Taking the Horizon Path: Keynote at the NWSA in New Orleans, LA, on June 19, 2003

Here we are, gathered under the banner of Women's Studies, at this moment's crossroads of past, present, and future. I come to this place tonight on a path that led me first through the political struggles of women's liberation in the 1970s. And in that struggle we believed that the point of studying women was not just to know about our lives—the point was to change our lives.

We studied ourselves to try to see, unflinching, who we were as women exactly in the matrix of our moment in history, so we could act to liberate ourselves, liberate our sisters! In this crucial year of 2003, I am returning to that question: What is the relationship between the study of women and our liberation, between what knowledge and what action?

Where We Are

But to begin to answer that question, we need to see exactly where we are—right now. Let's swoop up out of our seats like a flock of gulls, fly up into the air, and look down at where we are—down at the tiny convention hall just above the curve of the Mississippi, down at the muddy Mississippi snaking hugely south to the Gulf of Mexico.

We can see lights shining from our hotel hulking on high ground that is part of the old Treme section of town—on a rise in the land that was for centuries the footpath and portage route for local Indian nations between the Mississippi and Bayou St. John—a route of such economic value that colonizing French and Spanish land grants were measured off in relation to its twists and turns. It was that high ground that in the 18th century became the Faubourg Treme, the home neighborhood of the free people of color of New Orleans—the oldest black neighborhood in the United States ("Faubourg Treme" 1995, 34-5).

If we go even higher, we can see the Mississippi pour into the huge bowl of the Gulf of Mexico, we can see how the edge of land curves west to Veracruz, where dirt is the same dark red as that of Georgia, and recurves to the dense green of the Yucatan. We can see where the edge of the Gulf sweeps east past the sugar white sands of Alabama and the Florida panhandle, curving down to Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico.

We can see ourselves at this place where land and water meet, at this crossroads of history, where European colonists—the Spanish and the French, later the English—swept into the lands where indigenous peoples lived, the Chitimache and the Houma, the Ofo and the Biloxi, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Hitchitee, later called Seminole, the Euchee, the Timucua, the Satuniba, the Potano, the Apalachee.

Where We've Been

This is a region where, even into the 19th century, some indigenous nations still lived, in many ways, in pre-class communal societies, where the sexes functioned so equally that the colonizers found it a scandal and a sin (Mann 2000, 188-91). This was a system that one 20th century U.S. historian praised as "economic communism with a retention of individual liberty. . . . where women had a freedom not yet obtained by modern women" (Cotterill 1954, 12, 14).

An 18th century Jesuit missionary inadvertently revealed the complete normality of complexly gendered life within native nations here in his description of females who took on the profession of warrior and males who lived as women in Louisiana, Florida, and the Yucatan. The missionary disapproved—thus making even more emphatic his report that the men felt it was their honor to take on "the garb of women" and "all of women's occupations" (Lafitau 1978, 434).

This was not long ago. In the history of humanity, it's just a couple of hundred years out of our collective 160,000 years of development—so recently was there a different economic system in existence that produced such different relations between the sexes.

And then—the onslaught of the colonizers and the...