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       ?     Gg In  a party of Spaniards led by Hernando De Soto came upon a band of Indians in a place that is now called South Carolina. The European leader called for an audience with his local counterpart and set out ‘‘rest seats’’ for the headmen of the two peoples. The natives obliged, and soon a canopied boat appeared, bearing the leader of the nation of Catawba. The European explorers were startled to discover that the authoritative personage seated on that New World throne was a woman. She was designated in the colonial record as the ‘‘mistress of the town.’’1 Just two years later and over three thousand miles away, emissaries of the Spanish Crown disembarked near Point Concepción in a land they would call Alta California. They were greeted and fêted by an elderly female chief of the Chumash tribe, said to command the loyalty of sixteen Indian villages. The tiny band of Iberian sailors may have been prepared for this reception for they had doubtless heard tell that the land mass to the west of North America was an island ruled by an Amazon queen named Calafia.2 When Englishmen decamped along the Chesapeake nearly a century later, they conferred the title ‘‘queen’’ on the leaders of several Algonquian villages.3 Scraps of evidence such as these suggest that the first encounter of the peoples separated for millennia by the Atlantic Ocean was an epochal crossroads of gender.The encounter might even be imagined as a face-off between the dominant men of Europe against powerful women native to America. Scholarly prudence would dictate a retreat from such sensationalistic readings of the past, with a warning that such reports are scarce, partial, biased, and forever shrouded in mystery.Yet ethnohistorians, archaeologists, and Indian scholars have assiduously uncovered abundant evidence with which to demonstrate that the cultures native to America in the sixteenth century ‘‘did gender’’ in ways that would mystify European explorers. The first objective of this chapter is to describe how each axis of gender differentiation—asymmetry , the relations of the sexes, and hierarchy—was performed in myriad, unique ways across the wide landscape of North America five hundred years ago. Although not sufficient to create an exact and uniform model of primordial American gender, this fragmentary record is revealing enough to dispel the assumption that the differences between the sexes are timeless, predictable , and universal. The account of native gender practices that occupies the first half of this chapter will also serve as the background for a second investigation : how did mutual misunderstanding about the meaning of male and female affect the outcome of the confrontation between Europeans and American Indians? Not the least of these miscues concerned the distribution of power between the sexes: where Europeans saw kings and their subjects, Native Americans saw clan mothers and clan fathers. Though this chapter does not pretend to solve the quandaries of gender on the eve of European colonization, it will demonstrate that the differentiation of man from woman is a mystery of great consequence, something to wonder about and learn from as we strain to make sense of our history and our lives. g Just the first order of business is an impossibly tall one: to distill from the multiple and diverse cultures of pre-Columbian America some coherent representation of their highly complex and varied gender practices. Contrary to European imaginings of a virgin land inhabited by only a few brave young warriors and nubile Indian princesses, gender in America was a dense and wizened structure, acted out by as many as two thousand different language groups and up to eighteen million people. Together they put a human mark on virtually all the hunting and fishing grounds of North America.With roots in the hemisphere dating back twenty thousand years, Homo sapiens had a tumultuous if unwritten history in North America. Powerful civilizations, particularly in the Mississippi Valley and in the Southwest, had come and gone before the Europeans arrived on the scene. Tribes spread across much of the continent had been cultivating crops, especially maize, for some five thousand years.4 Had De Soto arrived just a few centuries earlier, he might have come upon cities of up to thirty thousand residents in the lower midwest of the continent and discovered the mysteries of massive earthworks in animal shapes near the great rivers of the Mississippi Valley. Had the Spanish entourage arrived more promptly in...

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