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Chapter 7 where are your women?: missing in action Barbara Alice Mann Once the prejudices and purposes of anti-Indian hegemony are exposed from within revisionist history, corporate-controlled media, the academy, literature, and law, it is easy to be unsurprised by how even “Indian studies” might regard the Indigenous female. To speak accurately about American Indian women and their powerful, egalitarian role in Indigenous cultures would bump into a double prejudice of the traditional Eurocentric mind-set—one against “Indians” and the other against women. In this chapter Barbara Mann contrasts the remarkable visibility of Indigenous women with the glaring omission of them in virtually any meaningful discussion about the Indigenous. In most Indigenous cultures, the role of men was to protect the woman’s power to give and nurture life and to maintain community harmony. Women “owned” all but those items men needed for hunting or defense. Even today on reservations throughout the United States, when serious issues face the nation, women often emerge as the primary leaders. Yet even the less hegemonic American Indian Studies programs at the university level tend not to fully address the place of the woman in traditional Indigenous culture. In this shocking exposé, Dr. Mann explains why. Barbara Alice Mann, PhD, lives, teaches, researches, and writes in Ohio, the homeland of her Seneca ancestors for the last fifteen hundred years. She is the author of Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2000) and Native Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds (2003); editor of and contributor to Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (2001); and co-editor and main contributor of Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) (2000). She has also authored numerous journal articles and book chapters, including “Euro-forming the Data” (1985) and “A Sign in the Sky” (1997). She is currently a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Toledo. *** In 1757, the great Cherokee speaker and chief Atagulkalu (Attakullakulla) arrived at a meeting in Charles Town, South Carolina, but he hesitated to conduct business with its all-male European council. Prodded by where are your women? 1 2 1 the Europeans to get busy, he turned impatiently to Governor William Henry Lyttelton and demanded, “But where are your women?”1 This remains a good question for Western commentators, popular and scholarly alike. Women are missing-in-action in nearly all studies of Native America, whether historical, social, or anthropological. I believe this is because westerners are still reacting to the panic that European patriarchs felt upon discovering Turtle Island chock-full of self-directed, articulate, and confident Native women, all demanding to be dealt with as equals. The initial Euro-male horror was frank and obvious in firstcontact records, and, although it might have gone underground in more recent treatments, the recoil remains, skewing discussion. In particular, to reestablish their comfort zone, Euro-American scholars industriously erased women from the memory of Native American cultures, in the same way that they had long since “disappeared” women from their own memory traces. Consequently, in the often fractious discussions of the extent of Native American contributions to modern Euro-American culture, the glaring omission of women continues almost utterly unaddressed. Despite their importance to Native cultures—particularly in the eastern woodlands and the desert Southwest, where women are vital elements of economic, political, social, and spiritual life—they are nowhere to be found in Western discussions. Women’s policies, words, and concerns may loom large on their own cultures’ agendas, and female representatives may hold important, decision-making offices in their own communities, but one is hard-pressed to guess as much from Western discussions of Native America. This being the twenty-first century, it is well past time for scholars to stop treating Native American history as though only men saw, thought, acted, and spoke. Women saw, thought, acted, and spoke, too—and a crying scandal it was to their European interlocutors. In 1632, the Dominican missionary Gabriel Sagard clucked his tongue over the amount of free time Wyandot women enjoyed and positively glowered that, as their own bosses, they used this leisure to feast, party, and gamble.2 Such behaviors put a European woman on the fast track to hell. With the perfect wife of the Bible a perfect slave to her family (see Proverbs 31: 13–27), Christian men “saved” Christian women from Christian hell by leaving them no free time whatsoever, while simultaneously ensuring that they went nowhere on their own. The Wyandot example of...

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