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

By Maeve E. Kane

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501767906

Book preview

SHIRTS

POWDERED RED

HAUDENOSAUNEE GENDER,

TRADE, AND EXCHANGE ACROSS

THREE CENTURIES

MAEVE KANE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Note on Language

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

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Cover

Title

Contents

Note on Language

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

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

Guide

Cover

Title

Contents

Note on Language

Start of Content

Epilogue: Miss Mountpleasant and the Indian Wigwam

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

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iv

NOTE ON LANGUAGE

Each of the Six Nations remains linguistically and politically distinct in the twenty-first century, and my use of the common Onondaga spelling Haudenosaunee rather than the Mohawk Rotinonshonni or other spellings is not intended to flatten these important distinctions. For the sake of readability for readers unfamiliar with the languages of the Six Nations, I use the English names of individual nations to avoid possible confusion between, for example, Onödowága:’ (Seneca nation in Seneca) and Onoñda’gegá (Onondaga nation in Onondaga). I use modern Onondaga spellings in the text for culturally specific terms such as goyá:neh (clan mother) and hoyá:neh (condoled chief). I use goyá:neh and hoyá:neh to emphasize the specific nature of clan-based Haudenosaunee governance and leadership. I chose the orthography used in Hanni Woodbury’s Onondaga-English dictionary that was produced in collaboration with living Onondaga speakers, in acknowledgment of the Onondaga nation’s place as the central fire of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, in recognition of Onondaga as a living language, and in recognition of the differences in dialect and orthography among Onondaga speakers at Six Nations and Onondaga Nation.¹ Following the example of the Native Hawaiian scholar David Chang and others working in the broader field of Native American and Indigenous studies, I do not italicize Haudenosaunee language words in the text to help emphasize the primacy of Haudenosaunee cultural and spatial knowledge in discussing their nations’ histories.²

In choosing a single language and orthography, I follow the example of leaders Tsaɂdegaihwadeɂ Irving Powless and Sakokweniónkwas Tom Porter in their transcribed oral histories and scholars like Susan M. Hill and Penelope Kelsey by using a single orthography for the sake of consistency.³ For names of rivers and lakes, I use the contemporary orthography of the nation whose territory the body of water was in or near (with the acknowledgment that some bodies of water bordered multiple territories and had multiple names). I use the orthography used in the most recent published dictionary where possible, with the acknowledgment that dialects and orthography vary within nations. A glossary of terms and place names is included at the end of this book.

For personal names, I follow the published orthography used by contemporary living individuals for their own names, and I follow the Haudenosaunee Documentation Committee’s convention of placing a person’s Haudenosaunee name as their first name where it is known to me. For historical figures like Jigonsaseh, I use the orthography used by the Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee where available.⁴ Each individual nation and community has its own history and concerns; in discussing them together with a single orthography it is my intention to draw out their common shared concerns while acknowledging their distinctions.

Introduction

Clothing the People without History

Over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people bought clothing in ways that reflected and created their national identity. Haudenosaunee people used cross-cultural trade to reinforce their nations’ sovereignty and maintain a distinctly Haudenosaunee identity. A long view of Haudenosaunee gendered labor from contact with settlers in the seventeenth century through the creation of academic anthropology in the nineteenth century reveals both the major changes and continuities in Haudenosaunee communities. This long view is necessary to examine how Haudenosaunee people used change in some areas of life to preserve their nations in the face of growing colonial pressures.¹ Indigenous histories are often told as a series of traumatic breakages, crises, or ruptures with the past. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy or Iroquois League) have certainly experienced hardship in their dealings with settler powers.

A reframing of how Haudenosaunee history has been periodized over a long span helps emphasize survivance into the present rather than rupture with the past.² Haudenosaunee women have always been essential to their nations, especially when their communities faced the crises that have characterized the settler scholarship of their nations’ histories, and analysis of women’s work helps reframe these academic narratives of decline. As the late Onondaga Nation Deer Clan Mother Goñwaiani Audrey Shenandoah said at a women’s suffrage celebration in Seneca Falls, New York, Haudenosaunee women have worked with the men to successfully guard their sovereign political status against persistent attempts to turn them into United States citizens. We have always had these responsibilities.³ Throughout the three centuries covered by this work, Haudenosaunee women’s political and domestic work was central to how both Haudenosaunee and European people understood the continuance of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and identity.

Before 1722, the Confederacy was comprised of five nations linked by common cultural and political goals. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were often known to Europeans as the Five Nations. These included the Mohawk, nearest to modern Albany, the Oneida, Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca in the far west, covering the Finger Lakes and stretching to and sometimes past modern Buffalo. After 1722 they were known as the Six Nations when the Tuscarora nation was welcomed home following its forced displacement from territories in what is now North Carolina.⁴ Indigenous feminist spatial theorists emphasize Indigenous ways of knowing both histories and places as part of the ongoing work of decolonization.⁵ To emphasize continuity between the present and the history of the Haudenosaunee discussed, I use Ononda’gega’ or Kanién’keha (Onondaga and Mohawk language) place names as much as possible.

The nations of the Haudenosaunee have often differed politically, socially, religiously, and economically throughout the period covered by this book and in the present. Before and after contact with settlers, they shared a matrilineal accounting of descent in which belonging to family, clan, and nation descended through the mother’s line.⁶ Goyá:neh, or clan mothers, guided the use of clan fields for maize agriculture in matrifocal towns that expanded and diffused as political and military conditions required. Together, they controlled access and travel through their territories for both Europeans and other Indigenous groups well past the American Revolution. In the twenty-first century, their national territories are the only continuously held Indigenous territories encompassed by former British colonies, with additional communities in Wisconsin and Oklahoma since the nineteenth century, as shown in figure 0.2.

Figure 0.1: A watercolor painting of an Indigenous woman looking directly at the viewer, carrying a baby in a cradleboard. She wears a white and blue striped mantua, a blue knee-length skirt, a blue blanket wrapped over one shoulder and arm, brown leggings, and moccasins. Her skirt, blanket, and leggings are decorated with ribbon and silver brooches.

FIGURE 0.1. Mohawk Woman, attributed to George Heriot. Musée du Nouveau Monde, La Rochelle, France, MNM.1980.1.15. Courtesy G. Dagli Orti / © NPL—DeA Picture Library/Bridgeman Images.

Figure 0.2: A black and white map of the national territories of Haudenosaunee nations in 2020. These territories extend throughout what is now Quebec, Ontario, New York, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin.

FIGURE 0.2. Haudenosaunee national territories in 2020.

Source: Map by the author. GIS data for this and figures 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 drawn from Natural Earth 1:10m; Aboriginal Lands of Canada Legislative Boundaries, Quebec and Ontario subsets, Government of Canada, English shapefiles, https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/522b07b9-78e2-4819-b736-ad9208eb1067; American Indian Reservations / Federally Recognized Tribal Entities, USGS ScienceBase-Catalog, United States Department of the Interior, https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/4f4e4a2ee4b07f02db61576c.

The colonial history that created many reserves and reservations out of reduced Haudenosaunee historical territories is the same process that separated the woman in figure 0.1 from her nation’s history. The watercolor is an embodiment of Europe and the people without history, or the historical reduction of non-European people to anonymous others with no histories of their own.⁷ As historical evidence, the image is as confounding as it is useful because its creation and preservation erase exactly the things it gives the most evidence of: the woman’s choices in clothing herself and her baby. Clothing is one of the most personal choices an individual makes, but the history of this image divorced the woman in it from any information about her own history or choices. Everything this woman is wearing was manufactured in Europe and purchased from a European trader. She wears a blue wrapped wool skirt, red wool leggings, and a blue blanket decorated with green and red ribbons and silver pins, all of them imported from Europe and trimmed by a white seamstress or the Mohawk woman herself. Her blue-striped cotton or linen overdress echoes fashionable white women’s ruffled mantuas of the eighteenth century but does not exactly match them. Her deerskin moccasins are perhaps the only part of her ensemble never touched by European hands. Even the baby’s cradleboard appears to be decorated with black wool and trimmed with imported ribbon.

Clothing in all its forms is inherently political.⁸ An action need not be considered political at the moment it is taken to have wider significance either in the moment or retrospectively.⁹ As the Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson argues, refusal is as political as action—to refuse to vote, pay taxes, or buy certain things is political. As Simpson argues, the story of refusal is the language that people use to talk about themselves.¹⁰ Political acts, in their broadest sense, are actions taken in dialogue with others’ choices and actions that have broader impacts beyond the individual. Buying or refusing to buy an object is a decision enmeshed in networks of social meaning that has wide-ranging effects beyond the buyer and the seller. Consumption brings distant production into the home, while rejection refuses its entry.¹¹ Eighteenth-century Europeans also understood production to extend the reach of the buyer through the chain of production because many saw consumption as the sole end and purpose of all production, as Adam Smith observed in Wealth of Nations.¹² The politics of consumption do not end at the moment of purchase because objects take on political meaning through their use in social contexts.¹³

The politics of clothing extend beyond the cultural meaning communicated by individual use, and extend through the meaning ascribed to the collective and political identity that common use creates.¹⁴ Clothing marks individuals’ social position as they, their community, and their observers perceive it. The choice to buy or wear clothing that fits perfectly within socially constructed expectations for one’s gender, race, age, or social position implicitly upholds those roles. The conscious or unconscious choice to clothe oneself outside those norms implicitly or explicitly pushes on the boundaries of social categories and their political reality. As a daily, domestic choice, Haudenosaunee clothing was a site of explicit and implicit self-positioning both within communities and within larger regional and global networks of power. Clothing purchases and reworking reflected not only individual agency but also the process of Haudenosaunee national self-fashioning.

The transformation of European cloth into Haudenosaunee clothing could be, and has been, interpreted from a colonial vantage as a replacement or erasure of Haudenosaunee material culture by European manufacturing and trade.¹⁵ That transformation, and the ways it has been interpreted, is the heart of understanding how Indigenous people navigated and shaped exchange with settlers. Cross-cultural interactions across three centuries have been perceived by settlers to erode Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous nations’ sovereignty and identity, in large part because this narrative serves settler goals of erasing and replacing Indigenous people and nations.¹⁶

Haudenosaunee people in the past and present have shaped material objects to preserve their sovereignty. In his oral history of the first treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee, the late Wampum Keeper and Onondaga Beaver Clan Chief Tsaɂdegaihwadeɂ Irving Powless Jr. said that the Onondaga promised that from this day forward we will know each other as brothers. And in the future when we meet, you will know who we are by the way we are dressed and the way that we speak. For this reason, Powless said, he always wore his ribbon shirt and a silver bolo bearing the symbols of his nation and clan when he appeared in court to show that he was dressed in the laws and the traditions of the Onondagas and the Haudenosaunee rather than those of the United States.¹⁷ Powless drew a direct line from his ancestors’ treaty promises, their distinction as nations marked by their clothing, and the sovereignty of his nation today.

Scholars have long acknowledged the importance of Haudenosaunee women in directing their communities and protecting their nations’ sovereignty.¹⁸ However, directly accessing these women’s thoughts and actions is difficult and, at times, impossible because archival records were created and preserved by a settler colonial system hostile to Indigenous women’s voices, histories, and agency. Oral histories and community-based archival studies by Indigenous scholars have centered on Haudenosaunee understandings of the past; this book asks how archivally based scholarship can respond to the questions raised by that important work.¹⁹ Scholarship on early modern European consumers has explored the ways consumption made new avenues of choice and self-determination to women and men throughout the Atlantic World. Consumers used goods to declare community, family, and other affiliations. Relatively little similar work has been done on nonwhite communities.²⁰ European and settler women’s purchasing roles are taken as evidence of their agency, and consumption is framed as both a unifying political act and an exercise of individual self-determination.²¹ Indig enous people, and especially Indigenous women, are rarely afforded the same empowerment.²²

Haudenosaunee communities used clothing to construct their own categories of nation, race, gendered power, and political legitimacy. This Haudenosaunee understanding of identity and sovereignty shaped engagement with the new American nation well into the nineteenth-century. Haudenosaunee self-fashioning was done in conversation with the evolving standard of European consumer civility as marked by the use of clothing and other material culture. Many Europeans from the seventeenth century on believed that adherence to a gendered, socially constructed standard of order, bodily control, and comportment was a necessary prerequisite to individual participation in civil society. The legitimacy of larger groups and nations as political actors depended on the civility of their members.²³ The daily performance of European-style civility included binary gender roles of subdued, laboring masculinity and modest, chaste femininity; the restraint of the lower impulses of the body; agricultural and commercial labor; and rituals of respectability like tea service for elites. All of these performances were mediated by the use of clothing and material culture in culturally prescribed ways.

The European concept of civility was closely tied to Christian values and European self-image as Christians. Europeans and later Americans viewed the material performance of civility as a necessary prerequisite to Christian conversion. The material performance of civility was conveyed by the use of clothing and other consumer goods like tea sets that were understood to signal the owner’s adherence to settler gender, hygiene, labor, and religious ideals. Material civility was an abstract ideal that settlers perceived as available for purchase and transfer, along with the material objects that were weighted with its social meaning. Civility as a concept has long been wielded as a weapon of colonialism.²⁴ However, like the clothing that Haudenosaunee people bought and remade, the material signs of European civility were likewise remade to fit a framework of Haudenosaunee sovereignty, political legitimacy, and civility.

The Haudenosaunee are in some ways unique in early America, at least in the way non-Indigenous scholars have approached the study of their history. Haudenosaunee people are, as the anthropologist and dean of Iroquois studies William Fenton once put it, the most over-studied group in the world.²⁵ This vast overstatement, which does not include that other most overstudied group (powerful men of European descent), has been used to dismiss the need for further study after academic Iroquois studies calcified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A distinction exists between Haudenosaunee studies, which is conversant with the academic discipline of Native American and Indigenous studies and the concerns of modern Haudenosaunee people, and Iroquois studies, which built upon a nineteenth-century colonialist salvage ethnography foundation. Academic Iroquois studies grew in large part from the early hobby ethnologist and foundational anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s fascination with defining Iroquois traditional culture so as to more properly play Indian himself. Non-Indigenous scholarly obsession with defining and dissecting Iroquois culture has been baked into the American academy from the start. Morgan’s paean on the responsibilities of the white race to the red in League of the Iroquois, the seminal historian Francis Parkman’s excoriation of the highest type of Indian, and the father of the American university George Bancroft’s lyric triumph of colonists over greedy Iroquois scoundrels all helped lay a foundation for academic history on racial hierarchy.²⁶ Iroquois history has long been fetishized by the settler colonial academy without much consideration of Haudenosaunee people.

Academic Haudenosaunee studies have undergone something of a renaissance in the twenty-first century. Scholarship has shown renewed interest in spatial mobility, diplomatic neutrality, gender, domestic economy, sovereignty, and imperial entanglements. The old chestnut of Iroquois empire and inevitable decline has been reconsidered in tandem with a turn in the broader field of Indigenous studies to centering Indigenous homelands and continuities. The Haudenosaunee were able to keep control of their lands for longer than other eastern Indigenous groups, but the Haudenosaunee use of exchange is suggestive of the broader study of political economy and settler colonialism. The longer Haudenosaunee experience of trade without dependency shows that Indigenous groups could and did engage with the Atlantic world in ways that reinforced rather than undermined their sovereignty. Land loss, debt, and trade dependency for the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups were the products of settler violence, colonial coercion, and loss of Indigenous diplomatic and military power, rather than a result of trade.

A long view of Haudenosaunee history beginning with the earliest indirect integration of European trade goods shows the important continuities between the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The integration of this trade with Europeans was shaped by Haudenosaunee gendered labor roles. Women were responsible for integrating both new goods and new people who arrived in Haudenosaunee territories via long-standing Indigenous trade routes. This gendered work of domestication and transformation first brought Haudenosaunee and European people and goods together in Haudenosaunee communities. European gender ideology of the seventeenth century increasingly viewed women’s proper place as separated into a private or domestic sphere. This created tension between the European goal to change Haudenosaunee gendered work and the very ability to perceive Haudenosaunee gendered work. Haudenosaunee women’s work included the formal direction of political and diplomatic decisions. Their work also included the familial work of transforming and integrating new goods and adopted captives as Haudenosaunee. Early seventeenth-century French efforts to more closely link Haudenosaunee diplomatic and military interests to French interests focused on converting Haudenosaunee women both to Catholicism and to French modes of gendered labor. Both Haudenosaunee and French leaders understood women’s labor in clothing families to be central to creating each community’s identity.

Haudenosaunee people were able to choose how to incorporate European goods and people because their nations’ diplomatic and military power allowed individuals and communities to keep settlers at a distance. Haudenosaunee free movement meant that Haudenosaunee consumers, and not settler merchants or officials, were in control of beaver supplies. French, Dutch, and English colonial officials dependent on beaver exports for their colonies’ profitability bemoaned this Haudenosaunee mobility and control of their territories because they could not control beaver supply. This supply fluctuated across the seventeenth century. Fluctuations coincided with periods of epidemic disease, warfare, and cool diplomatic relations between the Haudenosaunee and European settlements rather than depletion of hunting areas.

Haudenosaunee labor was not rearranged toward market-driven hunting. During periods of inter-Indigenous war or tense relations with European colonies, a realignment of Haudenosaunee priorities away from market hunting negatively affected colonial profits but not Haudenosaunee access to goods or the basics of life.²⁷ Haudenosaunee communities fit the new trade into their labor systems, and only shifted to buying a major portion of their garments when cloth prices fell at the end of the seventeenth century. Women domesticated imported cloth and clothing acquired through this trade as Haudenosaunee garments. An analysis of Haudenosaunee purchases and material culture shows that the time and work these women saved with their purchases were put toward specifically Indigenous decorative forms like twined and fingerwoven fabrics.

Settlers found this assertion of indigeneity profoundly distressing on both a political and a religious level, driving more than three centuries of pressure to convert to Christianity. European desires to view clothing as a signifier of civility fueled French and British hopes for Indigenous education, conversion, and incorporation as imperial subjects. The complete reform of Haudenosaunee gendered labor was the preferred method of these diplomatically oriented religious conversion schemes. British and French efforts at religious conversion created connections between European and Haudenosaunee communities that Haudenosaunee people put to use in facilitating cross-border, inter-imperial trade. This trade depended on women’s religious connections, both between Haudenosaunee women and between European and Haudenosaunee women. It also enriched settler men in New France and New York. Both the trade and the connections between women that it relied on were increasingly viewed as subversive and dangerous as tensions between France and England escalated in the 1740s. British and French colonial officials were unable to successfully suppress the trade or the inter-cultural connections it relied on without alienating the independent Haudenosaunee communities they depended on diplomatically and militarily.

Haudenosaunee individuals’ continued disinterest in the adoption of European material civility underlined the performativity and instability of European-style civility. Haudenosaunee disinterest raised the worrying possibility that Haudenosaunee nations might decide to pursue military as well as economic goals counter to British or French interests. Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, is a case study of diplomatic and domestic Anglo-Haudenosaunee conflict over material, political, and religious conversion. Earlier French conversion efforts in the seventeenth century and later American attempts in the nineteenth century centered on similar anxieties. For Wheelock and other settler missionaries, the Haudenosaunee represented the imagined religious and political key to control of eastern North America. Haudenosaunee women’s labor was the essential foundation on which these missionaries believed material, political, and religious reform of the Six Nations rested.

These shared Haudenosaunee and American experiences as Atlantic consumers and tensions around consumption exacerbated conflicts over political legitimacy in the years leading to the American Revolution.²⁸ American attacks on Haudenosaunee women’s property early in the war were symbolic denials of Indigenous claims to consumer civility and political legitimacy. As the war progressed, American hostility turned to attacks on Haudenosaunee women themselves. The American Revolution was a crisis in Haudenosaunee territories for its shocking violence between former neighbors and in the conflicts it caused within the Confederacy. Despite this and punitive land loss after the war, Haudenosaunee women remained central to the political and diplomatic life of their nations. Haudenosaunee leaders critiqued American attempts to marginalize Haudenosaunee women in treaty negotiations over women’s lands, making Haudenosaunee women’s political and diplomatic influence more visible even as it was under threat.

After the American Revolution, Haudenosaunee women like Seneca Caroline Parker used clothing and religious rhetoric to position Haudenosaunee communities as sovereign and continuing. Nineteenth-century American missionaries, like seventeenth-century French and eighteenth-century English efforts, attempted to make Haudenosaunee individuals politically legible as American citizens through the performance of material civility. These changes in civility depended on changing Haudenosaunee women’s labor in clothing their families. As pressure mounted for the Haudenosaunee to remove or be subsumed in the American nation, women like Parker responded with their constructions of civility. An overdress made and worn by Parker in the iconic photograph of traditional Iroquois women’s dress in Morgan’s 1851 work articulated her views of Haudenosaunee civility. In this overdress, she constructed her own vision of Haudenosaunee women’s dress as modern, dignified, and distinct from white middle-class American consumer civility. Parker’s political act of creating clothing for the New York State Museum, although dismissed by Morgan and later scholars because of its domestic nature, underlined the political nature of all women’s domestic work. Nineteenth-century Haudenosaunee clothing, from everyday adaptations, to silk regalia overdresses, to Parker’s cotton and wool ensemble for the State Museum, was a material construction of historical memory and a rejection of settler assimilation.

The image in figure 0.1 is the only image of a Haudenosaunee woman made before 1800.²⁹ Early European images of generalized or imagined Native American women are common. There are only a few images of Indigenous women who could be either Iroquoian or Algonquian, the two major cultural groups in what is now upstate New York and the territories of the Haudenosaunee. There are even fewer images of named Indigenous women who sat for portraits.³⁰ This image of an anonymous Mohawk woman is both unusually direct and unusually detailed. Looking at the viewer, the specificity in her clothing suggests she was painted from life and might even have been a specific woman who the painter saw, rather than a composite of many women. Even if the image itself is an amalgamation of what the painter saw many women wear, the rich detail is a significant record of eighteenth-century Indigenous women’s clothing. The woman pictured might have been a real, specific person with a name, a history, and a reason for looking at the viewer so directly. This woman is who I was looking for when I set out to write an archivally based history of Haudenosaunee engagement with settler colonialism.

The image is attributed to George Heriot, but Heriot’s other known work is much more stiffly classical in posing and stylized in its depiction of Indigenous clothing.³¹ Even the identification of the woman as Mohawk is uncertain and based on tentative ethnographic details. Her clothing resembles written descriptions of Haudenosaunee women’s clothing in the late eighteenth century, but she could have been a member of another Indigenous nation, or she could have been an imagined composite based on no specific nation and no specific woman. Having sat with this image and the questions that led me to it for many years now, it encapsulates the many possibilities and frustrations with trying to write an archivally based history of Indigenous people in early America. The many historical layers that separate the viewer in the present from both the moment this image was created and the woman it depicts have felt to me at times like a vast uncrossable distance.

These layers of distance are the products of gendered colonial power.³² Imperialism and settler colonialism are processes of economics, politics, and culture that accumulate over time rather than totalizing or inevitable natural forces.³³ This watercolor is one manifestation of those processes. In the catalog of the Musée du Nouveau Monde, the image is listed as Squaw Mohawk, an ugly colonialist term that has a long, dehumanizing history in both English and French.³⁴ Whether this is an image of a specific woman or a composite, the colonial label applied to the image separates her from her own history and places her in the imagined European context of sexualized Indian drudges.

As yet one more settler scholar of Indigenous history in a long tradition of settler scholars who have attempted to tell Indigenous histories, it is not my goal to give voice to the voiceless or recover a past for the woman in this image.³⁵ It is my goal to examine how and why Indigenous people like the Mohawk woman pictured in the water-color above have been so often rendered anonymous in settler archival records and histories. Settler hierarchies of gender and race helped sever this Mohawk woman from her own history and nation in the archive. These dynamics are still at play to deny Indigenous nations’ ownership of their lands and histories. Prosaic and anonymous moments like the one captured by this watercolor might yet speak to how people like her saw and thought of the changing world of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

If history is a cloth woven of many threads, a book is a garment tailored from many patchwork fabrics. The author pieces it together, while the reader inhabits it. The lived experience of any time is composed of a wide variety of intersecting warps and wefts, but over time that fabric becomes moth-eaten, patched, and occasionally burned by the vagaries of time and archival preservation.³⁶ A garment made from such fabric must necessarily patch together many small pieces. In tailoring the garment that you hold now, I have attempted to examine the reasons for that patchwork. The anonymous woman in the opening image does and did have a history. Unlike her frank gaze, the path to her history is not direct. Her choices are not evident from a single image alone, but they can be traced through the intersecting patchwork of evidence that remains. In the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, her identity and the identity of her descendants remain clear, dressed in the laws and traditions of the Haudenosaunee.

CHAPTER 1

Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact

Sometime between 1580 and 1600, a woman born in the tropics died in the Seneca town of Ganounata.¹ Her bones were deformed in a way that suggests she suffered from yaws or a related disease, which was endemic to coastal West Africa and tropical areas of North and Central America.² Her arrival at Ganounata was part of larger regional and global changes that would eventually bring more people and things from far beyond North America to Haudenosaunee territory. The Ganounata woman was not the first non-Haudenosaunee person to be adopted into a Seneca community. However, her arrival in Seneca country was made possible by a long history of extensive Haudenosaunee trade and signaled impending changes to that trade. The Ganounata woman might have been an African who escaped from enslavement in the Spanish city of San Agustín on the Atlantic coast of Florida, or one of the three hundred enslaved Africans abandoned by Sir Francis Drake near Roanoke in 1586, or she may have been an Indigenous refugee of the upheavals that racked the Cofitachequi chiefdom to the southeast in the wake of repeated Spanish incursions.³ Whatever her origins, she probably arrived in Seneca country via the long-standing Kawehnohkowanénhne (Susquehanna River) valley trade routes that connected the lakes and valleys of what is now upstate New York with the Chesapeake region and the southeast.⁴

The Ganounata woman entered a region that was fundamentally shaped by women’s work and women’s relation to land. As Mohawk Bear Clan Mother Iakoiane Wakerahkats:teh has said, Women are indeed the first environment . . . With our bodies we nourish, sustain, and create connected relationships and interdependence. In this way the Earth is our mother. In this way, we as women are the Earth.⁵ Women were connected to their land through the creation story of Sky Woman’s descent to Turtle Island, through the founding story of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and through their daily political and agricultural work. When Sky Woman’s daughter Zephyr died in childbirth, her mother Sky Woman planted corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and strawberries on her grave. These plants connected women’s bodies, agriculture, and lives to their lands in Haudenosaunee cosmology. Zephyr’s son Skyholder created the first humans from the soil of his mother’s grave, giving the soil life with his own blood, underpinning the philosophy that all life comes from the land and returns to the land. These connections formed the foundation of Haudenosaunee matrilineal identity and territoriality.⁶

When Hiawatha and the Peacemaker united the five related nations of the Haudenosaunee in the Confederacy, they sought the help of Jigonsaseh, or She who lives along the road to war, to provide provisions to warriors. As owners and cultivators of the land, women like Jigonsaseh supplied food for war parties, giving them an effective veto if they denied warriors supplies. With Jigonsaseh’s help, the Peacemaker and Hiawatha brought together the warring nations at her hearth to create a lasting peace within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Called the Peace Queen and Mother of Nations, Jigonsaseh’s provision of food for war parties made women’s agriculture central to their diplomatic and political power to appoint and depose leaders, sanction war and peace, and direct the political life of their nations.⁷ Seneca and other Haudenosaunee women owned land through matrilineal clans headed by a goyá:neh. They practiced extensive maize agriculture, and they adopted newcomers like the Ganounata woman into their clans.

Seneca country is cold and damp in the winter and moderate in the summer, a far cry from the tropics where the Ganounata woman was born. When the Ganounata woman arrived in Seneca country during the usual trading season of late spring to early fall, she saw rolling corn fields before she arrived at a town. These fields extended for miles around the settlement. Before arriving at the town, she had already traveled through the parklike expanse of older corn fields left fallow when the town relocated to a new location every twenty to thirty years. Every few decades, Haudenosaunee communities sought out fresher soil for farming and woods for gathering and moved to new town sites. They left behind cultivated stands of edible plants to forage and new growth to lure in deer and other game for easy hunting. Women’s cultivation of the land quite literally reshaped it for generations and created a bountiful landscape to support them and their communities. As they neared the town, the Ganounata woman’s traveling party encountered Haudenosaunee women, children, and older men on their way. They passed groups out in the fields who tilled interplanted mounds of corn, beans, and squash, or scared away birds from mounted platforms.⁸

The town of Ganounata was a bustling place, situated atop a long, high hill and surrounded by a tall, circular palisade wall made of trees nearly a foot around. A generation earlier, intermittent warfare made these palisades necessary for protection against raids, but Ganounata bore little evidence of warfare by the time Ganounata woman arrived. Inside the palisade wall were long, tall homes sheathed in elm bark, about twenty feet wide and forty to one hundred feet long. The town was home to anywhere from several hundred to more than a thousand people. Depending on the time of year, not everyone was at home. In addition to the vast corn fields, Haudenosaunee families and small parties traveled seasonally for fishing, hunting, foraging, and trade. Small family groups lived away from the town sometimes for months at a time at seasonal camps or traveled between towns for trade and visiting relatives.

Born outside of Haudenosaunee territory, the Ganounata woman lacked the clan affiliation that eased travel between Haudenosaunee nations. Clans extended across national lines. They offered reciprocal hospitality to members and marked their affiliations with animal emblems on longhouse peaks and other places. These longhouses were large bark and pole constructed buildings with a row of central fires down the middle and a peaked or rounded roof some ten to twenty feet high punctuated with smokeholes. If the Ganounata woman was a war captive, she would have been ritually tortured at the edge of the town to atone for the loss of Haudenosaunee family members. However, because she was a woman and her bones did not show evidence of trauma besides her yaws infection, she was probably not tortured. More likely she was adopted by a goyá:neh who accepted the Ganounata woman into her household and family in place of a recently deceased family member.

During her life in Ganounata, the Ganounata woman lived in a communal longhouse of anywhere from twenty to one hundred people. This longhouse was presided over by the goyá:neh and housed her daughters, their spouses and children. Raised platforms within the longhouse were paired across from one another, separated by a row of central fires, and families occupied these alcoves with their possessions. Corn was stored for winter in covered pits at the cooler ends of the longhouse with fish, meat, dried herbs, berries, and other necessities stored higher in the smoky loft. Families lived side by side with siblings, aunts, cousins, and grandparents, and worked together in communal, lineage-owned corn fields