Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists (9 page)
Read Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Online
Authors: Sally Roesch Wagner
Gage recognized the superiority of the Iroquois agricultural method. Beyond that, she believed that Haudenosaunee recognition of the spiritual, life-giving supremacy of woman’s creation of food represented a higher form of civilization than her own:
Three of the five ancient feasts of the Iroquois were agricultural feasts connected with this, their great staple. The first was celebrated immediately after corn planting in May, the second, or Succotash Feast, at filling of the ears in August, and continuing for a fortnight; the third, after corn-harvest. Centuries ago was agriculture honored by this ancient people. In Christian Europe during the middle ages the agriculturist was despised; the warrior was the aristocrat of civilization. In publicly honoring agriculture as did the Ongwe Honwe three times a year, they surpassed in wisdom the men of Europe.
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William Beauchamp described the third spiritual ceremony Gage mentioned—the “Thanksgiving that traditionally accompanied the harvest of the Three Sisters”—as one more example of cultural borrowing. “It is noteworthy that the Indian Thanksgiving Day antedated our own,” Beauchamp wrote. “It is more American than we have ever claimed.”
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Thanksgiving, it turns out, is a Native American celebration adopted by EuroAmerican settlers.
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Thanksgiving, it turns out, is a Native American celebration adopted by EuroAmerican settlers.
Haudenosaunee women held the sacred responsibility of creating life—from their own bodies and from the body of Mother Earth—the creation story told:
The Grandmother buried her daughter and planted in her grave the plants and leaves that she had clutched in her hands when she fell from the sky world. Not long after, over her daughter’s head grew corn, beans and squash. These were later known as the “three sisters” and became the main life support groups for the people of the Haudenosaunee. From her heart grew the sacred tobacco which would later be used as an offering to send greetings to the Creator. At her feet grew the strawberry plants, as well as other plants that would be used as medicines to cure sickness. The earth itself was referred to as “Our Mother” by the Master of Life, because their mother had become one with the earth.
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Women were responsible for everything
in
the earth, while men had the care of everything
on
the earth (hunting, fishing, etc.). That was the balance. It was, ironically, the benevolent attempt to “Christianize” and “civilize” the “savage Indian” that worked to destroy the previously healthy gender balance of the Iroquois Confederacy. Missionaries insisted that woman’s proper sphere was the home, and that Indian men should take up farming. When accomplished, this change not only would take away women’s economic independence, leaving them as dependent as white women; it also tore at the very fabric of Native society, which held that women, producers of life, were the only appropriate group to bring life from the soil. Despite resistance, Indian land—over which women had historically been the caretakers for the nation—was often divided up among Indian men, as “heads of the family.” Tribal governments, systematically changed to model after that of the United States, disfranchised women.
in
the earth, while men had the care of everything
on
the earth (hunting, fishing, etc.). That was the balance. It was, ironically, the benevolent attempt to “Christianize” and “civilize” the “savage Indian” that worked to destroy the previously healthy gender balance of the Iroquois Confederacy. Missionaries insisted that woman’s proper sphere was the home, and that Indian men should take up farming. When accomplished, this change not only would take away women’s economic independence, leaving them as dependent as white women; it also tore at the very fabric of Native society, which held that women, producers of life, were the only appropriate group to bring life from the soil. Despite resistance, Indian land—over which women had historically been the caretakers for the nation—was often divided up among Indian men, as “heads of the family.” Tribal governments, systematically changed to model after that of the United States, disfranchised women.
“It behooves us women,” Stanton wrote, “to question all historians ... who teach ... any philosophy that lowers the status of the mothers of the race.”
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She found a suppressed history, one that elevated women. While women’s work was not valued in the EuroAmerican world (if it were, it would be paid, Stanton insisted), there was nothing inherently demeaning about it, she held. To the contrary, the creative powers of woman in birthing and maintaining daily life, she came to believe, were the source of her strength. Stanton recognized the indigenous truth that agriculture grew naturally out of woman’s ability to birth. In an 1891 speech to the National Council of Women she expressed this view:
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She found a suppressed history, one that elevated women. While women’s work was not valued in the EuroAmerican world (if it were, it would be paid, Stanton insisted), there was nothing inherently demeaning about it, she held. To the contrary, the creative powers of woman in birthing and maintaining daily life, she came to believe, were the source of her strength. Stanton recognized the indigenous truth that agriculture grew naturally out of woman’s ability to birth. In an 1891 speech to the National Council of Women she expressed this view:
Careful historians now show that the greatest civilizing power ... has been found in ... motherhood. For the protection of herself and her children woman made the first home in the caves of the earth, then huts with trees in the sunshine. She made the first attempts at agriculture, raised grains, fruits, and herbs, which she learned to use in sickness. She was her own physician; all that was known of the medical art was in her hands. She domesticated the cow and the goat, and from the necessities of her children learned the use of milk. The women cultivated the arts of peace, and the sentiments of kinship, and all there was of human love and home-life. The necessities of motherhood were the real source of all the earliest attempts at civilization. Thus, instead of being a ‘disability,’ as unthinking writers are pleased to call it, maternity has been the all-inspiring motive or force that impelled the first steps towards a stable home and family life.
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Stanton recognized and valued women’s work in one small way with this prayer, delivered when she was asked to bless the food at a meal:
Heavenly father and mother, make us thankful for all the blessings of this life and make us ever mindful of the patient hands that oft in weariness spread our tables and prepare our daily food. For humanity’s sake. Amen.
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Stanton—unlike the Christians of her day—acknowledged the divinity of woman, along with the role of women in the creation of daily life.
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Her words expressed a sentiment somewhat similar to the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, an ancient prayer given by Iroquois elders before and after an event of importance. An oral tradition, it can take four hours to tell in its entirety. This is a contemporary Mohawk version:
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Her words expressed a sentiment somewhat similar to the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, an ancient prayer given by Iroquois elders before and after an event of importance. An oral tradition, it can take four hours to tell in its entirety. This is a contemporary Mohawk version:
We give greetings and thanks to our Mother the Earth—she gives us that which makes us strong and healthy. We are grateful that she continues to perform her duties as she was instructed. The women and Mother Earth are one—givers of life. We are her color, her flesh and her roots. Now our minds are one.
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While EuroAmericans might have lost that grounding, Native people had not. Traditionally, woman as mother and woman as creator of life were one and the same. Mother Earth was an obvious descriptive term, not a romantic metaphor. The Haudenosaunee believed that the earth would not bear unless cultivated by women. Agriculture retained its ancient spiritual connection to fertility, growth, and revival among the Haudenosaunee.
What happened to bring about the downfall of Western women from sacred creators of life-giving food to kitchen drudges? Stanton presented her theory, with which Gage agreed:
Women and their duties became objects of hatred to the Christian missionaries and of alternate scorn and fear to pious ascetics and monks. The priestess mother became something impure, associated with the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her very cooking a brewing of poison, nay, her very existence a source of sin to man. Thus woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch. The witch trials of the Middle Ages, wherein thousands of women were condemned to the stake, were the very real traces of the contest between man and woman. Christianity putting the religious weapon into man’s hand made his conquest complete.
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Gage documented the spiritual and practical authority Native women maintained in the field as well as in the kitchen, while acknowledging their influence on white women in both areas. “Let every eater of succotash—a ‘luscious mixture’ of green-corn, beans, and venison correctly called ‘msickquatash’—henceforth remember to whom we are indebted for that toothsome dish.” After replacing venison with pork and changing the name, “we white people speak of it as one of our national dishes,” she said, when in truth, “the gustatory succotash” was given to us by Haudenosaunee women. It is not “our only culinary remembrance of the red-woman’s skill in cookery,” she added, “for more than one of our national dishes are ours not by invention, but by adoption from our Indian predecessors.”
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In another article headlined,
“Do You Love Corn?”
Gage questioned whether the reader might “emulate Sancho Panza, and bless the man who first invented Succotash.” If so, Gage was ready for a fight. “Never, Mr. Editor, you cannot deprive my sex of that glory,” she challenged, for “succotash is the invention of a squaw.” [sic] “White men borrowed tobacco of the Red Indian,” she wrote, while “white women, more to good purpose, borrowed the art of succotash-making, and the golden pumpkin, its fit accompaniment, when in a Yankee pie.”
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“Do You Love Corn?”
Gage questioned whether the reader might “emulate Sancho Panza, and bless the man who first invented Succotash.” If so, Gage was ready for a fight. “Never, Mr. Editor, you cannot deprive my sex of that glory,” she challenged, for “succotash is the invention of a squaw.” [sic] “White men borrowed tobacco of the Red Indian,” she wrote, while “white women, more to good purpose, borrowed the art of succotash-making, and the golden pumpkin, its fit accompaniment, when in a Yankee pie.”
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A further Gage acknowledgment of Haudenosaunee influence on cooking claimed that, “Hasty pudding was an ancient method of preparing corn among the Iroquois.” Her proof? Reference to “A
History of the New Netherlands,
published in Amsterdam in 1671, [which] speaks of the Indian food, called by them sappaen, and made of crushed corn boiled to a pap.”
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History of the New Netherlands,
published in Amsterdam in 1671, [which] speaks of the Indian food, called by them sappaen, and made of crushed corn boiled to a pap.”
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Western women ... [from] sacred creators of life-giving food to kitchen drudges.
Appropriately, when Hattie Burr published her
Woman Suffrage Cook Book
in 1886, Gage contributed a recipe for Indian pudding that had been handed down in her family, coming to her from her mother:
Old-Time Baked Indian PuddingWoman Suffrage Cook Book
in 1886, Gage contributed a recipe for Indian pudding that had been handed down in her family, coming to her from her mother:
Three pints of sweet milk, two large iron spoonfuls of yellow cornmeal, one small egg, one iron spoonful of molasses, three-fourth cup of sugar, heaped teaspoonful of ginger, level teaspoonful of cinnamon, one-third of a small nutmeg, and one-half a teacupful thick sour cream. Put half the milk over the fire with a sprinkling of salt; as soon as it comes to a boil, scatter the meal quickly and evenly in by hand. Remove immediately from the fire to a dish, stir in the cold milk, the egg well-beaten, the spices, sweetening, and sour cream. Bake three hours, having a hot oven the first hour, a moderate one the remainder of the time. Eat with sweet cream. If rightly made and rightly baked, this pudding is delicious, but four things must be remembered as requisite: First, the pudding must be thin enough to run when put in the oven, second, the egg must be small, or if large, but two- thirds used for a pudding of the above size. Third, the sour cream must not be omitted (but in case one has no cream, the same quantity of sour milk with a piece of butter the size of a small butternut can be substituted). Fourth, the baking must be especially attended to. Many a good recipe is ruined in the cooking, but if the direc tions are carefully followed, this pudding will be quavery when done, and if any is left, a jelly when cold. Use no sauce, but sweet cream or butter.
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As they grew older, Stanton and Gage recognized that superficial changes in their culture and government would not bring freedom. Mirrored by surrounding nations with an ancient history of mutuality, the cutthroat world of competition in which they lived appeared flawed. “The hope of the future seems to be largely in cooperation,” Gage mused.
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Stanton concurred in the speech she delivered at her eightieth birthday party:
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Stanton concurred in the speech she delivered at her eightieth birthday party:
My message today to our coadjutors is that we have a higher duty than the demand for suffrage. We must now, at the end of fifty years of faithful service, broaden our platform and consider the next step in progress ... cooperation, a new principle in industrial economics. We see that the right of suffrage avails nothing for the masses in competition with the wealthy classes, and, worse still, with each other.
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