Circular Taxonomies: Regulating European and American Women through Representations of North American Indian Women

In eighteenth-century accounts of Indigenous North American cultures, the socially mediated European female body was imported as a prescriptive model for the construction of the public identity of the Native American woman. Not surprisingly, presumed prediscursive notions of feminine weakness (physical, intellectual, sexual, and spiritual) inform European accounts of and policy toward the physical bodies, social roles, and cultural organizations of Indigenous North American women as their racialized female identity was articulated as a negative space. What is perhaps more surprising are the ways in which this negative space was then used to further define and regulate European femininity.¹ The created idea of the Indigenous woman became a means to coerce European women into accepting acquiescent and subordinating models of identity and behavior, given that even supposed savages were reported to recognize them as natural. This circular taxonomy of femininity is an important dialogue between the old and new worlds, where a scale of relative liminality undermines by comparison women in either culture who act outside of their prescribed identities and roles.

As Joan Wallach Scott has argued, "Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based upon perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power" (42). In eighteenth-century Europe, the formalized domestic relationship of marriage functioned as the physical and social embodiment of those hierarchical gendered relationships. As might be expected, colonial accounts of North American Indian life take a particular interest in the domestic arrangements of the people they describe. The discursive implications of the accounts of these arrangements are the focus of this essay, which assesses the strategy and consequence of attempts to naturalize and universalize European constructions of gender, hierarchy, and domesticity in such a way that North American Indian women performed a double duty of repression as either humiliated failures or examples of quaintly natural femininity. The accounts not only affirm the European constructions but offer a mechanism to enforce them in both their original European contexts and the North American context upon which they are imposed explicitly through public policy and conversion efforts, and implicitly through the rhetoric of accounts written for European audiences. Through these mechanisms, a woman of either race who chooses not to subscribe to the determinist femininity so inscribed is not merely unfeminine, but savage, unable to meet even the most basic, presumptively innate standards of human civility.

While Gordon Sayre's analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and English reports of North America asserts that the colonial accounts reveal a conscious interrogation of the Europeans' own values and customs, I am more inclined to agree with the conclusions reached by John and Jean Comaroff in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, despite their focus on nineteenth-century Africa rather than North America. Comaroff and Comaroff argue not for conscious examination of the culture that demanded all the world's emulation, but for a process to manage those abroad and at home who might be so unruly as to question patriarchal and capitalist European values. And though their study emphasizes the effects of colonialism on the economic rather than gendered Other in Europe, their conclusion suits remarkably well the circular taxonomy that controlled women on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century:

Cultural colonialism, in short, was also a reflexive process whereby "others" abroad, the objects of the civilizing mission, were put to the purposes of reconstructing the "other" back home. . . . If anything is to be learned from this, it is that colonialism was as much about making the center as it was about making the periphery. The colony was not a mere extension of the modern world. It was part of what made the world modern in the first place.

(293)

In policy and practice, colonial and church administrations imposed a vision of idealized European domesticity and femininity on Indigenous communities. In the concurrent creation of the image of the Indigenous North American woman through colonial contact narratives, reporters turned that already altered Indigenous woman into a corrective for the messy actuality of...