Read Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Online

Authors: Sally Roesch Wagner

Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists (5 page)

 
 
 
 
War chief holding woman’s nominating wampum belt.
 
How Well Did These Culturally Different Women Know Each Other?
 
Even though they lived in very different cultural, economic, spiritual, and political worlds during the early 1800s, EuroAmerican settlers in Central/Western New York were, at most, one person away from direct familiarity with Iroquois people. The Haudenosaunee continued their ancient practice of adopting individuals of other nations, and many white residents of New York (including Matilda Joslyn Gage) carried adoptive Indian names. Friendships and visiting were commonplace activities between Natives and non-Natives. Newspapers routinely printed news from American Indian country. Each local history book began with a lengthy account of the first inhabitants of the land. These three leaders of the woman’s rights movement—Stanton, Gage, and Mott—were among those who had a personal connection with the Haudenosaunee.
Lucretia Mott visited the Seneca Nation in June 1848
 
Lucretia Mott and her husband James visited the Cattaraugus community in June 1848, just before taking part in the historic Seneca Falls Convention in July.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation
 
“I received the name of Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi, or ‘Sky Carrier,’ or
She who holds
the
sky.”
She wrote. “It is a clan name of the wolves.”
4
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin was named for an Oneida Chief and her closest Seneca Falls neighbor was an adopted Onondagan.
 
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin, Peter Skenandoah Smith, was named for an Oneida friend of the family, Chief Skenandoah. In addition, her nearest Seneca Falls neighbor, Oren Tyler, came from Onondaga, where he “had friendly dealings” with the people there and was adopted by them. He spoke their language fluently, and parties of Onondagans passing through Seneca Falls to sell their bead work and baskets “sought out their ‘brother,’ as they called Capt. Tyler, who always befriended them.”
5
 
Three generations of the Wolf Clan.
 
Forerunners
 
Gage, Stanton, and Mott were not alone among reformers to respect Native ways of life, nor were they the first. Many nineteenth-century feminists felt a strong kinship with Native Americans. Frances Wright, for example, was the first woman to publicly speak before audiences of men and women in the United States on woman’s rights—twenty years before there was an organized woman’s movement. Together with Robert Dale Owen, she edited a reform paper, the
Free Enquirer,
in the late 1820s. Practicing a decidedly pro-Indian editorial policy, their paper carried articles on the Cherokee alphabet, an interview with the Seneca sachem Red Jacket, a comparison of Christian and Indian “superstitions” (Christianity lost badly by contrast), and a strongly-worded protest against a threatened attack on the Winnebago and Potawatomi nations by the United States army. “The whites are more apt to commit first aggressions than the Indians,” the editors contended. Owen was deeply committed to woman’s rights. He and Lydia Maria Child, another prototype feminist most commonly known for her anti-slavery writing, were particularly moved by the fact that Indian men did not rape.
Women Writers
 
Many non-Native women studied and wrote about the Haudenosaunee—professional ethnographers such as Alice Fletcher and Erminnie Smith, along with amateur ones—women like Gage—who had developed an interest in, and friendships with Haudenosaunee women. Several dozen of these women often wrote with a depth of understanding which would, no doubt, have been recognized and respected into this century had they been men.
Laura M. Sheldon Wright, wife of a missionary at Cattaraugus, for example, published a
Dictionary of the Seneca Language
around 1835.
6
7
Harriet Maxwell Converse, the woman who arranged for Gage to be adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation, wrote extensively for New York papers. While her
Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois
(1908) has been criticized for being romanticized, her newspaper articles were straightforward and highly descriptive. They also document her extensive support and lobbying work for the Haudenosaunee. Converse “has ready for the press a volume of lyrics, sonnets, and Indian myth songs,” Harriet Phillips Eaton wrote Gage in the 1890s. Eaton, who was Gage’s cousin, also wrote about the Iroquois.
8
Helen F. Troy was adopted by Thomas and Electa Thomas into the Snipe Clan of the Onondaga nation in 1894 and given the name Garwen-ne-sho or “Spirit Dipping into the Silent Waters” in 1905.
The New York Herald
announced that “Mrs. Troy is at present at work on and is soon to have published an elaborate translation of the ‘Book of the Sacred Wampum,’ or the Iroquois Bible, also a dictionary for use in the colleges, of the Onondaga and Mohawk tongues with their equivalent meanings in English.” The book was the result of fifteen years of research.
9
Erminnie A. Smith was appointed by the Smithsonian Institution to study the Six Nations in 1880. She “lived among the Indians to study their habits and folklore and was so well-liked by the Tuscaroras that she was adopted into the White Bear Clan” and given the name of Ka-tie-tio- sta-knost, meaning “Beautiful Flower.” At the time of her death six years later, she was working towards completion of an Iroquois dictionary containing 15,000 classified words—6.000 of the Tuscaroras, 3,000 of the Onondagas, and a thousand each of the Oneidas and Senecas. She was just beginning her work with the Cayuga’s language when she died.
10
Her assistant, J. N. B. Hewitt, a Tuscarora who became a respected expert at the Bureau of Ethnology, completed the dictionary, calling Smith “a superbly gifted scholar.”
11
Horatio Hale said Smith “had pursued studies which in Ethnology alone would make any man famous.” The first woman elected to the New York Academy of Sciences, Smith was also a member of the Association for the Advancement of Science, the English Anthropological Society, and one of the leaders of the woman’s club, Sorosis—of which Gage was also a member. A contributor to various scientific journals,
12
Smith’s
Mythsof the Iroquois,
originally published in 1883, is in print again today.
13
Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp was the sister of William M. Beauchamp, who, according to
The Dictionary of American Biography
“became, among white men, the greatest authority on the history and institutions of the Iroquois. In a sense he was the successor of Lewis Morgan in this field.” Mary Elizabeth, who also wrote about the Haudenosaunee, was her brother’s secretary. In one of her newspaper articles, she wrote:
I believe I have mentioned the fact that women are treated with great respect among the Onondagas, and in fact are usually supposed to rule. When I came to teaching my little folks to read the catechism, I found that in the Fifth Commandment, they invariably put the
mother
before the
father,
even after repeated reading and corrections.
14
 
William Beauchamp mentioned in
Iroquois Folk Lore
that he had procured for the State Library an “interesting series of Seneca tales from Miss Myra E. Trippe of Salamanca, NY. Unfortunately,” he continued, “they were destroyed, along with the
Moravian Journals
I sent there at the same time.”
15
While Gage read Morgan, Lafitte, Schoolcraft, Catlin, and Clark on the Iroquois, she
knew
the Beauchamp family. There were strong family ties between the two. Gage wrote for Beauchamp’s father’s paper, and his daughter-in-law wrote a song, “The Battle Hymn of the Suffragists” in honor of Gage.
Newspapers
 
A wide range of information on the Haudenosaunee was readily available through newspapers. The local Syracuse paper, the
Onondaga Standard
—which Gage read—reported everything from condolence ceremonies to council proceedings to spiritual ceremonies. When legislation was introduced to break up the land of the Six Nations into individual ownership, protests that came from the Onondaga nation were published in full by the paper, along with the names of all the signatures to the petitions.
The level of sophistication of these newspaper stories indicates that the average reader in upstate New York 100 years ago possessed knowledge about the Iroquois that, among non-Natives, is held by only a relatively small number of scholars today. The newspaper articles assumed, for example, that the readers knew the process by which a chief was raised up and what comprised a condolence ceremony.
16
When Gage picked up her daily paper, she read how the Haudenosaunee ginseng trade with China was threatened by political events in that country. A dispute when two chiefs were raised up simultaneously brought non-Native readers into the question of which was the legitimate one. When Anton Dvorak came to the United States to write his New World Symphony, he suggested that indigenous music is the true voice of America; a Syracuse University professor gave a lecture supporting that thesis from his study of Iroquois music.
With so many writers and newspaper stories creating such a sophisticated level of general knowledge, it comes as no surprise that when reformers like Matilda Joslyn Gage looked for a model upon which to base their vision of an egalitarian world, they quickly found their well-known Native neighbors. And what did they find? What was revealed to the suffragists about women’s relative status in these two contrasting worlds? What did they have eyes to see?

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