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Chapter  Gendered Encounters In , Theyanoguin employed a gendered slur to chastise the British for their tardiness in confronting the French threat. Deriding Britain’s past military performance “which was a shame and a scandal,” he drew on sexualized imagery to criticize them further: “look at the French, they are Men, they are fortifying everywhere—but, we are ashamed to say it, you are all like women bare and open without any fortifications.” Two years later William Johnson returned the insult when seeking to shame warriors out of neutrality and onto the battlefield; he accused them of behaving “more like fearfull and silly women than brave and honest men.” Sharing a mutual appreciation of warfare as an inherently masculine pursuit, both sides resorted to gendered taunts to evaluate each other’s manly performance, to justify their own position, or to coerce the behavior of the other. Iroquois clan matrons, however, had no intention of allowing Johnson to consider them “fearful” or “silly.” As Canaghquiesa informed him, women were held in “Much Estimation Amongst Us” because “we proceed from them, and they provide our Warriors with Provisions when they go abroad.” In public Johnson acknowledged women’s political role, but privately he advised officials not to invite women to conferences as it “is only expensive, and troublesome and not the least Service [for] they have nothing to Say.”1 As these varied exchanges reveal, the Iroquois and British, throughout the s and s, encountered one another upon a gendered terrain where ideas about gender roles and relations, sexuality, and kinship shaped the content and meaning of their interactions. Both sides carried with them partially overlapping but nonetheless distinct gendered attitudes and practices. Both sides drew on the language of gender to assign roles and responsibilities, as well as to impose or resist domination. At times their gender systems provided a meeting point where both sides could acknowledge their essential 114 Chapter 4 similitude. Yet more often than not, gender remained a contested arena in which competing ideas about the division of labor, allocation of power, and nature of hierarchy collided. During the Seven Years’ War, protracted involvement with the British Empire imposed new strains on Iroquois gender roles, which, while not insurmountable, still proved onerous. In a conference with the Six Nations, during King George’s War, Governor George Clinton decried the “unmanly Murders” committed on New England frontiers by French soldiers and their Indian allies. He disapproved of the use of surprise raids, describing the “custom of murdering private People by Sculking Indians” as “inhumane.” By adopting Indian modes of warfare the French had proved themselves to be cowardly. Rather than face the British army in open battle, “they dare not look them in the face in day light.” Instead “like thieves” they “steal upon people who do not expect them in the night.” He hoped that the French would end the war or at least continue it “in a manly manner and after the Manner of Christians.” By contrast, he argued, the British had “acted like Men of Courage” because “they do not attack poor Farmers at their Labour but boldly attempted the Reduction of Louisbourg.” Clinton ended his diatribe against the “unmanly” methods of Indian warfare by paradoxically appealing to the New York Iroquois to employ identical tactics against the French. Whatever reservations he had about Indian warrior masculinity, Clinton recognized its utility.2 The governor’s exchange with the Iroquois is indicative of the general ambivalence Euro-Americans demonstrated toward Indian manhood. Imperialists and colonists alike acknowledged the martial character of Iroquois men. The brutal warfare waged by the Iroquois against western Indians and their French allies during the seventeenth century cemented such a reputation . They were, according to one colonist, “the most warlike people in North America.” Given that European culture celebrated the virtues of brave and heroic soldiers, Iroquois warrior masculinity had the potential to elicit comparable commendation. Cadwallader Colden, in one of the first histories written on the Five Nations, praised the image of the virile warrior for having “manfully fought” in past conflicts.3 But others were not so sure. Some denounced Iroquois methods of warfare that included ritualized torture, cannibalism , and scalping, forms of violence generally abhorred by Europeans. The Iroquois also relied on the guerrilla-style tactics of small-scale surprise assaults, which stood in stark contrast to European large-scale open battles and the use of heavy artillery.4 Warfare was only manly, some held, if con- [18.191.46.36...

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