Role of Cherokee women, 1700-1800
I recently shared a PowerPoint presentation with an all-women audience at a DAR meeting in Fort Worth, Texas. This is a condensation of my presentation which I believe is appropriate for a broader audience.
I wish to take a few moments to share with you the role of women in Cherokee culture and history from 1700 to 1900, the time span of my books. This is a pleasure for me. It honor’s my grandmother Ella Waters and her culture, the same motivation behind the creation of my historical novel Cherokee Trilogy, “Cherokee Rock,” “Cherokee Rose” and “Cherokee Reel.”
First, a little background. My grandmother Ella was a Dawes Roll signee. That role was undertaken in the late 1800s through the very early 1900s by the United States government sponsored by the Dawes Commission to enroll Native Americans for land disbursement - the second largest wound the Cherokees survived after the forced removal, what you have heard of as the trail of tears.
There are three tribes of Cherokee, the Eastern Band, the Ketowahs and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma by blood right and my grandmother’s signature on the Dawes Role. All citizens of CNO must prove their ancestory to a Dawes Role signee to be granted such citizenship.
Between 1700 and 1900, Cherokee women moved from a position of extraordinary social, economic, and political authority to one increasingly constrained by Anglo-American legal, religious, and economic models. Their story is not a simple narrative of decline, however. It is a story of power exercised through farming, kinship, and diplomacy; of adaptation under intense pressure; and of individual women whose voices helped shape the Cherokee Nation through revolution, removal, and reconstruction.
Pre White Contact And In the 1700s The Cherokees Lived In A Matrilineal World
At the opening of the eighteenth century, Cherokee society was organized around seven matrilineal clans, and lineage. Earlier times may have included fourteen, but the seven then and now are the Wolf. Blue, Wild Potato, Paint, Long Hair, Deer and Bird Clans.
Identity, and property all descended through the mother. As a non-Cherokee Pulitzer prize author observed, "the most important male relative in a child's life was the mother's brother, not the father," and mothers rather than fathers "controlled children and property". Ms. Johnson is the Elie Wiesel Professor of Humane Letters at Eckerd College, a national contributor to the understanding of the Experiences of Cherokee women during the forced removal, the Civil War and the later land allotment travesties.
Women owned the houses in which extended families lived, daughters inherited from their mothers, and a white man who married a Cherokee woman was, to the surprise of many European traders, not considered related to his own children.
This kinship structure gave women what historians describe as "gender equivalence, not hierarchy."
Cherokee women "had autonomy and sexual freedom, could obtain divorce easily, rarely experienced rape or domestic violence, worked as producers/farmers, owned their own homes and fields, and possessed a cosmology containing female supernatural figures".
European observers were repeatedly astonished to find that Cherokee women were treated "as the equals of men—politically, economically and theologically".
Cherokee Women Were Farmers, Weavers, and Providers
Men hunted because the First Man had been charged with providing meat, but women farmed because Selu, the Corn Mother, had first given corn to the people. Women tended the large communal fields, planted smaller household gardens near their towns, and, between planting and harvest when the men left to hunt, they assumed "total responsibility" for the food supply.
Cherokee women’s productivity was substantial. According to historian Wilma Dunaway, before removal Cherokee agricultural production "equaled or surpassed that of their white neighbors". Women also wove all of the cloth used in the village, joining together they processed hides, handwoven vegetal-fiber cloth, and, later, cotton or wool for trade. They made baskets, pottery, and clothing, cared for children, and kept the winter-house fires burning while men were absent on months-long hunts or conflicts.
Because women owned the fields and the harvest, this labor translated directly into economic power. A husband lived in his wife's household; if the marriage ended, she placed his personal belongings outside the abode and he left Cherokee divorced.
War Women, Beloved Women, and the Ageya Aghigau
Cherokee political life recognized two complementary "governments"—a white (peace) government led by a Beloved Man and a red (war) government led by a Great Warrior. Women participated in both. Each Cherokee community had a Women's Council whose leader sat with the Council of Chiefs. Women who distinguished themselves in war earned the title "War Woman," and the most revered elders were called Beloved Women, or Ageya Aghigau.
The Ageya Aghigau's authority was extraordinary. She led the Women's Council, held a voting seat on the Council of Chiefs, and "had total power over prisoners taken in battles and raids". The Cherokee believed the Great Spirit spoke through her. Beloved Women "made all choices related to war and peace".
European diplomats often failed to understand. When the great Cherokee leader Attakullakulla arrived in South Carolina in February 1757 to negotiate trade, he was shocked that no white women were present. As recorded by observers, he asked the colonial governor, "Since the white man as well as the red was born of woman, did not the white man admit women to their councils?". Eight years later he asked another delegation, "Where are your women?"—for the Cherokee, the absence of women signaled a lack of respect and a missing "centering force".
These conflicts were minor in the story of the Cherokee. Live history in my Cherokee Trilogy, "Cherokee Rose," "Cherokee Rock," and "Cherokee Reel."
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