Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America

1. “None of the Women Were Abused”: Indigenous Contexts for the Treatment of Women Captives in the Northeast

1 “None of the Women Were Abused” Indigenous Contexts for theTreatment of Women Captives in the Northeast Alice Nash LONG BEFORE THE first New England captives were carried to Canada in the seventeenth century, Wabanaki men took captives in intertribal warfare. A close examination of Wabanaki oral tradition, in conjunction with European travel accounts from the Northeast in the early contact period, suggests that when indigenous women were taken captive by other indigenous people they became wives, concubines, or slaves to their captors, sexually available within culturally defined limits . In contrast, when Englishwomen were taken captive during the intercolonial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all reports indicate that they were never subjected to rape, or sex without consent.1 Even Cotton Mather omitted rape from his litany of the horrors that English captives could expect. In Good Fetch’d Out of Evil (1706) he wrote, “Tis a wonderful Restraint from God upon the Bruitish Salvages, that no English Woman was ever known to have any Violence offered unto her Chastity, by any of them.”2 To reconcile these two scenarios, bear in mind that categories of analysis that seem important to us—including gender and sexuality— embody historically and culturally specific ideas that may actually impede our understanding. The operative category here has less to do with male sexuality or desire than with insider/outsider status, and specifically how outsiders might be incorporated into the group. The complicating factor is colonization. Wabanaki peoples responded to the contingencies of colonization in creative ways that allowed new cul10 tural possibilities to emerge—such as the practice of adopting some Englishwomen taken captive as sisters, a relationship that made them explicitly unavailable to men in their adopted households—without letting go of older ways. This essay is an exploration of the indigenous context of captivity among the eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Northeast, with a narrow focus on Wabanaki peoples in the area known to colonial New Englanders as “the eastern frontier”—a region that encompasses present -day Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and southeastern Quebec . The term “Wabanaki,” meaning “People of the Dawnland,” is used today to designate five linguistically and culturally related tribal groups (Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq). There are important differences, past and present, between them, but to keep things simple in this essay I use “Wabanaki” when making generalizations and other terms as appropriate. Wabanaki oral tradition, used as a complement to European explorer accounts, offers a way to examine the meaning of captivity as it figures in Wabanaki stories about themselves.3 The majority of the sources used for the following discussion of women captives in the early contact period relate to the Mi’kmaq, the easternmost of the Wabanaki peoples, and their near neighbors. Mi’kmaq oral histories collected and published during the late nineteenth century by Protestant missionary Silas Rand describe a series of conflicts that took place over several generations prior to 1600 between the Mi’kmaq and the Kwetej, an Iroquoian group who once lived along the St. Lawrence River and on the Gaspé Peninsula.4 Published accounts by French and English explorers report on intertribal conflicts in the two decades before 1620. These sources make it clear that there was extensive contact between the Mi’kmaq and their Wabanaki neighbors. Because they share broad cultural characteristics, related languages, and histories that include intermarriage as well as captive taking, I bring in evidence related to Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, or Abenaki peoples when it seems useful, knowing that there is a risk of conflating very different practices. It is important to be specific about time, place, and which groups of people are involved because not all Indians are alike, and cultures change over time.5 Due to the influence of two early and much reprinted articles, “The White Indians of Colonial North America,” by James Axtell, and “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” by “NONE OF THE WOMEN WERE ABUSED” 11 Daniel K. Richter, much of the academic literature on captives and captive taking draws heavily on accounts of Iroquoian practices.6 While this is fine when talking about Iroquoian peoples—that is, people whose languages are part of the Iroquoian language family, including members of the Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas , Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras) as well as the Huron or Wendat on the north side of the St. Lawrence River—it is problematic when generalized...