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4. Indian Teachers
- Louisiana State University Press
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50 4 . Y . Indian Teachers S outheastern indian women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries faced a barrage of change, from warfare and epidemics to new trading networks and growing white settlement, but through it all, they sought to teach their children how to be Cherokee, Catawba, Pamunkey, or Nottoway. Sometimes this meant emphasizing a few basic truths—that men hunted and women farmed, perhaps—but often it meant creating new educational programs that revolved around how a child could best survive in an increasingly white world. Through a marriage of familiar methods of childrearing and a conscious manipulation of the changing world around them, mothers taught their children how to retain a Native outlook on the world while ceaselessly fighting for their health, happiness, and material success. it may seem counterintuitive to highlight continuities in an era of such massive change, but like both white and black mothers, Native women absorbed and manipulated external developments in order to achieve a very basic set of maternal goals. Motherhood may be seen as the ship that weathers all storms— taking on new supplies and crew members, abandoning dead weight, but maintaining a structure that remains fundamentally sound from one shore to the other. as teachers, Cherokee and Catawba mothers held the power to put those continuities into action, to instruct the next generation in the ways of the generation before. These women also understood the importance of incorporating new educational philosophies into their curricula. The mothers who oversaw the education of Native children in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—either at their knees or in distant classrooms—controlled, to some degree, both the identities of their children and the development of their nations . This was no small power. 51 indian teachers ƒ Z % when Native mothers raised their children at home, their educational programs were similar to those of other women in the South: they trained their sons and daughters in gendered behavior, moral sensibilities, and practical skills. within most Native societies, the distinction of gender was one of the key social foundations , and mothers early on distinguished between the educational needs of their sons and those of their daughters. in the eighteenth century, Cherokee and Catawba men and women were still generally understood to be complementary (two sides of a coin) rather than hierarchical (two rungs of a ladder), so mothers typically devoted equal attention to their young sons and daughters, though their lessons proved very different.1 Unlike white mothers in the South, whose attention to both boys and girls challenged a more general social understanding that sons had more value, Native women’s sense of gender equity was largely reinforced by those around them. women enlisted their brothers to teach little boys to make bows and arrows, while young girls trained in agriculture and food preparation. when a Scottish traveler visited a Catawba town in 1798, she first noticed a ten-year-old boy with “a bow & arrow in his hand,” and his four-yearold brother, who had “a pipe in his mouth & was smoking with all the gravity of a Philosopher.”2 These children seemed precocious to the european observer, but to the mother who made sure the boys knew how to shoot and to smoke, they had been well trained in proper masculine behavior and would make fine warriors, council men, or priests. while schooling in the hunt usually took place with the help of an uncle or other male relative, mothers also provided guidance to their young sons struggling to wield a bow and arrow, helping them hone skills that would earn them communal respect. among the Powhatans, “to practize their children in the use of ther bowes and arrowes, the mothers doe not give them their breakfast in the morning before they have hitt a marke which she appoints them to shoot at.” a Powhatan mother would throw a piece of moss, or some other remarkably frail target, into the air and if her son failed to hit it, he went hungry and could try again the following day.3 Cherokee mothers encouraged their sons to play with toy bows and arrows and to learn the game of “hunter and deer.” once the boys grew older, however, they often came under the supervision of their mother’s brother, who would teach them “various formulas for success in hunting and . . . [44.223.94.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:33 GMT) 52 they sprung from a woman love affairs.”4 even after many indian communities...