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116 l WOMEN IN INDIGENOUS AND AFRICAN TRADITIONS Act; First Annual Message to Congress, 8 December 1830” in Patrick Jennings, North American Indian Removal Policy: Andrew Jackson Addresses Congress, http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ ejournal/jackson.htm; Statutes of South Carolina quoted in George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens (1882), 290; John Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (1946), 175; Robert Walker, Torchlights to the Cherokees (1931), 298–299; Nathaniel Willis, Indian Pioneer History Collection [microform], ed. Grant Foreman, (1978–1981); J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indian in the Old South (1981), 148. WOMEN IN AFRICAN CARIBBEAN RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS Dianne M. Stewart THE CARIBBEAN REGION is composed of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, encompassing an extensive archipelago of islands with diverse populations after centuries of conquest, exile, and resettlement. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Europe’s expansion into the Caribbean region occasioned a history of genocide, enslavement , and colonization, bringing together peoples of indigenous, African, European, and Asian descent. With time, the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danes claimed sovereignty over the vast collection of islands that compose the Antilles. The significance of most Caribbean islands to slave economies accounted for the disproportionate number of Africans in virtually each island when compared with dwindling numbers of indigenous people and sparse numbers of Europeans. African women were introduced into the Caribbean for the purpose of breeding enslaved offspring. They were also central to the labor structure on the plantations across the Caribbean. There is ample evidence that women (as did men) began to resist bondage as soon as they were captured. As white men assaulted African women during the Middle Passage, many resisted with devastating consequences; others did so by refusing food and attempting suicide. Enslaved women’s resistance could also be noted throughout the period of slavery. Overall, slave records that document women’s defiance and insubordination in the day-to-day structures of plantation life contest the natural passivity often associated with the female gender. Women were punished more often than men for infractions such as intentional destruction of sugar cane, neglectfulness, and excessive insolence. Moreover, pregnancy did not shield them from undergoing the most brutal forms of punishment, from solitary confinement and iron collars to hand and foot stocks. They also participated in and led insurrections . On the Caribbean plantations, African women endured the double burden of exploitation in terms of their rates of production as enslaved laborers and reproduction , both of which were essential to making Caribbean slave societies profitable. The conditions under which women labored did not change much throughout the period of slavery. For example, enslaved women in seventeenth-century Barbados were compelled to work only two weeks after giving birth. This pattern was still observable in the nineteenth century, the only difference being that the planters allowed for the attendance of an African midwife during childbirth. The experiences and roles of women in the plantation economy varied greatly from island to island and fluctuated in accordance with modifications in labor size and economic stability during various stages of slavery. On many islands, women shouldered the triple burden of carrying out personal domestic duties in addition to field or domestic slave labor, farming their allotted provision grounds, and marketing their produce. Although the maintenance of personal provision grounds and market produce and brutal fieldwork allowed women a certain degree of independence denied to those working in the plantation houses, the enslaved woman was perpetually dispossessed of her liberty to create the most desirable life of meaning and purpose for herself and her children. African Caribbean Religious Traditions In most Caribbean islands Africans outnumbered Europeans from the inception of their arrival as bondspersons . Over the years the gap increased exponentially as slavery became the defining economic institution of the Caribbean. Although under extreme duress and inhumane circumstances, enslaved women and men from a number of West and Central African societies shaped the cultures of the Caribbean. The music, food, art, and dance of the Caribbean as a whole bear indelible traits of African civilizations that are centuries old. In addition , many Caribbean religions have a distinctive African ethos and identity whether historically rooted in emergent slave societies or in postemancipation movements . The aggregation of European, Asian, and African religious traditions in the Caribbean has allowed for sundry religious expressions among people of...

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