Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850

by Sandra Slater (Editor), Fay A. Yarbrough (Editor)

Overview

Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography

Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans.

Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles.

Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643363684
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/10/2022
Edition description:	updated edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sandra Slater is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition vii

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction Fay A. Yarbrough 1

Subverting Gender Roles in the Sixteenth Century: Cabeza de Vaca, the Conquistador Who Became a Native American Woman M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo 11

"Nought but women": Constructions of Masculinities and Modes of Emasculation in the New World Sandra Slater 30

Revisiting Gender in Iroquoia Jan V. Noel 54

Who Was Salvadora de los Santos Ramirez, Otomi Indian? Dorothy Tanck de Estrada 75

Hannah Freeman: Gendered Sovereignty in Penn's Peaceable Kingdom Dawn G. Marsh 102

Women, Labor, and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Choctaw Nation Fay A. Yarbrough 123

Womanish Men and Manlike Women: The Native American Two-spirit as Warrior Roger M. Carpenter 146

Two-spirit Histories in Southwestern and Mesoamerican Literatures Gabriel S. Estrada 165

Supplemental Bibliography 185

Contributors 193

Index 195