Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries

by Maeve E. Kane

Overview

Beginning with a purchased shirt and ending with a handmade dress, Shirts Powdered Red shows how Haudenosaunee women and their work shaped their nations from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century.

By looking at clothing that was bought, created, and remade, Maeve Kane brings to life how Haudenosaunee women used access to global trade to maintain a distinct and enduring Haudenosaunee identity in the face of colonial pressures to assimilate and disappear. Drawing on rich oral, archival, material, visual, and quantitative evidence, Shirts Powdered Red tells the story of how Haudenosaunee people worked to maintain their nations' cultural and political sovereignty through selective engagement with trade and the rhetoric of civility, even as Haudenosaunee clothing and gendered labor increasingly became the focus of colonial conversion efforts throughout the upheavals and dispossession of the nineteenth century.

Shirts Powdered Red offers a sweeping, detailed cultural history of three centuries of Haudenosaunee women's labor and their agency to shape their nations' future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501767883
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2023
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

Maeve Kane is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. Follow her on X @MaeveKane.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Clothing the People without History
1. Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact
2. Purchased Cloth and the Transformation of Labor in the Seventeenth Century
3. Cultural Entanglement and European Anxiety in the Early Eighteenth Century
4. Women's Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
5. Gender, Race, and Civility in Eighteenth-Century Education
6. Erasure and Violence against Women in the American Revolution
7. Caroline Parker and Making a Modern Traditionality
Epilogue: Miss Mountpleasant and the Indian Wigwam

What People are Saying About This

Jessica Yurish Stern

Bringing deep, quantitative analysis to the fore, Maeve Kane illuminates how Haudenosaunee consumer choices were a form of agency and enriches what we know about and can learn from Haudenosaunee exchange.

Kathleen DuVal

A dazzlingly original book, which traces the long history of Haudenosaunee ways of dress to show how clothing has been intertwined with politics, economics, and gender, from the distant past to the present day.

Tai S. Edwards

The breadth and depth of Shirts Powdered Read is commendable. It is a joy to read. Maeve Kane weaves detailed explorations of daily life for Haudenosaunee people and settler colonists with contextual analysis of long-term Haudenosaunee power and colonization.