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Chapter Seven The Political Roles of Wyandot Women So far, only men’s positions of authority, male Wyandot political roles, have been discussed. These are more clearly articulated in the primary documents and in the historical literature generally than are the political roles of women. In most of the writings of the Jesuits there are few reasons to believe that Wendat (or any other Aboriginal) women had any strong social or political influence in their societies. However, in Potier’s detailed recording of the people, we have evidence to the contrary, although not much is spelled out for the historical interpreter as to the areas of authority possessed by these women. As we have seen already, Potier recorded the names of the people who, early in 1747, were members of what can be called the elders’ council of the Wyandot. What is key to the discussion in this chapter was that he listed not only who the ‘‘anciens” (male elders) were, as did his Jesuit colleagues, but also who the “anciennes” (female elders) were. In addition to this, Potier presents a great deal about the participation of Wyandot women in the Christian-based rituals he recorded. This tells us a lot about their role in Wyandot society and gives us some social content to add to their names. The words “matriarchy” and “matriarch” will not be used here, which is unfortunately not always the case with discussions of the roles of Iroquoian women. The technical anthropological meaning of these words relates to a political order in which females rule. That was not the case for the Wendat peoples. Women had significant influence (and still do) in Wendat cultures , but they did and do not rule. You likewise certainly cannot call Wendat societies patriarchies, where males rule, are all powerful, because they 171 172 chap ter se v en were not and they are not. The roles of women were and are too important to ignore. Men were the chiefs, but the leading women also had significant influence. In all my reading of the seventy-three volumes of The Jesuit Relations, the annual reports of the Jesuits to their superiors back in France, and in my work with the Huron dictionaries that they wrote, I had never read the word “anciennes” before seeing it in Potier’s elders’ council list. It was always “anciens,” talking about the male elders (see, for example, JR8:144; 10:27, 200, 212, 248, 304, 306; JR28:88). This is typical of Jesuit treatment of the subject of women in Aboriginal culture. As an all-male society, spending most of its time with males in a patriarchal culture, the Jesuits knew little of female authority, of female culture, even in their own society. Of course, the Jesuits were not unique as European male writers in their neglect of female culture in their descriptions of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Aboriginal people. In the previously mentioned work by historian Erik R. Seeman (2010, 154), Death in the New World, he notes that English writer Roger Williams (1603–83) was “blithely unconcerned with Narragansett1 women and children” in his book, A Key into the Language of America (1643). Williams was a minister , an advocate of religious freedom, and one of the writers who can be considered relatively “sympathetic” or “understanding” of Aboriginal peoples; in his case, the Algonquian-speaking Narragansett in the area of his Rhode Island settlement of Providence. However, as a male coming from a patriarchal culture, he could not “see” women with authority. And, as Karen Anderson rightly informs us in the beautifully titled work Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (1991), when they saw socially strong women among the Montagnais (Innu) and Wendat during the seventeenth century, the Jesuits often did what they could to lessen female social strength. In the case of the Jesuits, we can see this neglect of women and female culture in such aspects as the names presented in The Jesuit Relations. There appear to be about 268 Wendat names that they recorded, only thirty-nine of which are female names, or about 15 percent. When the expression for elders is used in their Wendat dictionaries, I have only found “hati,8annens,” meaning “they (masculine) are elders,”2 and “anciens,” meaning “male elders” (see FH1697:13), as in the following: Capitaines, chefs de Conseil [captains, chiefs of council], des Anciens hati8annens (FH1697:30) ga,8annen...les Anciens hati,8annens (HF59:72) [13.59...

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