Martha Garcia and Paula Gunn Allen both write in their essays of the challenges that Native American women have historically faced and continue to confront to this day. Major contributors to these challenges are the stereotypes and misconceptions by white male anthropologists and missionaries who studied the Native American tribes and found the women subservient and passive. Both of these authors strongly disagree in this characterization of Native American women and instead portray them as important and honored members of their tribes who will struggle but will continue to have a tremendous impact on the future of their tribes. Garcia’s research concentrates on previously published works on Cheyenne women by white men and reexamines these studies through a feminine point of view. As these white men migrated West, they recorded their observations. Unfortunately their reports were flawed and biased because the white men’s access was limited due to their outsider status and gender. These early observations reported Native American women performed menial work for the tribe such as berry picking. Garcia notes that what these men did not realize and understand was the rich communal life these women shared while berry picking. These men were also not aware of the culturally valued norms of feminine behavior such as modesty, kindness and being private, which led them to see these women as passive and subservient. The Cheyenne women were simply possessing the natural tribal values encouraged for women. By looking at the reports through a feminine lens, Garcia found that Cheyenne women have historically held an extremely important role within their culture, especially in their religious ceremonies. Cheyenne w... ... middle of paper ... ...thirsty savages. These men are fulfilling the white man’s vision of the savage Indian by abusing women. In order to stop the abuse, Garcia believes these popular culture stereotypes must be confronted and changed. If media, literary and artistic images are not changed to accurately reflect the lives of Native Americans, the violence will continue. Martha Garcia and Paula Gunn Allen both write of the historical challenges that Native American women have faced and continue to face to this very day. They describe these women as honorable, brave and proud members of a culture who are integral members of their people’s past and future. By bringing awareness of the faulty reports and stereotypical characterizations of the Native American population, these two women shed light on the importance of woman to the survival of the Native American culture.
Shoemaker, Nancy. “ Native-American Women in History.” OAH Magazine of History , Vol. 9, No. 4, Native Americans (Summer, 1995), pp. 10-14. 17 Nov. 2013
In the text “Seeing Red: American Indian Women Speaking about their Religious and Cultural Perspectives” by Inés Talamantez, the author discusses the role of ceremonies and ancestral spirituality in various Native American cultures, and elaborates on the injustices native women face because of their oppressors.
The contrast between the two groups of women was tremendous. Haudenosaunee women held prominent, decision-making positions in their matriarchal political system. They had the power to choose their clan’s chief, and their authority as clan mothers was respected by Haudenosaunee law. Spiritually, these women were viewed as being connected to Mother Earth and were responsible for leading various religious ceremonies, alongside of men. Haudenosaunee women also shared agricultural work with men, dealing with the work load on a communal basis. Not only did they have control of their own property, but women also had authority over their own bodies, including the responsibility of childbearing. This authority was developed in the Haudenosaunee matriarchal system of family in which children were considered members of the mother’s clan and husbands were brought into the wife’s longhouse upon marriage. Women had final domestic control; violence against women and children was not tolerated because wives had the power to kick their husbands out, ordering them to “pick up [their] blanket and budge” (Wagner, p. 47).
Professor and poet Deborah A. Miranda, pieces together the past and uncovers and presents us with a story--a Californian story--in her memoir, “Bad Indians.” Her use of the Christian Novena, “Novena to Bad Indians,” illustrates the irony of using the form of her oppressors as a call out for help, not to God, but to her past ancestors. We tend to think of religion as a form of salvation and redemption of our lives here on Earth, in which we bare down and ask for forgiveness. But by challenging this common discourse using theological allegories and satirical terminology, Miranda turns her attention away from a Deity to call the reader out for help. It is crucial to recognize the struggles that the Native community currently face. Californian Indians are often not given recognition for their identity and their heritage, and are also repeatedly stereotyped as abusive, alcoholic, uncivilized, and “freeloaders” of the United States government. Such generalizations root back from European colonization, nevertheless still linger in our contemporary society. Miranda has taken the first step forward in characterizing few of these stereotypes in her Novena, but she’s given her story. Now what are we going to do with ours? It’s up to us to create our
Lakota Woman Essay In Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog argues that in the 1970’s, the American Indian Movement used protests and militancy to improve their visibility in mainstream Anglo American society in an effort to secure sovereignty for all "full blood" American Indians in spite of generational gender, power, and financial conflicts on the reservations. When reading this book, one can see that this is indeed the case. The struggles these people underwent in their daily lives on the reservation eventually became too much, and the American Indian Movement was born. AIM, as we will see through several examples, made their case known to the people of the United States, and militancy ultimately became necessary in order to do so.
Deloria, in the introduction, begins with the picture of an American Indian using a modern bubble-style hair dryer at a hair salon. This image often evokes a chuckle, as Deloria states, because of our inherent expectation for an Indian to be wearing buckskin in the plains, rather than in a hair salon. Often, once the topic of stereotype, malice, and expectations are brought up, the chuckle or grin is gone. The preconceived ideal of what an American Indian should be is so deeply ingrained within us that we do not even give it a second thought when judging a supposed anomaly as the woman under the hair dryer. Deloria organizes his work into five sections, in the form of essays. These tackle the issues surrounding the stereotypes and expectations that we have for the Native peoples, in a variety of different aspects. The first one focuses on the idea of violence, and the popular notion of a savage depiction of the Indians. The second focuses on the Native American view of themsel...
Feminism and Indigenous women activism is two separate topics although they sound very similar. In indigenous women’s eyes feminism is bashing men, although Indigenous women respect their men and do not want to be a part of a women’s culture who bring their men down. Feminism is defined as “The advocacy of women 's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.” In theory feminism sounds delightful despite the approaches most feminists use such as wrong-full speaking of the opposite gender. Supposedly, feminism is not needed as a result of Indigenous women being treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white”. This essay argues that Indigenous women may
The Cheyenne Indians had quite an interesting life and many different customs that even live on today. The daily life of a Cheyenne always began before the sun rose. Women and men each had their own separate duties for the day. The women would prepare the meals while the men and boys would herd up the horses back to their camp. Each day, also, there were daily activities announced to everyone in the tribe. These activities included the children to go out and play for most of the day, the women would clean and have their time to converse with the other women, and the men would go out and play w...
Prior to 15th century colonization, indigenous peoples of North America enjoyed a gender system that included not only women and men, but also a third gender known as Two-Spirit. In Native American culture, individuals who identified as Two-Spirit were revered by society and held important roles among tribes. In their article “The Way of the Two-Spirited Pe...
McNickle, D'Arcy. "A Different World." Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology. Ed. Vizenor, Gerald. United States of America: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, 1995, 111-119.
Nevertheless, in the author’s note, Dunbar-Ortiz promises to provide a unique perspective that she did not gain from secondary texts, sources, or even her own formal education but rather from outside the academy. Furthermore, in her introduction, she claims her work to “be a history of the United States from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective but there is no such thing as a collective Indigenous peoples’ perspective (13).” She states in the next paragraph that her focus is to discuss the colonist settler state, but the previous statement raises flags for how and why she attempts to write it through an Indigenous perspective. Dunbar-Ortiz appears to anchor herself in this Indian identity but at the same time raises question about Indigenous perspective. Dunbar-Ortiz must be careful not to assume that just because her mother was “most likely Cherokee,” her voice automatically resonates and serves as an Indigenous perspective. These confusing and contradictory statements do raise interesting questions about Indigenous identity that Dunbar-Ortiz should have further examined. Are
“If you plan to be born, make sure you are born white and male” (Crow Dog, 1990, p. 4). Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog is a passion-filled book that addresses many of the challenges faced by American Indian women between 1954 and 1990. Crow Dog, half American Indian, half white was a member of The Brule tribe, a small tribe belonging to the larger Western Sioux, who grew to be a well-known activist in the American Indian Movement (AIM). Lakota Woman covers not only significant protests and rallies such as the Trail of Broken Treaties and the Indian Occupation at Wounded Knee but also speaks to the day-to-day life of a woman of the Sioux tribe. Meritocracy, or lack thereof, extreme sexism, racism, white denial and compliance are all important themes discussed in Lakota Woman.
For example, in the local school, stereotypes such as the image of the ‘wild man’ are consolidated by claiming that there was cannibalism among the indigenous people of the northwest coast (Soper-Jones 2009, 20; Robinson 2010, 68f.). Moreover, native people are still considered to be second-class citizens, which is pointed out by Lisamarie’s aunt Trudy, when she has been harassed by some white guys in a car: “[Y]ou’re a mouthy Indian, and everyone thinks we’re born sluts. Those guys would have said you were asking for it and got off scot-free”
Kugel, Rebecca, and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy. Native women's history in eastern North America before 1900: a guide to research and writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
For most Americans, their knowledge of Native Americans and their culture of both past and present are based predominantly on outdated labels and stereotypes. Over the past 7 weeks, we have covered several sources that have contributed to the continuous development of the stereotypical images that have unsettled the Native Americans over time. These misleading pictures, novels, Hollywood films, professional sports mascots, and other mediums have misrepresented and alienated the indigenous peoples within in each respective time period regarding the current Euro-American centered culture. In order to empathize with their situation one need to understand how and why these stereotypical images of Native Americans were first created in the first