Subversion and Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Power in Euro-American Encounters. Each Indigenous Nation on Turtle Island formed unique social structures and hierarchies that imagined gender in distinct ways. Still, women hold significant power and authority within many nations across Turtle Island. Women’s roles in agriculture, material culture, and kinship made them powerful figures in their communities. Many matrilineal and matrilocal nations provided women with unique authority over kinship and relationship with land. Many cultures also viewed women as symbols of peace and diplomacy because of their authority over kinship. These cultural gender norms greatly differed from Euro-American gender roles which created tensions during European and Native exchanges. As many Nations,
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These women exhibit the intelligence and strategy Indigenous women possessed while encountering a collision between their own social gender construction and Euro-American patriarchy. As the United States increased its colonial expansion, Indigenous women found ways to conform to Euro-American standards of “civilization” only so much as it benefited the status of themselves and their Nations. As pressures from the United States government to assimilate into white society increased, the Cherokee Nation, specifically Cherokee women, compromised with their requests to a certain degree. They wrote, “Our Father the President advised us to become farmers, to manufacture our own clothes, & to have our children educated.to this advice we have attended to everything as far as we were able.” Yet, women refused to give up their traditional power so readily. Cherokee women sent their children to mission schools; however, many refused to assimilate into European conceptions of gender, authority, or family
These women exhibit the intelligence and strategy Indigenous women possessed while encountering a collision between their own social gender construction and Euro-American patriarchy. As the United States increased its colonial expansion, Indigenous women found ways to conform to Euro-American standards of “civilization” only so much as it benefited the status of themselves and their Nations. As pressures from the United States government to assimilate into white society increased, the Cherokee Nation, specifically Cherokee women, compromised with their requests to a certain degree. They wrote, “Our Father the President advised us to become farmers, to manufacture our own clothes, & to have our children educated.to this advice we have attended to everything as far as we were able.” Yet, women refused to give up their traditional power so readily. Cherokee women sent their children to mission schools; however, many refused to assimilate into European conceptions of gender, authority, or family