Indigenous Women and Colonial Cultures: An Introduction

In the last decade or so, colonial studies have undergone something of a revolution. Inspired by the work of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, and informed by Joan Scott’s work on “gender as a useful category of historical analysis” scholars have analyzed the creation of colonial categories and identities and the psychic and cultural operations of sexuality and race.¹ We now have a much better appreciation of how bureaucratic practices and discourses intrinsically shaped and depended upon social and cultural understandings of race, and of the place of white women in the colonial order.² Rejecting older formulations of domination and resistance, writers have explored the mutually constitutive practices of colonial hierarchies within a wider colonial sphere. The articles that follow are clearly in debt to this literature with its emphasis on comparative colonial cultures, sexuality, and race.³

This special issue also seeks to depart from recent work on colonial cultures that seems implicitly to privilege for analysis the constitution and reproduction of whiteness. Scholars have analyzed the ways in which colonial orders sought to define through cultural practice who counted as European and who did not. Child-rearing techniques, the relationships of servants to children, the changing ideological meanings of concubinage and marriage, all these sites proved indeed powerful nodes at which whiteness was invented and protected, if always imperfectly. The scholarship concentrates in this regard on those individuals and processes, which most clearly threw concepts of “European” or “white” vis a vis “native” into relief. This work has vastly increased our understanding of the nuances and fragile borders of colonial hierarchy. As we know from the vast literature on slave and other societies, however, the dominated rarely shared the mythic beliefs in family and emotion articulated by the dominant.⁴ We also need to explore how the colonized experienced and helped constitute colonial cultures.

As Karen Vieira Powers has pointed out, relatively little focus has been paid to indigenous women except as metaphors for the land or for colonial domination, the latter a key feature of early conquest and travel narratives from the Atlantic to the Pacific.⁵ The articles in this issue wrestle with the implications of recent authors’ challenge to historiography to try to render more subtly the landscape of women’s experiences of early colonial rule. The articles investigate the meanings of indigeneity and femaleness in emerging colonial cultures. They demonstrate the fluidity and importance of the category “indigenous woman” to colonialism. The articles cover various regions and periods: the earliest colonial encounters in the Atlantic World, the worlds of eighteenth century India and the Ohio Valley, families in nineteenth-century Canada and Britain and the colonial frontier of Queensland, Australia. Authors illuminate the complex lives of indigenous women in an era which witnessed the movement of European explorers and their military entourages, company rule, the more formal establishment of colonialism, and the triumph of settler capitalism.

The focus on indigenous women as people in history, rather as metaphors for imperial exploration challenges us to find historical methods that enable us to read women’s experiences of history. We have to avoid rendering women’s lives within the victim/traitor dynamic that has shaped so much of the literature on indigenous women such as Malintzin. The articles that follow begin to outline how we might write histories of indigenous women in ways that work through and beyond the privileged analytical position given historically to sexuality, in order to explore the multifaceted lives of these women in colonial frontiers and colonial orders.