In the White Woman's Image?: Resistance, Transformation, and Identity in Recent Native American Women's History

Review Essays In the White Woman's Image?: Resistance, Transformation, and Identity in Recent Native American Women's History Freda Ahenakew and H.C. Wolfart, eds. Our Grandmothers'Lives as Told in Their Own Words. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Fifth House, 1992.408 pp. ISBN 0-920079-81-4 (pb). Janet CampbeU Hale. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. xi + 187 pp. ISBN 0-06-097612-8 (pb). K. Tsianina Lomawaima. They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. xi + 205 pp. ISBN 0-8032-2904-6 (cl). Devon A. Mihesuah. Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. ix + 212 pp. ISBN 0-252-01953-9 (cl). Nancy Shoemaker, ed. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. 234 pp. ISBN 0-41590993 -7 (pb). Carolyn Ross Johnston In February of 1757, AttacuUaculla, a chief of the Cherokees, arrived in South Carolina to negotiate trade agreements with the governor of South Carotina and was shocked to find that no white women were present. Cherokee women regularly advised the councU on matters of war and peace. Finally he asked "since the white man as well as the red was born of woman, did not the white man admit women to their councils?" The governor was taken aback by the question and took two or three days to come up with a response. Evasively he said that "the white men do place confidence in their women and share their councils with them when they know their hearts are good." The Cherokees remained incredulous.1 Just as European women were absent from the trade negotiations in South Carolina, so have Native American women been absent from traditional histories of the United States and even from histories of Native Americans. This essay reviews exciting new research which offers insights into the question: Where are the women? Many of the first studies of native women by anthropologists such as Ruth Landes focused on a universal sexual asymmetry. In the 1970s Michelle Rosaldo contended that separate © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 206 Journal of Women's History Fall spheres for men and women led to nearly universal male dominance. Writing from a Marxist perspective, Eleanor Leacock criticized earUer interpretations, and argued that colonialism and contact between Europeans and native peoples created inequality between the sexes where autonomy had existed. A major interpretive framework in the scholarship on Indian women has been this "declension" of women's power. Nancy Shoemaker points out that recent literature acknowledges that "gender differences were crucially important in Indian cultures for organizing behavior and activities but gender was also flexible and variable."2 The major questions in Indian women's history revolve around whether Indian women lost status and power due to European contact and conquest . What kinds of power did Indian women have before and after European contact? What were the sources of their authority? What were their productive and reproductive roles? What was the impact of U.S. governmental policy on gender roles within tribes? How did Indian women resist, accept, and transform the relentless attempts to eradicate "Indianness"? This essay reviews five recent contributions to the ongoing exploration of these questions. Two works explore the response of Indians to educational institutions which were founded to hasten assimilation into white values: Cultivating the Rosebuds and They Called it Prairie Light. Janet CampbeU Hale's autobiographical work, Bloodlines, explores the heart sickness and anguish she felt growing up as an Indian woman. Ahenakew's and Wolfart's oral histories give us a glimpse of the lives of contemporary elder Indian women, and Nancy Shoemaker's collection of scholarly essays contains ground-breaking articles on Indian women. They all approach the questions of identity, resistance, and transformation of women confronted by those who wanted to change them into the "white woman's image." Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 is a significant contribution to our knowledge of Cherokee women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Devon A...