American Indian women and social equality

Significance:American Indian women’s resiliency in the face of two hundred years of role changes and economic oppression caused by white encroachment manifests itself in women’s creative, healing, and renewing power to restore balance.

White colonization and expansion have disrupted American Indian social systems and life patterns and necessitated varied personal and professional responses and adaptations to acculturation, Christianization, and economic change. Of crucial consideration are American Indian women’s dynamism and diversity in terms, for example, of significant tribal variations and the centrality of the spirit world. Even ethnographers have subscribed to stereotypical myths and fantasies that reduce the rich variations to a squaw/princess duality. For these reasons, to improve the understanding of their contemporary experience, a better grasp of their historical context must be achieved.

History

Traditionally, women’s identity as well as their harmonious role in the biological and social spheres as caretakers and culture bearers was grounded in spirituality, extended family, and tribe. Although not all women in all tribes shared equal power and status with men, many western North American tribes, such as the Klamath, rest on egalitarian systems of reciprocity in which separate and complimentary tasks assigned to each sex are equally valued. In the gynocratic tribal world, woman is the creator of existence; thus, the female principle inherent in the earth, minerals, crystals, stones, wood, water, sun, and moon is multitudinous, ever-generating, cyclic, and consistent. The welfare of the young and the complementarity of all life are paramount. Female spirits and mythological figures include the Keres Thought Woman, the Santa Clara Pueblo Clay Lady, the Navajo Changing Women, and the Sioux White Buffalo Calf Woman. Women in legends are honored for their powers of creation and their ability to provide harmony and balance in tribal life.

Roles and tasks are variable and lifestyles flexible enough to allow free sexual expression and nonconformity. For example, women in Plains tribes, such as the Canadian Blackfeet, inhabit a spectrum that includes the significant Sun Dance Woman, the sexually promiscuous woman, the submissive and obedient woman, and the independent and assertive woman. Among the Cheyenne are the daring horse riders. Lakota women participate in the Buffalo Ceremony. Indeed, widespread evidence of the warrior woman exists in Apache, Crow, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, and Pawnee tribes. Also common in at least thirty-three tribes is the berdache, a cross-gender individual. Female berdaches, who may be lesbians, shift to male social and occupational roles, often earning high regard for their boldness, efficiency, status, and wealth.

Also unlike Anglo culture, American Indian women’s status increased with age and the wisdom that comes with it. Especially revered were their opinions on sacred matters, herbal medicines, and tribal history. Tribes in which women of all ages played pivotal economic, political, and spiritual roles include the Cherokee, Montagnais-Naskapi, Navajo, Iroquois, Mandan, Hopi, Zuni, Northern Paiute, and Eastern Pueblo. For these cultures, matrilineal inheritance placed land, crops, houses, and tools in women’s ownership and made men responsible for much of the labor and cultivation. Part of women’s power came from their association with food preparation and its supply. The precolonized Cherokee gynocracy is one example in which tribal decisions were largely influenced by the Women’s Council, the head of which was believed to have an affinity with the Great Spirit. Before the influx of Catholicism, the Naskapi were gynocentric and, like the Huron, peaceful and nonhierarchical: Children and women, like men, were encouraged to be independent and decisive.

Acculturation

Acculturation to the European political, social, and religious order brought an increase in male dominance and control. Changes in traditional economic systems, even within America’s largest Indian tribe (the Navajo), reduced women’s status. Men’s increased off-reservation work created a shift to independent rather than extended families, lessening women’s support network in child rearing and eroding complementarity because men began to see their paychecks as theirs alone.

Another negative effect of white encroachment was the residue of so-called boarding school trauma: domestic labor “education,” beatings for resistance, less classroom instruction for girls than for boys, and eventual shunning for their “white” ways by reservation residents. Accompanied by the Bureau of Indian Affairs field matron program, U.S. government efforts to “civilize” American Indian women into simulations of white women, including application of some Indian New Deal policies, neglected the import of their previous political roles. Nevertheless, women often became acculturated more successfully than men—for example, among the Oglala Sioux and Northern Paiute, women developed expertise as political leaders, landowners, and liaisons. Some also gained access to advanced training in the education and social welfare fields.

Generally, however, adapting to the mainstream has been fraught with conflict, stress, and vulnerability for American Indian women. At issue are the majority culture’s value of a work ethic that emphasizes individual achievement, competitiveness, the accumulation of material wealth, and professional status, and that places family and cultural bonds second at best. These values conflict with the American Indian emphasis on communal concern, extended family responsibility, cooperation, and group-oriented identity. Because American Indian men without college degrees seldom marry college graduates, bicultural conflict for American Indian women desiring postsecondary education is compounded. Nor surprisingly, degree completion rates are low: 18 percent for Indian undergraduates, 1 percent for master’s candidates, and 0.2 percent for doctoral candidates.

Demographics

The pre-Columbian Indian population ranged between twenty and forty-five million; by 1995, this figure was approximately two million, spread across 542 tribes. Among this population, 25 percent of women and 10 percent of men are sterilized without informed consent, life expectancy is fifty-five years and infant mortality is high, as are unemployment and poverty. Fifty percent of homes are female-headed households. The states with the largest American Indian populations are Oklahoma (formerly known as Indian Territory), Arizona, California, and New Mexico. The largest tribes are the Cherokee, the Navajo (which has most successfully preserved its language), the Chippewa (or Ojibwe), the Sioux, and the Choctaw.

Achievements

Many American Indian women are becoming social workers, psychologists, writers, artists, and political leaders dedicated to serving their tribes and communities. These women include Comanche LaDonna Harris, president and director of Americans for Indian Opportunity; Wilma P. Mankiller, former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation; and Laguna JoAnn Sarracino, developer of the Native American Mineral Engineering and Science Program; and contemporary writers who continue to communicate ancient knowledge and to tell the stories of their people and of survival, such as Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Rayna Green, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan,Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahanso, and Roberta Hill Whiteman. Embodying success, autonomy, leadership, confidence, and emotional control, these women have attained professional recognition even as they have sustained cultural heritage and kinship connections, answering the demands of vital tribal needs with their leadership capacity. They contextualize their efforts at cultural preservation and restoration within family, nation, and sacred Mother Earth. Many have endured arrest rather than sacrifice treaty rights or forsake their sacred lands. Consistently redefining identities obscured by misconceptions, American Indian women remain a strong and vital force, perpetuating respect for the past with clear agendas for the future.

Bibliography

Fixico, Donald. The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Nichols, Roger L., ed. The American Indian: Past and Present. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2014. Print.

Rowbotham, Sheila. Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Schaller, K. B. 100+ Native American Women Who Changed the World. Sarasota: Peppertree Press, 2014. Print.

Schmidt, Ethan A. Native Americans in the American Revolution: How the War Divided, Devastated, and Transformed the Early American Indian World. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014. Print.