Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads
296
Midwestern Women: Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads
296Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253211330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/1997 |
| Series: | Midwestern History and Culture |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Midwestern Women
Work, Community, and Leadership at the Crossroads
By Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Wendy Hamand Venet
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1997 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33307-0
CHAPTER 1
Leadership within the Women's Community
Susie Bonga Wright of the Leech Lake Ojibwe
REBECCA KUGEL
Historically, the lives of Native American women have been misunderstood by the dominant society. They have been characterized as oppressed and powerless drudges (the "squaw" stereotype) or as exotic and compliant helpers of the male European colonizers (the "princess" stereotype). In recent years, numerous scholars, both Native and non-Native, have issued calls to move beyond this inadequate polarization and reexamine the lives and work of Native women.
Perhaps no realm of female activity is less accessible than leadership. There is great irony in this, for Europeans and, later, Euro-Americans, were struck by Native women's political presence and participation. Along the eastern coast of North America, the earliest English colonizers encountered women in positions of leadership. John Smith made note of the "Queene of Appamatuck" in his first communications; the Puritans likewise observed that the leader of the Massachusetts confederacy, on whose lands they had established their colony, was a woman, the "squa-sachim of Puckanokick." In the eighteenth century, John Adair, an English trader in the Southeast, disparagingly described the Cherokees as "under petticoat government," and long before Adair's complaint that Cherokee women exercised too much political power, both English and French colonists had come to recognize and respect the political influence of Iroquois women. In addition, and of particular interest to this study, there exists in the early nineteenth century a remarkable portrayal of Netnokwa, a female political leader in a multi-ethnic Ojibwe-Odawa community.
Yet the Europeans and Euro-Americans who were so keenly aware of Native women's influence and participation in public councils rarely recorded — and presumably, were rarely aware of — other forms of female political activity that took place away from council meetings. In part this is due to the fact that the interests of Europeans and Euro-Americans, revolving largely around trade relations, diplomacy, and military affairs, were issues concluded in the council meeting forum. They had little reason to look elsewhere, to other social groups or social settings. From this situation numerous questions arise concerning Native women's political participation. For instance, were Native women's political expressions confined only to the public councils? Were certain women recognized as leaders among women, within kinship groups such as clans or extended families? How were such female leaders selected and what were their responsibilities? And of course, how did Native women's political activity vary between tribal groups?
This chapter examines, within a specific tribal setting, a form of female political activity outside the realm of the public council. Given the scanty documentary record respecting women's activities, this work can provide only a partial glimpse, and raises questions it cannot answer. Yet in revealing, however imperfectly, the political activities of Native women from a particular tribal background, the Minnesota Ojibwe, at a particular point in time, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it suggests much about the range of political activity in which Native women engaged, and, perhaps more important, the goals their political actions were meant to achieve.
Susie Bonga Wright, from the Minnesota Ojibwe community of Leech Lake, emerges from a small selection of documents in the 1870s and 1880s as a leader and spokeswoman for an important female constituency within her community. Bonga Wright's actions offer a view into the functioning of a distinct women's community, but they also allow an examination of the ways in which women's leadership was challenged and channeled by the growing dominance of Euro-American society. While only sketchily portrayed in the documents, her personal life reveals additional information that illuminates her leadership role, both in its traditional and innovative dimensions. Further, her life, as a person of mixed African and Ojibwe ancestry, the daughter of an influential fur trader, also lends itself to an examination of the changing intersections of race, class and gender.
Like other midwestern Indians, the Ojibwe understood gender relations as complementary. Men and women were social halves that made up a whole. To Ojibwe minds, this was clearly demonstrated economically on a daily basis — male hunters provided the meat portion of the family's diet and female farmers contributed the products of the earth: grains, vegetables, and fruits. An obvious component of Ojibwe gender complementarity was the significant sex-segregation of male and female work. This is not to say that men and women worked in isolation from each other, for this was not ordinarily the case. Indeed, men and women often worked in physical proximity to one another, but on gender-specific aspects of a task. What gendered work roles do indicate is that the Ojibwe perceived women and men as having differing areas of expertise and interest.
Not surprisingly, given the gender-segregated organization of much of Ojibwe life, women and men formed separate political councils. One Ojibwe community made this division explicit in 1882, identifying "two persons as our leaders[,] one for the men & the other for the women." These two political bodies met together to create community policy, with the leader of the women's council presenting female opinion "to the men at their Meeting." While only the female leader, or ojyimakwe, spoke, in keeping with Ojibwe political protocol, all other interested women could and did attend these joint meetings. Ojibwe women also operated independently as a political entity. Assuming that Euro-Americans also divided political activity along gender lines, they worked to establish connections with organizations they understood to be Euro-American women's councils. In 1878, for instance, three prominent Ojibwe women wrote the wife and daughter of the Indian agent, emphasizing the "very pleasant feelings [that] have existed between us."
Ojibwe women also addressed issues within their communities. In the 1820s, for example, a visitor observed that when the Leech Lake community had obtained alcohol and a general village revel was taking place, it was "the usual practice" for the women to confiscate all weapons and police the community while the men drank, preventing the intoxicated from injuring themselves or others. Such female drinking patrols existed in Ojibwe communities until at least the 1870s.
Yet the most ubiquitous circumstance under which Ojibwe women organized themselves involved coordinating and directing their daily and seasonal work, much of which was performed in groups. The work of farming, gathering wild foods, and processing all foodstuffs; the construction of housing; and the manufacture of clothing, bedding, domestic containers, and utensils; not to mention child care, required women to organize and lead their activities. One female leader, Susanna Roy, discussed her work coordinating the labor of other women, organizing "the women [to] work making things."
This most mundane level of activity may well have been the most important, however. The daily environment of a work group provided an obvious forum for political debate, and indeed, in the work group setting, Ojibwe women discussed issues and formulated their opinions. As late as the 1890s, missionary worker Pauline Colby observed that the work groups remained the arena for Ojibwe women "to discuss all affairs of interest to them." Echoing descriptions of more formal council meetings, Colby noted the egalitarian nature of these political discussions. Any woman might "rise and make an address," to the others, Colby noted, and all opinions were given "respectful attention." Susie Bonga Wright's career likewise demonstrates the significance of the work group for female leaders. While she participated in the multiple layers of female political activity, "speaking for" her supporters in a variety of contexts and regularly communicating with interested Euro-American women, the work group remained a central focus of much of her political activity.
Born around 1850, Susie Bonga grew to young adulthood during some of the most difficult times the Ojibwe had known. Pressured by the growing physical and economic dominance of the United States during the 1850s and 1860s, the Minnesota Ojibwe had ceded most of their lands in the Treaty of 1855. The results had been calamitous. The reduced and fragmented land base could not sustain the older hunting/gathering and trapping economy, and the Ojibwe slid rapidly into poverty. Economic and social decline were accompanied by bitter political divisions, as Ojibwe communities split over strategies for dealing with the growing American presence. Unable to sustain themselves from the land, the Ojibwe found themselves increasingly dependent on cash payments from the U.S. government. This dependence, they learned to their dismay, made them increasingly vulnerable to additional American demands, both for more land cessions and for the dramatic cultural changes Euro-Americans called "civilization."
American policy respecting Native Americans in the middle to late nineteenth century involved the near-complete transformation of Native people. Federal government policymakers and well-meaning Euro-American reformers envisioned a two-pronged program simultaneously involving conversion to Christianity and the adoption of an idealized variant of American agrarianism, a cluster of cultural attributes that Euro-Americans called "civilization." The Ojibwe (indeed, all Native Americans) were to embrace private property, especially with respect to landholding, and accept a market economy with gender roles for men as wage-earning farmers and women as housekeepers who did not earn wages for their societally undervalued housework. Political matters were to be decided by a majority of the adult males. Ojibwe children were to attend schools where the civilized values would be sternly inculcated. On more visible and daily levels, the Ojibwe were to adopt the housing, clothing, foods, and language of Euro-Americans.
In the face of this onslaught, the Ojibwe, including the people of Susie Bonga's village of Leech Lake, sought to preserve what they regarded as their cultural core. Daily manifestations of Euro-American culture such as housing and clothing styles did not concern them deeply. Indeed, as the Ojibwe had been involved in the fur trade since the 1600s, they had already adopted many items of Old World material culture. What the Leech Lakers struggled hard to preserve were a series of intangibles, valued and distinctive cultural attributes, ways of thinking and behaving, that were sharply at odds with Euro-American cultural norms and expectations. They sought to continue their political decision-making process along aboriginal lines, basing decisions on unanimity rather than majority rule, and including both women and men as political participants. They further struggled to maintain an economic system based on egalitarian redistribution of resources contributed by both sexes rather than the private accumulation of wealth controlled by men. Beginning in the 1850s, gaining widespread support by the 1870s, sizeable numbers of Ojibwe sought to turn the "civilization" program into a weapon they might wield in their own defense. Hard-pressed to find means of self-support now that the resources of their former land base were denied them, the Ojibwe were particularly interested in the possibilities that increased reliance on agriculture seemed to promise.
At the same time, the Ojibwe also sought to cultivate ties with those groups of Euro-Americans heavily involved in administering the government's programs. Prominent in creating and administering the federal Indian policy were several Christian denominations and a host of religiously inspired individuals, a policy innovation begun during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. Deeply concerned about injustices toward Native peoples, determined to eliminate the near-legendary fraud and corruption of the Indian Office, such well-connected "friends of the Indian" could be mobilized in defense of Native interests.
Toward this end, important political leaders, their family members and influential supporters on several Ojibwe reservations formally converted to Episcopalianism, the denomination that had maintained a presence in Ojibwe country during the midcentury decades. At Leech Lake, in July of 1880, the sister of the premier village leader, Flat Mouth, led an initial group of thirty-nine converts from notable families. Prominent among them were the Bongas, with ten family members, including Susie, converting.
If the decades of Susie Bonga's youth had been difficult, the late 1870s and early 1880s were exciting times. Their adaptive revitalization strategy, the Ojibwe believed, was succeeding. They were learning a range of valued skills, from literacy in English to the mechanical knowledge to operate farming equipment. Conflicts with their Euro-American Episcopal friends, who decidedly did not envision an enduring Ojibwe cultural or political existence, had yet to arise. Instead, the two groups could focus on the obvious overlap in their goals. Euro-American and Ojibwe threw themselves into the work of constructing churches and organizing congregations. More compelling, from the Ojibwe perspective, were the simultaneous efforts to create the infrastructure they would need to become subsistence farmers. Land had to be cleared, plowed, and planted in Euro-American fashion with draft cattle and farm machinery; barns, outbuildings, and farmhouses had to be built; and the Ojibwe had to learn to equip and maintain these possessions, on which their new lifestyle was to be based.
The Episcopalians, like other denominations, advocated conventional Euro-American gender roles for Native peoples, and focused most of their time and energy on transforming the lives of Ojibwe men. They paid far less attention to Ojibwe women. Indeed, efforts to transform women's roles were often understood only within the larger context of altering male work. The Episcopalian head missionary, Joseph A. Gilfillan, a Euro-American, argued that as long as Ojibwe women continued their traditional subsistence pursuits (including agriculture), men would never accept their proper role of family provider. Once women were made into "housekeepers," however, Ojibwe men would be forced to adopt the corresponding male work of farming. Also suggestive of Episcopal priorities was the fact that they supported no female missionaries, who might reasonably be expected to focus their attention primarily upon Ojibwe women, for the first forty years of mission work.
Nor were the wives of male missionaries to involve themselves in active prosletyzing. Joseph Gilfillan made clear his feelings on the work proper for the sexes. Having determined that he and his wife could not both perform missionary work and maintain a household, he advocated a conventional and biblically sanctioned division of labor. Her husband, Harriet Cook Gilfillan recollected, "agreed with the Apostles that 'it is not meet for us to leave the word of God and serve tables.'" Rather than split the household work, "he took the 'Word' and she the 'tables.'" The Gilfillans regularly invited "for supper" "all the good Christian Indians ... and their wives," with the goal of showing them "a Christian home." Prominently in evidence within that home were the proper male and female spheres. If Native men were to become yeomen farmers, Native women were being offered a familiar vision of female domesticity; they were to become Victorian True Women.
Ojibwe women as well as men discovered that, in seeking to adapt the Euro-American civilization program to their own ends, they needed to learn a daunting range of new skills and work roles. Susie Bonga Wright and her contemporaries began living in log or frame houses equipped with heavy furnishings in place of their mothers' easily cleaned and easily transported bark wigwams. They ceased to manufacture basic household items such as storage containers, dishes, and other cooking and eating utensils from forest resources, relying instead on more-fragile crockery that had to be carefully cleaned and maintained. They began cooking on woodstoves instead of open-pit fires, and they had to learn to process and prepare a range of new foodstuffs. As the Ojibwe began wearing Euro-American-style dress, women sought to learn to construct, clean, and maintain clothing and bedding made of wool and cotton instead of tanned animal skins. Ojibwe women evidently pursued knowledge of their half of the new agrarian lifestyle with an enthusiasm that initially gratified the Euro-American missionaries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Midwestern Women by Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Wendy Hamand Venet. Copyright © 1997 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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