Locating Women in Male-Authored Archives: Catharine Brown, Cherokee Women, and the ABCFM Papers

As a scholar whose passion is women’s writing, I find that working with Native writings in early America can seem a rather relentlessly masculinist enterprise. In my research into Cherokee materials of the 1810s through 1830s, I sometimes feel, frankly, put off by the cacophony of male voices echoing through the pages of the archives. This masculine dominance in the written materials should not surprise me, since we know that women had less access to literacy and publication during this period and that women’s written texts, often labeled private, were frequently not perceived as significant enough to deposit or maintain in archives. Factors surrounding the documentary record of Native peoples compound these problems. Usually penned by Euro-American men, written materials reflect their authors’ often inaccurate understandings of Native cultures and gender roles. Many scholars lack the deep knowledge of Native social, cultural, and political histories to make meaning of the traces Native people—especially women—have left in written archives. They also lack the training to engage with Native-produced “texts,” broadly defined. Although current scholars are rapidly verifying the existence of a long and rich tradition of Native writing, they have so far uncovered only a few Native women who wrote in English in the colonial or early republican periods.¹

Yet I am still somehow surprised that even with my abiding devotion to women’s writing, I find myself working with the writings of so many men. I have spoken with other early Americanists who voiced similar feelings: they began their graduate studies interested in working with women’s writings, but as their research trajectories developed and they pursued Native studies, they found themselves working more and more with male-authored texts. In my case, I was initially led to Cherokee materials by women’s writings: the letters of Harriett Gold and her four sisters, which form a substantial portion of my first book, an edition of manuscript materials entitled To Marry An Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (2005). The Gold sisters debated Harriett’s decision to marry Elias Boudinot, who went on to become a controversial Cherokee political figure and editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, in a series of eloquent and heartfelt letters spanning several months during the familial and community upheaval occasioned by the betrothal announcement. While I recognized the importance of Elias Boudinot’s personal letters, which I also included in the volume, I felt and still feel that one of the most important contributions of that book is to the field of women’s writing through the recovery of the Gold sisters’ extraordinary letters. Despite my personal clarity on that point, I watched with some degree of chagrin as reviews focused almost exclusively on the contribution the book made to scholarship on Boudinot.

As I pursue additional research projects on Cherokee materials from the pre-removal period, I continue to struggle with the question of how to remain centered on women’s experiences, perspectives, and writings in my work. Staying focused on Native women presents difficult dilemmas, in large part due to the sparse documentary record. In “Native Women Writing: Reading Between the Lines,” Hilary E. Wyss thoughtfully explores “early Native women’s fraught connection to textuality” and speculates about the reasons behind the paucity of documents written by women in archives of early Native writings.² My essay takes one of her hypotheses—that early Native women did produce a “body of work” but “scholars simply haven’t found it yet”—and pushes it further (p. 122). What methods and interpretive strategies do we need to develop in order to engage with Native women’s writing in archives that overwhelmingly showcase men’s voices and perspectives?

In this essay, against the background I have traced here, I will briefly examine the challenges as well as the opportunities inherent in attempting to foreground Cherokee women while working with an archive of writings produced largely by Euro-American men. The archive that I address is that of a missionary organization, the American Board...