Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists (13 page)

Read Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Online

Authors: Sally Roesch Wagner

Ridiculed, labeled heretics, and arrested for the crime of voting, the courageous suffragists continued to believe in the rightness of their cause. They believed it was neither natural nor religiously mandated for women to be denied a voice in decisions affecting their lives and the lives of their children.
Mother of Nations
 
Denied a political role in their own nation, the two major theorists in the woman’s rights movement, Stanton and Gage, knew and wrote about the decision-making responsibilities of women in the Six Nations. Stanton talked about how the clan mother held the authority for putting and keeping in place the chief that represented her clan:
The women were the great power among the clan, as everywhere else. They did not hesitate, when occasion required, ‘to knock off the horns,’ as it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send him back to the ranks of the warriors. The original nomination of the chiefs also always rested with the women.“
8
 
Stanton read Lewis Henry Morgan, a Rochester lawyer known in some circles as “the father of American anthropology, who wrote
League of the Iroquois
in 1851. Morgan drew heavily on the knowledge of the Seneca, Ely S. Parker, along with the decades of personal knowledge gathered by Ashur Wright, missionary to the Seneca nation. Wright had explained women’s decision-making responsibilities to Morgan in this way:
So also if the regular heir of office should be guilty of any disqualifying conduct or should prove wanting in any respect, the old people could interfere, throw him out of line and select another in his place: and in a like manner they could depose one already a full Chief, who had been guilty of three successive disqualifying acts, and raise the next in line into his place. In the case, however, of tribal and national chiefs, it was customary for the tribe or nation to ratify their action; which they very seldom if ever failed to do. In all these matters the old women of the clans took the lead, so that it used to be said they could put up or put down whomsoever they chose, and they could approve or veto all the acts not only of the councils of their own clan, but those of the tribal and national councils also (in the latter case, in connection with the women of the other clans).
 
Gage described the purely democratic nature of Iroquois decision making:
The common interests of the confederacy were arranged in councils, each sex holding one of its own, although the women took the initiative in suggestion, orators of their own sex presenting their views to the council of men.
9
 
Voting is not a concept that makes an easy cross-cultural transfer. The United States government takes the form of a representative democracy, with each citizen having a vote (initially African American men and all women were not allowed to participate, of course), and the majority rules. Among the Haudenosaunee, decisions are made by consensus and everyone must agree. It has been that way since the founding of the Confederacy, long before Europeans arrived on this continent. Voting, per se, does not exist. Rather, people speak and listen to one another, carefully considering ideas, until they are all of one mind. There is a balance of responsibilities between men and women that allows consensus to work.
This reality presented a startling contrast to the “liberty and justice for all” nation which denied women—despite their continuous protest—any part in their own government. Among the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, as Morgan explained, the intricate system of female lineage “lay at the foundation of their political as well as social organization.”
10
Hewitt described what a family-based government looked like:
The ohwachira [matrilineal family] which in their own right possessed official titles of hereditary chiefships, and lesser officials, filled these offices by nomination by the suffrages of the mothers and adult girls in them. The federal chief who represented the ohwachira in the tribal council and also in the federal council [the Iroquois League] and the chief warriors as well, were chosen in this manner, usually with the advice of the warriors of the ohwachira. The woman trustee chief, [clan mother] the highest official known to Iroquois polity, was also nominated and confirmed in this manner. She was the executive officer of the ohwachira and was chosen because of exceptional ability and purity of character; she had a seat in the federal council in addition to her position as a trustee of her ohwachira, and so had a somewhat higher standing and authority than had the male federal chief.
11
 
The Haudenosaunee world view is based on keeping everything in balance. Women and men each have responsibilities they must carry out to maintain this balance. The clan mother heads the entire extended family that makes up a clan. Since the ancient founding of the League of the Haudenosaunee, which Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields have dated at 1142 C.E.,
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each clan mother has the responsibility for carrying out the process by which the women of her clan select a male chief. The clan mother also has the duty of deposing the chief if he fails to perform his official duties. The man cannot become a chief or remain a chief if he commits rape, which is considered one of the three major crimes—theft and murder are the other two.
 
Women’s Nominating Wampum Belt
 
Balance also requires that everyone in the nation have a voice, and decision-making is achieved by consensus in public councils. All questions, including the making of treaties and deciding on issues of war and peace, have always required the approval of both women and men. This ancient democratic government continues to this day, with clan mothers still choosing the chiefs. The women’s nominating wampum belt records this law of the Confederacy of the original Five Nations:
We give and assign the sacred chieftainship titles and the soil of our land to all of our Mothers, the Women of the Five Nations, and they shall be the proprietors of the same.“
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Arthur C. Parker describes the critical female role in the formation of the confederacy which resulted in women having responsibility for holding the chieftainship titles:
Likewise, in the wampum codes of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, we are told that both Hiawatha, the Onondaga and the Peacemaker, a Wyandot, made their journeys to the tribes with the ‘Great Mother,’ Ji-gon-sa-seh, the Kakwah, and consulted her in every important detail. Without the approval of their ‘Mother of Nations’ and her sanction of Hiawatha’s plans, the integrity of the principles of the confederacy of the Five Nations would have been assailed. But Ji-gon-sa-seh, who was regarded as a descendant of the first Ye-go-wa-neh, the woman who was the mother of all the first Ongwe was sacred to her people, for her word was law and her sanction was necessary in all political measures of inter-tribal importance.
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The decision to place women in the highest position of governmental, as well as social, authority, was thoughtfully made by the founding mothers and fathers of the Six Nations Confederacy. Hewitt explained:
The astute founders of the league had made the experiment of entrusting their government to a representative body of men and women chosen by the mothers of the community; they did not entrust it to a hereditary body, nor to a purely democratic body, nor even to a body of religious leaders. The founders of the league adopted this principle and with wise adjustments made it the underlying principle of the league institutions.
15
 
Even when the Seneca, in a desperate attempt to maintain their land abandoned their traditional system and emulated the United States constitutional form of government—as had the Cherokee—the women still maintained their traditional authority over the land, as Minnie Myrtle wrote in 1855:
The legislative powers of the nation are vested in a Council of eighteen, chosen by the universal suffrages of the nation; but no treaty is to be binding, until it is ratified by three-fourths of all the voters, and
three-fourths of all the mothers of the nation!
16
So there was peace instead of war, as there would often be if the voice of woman could be heard! And though the Senecas, in revising their laws and customs, have in a measure acceded to the civilized barbarism of treating the opinions of women with contempt, where their interest is equal, they still cannot sign a treaty without the consent
of two hirds of the mothers
!
17
 
Myrtle also described the political authority women held in the traditional way:
The emblem of power worn by the Sachem [chief] was a
deer’s antlers,
and if in any instance the women disapproved of the election or acts of a Sachem, they had the power to
remove his horns
and return him to private life. Their officers or
runners
from council to council were chosen by themselves and denominated
women’s men,
and by these their interests were always fully represented. If at any time they wished any subject considered, by means of their runners, they called a council in their clan; if it was a matter of more general interest there was a council of the nation, and if the opinions of the women or Sachems of other nations were necessary, a grand council was called as readily to attend to them as to the interests of men. Thus a way was provided for them to have
a voice
in the affairs of the nation, without endangering their
womanly reserve
or subjecting them to the masculine reproach of publicity, or a desire to assume the offices and powers of men!
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The emblem of power worn by the Sachem is a deer’s antlers.
 
Gage’s first-hand knowledge of Haudenosaunee political structure came through her friendship with Harriet Maxwell Converse, known widely for her creation of cultural bridges between Native and EuroAmerican people. Converse, in turn, introduced Gage to Mohawk friends, who decided to give Gage an honorary adoption into their clan, the Wolf. Gage’s Mohawk sister told her that “this name would admit me to the
Council of Matrons,
where a vote would be taken, as to my having a voice in the chieftainship,” Gage wrote.
19
This was in 1893, the same year Gage was arrested for voting in a school board election in Onondaga County, New York. While offered the possibility of decision-making rights in her adopted nation, Gage was arrested for voting in her own community! Would this not have profoundly affected her vision?
War and Peace and Land
 
Iroquois women were involved in all decisions of governmental policy, from the local to the federal level, as white reformers well knew. This extended to issues of war and peace. Timothy Dwight, writing in 1822, stated that if the warriors wanted to go to war, they needed the consent of the women:
If the women opposed the enterprise the warriors always gave it up, because the opposition of such a female council to any public undertaking was regarded as a bad omen.
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