Before the United States was the US, the land was home to numerous Native American nations whose diversity, then and now, rivals that of Eurasia. Each of the hundreds of nations has, and had, its own language, religion, customs, governance structure, judicial system, and history. The role of women in Native culture is as complex and different as the nations from which they emerged. 

Like most cultures, so much depended on where the nation was located, and the particular needs of that geography and environment dictated the various roles people within that society played. Northwestern nations lived on rivers and relied on fishing, while those on the plains followed buffalo and planted corn. While gender usually plays a role in determining responsibilities, gender did not limit women in many Native cultures.

Investigating the lives of women native to North America is deeply challenging because the experiences of Indigenous people varied from region to region, community to community, and even within communities. Native people are diverse – their societies rich, complex, and enduring. Gender was, however, significant in the lives of early Native peoples wherever they were.

Family and community systems brought Native people together through mutual reliance and respect. As in many places and cultures, men were generally responsible for hunting, warfare, and interacting with outsiders; therefore, they had more visible roles. This is why the names of male Natives tend to be more visible in our histories. 

A Drawing of Native American Women in Traditional Dress, 1891

Gender Norms 

Native women were active in community governance and activities. Many nations, perhaps one-fourth if not a majority, were organized matrilineally, where husbands would come to live with the wife’s family and inheritance was passed down from the mother. 

In matrilineal societies, women owned the family’s home and goods. They did all the agricultural production and reared children. They also held political and economic power. The Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or the Haudenosaunee, were all led matrilineally with women at the helm. Clan leaders selected a male chief to represent the nation, and they removed them when the women were dissatisfied with their leadership. In other nations, women would even become warriors. In their own right, women could earn the title “chief” with exceptional performance in battle or when their husband died. 

In midwestern and southern communities, the relationship between gender and the specific roles assigned in society was much less significant. In the Midwest, where communities were more migratory and so much needed to be done, women often helped hunt, harvest buffalo, and were responsible for utilizing the entirety of the animal. 

In other communities, gender determined many of the expectations about what contributions a person would make to the community. For example, the Iroquois of the Northeast, also known as the Haudenosaunee, classified the forest as male and the village as female. Among Pueblo communities, women and men each had their own complementary sources of wealth and power. Corn was associated with women; in Hopi, the word posumi means both corn seed and young women. Flint was associated with men, both in the fire it made possible and in the rain, as flint striking a rock sounded like thunder. Community prosperity depended equally on both – corn and flint, femininity and masculinity. To become an adult was to inhabit a gendered role in the society with its requisite responsibilities. Pueblo girls learned to produce pottery, grind corn, tan hides, and make baskets. While Pueblo boys learned to hunt, weave cloth, and tend corn crops. But all those skills mattered and were valued. 

For some Indigenous peoples, gender was not always strictly binary. For example, the Diné, or Navajo, recognized six different genders. The Ojibwe did have male and female roles, but individuals could align with the gender of their choice. A variety of words in the Cherokee language describe people who are “Two-Spirit,” or whose gender expression or identity fits outside the binary male or female. There are words in Cherokee that translate to “he or she thinks like a man or woman.” 

In most Native communities, women had significant spiritual roles. They often served as spiritual leaders, healers, and political leaders. In many Native American creation stories, one of the female characters created life, nature, and Earth through their body through some sort of birth. The Pueblo of the Southwest have a fascinating origin story where the Corn Mother gave birth to human life, and corn sprouted up through the ground. All babies were given an ear of corn at birth to recognize this sacred connection to the Mother. This story illustrates the centrality of the feminine to Pueblo life. The belief in women’s inherent spirituality led to their role as healers. Many nations believed that women had more healing power. Women had extensive knowledge of plants and medicines for healing and were vital to the nation's success. Most Native American women were master craftspeople producing blankets, baskets, jewelry, and pottery. This work, done by women, was recognized and valued by communities.

In many instances when tribes gathered together to barter, trade, or negotiate, Indigenous women took the lead. One example of Indigenous women's diplomatic strategy included a dice game. The game was not about winning. Instead, dice games allowed communities to interact around a shared set of rules that everyone thought was fair. They created a space where women from different groups could interact and exchange information and goods. According to scholars, women’s dice games were “powerful social technologies” that linked communities together. Archaeologists have found evidence of these games as much as 12,000 years ago, long before such games appeared in Bronze Age Europe. And these traditions endured: Europeans studying Indigenous society in the early 20th century noted that most tribes played dice games, with over 80% of games played exclusively by women.

A 1585 Portrait of Native Algonquian Mothers by John White, a colonist and artist (public domain)

Marriage and Sexual Freedom 

Marriage and sexual activity in Native communities were extremely varied. Sex was not necessarily reserved for only marriage, and sex often began at a young age. Some nations were polygamous– meaning people had multiple partners in their lifetime or at the same time– a practice still in place in some Mormon and Muslim families today. Some nations had formal marriage ceremonies, while others considered a couple married when they began living together. 

Women’s power in relationships and within the nation showed most notably in divorce. Both men and women could decide to end a marriage or relationship, but in many nations, women owned all the household belongings, so men leaving marriages could only take the items they had when they began the relationship. Unlike the patriarchal societies of Eurasia where fathers owned their children and mothers had little rights to them, children in Native societies often belonged exclusively to their mother. When a widow remarried, her children from the prior marriage would be adopted by the new husband.  

Native cultures had different practices around menstruation. In some, women inhabited separate quarters during menstruation. For the Ojibwe, women were considered most powerful during that time of the month. Generally, most cultures celebrated female puberty, rather than shaming it. The Hupa people, for instance, celebrate a three- to ten-day coming-of-age ceremony following the first menstruation.  

Some nations would not allow a couple to have sex until their child reached a certain age, although this practice varied considerably from the child’s ability to crawl to closer to ten years, as practiced by the Cheyenne. As a result, Native American families had about three children, while Eurasian families would sometimes have up to fourteen children.

Native women did what the later Europeans considered “men’s work.” Most scholars agree that Native American women had more authority and independence than their European counterparts. ​

1832 Painting of an Assiniboin Woman and Child by George Catlin, an American painter. The Assiniboine (Catlin spelled their name slightly differently) are an Indigenous people of the Northern Plains. He painted this woman and her child at Fort Union in the Upper Midwest in 1832. He noted that their dresses were made from goat skin and decorated with porcupine quills and elk’s teeth. (public domain)

Property Ownership 

The importance of property ownership depended on where the nation was located and what natural resources the nation used to sustain itself. In the Pacific Northwest, trees and acorns were incredibly important to the community’s diet, so ownership of trees was passed down from mother to daughter. In the east, some Native nations emphasized actual land ownership, and women often owned the land. The Algonquin and other North Central nations used physical markers, as Eurasians did, to show where one family’s property began and ended.

Other nations, like the Lenape, thought of ownership more like leasing, where someone had the right to use the land, but it belonged to the nation as a whole. To the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, women owned the fields they worked, the longhouses, and everything in them. The Hopi women owned the pueblos and the land, which was inherited matrilineally.

Colonel Thomas Proctor was sent on a peace mission to the Western tribes by the early American government in 1791. In his journals, he recorded the remarks of an Iroquois woman, “You ought to hear and listen to what we women shall speak…for we are the owners of this land and it is ours.” Native American women engaged in agricultural activity for generations prior to European contact. 

1832 Painting of a Dakota Woman and an Assiniboin Girl by Karl Bodmer, an American artist (public domain).

On the Great Plains, where buffalo were essential, and nations migrated to follow them, inheritance rules put emphasis on objects that people moved with them. When these nations, like the Lakota and the Pawnee, got horses brought from Europe, they became the predominant source of wealth. Everyone, even children, had the right to own horses.

Domesticating animals other than horses was rare in Native cultures because they tended to believe that animals had equal spiritual rights as humans and because it disrupted gendered distributions of labor, where men hunted and women farmed. Neither wanted to shift to tasks disconnected from their social role. 

There are few reliable written sources about Native women’s lives before contact with Europeans, so unfortunately, white men’s interpretations of Natives are the only written sources. In 1644, the Rev. John Megalopensis, minister at a Dutch Church in New Netherlands (modern day New York) said that Native American women were, “obliged to prepare the Land, to mow, to plant, and do everything; the Men do nothing except hunting, fishing, and going to War against their Enemies” Others described Native women as “slaves'' to the men. These observations were describing and defining the actions of Indigenous people, but filtered through a European lens. Specifically, these white men were witnessing what they saw as aberrations to idealized European gender roles. Some historians have argued that these observations contributed to the racialization of Native peoples as “savage” or uncivilized, because their gendered division did not mirror Europeans’ gendered division of labor. The reality was that these European writers did not really understand, or care to understand, the way Natives shared the burden of labor between men and women differently. 

European Arrival 

After the arrival of more European explorers, 90 to 95 percent of the Indigenous population was wiped out by diseases. Territorial disputes and the resulting conflicts also had devastating impacts on the already weakened Native populations. Scholars disagree on how European expansion and migration impacted Native women. Some argue that, after contact, women’s authority declined because of a term called “cultural assimilation,” where cultures shift and change to become similar to the dominant culture. White men preferred to deal with Native men in trade and political negotiations, despite women sitting at the helm in most Native communities. White Christian leaders demanded of their Native converts that they follow patriarchal norms and European gender norms.

An unknown artist painted this Métis Man and his two Wives between 1825 and 1825. Though when he titled it, he called the man “halfcast.” Métis were the children of French fur traders and Indigenous women. Over time, they became a distinct Indigenous nation with their own culture and language, living primarily in the northern United States and Canada (public domain)

And while that may be true in some places, other scholars insist that women’s leadership remained central to other societies. Matrilineal inheritance of clan identity remained important to many communities, as evidenced by women’s central role in those communities long after European contact and today. By the 1800s, when the Cherokee nation was increasingly forced out of their homes, groups of Cherokee women petitioned their Council to stand their ground. They forcefully stated, “[b]eloved children…God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions…[do not] part with any more lands.” These quotes give merit to the suggestion that women’s roles remained, and continue to remain, central to the leadership of at least some Native communities. 

Women in the Southwest

The area that is now New Mexico and Arizona was home to 19 Pueblo tribes, including the Acoma, Zuñi, Cochiti, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, and Hopi pueblos, along with the Navajo Nation. Living on the arid mesas and steppes of they southwest, they relied on dry farming and built extensive irrigation systems to take advantage of infrequent but heavy rains.  At the beginning of the 16th century, historian Ramón Gutiérrez estimates there may have been as many as 248,000 Pueblo people living in as many as 134 towns and villages. Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico is the oldest, documented continuously inhabited community in the US. Acoma oral traditions place women at the center of human existence. Two women, born underneath the earth, were nursed by Tsichtinako (Thought Woman). One was named Iatiku, Mother of the Corn clan, and the other Nautsiti, Mother of the Sun clan. Thought Woman gave each of them a basket with the seeds of all plants and animals that would exist in the world. When the women asked Thought Woman why they had been created, Thought Woman responded, “that you would bring to life all the things in your baskets in order that the world be complete for you to rule over it.” 

Women’s status and power clashed with Spanish conceptions of authority. For example, marriage among the Pueblo was not a lifelong relationship. Rather, a marriage was a mutual agreement to live together as long as the couple wanted to. As Europeans observed and were quick to note, women and men could end these marriages and seek another partner when they chose. Pueblo society was matrilineal, and women had their own sources of wealth and authority, as one Spanish explorer noted in 1601, “The houses belong to the women, they being the ones who build them.” Children belonged to and lived with their mothers, and men moved into their wives’ households. 

Spanish colonialism came in many forms. The Spanish came as settlers, military occupiers, soldiers, Catholic priests and friars, and as enslavers. Indigenous communities resisted Spanish colonization in its many forms, and women were central to the effort to defend Pueblo society. In 1599, for example, Acoma was a pueblo of around 6,000 people and they resisted Spanish demands that they give up food stores to feed Spanish soldiers, clergy, and settlers. Hearing of Acoma resistance, the Spanish responded with brutal violence. In a battle that lasted three days, Acoma women fought back, defending their homes and preventing soldiers from seizing their corn and their blankets. Acoma women paid a heavy price for their courage: 300 women and children died, 500 people were captured, and of those captured, every woman over age 12 was enslaved for a term of 20 years. Some worked at Spanish settlements and missions. The youngest girls were sent to convents in Mexico City. Despite this assault and the decades of Spanish colonial violence that followed, Pueblo communities endured.

Conclusion

​By the end of this era, so much remained in question. How would these rich cultures continue? What would happen to the Native people who survived European arrival, and what role would women play in that survival? What efforts would be made to resist European expansion? And how many would assimilate to European norms and culture?

Checking For Understanding

1. What does the term matrilineal mean, and how did matrilineal societies give women political and economic power?

2. How did the roles of women differ among Native nations such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Cherokee, and Plains nations? Provide at least one example.

3. What evidence from the chapter suggests that some Native cultures recognized more than two genders?

4. How did marriage and divorce practices in many Native societies differ from those in European societies of the same period?

5. How did ideas about property ownership vary among Native nations, and what role did women often play in owning or inheriting property?

6. How did European arrival affect Native women’s authority and leadership? Why do historians disagree about the extent of these changes?