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Revisiting Gender in Iroquoia Jan V. Noel Although the unusual authority of women among the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) has been acknowledged by various observers over the centuries, others have raised doubts. Of late, however, aboriginal, feminist, and environmental movements are leading to fresh scrutiny of Haudenosaunee accomplishments. New work by aboriginal and other scholars reasserts a truly unusual gender balance in the political organization of the Haudenosaunee in eighteenth-century settlements in northern New York and their kin living at the Catholic mission near Montreal. This was attended by a remarkably equitable distribution of wealth, including the food and shelter that were primarily provided by women. There is also growing evidence that female elders and clan mothers carried maternal responsibilities well beyond supervision of the longhouses and fields that stood in the “clearings.” Not only were they involved in choosing and deposing chiefs; there is also considerable evidence that some served as active councilors and diplomats in ways that affected major decisions about land, war, and relations with neighboring peoples. By extending female agency to the councils of state, the Haudenosaunee created an illuminating model of what governance can mean in a society without patriarchy. For those who are curious about gender among North America’s First Nations, one group has caused fascination across the centuries. Among explorers, officers, missionaries, and the scholars who came in their wake, views have varied about precisely how much authority Iroquoian matrons or clan mothers possessed .1 The twenty-first century brings developments that will interest all those who follow this debate. There are now major revisionist works on the subject , from a scholar who is herself Iroquois (or to use the indigenous term, Haudenosaunee) who asserts that conventional scholarship is freighted with patriarchal assumptions; and from a French Canadian anthropologist.2 There are language issues here: perhaps because some recent analysis is written in French and some makes extensive use of oral traditions, fresh perspectives have not received the reviews or critical attention they deserve. What does twenty-first century scholarship contribute to the debate about whether the Haudenosaunee (who assigned quite different tasks to men and women) still managed to develop a gender balance that few, if any, other societies have attained? This essay discusses new Revisiting Gender in Iroquoia 55 scholarship in tandem with classic studies of eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee settlements in southern Canada and northern New York. It presents evidence that those regions were home to a very rare phenomenon: a nonpatriarchal society based on a genuine equilibrium in the prestige, rights, and responsibilities of women and men. Moving beyond Binaries This essay presents evidence that it was quite normal for Haudenosaunee women to venture beyond the villages to assume roles in the politics, diplomacy, warfare, and trade of their people. Theirs was not the confining position that so many societies across time and space have assigned to females of caring for the young in obscurity and perhaps influencing village life through gossip or pleading, while male public figures monopolized broader horizons and bigger decisions. We shall see that the timeworn binaries of public versus private, forest versus clearings, and direct versus indirect political influence are all faulty ways of conceiving Iroquois gender. It has long been recognized that something unusual was afoot in Iroquoia. The men supplied renowned warriors and chiefs at all levels within the League of the Five (later Six) Nations. Nonetheless, father was not “master of the house,” nor was he the family’s sole political representative. Haudenosaunee matrons or clan mothers spoke up in councils, and they alone directed the longhouses in which villagers of both sexes dwelt. The classic formulation is that the “clearings” (the village and outlying fields) were the domain of women, the “forests” (hunting , warfare, external diplomacy) the domain of men. Nancy Shoemaker, for example, in an insightful 1991 article entitled “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women”3 documented that in the Seneca Nation women retained unusual rights over land, property, and marriage all through the nineteenth century, issuing challenges to patriarchal property systems such as their 1849 assertion that “we women have an equal right to our annuities with the men, and with the chiefs.”4 Nonetheless, influenced by the work of Elisabeth Tooker, Shoemaker relegated them to a stereotypical “sphere,” supposing that, “in the language of women’s history , Iroquois women probably had more influence in the private sphere than in the public.” She went on to assert that “Iroquois women acquired their...

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