Sifters: Native American Women's Lives

by Theda Perdue (Editor)

In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions,
kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Native American, Biography

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

The anthropologists, historians, and social scientists who contributed to this book have presented a diverse and highly educational selection of Native women's biographies. The essays are informative and clearly come from academics, but I found them to be accessible as a "layperson" in the field. The chapters can stand alone and are short enough to read in one sitting. Don't skip Theda Perdue's artistic, thoughtful preface. I highly recommend this book!

[David Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the problems with historical biography, particularly with the biographies of women, is that individuals who left a substantial paper trail are generally more exceptional than typical, and one must question the applicability of their experiences to the lives of ordinary people. The fourteen Native American women discussed in this anthology, however, represent a sufficiently extensive range of ethnicities, social classes, and life experiences that their collective story proves relevant to the lives of many of their contemporaries. Some of the women covered in this volume became famous primarily as propaganda symbols for whites – in the twentieth century Pocahontas and Sacagawea became known as “princesses” (neither was) who blessed the white man's conquest of America by falling in love with the colonists. Some shrewdly commodified their people's culture and marketed it to whites, like the Penobscot road show manager and pageant organizer Lucy Nicolar, or Maria Montoyez, the Tewa artist who revived the manufacture of ultra-thin black pottery. Some took the symbolic identity that whites wanted to assign to them and subverted it, like the Christian Cherokee Catherine Brown, who asserted her gender and traditional religious identity by seeking remote locations to meditate and by organizing women's prayer groups. Christine Quintasket (Mourning Dove) wrote romantic novels about historical Indians, then added her own spin to them by arguing that Native Americans could adapt to modern society. Many women devoted their lives to a struggle for economic self-sufficiency and status: Mary Musgrove sought the status of a landed English gentlewoman and Creek Indian “queen,” Molly Brant the dignity of an English baronet's widow and the comfort of a Loyalist's estate, Delfina Cuero merely the means to feed her family and return to her Kumeyaay homeland in California. And many became political and cultural reformers, a role that neither Native American nor, ultimately, white American society denied to women. Gertrude Bonnin helped found the Society of American Indians and became a field teacher and anti-peyotist. Alice Jemison devoted her journalistic career to opposing the BIA and upholding Indian sovereignty. Anna Pictou-Aquash became a member of AIM and a participant in the Wounded Knee standoff of 1973, and Ada Deer, after helping lead the campaign to restore Menominee sovereignty in the 1970s, became the first female commissioner of Indian Affairs.

The collective picture that emerges from these disparate biographies is one of great cultural resilience and of lives more constrained by colonialism than by sexism. While some of these women suffered from alcoholism or died by violence (Quintasket and Pictou-Aquash), most came from cultures that afforded women considerable economic power and political influence. Salish women were the principal breadwinners for their families, Cherokee women farmed and held inalienable spiritual power as daughters of Selu, Iroquois women owned their peoples' land, Apaches allowed exceptional women to fight as warriors. It was not, for the most part, their male Indian relatives who tried to turn women like Pocahontas and Catherine Brown into propaganda symbols, who provided the market for the “vanished” Indian culture that Lucy Nicholar sold, or who drove Molly Brant and Delfina Cuero’s people out of their homelands and plundered the Menominees' resources. SIFTERS is a useful comparative source for students of American women's history, but even more useful for scholars of Native American history and colonialism, and those studying the interplay between gender, race, and power.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays about influential Native Americans, this book covers Pocahontas and Sacajawea through activists in the 1960s.

All the essays were well-written but had different authors, so there wasn't a great sense of continuity. Recommended for history readers.

[A.V.]

4: Sacagawea, The Making of a Myth (Barbie, Donna)