A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians

Preface

Preface I did not set out to write a book about gender. In fact, I was not particularly interested in the topic at all. What did interest me was trying to understand as much as I possibly could about how Lenape Indians lived their lives around the time that they first encountered people from across the great sea and how that encounter altered their society and the world they knew. Therefore, I began mining archives and published primary sources for anything relating to the Lenapes (or Delawares, as they were subsequently known) written by English, Swedish, Dutch, German, or even French colonists. This is where I met a woman named Notike, a woman who more than anyone else came to change the direction of my research. She appears—so far as I know—in only three documents, and the circumstances of her emergence was a land dispute, ostensibly between Swedish and Dutch colonists concerning land along the west bank of the Delaware River. But her very appearance in these documents unveiled an equally important internal confrontation among Lenapes regarding control over and alienation of land. Clearing the brush surrounding Notike’s intervention in Swedish and Dutch colonial politics forced me to come to grips with issues of gender, and as I did so I discovered that Delaware history, as well as contact history, cannot be told intelligibly without reflecting on gender and its function in human societies. Thus, I stumbled on my subject by chance, or so I thought, caught by the nagging notion that I was observing a picture where one object stood out of place. The problem I had with the picture I was beholding was that it contained only men. Reading Swedish, Dutch, and English sources from the seventeenth century more or less convinced me that a friend of mine was correct when she commented that her people had thought that “the Swedes were a race of only men, as they had to do all the labor of planting themselves.” That the colonists were predominantly male was true of some colonial ventures, although Sweden did indeed encourage (or force) families to emigrate. However, looking at the same sources, the Native populations emerged as equally unbalanced. This of course was not true then or now, and the only reasonable explanations for the absence of women that I could viii Preface find were based on feminist theories regarding the double marginalization of colonized women. As I entered the search for Notike’s story I uncovered more and more women. I became convinced that it was both possible and necessary to write them into history in order for me to be able to envision adequately Delaware experiences in the past. I found that this history was about relationships—relationships between and among women and men, Indians and whites, mortals and divine spirits. This book is my attempt at understanding these relationships. It is an offering to a people who once met with people from my country, fought with them, fed and clothed them, and created links to them, an offering that I hope will demonstrate the necessity of taking Delaware experiences seriously in the endeavor to uncover and interpret the complex web of interactions that led to the growth of the Middle Atlantic colonial world, as well as to the more or less forced removal of a coastal people to places such as Oklahoma and Ontario. ...