“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”
— Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop
In the late 1970s, I began work on my PhD dissertation, in search of the roots of early 19th century feminism in the US. Beyond the obvious striving for freedom, equality, respect, and dignity, I wanted to know who and what led women in the US to assert their value and worth as human beings, to demand full inclusion in society, to seek changes to laws and cultural mores. Because my doctoral degree was in political theory, I focused on three early 19th century feminist theorists – Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller. I researched their lives, their work, their associations, and their intellectual influences – the books they read and the writers and philosophers whose work pervaded their own. I found the roots to be quite varied – from the Scottish Enlightenment to the abolitionist movement to Transcendentalism. Yet, as Keres author Paula Gunn Allen would note a few years later, her version of the roots of American feminism was “far removed [from that of] . . . those steeped in either mainstream or radical versions of feminism’s history” (213-214). As one who had contributed to that history, I feel it incumbent upon me to share what I had overlooked so long ago -- the most important root – the influence and example of indigenous women.[i]
In her essay, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,” Allen explained how among indigenous societies “gynarchy was the norm . . . and . . . femaleness was highly valued” (212). She demonstrated how these indigenous beliefs and values “became part of the vision of American feminists,” remarking that the 19th century feminists “chose to hold their founding convention . . . just a stone’s throw from the old council house where the Iroquois women had plotted their feminist rebellion” (213).[ii]
A few years after Allen wrote her piece, historian Sally Roesch Wagner explored this connection of the indigenous women of the Haudenosaunee nation[iii] with the early feminists who gathered to enumerate and demand their rights in the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, believing, in Wagner’s words, that “women’s liberation was possible because they knew women who possessed a position of respect and authority in their own egalitarian society – Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women” (268). Through their close associations and friendships with the Haudenosaunee, these feminists learned of the freedom, equality, and respect the Haudenosaunee women experienced. The Haudenosaunee had strong cultural taboos against violence toward women, and rape in their society was virtually non-existent. The fact that a local reporter noted that among the Haudenosaunee “’a solitary woman may walk about for miles, at any of hour of the day and night, in perfect safety’” indicates how unusual this was (Beauchamp qtd. in Wagner, 271). Among the EuroAmericans at that time, it was legal and expected that a man beat his wife, within limits, but among the Haudenosaunee such behaviors were unthinkable and unacceptable. Unlike the EuroAmerican women who, when they married, lost all rights to their bodies, their children, their income and property, and to divorce, the Haudenosaunee women in marriage retained their full personhood and could “divorce” their husbands simply by placing their things outside their home and telling them to leave and return to their own clans. “Indian women's violence-free egalitarian home life could only have given suffragists a vision of how women should be treated, along with the sure knowledge that they, too, could create a social structure of equality,” Wagner posited. (276).
Far freer in their bodily autonomy and movement, the Haudenosaunee women inspired new clothing and women-centered birthing methods. Many of the women of the area adopted the Native women’s dress of loose tunics and pantaloons, popularly known as “bloomers.”[iv] Others learned Native forms of natural childbirth, most well-known among them being feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who reportedly gave birth to her seven children with relative ease, in contrast to many of the white women of her day who increasingly relied on the male medical profession and were instructed by their male Christian pastors that it was their burden to bear children in pain.
The women learned as well about the importance of the indigenous concept of balance that required decisions to be made by consensus with everyone having an equal voice and with equal approval by women and men. In Stanton’s living room, where many of the conversations about women’s rights occurred, all sat in a circle, using the indigenous practice of passing a talking stick to ensure that all would have an equal voice. All of this would come to shape their vision for an egalitarian society, as well as the specific reforms they called for in the Declaration of Sentiments, the Married Women’s Property Act, the dress reform movement, their work to reform sexual mores and to bring an end to wife-beating, as well as their work for the full inclusion of women in the political decision-making process and women’s suffrage.
Fast forward 130 years to the time when the Second Wave feminist movement was coming into its own here in Duluth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [v] It was an exciting time, seeing the rise of grassroots feminist organizations – from the early days of rape crisis hotlines and battered women’s shelters to Women’s Studies programs and feminist coffeehouses, radio programs, and bookstores.[vi] Grassroots feminist organizations here have played as significant a role in the Second Wave feminist movement as did the upstate New York women’s rights movement during the First Wave, and though the role of indigenous women in the work of feminist organizing in the Twin Ports has been different from that of those in upstate New York in the 19th century, it has had just as significant an influence in shaping the nature of feminist organizations here.
130 years after the first Women’s Rights conference, non-Native women had made several of the gains they had originally sought – suffrage and a voice (though not yet equal) in political decision making, marriage reform, dress reform, education and employment, and some reproductive freedoms. Native women, on the other hand, due to conquest and colonization, had lost nearly all the freedoms, the respect, and the equality they once knew. Their spiritual traditions, language, and voice stripped away in boarding schools and forced assimilation; their land and waters stolen, mined, and polluted; their bodies and spirits desecrated and destroyed, Native women’s world was turned upside down. With Western patriarchal values imposed on once egalitarian partnership societies, Native women now experience higher unemployment, lower levels of income and education, and higher rates of sexual assault and domestic violence than any other ethnic or racial group, and the numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women has become epidemic.
Native women have always found ways to assist each other, but it was not until the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act that indigenous peoples could fully begin to reclaim their language, culture, traditions, and values. At the heart of this, to quote the mission statement of Mending the Sacred Hoop, is the task to restore the “safety, sovereignty, and sacredness of Native women.” In Duluth, two organizations in particular – Mending the Sacred Hoop and the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO) -- have made celebrating the sacredness of women and restoring women’s dignity and respect central to their work. In their work with tribes across Indian Country, Mending the Sacred Hoop has acted to mitigate domestic violence, decolonize the dominance values imposed by white culture, and reclaim the original respect given to Native women. They have done the same working with local police and social service agencies, as well as the federal government in adding key provisions to the Violence Against Women Act.[vii] They have trained dozens of advocates in indigenous trauma therapy to bring healing to indigenous peoples carrying generations of historical trauma. AICHO has provided safe housing to women leaving situations of domestic abuse, as well as the unhoused, integrating traditional spiritual practices into their programming and inspiring women to respect themselves and other women through what Victoria Ybanez has called “creating sister space,” where when someone is in crisis, they create a space for her and treat her as they would a sister. Providing a gathering place for the community, they offer space for indigenous storytelling, speakers, feasts and ceremonies, and displays of indigenous art.
Native women have been at the heart of bringing the honoring of and respect for women into the core of feminist work here. I have heard it in the voices of the women in the Women’s Action Group where, as Babette Sandman recalled, “We were believed, we had value, we had wisdom”; in the women-affirming music of the Northcountry Women’s Coffeehouse and Wise Women Radio, and in Women’s Studies classes where generation after generation of young people sitting in circles, each taking their turn, have found their voices and their truths honored and respected. I have heard it repeated by the women in these grassroots organizations who have spoken of the importance of staying true to their mission and of needing to be guided by the voices and wisdom of the women in their programs, and by the support of women for each other. It is one of the key reasons for the thriving of feminism in this community. The predominant message at the core of the work is of the importance of the empowerment of and respect for women. It is a message that was inspired and continues to be renewed by the vibrant activism and inspiration of indigenous women.
Paula Gunn Allen has wisely said, “feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of its rules of civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchical societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time” (213). How different this country might have been had those who landed on these shores listened and learned. As Allen noted, “If American society judiciously modeled the traditions of the various Native Nations, the place of women in society would become central, the distribution of goods and power would be egalitarian, the elderly would be respected, . . . . the biota . . . and the spiritual nature of human and nonhuman life would become a primary organizing principle of human society, and . . .war would cease to be a major method of human problem solving” (211).
The poster for Mending the Sacred Hoop pictures three women dancing, celebrating the sacredness of women. May we all learn from their wisdom and work for the day when the sacredness of and respect for women is integral to society, and the sacred hoop is restored.
Sources
Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. 1994. Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller. New York: Carlson Publishing.
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. 2016. Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.
Sandman, Babette. Personal Interview. December 11, 2014.
Wagner, Sally Roesch. 2004. “The Indigenous Roots of American Feminism.” In Feminist Politics, Activism, and Vision: Local and Global Challenges. Ed. by Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela Miles, and Margaret H. McFadden. 267-283. London and New York: Zed Books.
Ybanez, Victoria. Skype Interview. October 29, 2014.
[i] Most of what I have included here of the importance of the Haudenosaunee women to the 19th century women’s rights movement and of indigenous women to the feminist movement in Duluth was in my original draft of Making Waves. However, the external reviewer insisted that this and other important roots, such as the role of the Benedictines, be removed before they would approve publication, requiring instead that I include the influence of East and West Coast Second Wave feminism, which was not nearly as important to the unique feminist movement here, and once again silencing and making invisible the importance of indigenous women to US feminism.
[ii] The Iroquois nation – or as they refer to themselves, the Haudenosaunee – gathered on the shores of Lake Onondaga, in what is now Syracuse, New York. The first Women’s Rights convention was held less than forty miles away in Seneca Falls, New York. The Iroquois feminist revolution to which she refers was a Lysistrata-like action in the 1600s in which the women refused to have sexual relations until the men stopped their warring.
[iii] The Haudenosaunee nation is a federation of five nations --the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Seneca, and the Mohawk.
[iv] The clothes were named “bloomers” after Amelia Bloomer, who promoted the clothing style in her newspaper for women, The Lily.
[v] The First Wave of feminism in the US is generally understood to have begun in the 1840s with the first Women’s Rights Convention and ending with the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the United States and its various states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex. The Second Wave is understood to have begun in the 1960s with an older branch of mostly professional women and a younger branch of students and activists who had come of age in the New Left and civil rights movements.
[vi] Here in the Twin Ports, some of the many organizations that began during that time were the Program to Aid Victims of Sexual Assault (PAVSA), Safe Haven Shelter, the Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse (CASDA), the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP), Mending the Sacred Hoop, the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO), Women’s Transitional Housing, the Northland Women’s Coffeehouse, Wise Women Radio, Aurora: A Lesbian Organization, Women in Construction, the Building for Women, and the Women’s Studies program at UMD. For more details, see my Making Waves: Grassroots Feminist Organizations in Duluth and Superior.
[vii] In 2013, Native women activists and advocates were successful in insuring the inclusion of the historic provision in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization act that would allow Tribes to exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit acts of intimate partner violence. Prior to this, non-Indians could commit such acts with impunity.
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