Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (review)

Research and writing about American Indian women in the colonial period is a challenging task. European documentary sources rarely discuss Native women directly except in biased, often derogatory ways, and the written evidentiary data are scattered far and wide in published and archival collections. This shortage of evidence can be overcome using ethnohistorical methodology to incorporate archeological data, anthropological theory, and Indian oral traditions, languages, and perspectives. Just as American history can no longer be written without paying attention to women, to ignore Native women and gender roles in writing the histories of Indian people due to an alleged lack of sources is an omission that can no longer be tolerated. Indian women experienced life differently than their male counterparts, sometimes even speaking their own female-only dialect, and their roles and perspectives in cultural change and persistence need to be better understood. Still, monographs focusing on Indian women's history have only recently begun to appear. Book-length attention to southeastern Indian women, for example, is a relatively recent phenomenon with books on Cherokee women by Devon Mihesuah (1993), Wilma Mankiller (1993), Sarah Hill (1997), Theda Perdue (1998), and Carolyn Johnston (2003) being the sole representatives in the field. Michelene Pesantubbee's new book on Choctaw women during the colonial era addresses the need in this literature to consider the experiences of non-Cherokee women in the South.

Pesantubbee, a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa and of Choctaw descent, employs a traditional scholarly approach to her history of Choctaw women. The book begins with brief descriptions of how the Choctaws settled in central Mississippi based on published accounts of Choctaw origin stories. After establishing the broad cultural parameters of the role of women within Choctaw society, Pesantubbee then supplies a chronological narrative that emphasizes Choctaw interaction with Europeans, especially the French. Most of this narrative can be found in other histories of the Choctaws as Pesantubbee focuses on the wars, trade, and diplomacy that characterize that intercultural relationship. The author places a greater emphasis on the role of French Catholic missionaries among Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley than many other scholars, but she does not identify any specific Catholic impact on the Choctaws beyond her supposition that the differing gender expectations of missionaries and Indians "no doubt had an impact on how Choctaw society perceived and treated women" (85). That impact on Choctaw women, Pesantubbee argues, was inherently negative. There is little dispute that European diseases, the British-sponsored Indian slave trade of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the deerskin trade of the entire eighteenth century forced Choctaws and other southeastern Indians to reconfigure various aspects of their cultures and societies. To say that change was automatically harmful or that Choctaws were incapable of resisting it, however, portrays Choctaws as only victims in a story that is actually much more complicated.

Although the book is centered on the thesis that frequent contact with Europeans dramatically altered Choctaw women's lives in a damaging way, Pesantubbee offers few solid examples. Her primary evidence is that there were fewer "beloved women" among the Choctaws by the late eighteenth century than there had been at the start of that century, and that this development shows that women were not held in as high esteem by Choctaw men as they had been previously. A common feature of southeastern Indian societies, beloved women were highly respected and played important roles in spiritual matters, politics, diplomacy, war, and peace. But their scarcity in even the early French records suggests either that this aspect of Choctaw society always remained hidden from European observers or that it was never a key feature of Choctaw society. The book only seriously considers sources from the French period in the lower South (until 1763), while failing to pay adequate attention to the voluminous British...