and engaged in the give-and-take of debate, discussion, and the arrival at consensus.
Such distinctions between women’s and men’s political role were honored within all the Algonquin societies, but there were exceptions. Women could, and did, make claim to direct political authority based on a variety of circumstances thought to be more compelling than gender distinctions. Elizabeth I of England no less than Wetamo could make such a case for their leadership. Thus “sunksquaws,” or female political and military leaders, do appear in the historical record. Wetamo is one, and she is joined—at the least—by John Smith’s “Queene of Appamatuck,” mentioned in his first report from Virginia, and by seventeenth-century New England’s Qualapan and Awashonks.
The entire question of women’s relative political power may be misguided. For Europeans, politics and the system of laws governing inheritance and private ownership of land and resources were formal spheres weighted with importance. Centralized states, nationalism and mercantilism, and territorial expansionism enlarged the arena of politics and raised the stakes involved in having access to and wielding political power. Among most of the Algonquin societies, however, such circumstances did not apply. The eighteenth-century Iroquois Confederacy and Powhatan’s seventeenth-century empire-building were exceptions to a rule of limited central authority and limited, sporadic warfare. Raids to avenge the loss of clan members were more common than intertribal war, and these did not demand full-scale mobilization of men or resources. Territorial rights were recognized and protected, but the primary concern of Indian communities was the replication and maintenance of the community rather than growth or acquisition of wealth. Without the engines of private property, a profit-oriented ethos, or expansionism, Indian societies were well served by a politics of daily life. Thus, although political organization within the Middle Atlantic societies extended through five levels—from clan to village to district to tribe to confederacy—the most active and vital area was clan management—and this was a female sphere. Ironically, this local political arena went largely unnoticed by Europeans, who sought their own recognizable counterparts in government and military leadership within the Indian societies. And, as a result, Europeans consistently overestimated the power of chiefs, who governed by consensus rather than by power.
It is clear that women and men shared authority in many of the Algonquin societies. Women’s economic power and their institutionalized role as community leaders and family heads stand in stark contrast to the temporary, informal, and often limited authority of their colonial English counterparts. As New England Puritanism eliminated any possibility of women clerics and silenced female theologians, Iroquois communities continued to include women among their “keepers of the faith” and to celebrate women’s activities and their role as food providers and childbear-ers in religious ceremonies and rites. Such a comparison across cultures tells us much, but neither this nor the calibrations of women’s authority relative to men’s within Algonquin society provides a complete picture of Native American women’s experience in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For this, a closer look at their activities within the community is necessary.
The life of every Indian woman was marked by rituals and ceremonies, many of which focused her attention and the attention of her community upon her biological functions. These rituals both honored and guarded against the powers that women were assumed to have because of their sex. In the cycle of sexual maturation, fertility, menopause, and death, ritual taught women the significance of the intersection between the biological and the social realms. Young Native American girls, like the daughters of the white settlers, spent much of their time in the company of other females. In this setting, a young girl received her vocational training, acquired the skills of cultivation, and learned what activities were appropriate to her sex. Thus, Iroquois girls worked beside their mothers, learning to plant corn and to pound it into meal in a stamping trough or mortar, how to cook, bake bread, and make tumplines and bags. The daughters of colonial New England settlers would recognize the pattern of their own lives in this apprenticeship.
Among all the East Coast societies, the arrival of puberty was marked by ritual for girls as well as for boys. In most communities, girls were isolated during their first menstrual period, but the conditions of this isolation varied. An eighteenth-century observer recorded that a Munsee girl was expected to retire to a hut, where she sat with a “blanket over her head. She is given little to eat, but regularly does with emetics … usually … twelve days … At the end of the time, they bring her back into her home, looking black, grimy and disheveled, because she has been lying around in dust and ashes.” On her return, the young woman was washed, dressed in new clothing, and allowed to reenter her home. For two months she wore a cap that blocked her vision and hid much of her face; at the end of this period, she was declared eligible for marriage.
In many tribes, girls and women were expected to isolate themselves during each monthly menstruation, but again, the degree of isolation varied. Both the patriarchal hunting tribes such as the Ottawa and the agricultural society of the Chickasaw set apart “moon houses” to which menstruating women retreated. The Shawnee and the Mingo allowed women to remain in their houses and prepare food, but did not allow them to eat that food. Despite these differences, it remains clear that Indian cultures believed menstruation signaled a moment of heightened power in women. For some, like the Micmac, that moment was considered dangerous, the blood itself was a “source of pollution,” and even one glance from a menstruating woman could bring illness or bad luck. For all, the power of menstruation deserved attention and cautious ritual control.
Marriage was the most significant rite of passage for most Indian women. It was publicly recognized as a transition, a movement between families and households, from youth to adulthood. As shocked European commentators noted, however, marriage was not expected to be an introduction to sexual intercourse for wife or husband. Premarital sex was permitted in almost all Indian societies, sometimes even before the partners reached puberty. What was not socially acceptable was any public display of emotional attachment, and kissing was unknown until Europeans introduced the practice to the New World. Young couples experimented with sex, but they met at night for that experiment. In daylight hours, neither their expressions nor their actions revealed who their lovers might be.
Courtship, which was a male prerogative or obligation, followed local traditions. In most cases, if a young man wanted to marry he sent intermediaries—a brother, uncle, or parent, depending on his tribe—to ask permission from the parents of his bride-to-be. Occasionally the ritual was more complex. Among the Huron of Ontario, for example, the prospective husband not only asked the parents’ permission, he engaged in an intense final courtship of his lover, improving his appearance by painting his face and showering her with jewelry.
The decision to permit or forbid a marriage was never entirely the right of either the parents or the couple, for marriage joined two clans, not simply two individuals. Important clan members had to be consulted, and sometimes the advice of shamans or religious leaders was sought. No matter how acceptable the clan and its advisors found the suitor to be, women were rarely forced into an undesired marriage.
Like many European couples, Indian couples celebrated their union publicly, with a feast for family, neighbors, and friends. In some patrilineal tribes, no women attended these feasts except the mothers of the couple. In others, the entire community was invited. Before the celebration, it was the custom in many tribes for the couple and their families to exchange gifts, an exchange that symbolized the reciprocal nature of the marriage. In this reciprocity, Indian custom and English diverged. Where one party did pay for the privilege of marriage, among the Tuscarora and Catawba of the Southeast, for example, it was the groom who offered a “bride price” to the family of his new wife.
On the whole, Indian couples came to a marriage through choice and in some measure of equality. And on the whole, they could leave it in the same fashion. Divorce was often simple in its execution, for no complex laws of inheritance or dower encumbered it, no institutional religious sanctions opposed it, women’s dependency did not deter it, nor did the community condemn it. As Father Chrestien Le Clercq observed in his reports on the Micmac: “As they are all equally poor and rich, self-interest never determines their marriages. Also there is never a question of dowry, of property, of inheritance, of a contract, or of a notary who arranges the property of the two parties in case of divorce.”
That divorce was an option did not mean that Indian communities made no effort to ensure a couple’s initial compatibility. The Huron man who courted with necklaces and bracelets and the young woman who accepted his gifts spent several nights together before the marriage ceremony. The purpose was to test whether the suitor’s “kindness is not maintained.” In other communities, such as the Micmac’s, young couples were asked to abstain from sexual relations for the first year of their marriage, so that they could grow fond of each other as “brother and sister,” the closest of relationships within their society. The concern underlying these tests of compatibility was this: if a marriage was best dissolved, it should happen before children were born.
European observers appeared more curious about issues of infidelity and its punishment than divorce itself. Among the Ottawa, a man could renounce his wife and take a new one if he could prove her infidelity. The Illinois permitted a husband to kill an unfaithful wife, but disfigurement was the preferred punishment. Roger Williams argued that among the Narragansett the opposite tactic was taken: the wife’s lover, not the wife, was punished for her adultery.
Emotional responses to marital problems varied. “Love charms,” or besons, were used to hold the affections of a wife or husband in some communities. Most European observers knew of at least one story of suicide by a despairing husband or wife. “Many a one takes her unfaithfulness so to heart,” one commentator noted, “that in the height of his despair he swallows a poisonous root, which generally causes death in two hours, unless an antidote be administered in good time.” On the whole, infidelity was less troubling if the expectation for a lifetime marriage was low. Iroquois and Huron parted easily by mutual consent, and as one Miami husband told a distressed missionary: “My wife and I cannot live in peace together; my neighbour is exactly in the same situation, we have agreed to exchange wives and are all four perfectly well satisfied: now what can be more reasonable.”
The mutuality and reciprocity that informed most Indian attitudes toward marriage were based on the distribution of privileges and rights within the marital household. Women in most patrilineal and matrilineal communities exercised complete control over their households. A wife distributed the fish and game her husband brought home as well as the products of the fields she worked with other women. Her priorities and her discretion often appear absolute. As one European observed: “If his wife longs for meat, and gives him a hint of it, the husband goes out early in the morning without victuals and seldom returns without some game, should he even be obliged to stay out till late in the evening … She may then do what she pleases with it. He says nothing, if she even gives the greatest part of it to her friends, which is a very common custom.”
While issues of property and inheritance formed the core of English marital law and influenced even the most intimate aspects of marital life, these issues appear to have been absent or muted within Indian societies. Among the Delaware, or so one observer recorded, the personal possessions of a husband or wife did not remain within the family upon their death. Instead, friends came, divided the belongings, and quickly distributed them among their own friends. Nothing was kept by this inner circle, no matter what its worth, for the Delaware preferred to forget rather than retain mementos of the dead. Anything the husband had given his wife during his lifetime, however, remained hers. In order to ensure that property was not redistributed to others, therefore, husbands and wives tended to pool their wealth during the marriage.
The rules regarding custody of children, like those regarding property, rarely required elaborate manipulation or modification. Since, in most Algonquin communities, children were members of the mother’s clan, they remained with her if the marriage dissolved. Because there are so few cases in which the Indian speaks for herself, we cannot know the emotional meaning of marriage to her or to her husband. We do know that marriage did not provide a woman with a second, essential dependency relationship, as she moved from the care of her father to the keeping of her husband. It was not the exclusive setting in which she could raise her children or give them legitimacy. It did not mark her introduction to sexual relationships nor was it the only public ritual that marked recognition of adulthood. Marriages appeared, on the whole, to be a means of establishing a sustaining companionship—material and emotional—between two adults, sometimes on a temporary basis, sometimes for a lifetime. Companionship and economic cooperation seemed to be the raison d’être of the short-term marriages that lasted only as long as a hunting expedition. Companionship also seemed to guide the custom of sexual abstinence in the first year of marriage, as a woman and man developed ties suited to siblings before they continued the more difficult relationship of lovers. Perhaps an interpretation that stresses companionship and mutuality helps us understand Wetamo’s marital pattern, as she joined with and parted from men whose perspective on politics and war meshed with and then diverged from her own. That there were other critical factors is undeniable but less easily deduced.
