Native Women’s Traditional Roles within Their Culture and ...



Native Women’s Traditional Roles within Their Culture and How Christianity has changed that Tradition

Submitted by Sarah Thompson

Submitted to Melissa Blind

Submitted on the date June 20, 2007

Indigenous Studies 100

First Nations University of Canada

University of Regina

The traditional roles of Native women were quite different than that of Christian women in Europe and the New World. As Europeans came over to the New World they came to conquer land and through that felt the need to Christianize the “savages” that were running “wild” on the untamed land. Traditional Native women are women that in today’s society should be looked up to and honored. Their roles as strong, independent women are roles that every woman even today, should strive to become. However, contact with Christianity changed the lifestyles and the ways that women were viewed. With that there has been great struggles for Native women to regain their traditional roles as healers, storytellers, caregivers, trainers of the arts, and most importantly the link to community.

Native Women’s Roles before Christianity

Throughout the generations before contact, women within the Native cultures were considered to be very high status individuals. Native women lived within Matriarchal societies that were based on the views and the work of the women within those societies. Their status was mainly for the fact that the many Native women were the barriers of the future children, they taught the role and purpose of the culture which included their views towards spirituality as well as, Native women were known to be more powerful when it came to healing the sick (Obomsawin, 1977, Documentary).

Native women maintained the cultural traditions of their people. They also, on other occasions, advocated change. They were, in short, crucial participants in the ongoing struggle for the survival of Indian cultures and communities (Shoemaker, 1995, 2).

Traditional Native societies all had divisions of labour. The women had duties that included being in charge of the agriculture, the livestock, and the children in the village. Women were the source of the community while the men were gone hunting and fishing to supplement the food that the women provided. While stationed within the village the men did not have that much of a prominent role, the women were heavy influences for what happened for the entire community. “As agriculturalists, women must have had great influence over decisions to move to new grounds, to leave old grounds fallow, and to initiate planting (Shoemaker, 1995, 30).” It is also known that Native women were the key to wealth and prestigious lineage. “Lineage wealth and political power passed through the female line, perhaps because of women’s crucial role in producing and maintaining property (Shoemaker, 1995, 30).”

After contact, women’s roles were largely shifted. Contact brought the new role of Native men, fur traders and trackers. With this new role, women began to work for the men of their communities to help with the workload that kept growing.

The introduction of the horse had enhanced men’s ability to hunt and trade but disempowered women. No longer the provisioners of essential foods, women in the nineteenth century now devoted most of their labour to processing hides, which men then controlled the trade (Shoemaker, 1995, 10).

Women and men were on equal playing ground up until contact and afterward. Women could be chiefs, elders of importance and great minds for helping with making decisions. After contact, the Europeans did not want to consult with the females of the Native communities; they only came to consult with the men who they believed made the important decisions anyway (Obomsawin, 1977, Documentary).

Missionaries Roles within the New World

European missionaries came to the New World hoping to help the people that had been residing there for centuries. The missionaries came specifically for the reason of helping the Natives of the land to become Europeanized. These missionaries did not want the land that they working on, they just wanted to “save” the Natives in whatever way they could (Higham, 1992, 6). The missionaries felt that their job was to show the Native people the white culture, however, their “focus expanded to include conversion of whites on the frontier as well (Higham, 2000, 15).” The main focus that seemed to shape the missionaries societies work was that of wanting to Christianize all the heathens of the world (Higham, 2000, 15). Traders and settlers moved west along the path to economic success while missionaries stayed behind and moved along the path of introducing “civilization” or Christianity to the Native people (Higham, 1992, 2).

Missionaries that came to the New World were key resources for the people still in Europe. The missionaries wrote back to Europe to inform the people who were funding their missions about who they were helping and how “uncivilized” these people actually were. “Missionaries actively helped define the idea of the Indian to White society and government (Higham, 1992, 2). The contact that the missionaries had with these people was to help them become civilized so that when more Europeans came over to live they would not have to worry about living amongst heathens.

While not directly forcing the natives off their land and into assimilation, as happened with the removals in the United States, Canada still pursued a policy of assimilation that was openly supported by the Protestant missionaries (Higham, 2000, 118).

The Role of Native Women within Christianity

The Christian role of women is one that sees women as helping the duty of man. Women within the Christian church did not have legal status in the New World and in Europe until the 1840s when women in the United States started to bring awareness of the legal bondage of women within the church (Sharma, 1994, 269). Native women were trapped within this bondage of the church, however, for European women, the churches were where a lot of the leadership roles were beginning for women. Within the churchwomen finally found a role that was outside of the family and the traditional role of European society (Sharma, 1994, 271). Although this change really depended on the church to which these women belonged. The Catholic Church was not so keen on letting women find new leadership outside of the traditional role of the family. “The churches, which had so long justified women’s lack of civil rights as ordained of God, made little movement in response to this change (Sharma, 1994, 272).”

Reservation schools were formed to assimilate the Native people into the European society. These schools was where a lot of the Native women today learnt the Christian religion and where they were told to forget they’re traditional ways. Christianity was seen as the civilized mans religion. Reservation schools taught the youth the English language, the Christian ways, and how to farm and live amongst the ruling class of the Europeans. “For Native people to become “civilized”, they must shift from hunting to farming (Shoemaker, 1995, 91).”

The reservation schools as well as the role of the missionaries on the frontier effectively destroyed the Native culture by shutting down the people’s self-esteem and the interrelationships that bind them together as a community. A lot of this is done through the women and shutting down the independence that they are used to, the need to be strong and to lead.

By and large, Indian people have not found liberation in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but rather, continued bondage to a culture that is both alien and alienating, and even genocidal against American Indian peoples (Tinker, 1993, 5).

Native Women’s Movement to gain Traditional Status

Native women today are trying to gain the equal status that they had amongst their people as well as amongst the rest of the society. Women are starting to teach the youth to be proud of whom they are and to be apart of their culture. Native women are activists who are working against the assimilation that has been going on for so many centuries. The need to find and to reestablish the culture is what makes a lot of the women today strong and independent women (Obomsawin, 1977, Documentary).

Women within the Native culture are fighting to gain education for themselves and for the youth of today so that they can learn to be proud of what they have. With education there is hope and a chance that the culture will gain the strength and freedom that it once had. “Cultural genocide is more subtle than overt military extermination, yet it is no less devastating to a people (Tinker, 1993, 5).” Many Native women feel lost and without a community due to the lack of cultural influence that has been around. A native woman, although many still practice the Christian traditions that they learnt, are looking to fulfill their lives with the Natives values and believes; a way to gain a connection to the ancestors of their past. There is an old proverb that the elders would say, “No people is broken until the hearts of its women are on the ground, only then will they die” (Welsh, 1994, Documentary).

Native women are the key to the survival of the Native culture. The women in today’s society need to band together to get rid of the injustices that the Euro-American society brought over with them; such injustices as alcohol, domestic violence, and the unequal status of women. Native women today need to regain a sense of culture and tradition that does not focus on the message that the missionaries of the European society brought over with them.

The message was—and is—that white, Euro-American culture and its values are good, while Indian culture and values are inferior and outright bad. The white world has lived out this lie consistently and has even believed it. The tragedy is that Indian people have also believed and lived out of the lie, reaping not benefits but the implicit consequences of self-destruction (Tinker, 1993, 94).

Native women today are struggling with the concept of Self-Government. The women want to gain some say into what is going on and what is going to happen within their own societies. With Self-Government there is a chance of controlling the amount of outside sources, such as the Christian culture and how this affects the learning of the youth today. In the documentary, Native Women Politics (1993) the women discuss the ways to which the traditional culture needs to be introduced back into the Native communities. By doing this, Self-Government should be implemented, however, this new version of Self-Government would need to be advanced and different than the traditional cultural version that existed centuries ago.

Throughout the many centuries before contact women were highly involved within all the different levels of the Native traditional culture. Women were the great healers, storytellers, caregivers, and the teachers of the culture, which included the arts and the values. Native women within the values of the culture were seen as very needed for the life of the society. After contact with the Europeans, these Native women seemed to loose their status amongst the men due to not being invited to help with the negotiations of the treaties and not being allowed within the Forts to help trade. In today’s society women are striving to regain their traditional roles of the caregivers, the great healers and the storytellers of the past culture. Women are striving to help the youth of today identify with the traditional ways and to say no to the assimilation of the Christian world that has forced the Native culture into acculturation for too long.

References

Videos:

Keepers of the Fire. Director: Christine Welsh. National Film Board of Canada. 1994

Mother of many Children. Director: Alanis Obomsawin. National Film Board of Canada. 1977

Native Women Politics. Director: Richard Hersley. First Nations Films. 1993

Books:

Higham, Carol Lee, Ph.D. The Savage and the Saved. Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University. August 1992

Higham, Carol Lee, Ph.D. Noble, Wretched, and Redeemable. University of Calgary Press, Alberta. 2000

Sharma, Arvind. Today’s Woman in World Religions. State University of New York Press, Albany. 1994

Shoemaker, Nancy. Negotiators of Change. Routledge, London. 1995

Tinker, George E. Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide. Fortress Press, Minneapolis. 1993

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download