Essay: The Native American woman’s role

Early European explorers and missionaries interpret the Native American woman’s role by introducing trade, disease, and conquest. These women have been described as “an epochal cross-roads of gender.” The diversity of Native people extended to their gender systems. Women;s experiences after marriage depended on whether they were expected to live among their husband’s people(patrilocal marriage) or whether their husbands came to live with them (matrilocal). Indigenous women’s daily work varied according to where they lived and what foodstuffs were available. Although popular images of Native Americans depict them primarily as hunter-gatherers or nonmadic hunters, a significant number engaged in farming, along with fishing or hunting. The Cahokia settlement in present-day Illinois, for instance, featured large cornfields around a residential and ceremonial center. Women fulfilled crucial roles in planting, harvesting, and processing food. Native American Peoples, 1492 have dominated the entire North America map. They were living on the borders of the plains- like the Comanches, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux- had access to horses that significant numbers migrated to the Great Plains and became nomadic bison hunters. Wherever they lived, indigenous Americans were not a static people, frozen in time waiting for Europeans to “discover” them. In many Indian nations, women had more power and sexual choices than most European women of their time did, albeit in the context of clear distinctions between the labor and responsibilities of men and women. Europeans did not understand why a Native American woman had so much power. They had to discuss, dissect, and destroy this idea. The Huron Women proved to be the best in the their class. “They till the soil, sow the Indian corn, fetch wood for the winter, strip the hemp and spin it, and with the thread make fishing-nets for catching fish,….have the labour of harvesting the corn, storing it, preparing food, and attending the house”, from Samuel de Champlain. Next, the Pueblo Peoples: These women work to be centered on what went on withing the walls, the “inside of the community”. The Iroquois Confederacy: The sexual division of labor reinforced women’s dominance in the village. Men prepared fields for planting, but their major duties took them to the forests, where they hunted, conducted trade, and warred with hostile tribes. Women’s responsibilities centered in the village, where they raised crops, distributed men’s hunting, and made baskets. These women worked hard but communally. Missionaries interpret the Native American woman’s role as being the following: new and different, unbelievable, and brave. Native Women’s Worlds: Among the coastal Algonquians, women not only tended crops but also participated in the fishing vital to their people’s survival. Furthermore, European observers tended to view Native American sexual practices through a pejorative lens, giving the impression that Native women were promiscuous. In some cases, European men projected their own desires onto Native women. In others, women entered into liaisons with fur traders so that these outsiders could be incorporated into their community. Despite their relative sexual freedom and the importance of their economic contributions, most Native American women held no formal political power. In closing, whatever their roles in their society, Native American women, like men, faced extraordinary challenges in the wake of the European invasion. These overall changes affected the Native American woman more than anybody. The first and most controversial was Malintzin, known to history as Malinche. She was captured given by the Native people to the Spaniards as a gift. She became loyal and bore children. She has been both revered as the mother of their race and reviled as the first to betray Native peoples to Europeans. Only Native American societies involved men and women from the same society in approximately equal numbers, living together in family and kin groupings, engaged in complementary productive tasks, and varying political roles as determined by their communities.