Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN NATIVE AMERICAN SOCIETIES

by

Kristina Maul

1. Introduction 3

2. Concepts of Society 3

2.1 Egalitarian Societies 3
2.2 Matrilineal Societies 4
2.3 Women′s Societies 5

3. Organization of Society 6

3.1 Marriage and Family 6
3.2 Sexuality 7
3.3 Ownership 8
3.4 Hierarchy 9
3.5 Work and Hunt 10

4. Political Power 11

5. Spirituality and Healing 13

6. Cultural Domination 15

7. Women Activism 17

7.1 American Indian Movement (AIM) 17
7.2 Women of All Red Nations (WARN) 18

8. Pocahontas 19

8.1 Historical Facts 19
8.2 Images of Pocahontas 21
8.3 Disney′s Pocahontas 24

8.3.1 The Movie Itself 24
8.3.2 Different Opinions on "Pocahontas" 27

9. Final Remarks 29

10. Bibliography 31

1. Introduction

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)

2. Concepts of Society

2.1 Egalitarian Societies

The belief in egalitarianism and reciprocity is one of the pillars many Native Ameri-can societies are built on. Early researchers, all of them male and from a western background, figured that because women often kept in the background, they could not possibly have any power. "The tendency to fill in this silence with powerlessness is the Western bias" (Klein & Ackerman: 4).
The concept that women and men are equally important in a society was hard, if not impossible to grasp for people in the old world. Every single member of the soci-ety had to fulfill their duty in order to guarantee the tribe′s survival. The male role is in no way superior to the female one and neither can most of those societies be divided into a public sphere as being the males′ and home and family as being the women′s responsibility.
Nevertheless labor was mostly distributed according to gender. Female members of a nation generally had to take care of their home, manage the household and the children, but mostly also took part in tribal councils and not seldom had the right to elect the leader of the tribe. Males were concerned with hunting, warfare and getting in touch with outsiders. "Family" in this context is not defined as "female domain of work", but as "heart of society" (Klein & Ackerman: 14).
As will be seen later there were nations where women took part in the hunt and men were allowed to take over tasks which, from a western point of view, would nor-mally be ascribed to females.
In most cases, if gender was of any importance at all in an indigenous society, the distinction into a stronger and a weaker gender was made by the society itself, not by nature. Often the question of gender was not important. Speakers of the Algonkian language did not even differentiate between male and female through lexical gender, but the distinction that mattered to them was the one between animate and inanimate beings (Kehoe: 120).
It can therefore be said that if male dominance occurred, it was because men had a dominant role in public life, not on the basis of their biological masculinity. Yet a large part of Native American societies were egalitarian and men and women had equal prestige and power.

2.2 Matrilineal Societies

Apart from being egalitarian, most Native Societies also were matrilineal, meaning descent and property was passed down on the distaff side of the family and women had a very high social prestige. If a society was matrilineal, it mostly was also matrilocal, which means that after getting married, the husband moved into the wife′s house and became part of her family and tribal community.
This was practiced for example in the Navajo nation. The women owned the crops as well as the household, in which they lived with their spouse. They also had com-plete sexual freedom, which included the concept that moral character was simply determined by age and not in the least by gender (Shepardson: 159).
The matrilineal organization of a society often derived from practical deliberations, as in the case of the western Eskimos. In this inhospitable area, the husband was busily trying to come up with enough food to save his family from starvation. There-fore he spent a great deal of time away from home and would have had difficulties "controlling" his wife′s actions. It could be assumed that brothers would then have taken over his responsibility and directed his wife. As a matter of fact this did not happen, but men simply did not have a great deal of influence on the domestic life (Guemple: 21).

2.3 Women′s Societies

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