Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists (14 page)

Read Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Online

Authors: Sally Roesch Wagner

French observers Lafitau and Charlevoix 200 years earlier had stated that the “chief matrons” who were the “principal women” could order the warriors to cease and desist from war.
²¹Beyond being a “bad omen,” since the women were responsible for providing the food and clothing the warriors needed, there was an economic basis to their authority. If the women withheld food and moccasins, the warriors stayed home. According to Gage:

Although it was a confederation of warriors, owing its permanence and its growth to prowess in arms, yet its women exercised controlling power in peace and war, forbidding at will its young braves to enter battle, and often determining its terms of peace.
²²... Sir William Johnston mentions an instance of Mohawk squaws [sic] forbidding the war-path to young braves.
²³

Another famous instance occurred when the Seneca had reached an impasse in their dealings with the United States which threatened to lead to war. The women intervened and addressed the U. S. government’s representative. Minnie Myrtle described it:

In the year 1791, when Washington wished to secure the neutrality of the Six Nations, a deputation was sent to treat with them, but was not favorably received, as many of the young Chiefs were for war and sided with the British. The women, as is usual, preferred peace, and argued that the land was theirs, for they cultivated and took care of it, and, therefore, had a right to speak concerning the use that should be made of its products. They demanded to be heard on this occasion, and addressed the deputation first themselves in the following words: “Brother:—The Great Ruler has spared us until a new day to talk together; for since you came here from General Washington, you and our uncles the Sachems have been counselling together. Moreover, your sisters, the women, have taken the same into great consideration, because you and our Sachems have said so much about it. Now, that is the reason we have come to say something to you, and to tell you that the Great Ruler hath preserved you, and that you ought to hear and listen to what we, women, shall speak, as well as the Sachems;
for we are the owners of this land,
AND IT IS OURS! It is we that plant it for our and their use. Hear us, therefore, for we speak things that concern us and our children; and you must not think hard of us while our men shall say more to you, for we have told them.

The women then designated Red Jacket as their speaker, who represented them in this way:

BROTHERS FROM PENNSYLVANIA:-You that are sent from General Washington, and by the thirteen fires; you have been sitting side by side with us every day, and the Great Ruler has appointed us another pleasant day to meet again.

We are left to answer for our women, who are to conclude what ought to be done by both Sachems and warriors.

Red Jacket—Sagoyawatha

NOW LISTEN BROTHERS:-You know it has been the request of our head warriors, that we are left to answer for our women, who are to conclude what ought to be done by both Sachems and warriors. So hear what is their conclusion. The business you come on is very troublesome, and we have been a long time considering it; and now the elders of our women have said that our Sachems and warriors must help you, for the good of them and their children, and you tell us the Americans are strong for peace.
²⁴

In treaty negotiations with the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, representatives of the newly created United States government had to deal directly and indirectly with Haudenosaunee women, a fact well-known in the nineteenth-century to those who read the wide selection of popular books on the Iroquois. Women’s political power, combined with their responsibility for the land, gave them authority in the making of treaties. According to Gage:

No sale of lands was valid without consent of the [women] and among the State Archives at Albany, New York, treaties are preserved signed by the “Sachems and Principal Women of the Six Nations.
²⁵

Fletcher also described women’s involvement in treaty negotiations:

In olden times the women claimed the land. In the early treaties and negotiations for the sale of land, the women had their voice, and the famous Chief Cornplanter was obliged to retract one of his bargains because the women forbade, they being the land-holders, and not the men. With the century, our custom of ignoring women in public transactions has had its reflex influence upon Indian custom.
²⁶

William Stone, writing of this story in 1841, cautioned his readers:

Very erroneous opinions are generally entertained among civilized people, in regard to the consideration in which their women are held by the American Indians, and the degree of influence they exercise among them ... although the respect with which they are treated by their lords is not as refined and spiritualized as among the cavaliers in the days of chivalry, still it may safely be averred that in the adjustment of weighty and difficult matters, no other people are in the habit of treating the opinions of their women with greater deference than the America Indians.
²⁷

Stone went on to explain:

It is one of the peculiar features of Indian polity that their lands belong to the warriors who defend, and the women who till them, and who, moreover, are the mothers of the warriors. And although the sachems, as civil magistrates, have ordinarily the power of negotiating treaties, yet whenever the question of a sale of land is the subject of a negotiation, if both the warriors and women become dissatisfied with the course the sachems are pursuing, they have the right to interpose and take the subject out of their hands.
²⁸

Also often cited were instances in which Iroquois women, through their male representatives, had addressed the U.S. government. One example was the last general council held by the United States with the Iroquois Confederacy at Canandaigua in 1794. There, Haudenosaunee women countered a prayer offered by Jemima Wilkinson, the itinerant preacher, who called on the Indians to repent. The Iroquois women responded through their representative that “the white people had pressed and squeezed them together, until it gave them great pain at their hearts, and they thought the white people ought to give back all the lands they had taken from them.” They, in turn, called on the white people “to repent and wrong the Indians no more.
²⁹ ³⁰ ³¹ ³² ³³ ³⁴ ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷

Women’s Rights Support by Haudenosaunee Men

The injustice of women’s lack of political freedom in the United States was recognized by Haudenosaunee men. Dr. Peter Wilson, a Cayuga chief, addressed the New York Historical Society in 1866, encouraging United States men to give everyone the vote, “even the women, as in his

Endnotes

Who Gets To Be Part of History?

1
Ray Fadden, “Fourteen Strings of Purple Wampum to Writers about Indians,” in
New Voices from the Longhouse: an Anthology of Contemporary Iroquois Writing,
[ed.] by Joseph Bruchac. Greenfield Center, New York: The Greenfield Review Press, 1989, pp. 97-98.

2
Ray, who founded the Akwesasne Mohawk Counselor Organization, is “recognized as an outstanding figure in Six Nations culture and history,” according to Julius Cook in his biographical sketch of Ray in
New Voices from the Longhouse: an Anthology of Contemporary Iroquois Writing,
p. 96.

3
Matilda Joslyn Gage, “Letter to the Editor,”
Lucifer the Lightbearer,
21 February 1890.

4
Speech, quoted in
Lucifer the Light Bearer,
13 March 1885.

5
Matilda Joslyn Gage,
Woman, Church and State,
Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1893; reprinted., Aberdeen, South Dakota: Sky Carrier Press, 1998, p. 145.

6
Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Sara Underwood, 19 October 1889 and 9 May 1889, Stanton Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, New York.

7
Matilda Joslyn Gage, “Woman in the Early Christian Church,” Report of the
International Council of Women, Assembled by the National Woman Suffrage Association...
1888. Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1888, p. 401.

8
Lois Banner,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights.
Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1980, p. 145.

9
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage,
History of Woman Suffrage
Vol. 1, New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881; reprint ed., Salem New Hampshire: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., 1985, p. 604.

10
Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Lucretia Mott, 19 July 1876, quoted in Stanton, Anthony and Gage,
History of Woman Suffrage
Vol. 3, Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1886; reprint ed., Salem New Hampshire: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., 1985, pp. 45-47.

11
Gage,
Woman, Church And State,
p. 76.

12
The
(Washington, D.C.)
Alpha,
May 1880, p. 6.

13
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Socialism.” Chicago: The Progressive Woman, 1898.

14
Gage,
Woman, Church And State,
p. 253.

15
Ibid., 257.

16
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
The Revolution
(New York), 14 January 1869.

17
Matilda Joslyn Gage,
Speech of Mrs. M.E.J. Gage at the Woman’s Rights Convention held at Syracuse, September 1852.
Woman’s Rights Tract No. 7. Syracuse: Master’s Print, 1852.

18
Gage, “The Remnant of the Five Nations: Woman’s Rights Among the Indians.”
The
(New York)
Evening Post,
24 September, 1875. Scrapbook of Gage’s Published Newspaper Articles, Matilda Joslyn Gage Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.

19
“A Notable Position.” Unidentified newspaper clipping, July 1896, Iroquois collection, Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse, N.Y.

20
Ibid.

21
Turner, Orsamus,
Pioneer History of the Account of the Holland Purchase of Western New York.
Buffalo: Geo. H. Derby and Co., 1850.

22
“The Onondaga Indians.”
The
(New York)
Evening Post,
3 November 1875. Scrapbook of Gage’s Published Newspaper Articles, Matilda Joslyn Gage Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.

23
Minnie Myrtle,
The Iroquois; or, The Bright Side of Indian Character,
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855, p. 299.

24
Ibid, pp. 24-25, 65-66.

25
Onondaga Standard,
11 October 1890. Iroquois Clipping File, Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse, New York.

Haudenosaunee Women: An Inspiration To Early Feminists

1
Gage, “The Remnant of the Five Nations: Woman’s Rights Among the Indians.”

2
Gage,
Woman, Church and State,
p. 5.