NO MASTER TO OVERSEE OR DRIVE US, SO THAT WE COULD WORK AS LEISURELY AS WE PLEASED Deirdre S Kearney: Love this film! [Goddess Remembered] Looking at American Indian patriarchy seems different, with survival the paramount value about an hour ago. Amy Rebecca Williams: Education historian Joel Spring offers a similar view based on the narrative accounts of colonial women who had been captured and thus had the opportunity to experience life in both worlds. They often preferred the indigenous society to they one they left: Another important cultural difference was in family organization. Most Native American tribes were organized into extended clans. Europeans wanted to replace the clan system with a nuclear family structure that would give power to the father. In the clan system, gender roles were divided by work. Women took care of domestic and agricultural work, and men did the hunting. The major responsibility for child rearing was not with the father but with the mother and her relations within the clan. Many European men were offended by the power of women in the clan structure. James Axtell found, however, that many colonial women captured by Indians preferred to remain with the tribe because of the higher status of women in Indian society in contrast with colonial society. Captured by Indians at the age of fifteen, Mary Jemison described female Indian work as being not so severe or hard as that done by white women. In the summer season, she wrote, we planted , tended, and harvested our corn, and generally had all our children with us; BUT HAD NO MASTER TO OVERSEE OR DRIVE US, SO THAT WE COULD WORK AS LEISURELY AS WE PLEASED. Axtell concludes, Unless Jemison was correct, it would be virtually impossible to understand why so many women and girls chose to become Indians. Often, Native American women exercised political power. The Cherokee, in particular, were noted for having female leaders and, frequently, female warriors. White male settlers often spoke despairingly of the petticoat government of the Cherokee. Cherokee women decided the fate of captives; they made decisions in Womens Council that were relayed to the general tribe by the War Woman or Pretty Woman. Clan-mothers had the right to wage war. War Women, among the Cherokees, were called Beloved Women and had the power to free victims from the punishment prescribed by the general council. Paula Gunn Allen forcefully describes the consequences for Native American women and children of a nuclear family and authoritarian child-rearing practices. Allen describes these changes as the replacing of a peaceful, nonpunitive, nonauthoritarian social system wherein women wield power by making social life easy and gentle with one based on child terrorization, male dominance, and submission of women to male authority. - Joel Spring, The American School 1642-2004 (Sixth edition), pp. 24-25
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 17:08:55 +0000
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