The Life of The Native Americans Post Colonization: Impact of Women

The Native Americans, who were the first settlers before the arrival of the Europeans, were not naive or politically innocent people. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Native Americans knew how to play one rival against the other i.e. they understood how to side with the English against the Spanish or side with the French against the English. In doing so, they knew how to protect their own communities and often got rewards for their loyalties to the side that they had aligned themselves with. In this essay we will discuss the status of the Native Americans after colonization.

The Native American Women

From the very beginning, the English were agriculturalists or farmers, thus justifying, in some way or the other, their need and greed for land. Also, they tended to be fairly narrow-minded about the other cultures; they viewed the Indians especially of the seventeenth century whose role remained unchanged for centuries, until the arrival of the Europeans  as an inexplicable group of people.

In English culture, while men farmed, women did domestic activities. In a way, this defined one's gender, the man was a farmer and the woman was a homemaker (housewife). But in the Native American culture, women were the farmers or agriculturalists, and men supplemented the diet of the tribe or clan or community by hunting, thus protecting their community.

The surprise of the English travellers can only be imagined, when they arrived in a community where for instance, during the summer time, the Native American men did not hunt due to the lack of tracks that they could follow in the snow. What the English saw is the women toiling in the soil, planting food, while the men sitting around either doing nothing or something such as mending nets, fishing, preparing weapons or playing ball in order to keep in good physical shape. Thus, the English planted in their minds the notion of turning them into slaves because from their perspective, these men and women were lethargic and good-for-nothings.

They couldn't comprehend that women would be farmers. Even worse for them was that they couldn't comprehend that many Natives American tribes were matrilineal i.e. they traced families through the mother which made sense since one always knew who the mother was as she was present at birth. Instead of going to live in his home, the Native Americans would go to live her family's dwelling. Moreover, since there was no private property to pass down in Native American culture, it didn't really matter who fathered the first or second son; legitimacy wasn't the kind of issue like it was in a culture where property passed from father to son. For instance, in some tribes, while the men would go off hunting, the women were self-sufficient because they were the ones producing the food. If they decided they did not like their husbands anymore, they would let their men find their possessions outside their house, thus symbolizing divorce.

For the English, this behaviour of the Native American women was scandalous. What they couldn't understand is that women had power because as obvious it is, in English culture; women had no formal power at all. So while the men could decide to go to war, the women who although did not decide the war could decide not to give them any supplies to go to war with since many of the women harboured thoughts of fighting in the war to be foolish; they had the power to either block or support the war. The English patriarchal hierarchal society found this incomprehensible.

This became one of the reasons as to why the relationship between the English and the Indians was always strained; they are viewed as enemies of one another or in modern parlance, the Indians were always the other from the lens of the Englishmen. The brewing tensions have led to violence. The French found the thought of the Native Americans being savagesas senseless and hence, in any confrontation, they were more than willing to learn the native language and marry Indian women. Since most of the Indians supported the French, the French were defeated in the French and Indian War and driven out of Canada in the Northwest Territory. This made the Native Americans unable to play two sites against one another i.e. they couldn't ask the English to give them guns, alcohol, tools, pots and pans, etc. and then promise to remain neutral which many of them daringly offered to do in the French and Indian War and then took a U-turn to side with the French because the English were left with no alternatives in that part of North America and the Eastern Woodlands (East of the Mississippi River).

The entire world knew that the Americans were land grabbers; first they would beg, then borrow and end up cheating and stealing to acquire Native American land. Much of history is about the history of people moving west and engaging in all sorts of nefarious and often violent activity toward Native Americans. The Chickasaws and the Indians of the South (modern-day Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee) knew that as soon as the war was over, they would be driven off their land into an empty territory if the Americans won the war. On the whole, the Native Americans understood that while the English might not be great, they were at least better than the Americans.

One of the great leaders who supported the English in the Northeast was a woman named Molly Brandt. She was the diplomat of the Mohawk Indians tribe. It was she who negotiated with in Canada; offering support in exchange for tracks of land to be granted so that they would have a place to settle upon. The Native Americans were good fighters; they desperately fought to preserve for their independence, liberty, identity, heritage and right to their homeland. But no matter how hard the Indians i.e. the Cherokees tried to satisfy all of the demands of the dominant white society to have a proper and typical kind of family structure in the house, men to be seen in the fields, to convert to Christianity, to have a written language, etc. a trail of tears was left behind.

The women could not come to terms with the fact that their land was going to be taken away from them. At a great expense, they eventually lost their autonomy and identity as farmers. This was not widely acknowledged since there are very few written accounts (captivity narratives) about the confrontation between the white women and the Native American women. Since most of these were written by white women who became adopted members of Native American tribes, it seemed as though the incidents did not take place if one could not write it down and hence, it is very hard to find an account of Native American women.

Conclusion

It's no secret that colonization has had a negative impact on the Native Americans; its effects are still felt today, especially on the women of this community. For them, life before colonization was much freer; they had autonomy and a greater sense of themselves as significant and important people than they had in patriarchal, hierarchical and domestic life in New. Women of all generations and races have contributed large and small to make life in America better. However, it is the enduring spirit of the Indian women that continues to be present, thus making them the most powerful group of American women.

References

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2. Johansen, B. E. (2015). Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. Routledge.

3. Kehoe, A. B. (1997). North American Indian Tribal Women's Matrilineal Systems. Ethnology, 36(2), 181-202.

4. LaDuke, W. (1999). All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. South End Press.

5. Littlefield, D., & Parins, J. W. (1999). Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (2nd ed.). Routledge.

6. Riley, G. M. (2011). Gender and Sexuality in American Indian Cultures: Complexities and Challenges. University of Texas Press.

7. Saffle, M. L. (2017). American Indian Women of Proud Nations: Essays on History, Language, and Education. University of Oklahoma Press.

8. Smith, A. E. (2006). Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. South End Press.

9. Treuer, A. (2019). The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. Riverhead Books.

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10. Turner, F. J. (2017). Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (2nd ed.). Routledge.