Pregnancy and childbirth, like menstruation, were female experiences believed to heighten spiritual power. Algonquins honored this massing of power and treated it with caution. Taboos were established to protect the unborn child and to protect the community, especially its male members. Among the Huron, for example, a pregnant woman who broke the protective circle of taboo by looking at an animal being hunted could cause her husband to fall at its capture; if she ate with others, they might fall sick; if she entered the cabin of an ailing person, the illness grew worse. Pregnant women, aware of their more intimate connection with the forces of nature, were taught to constrain their powers for the sake of their families and communities.

  Childbirth itself took place outside the boundaries of the community. A woman in labor withdrew to a special hut in the woods, where she delivered her baby, sometimes entirely alone, sometimes with the help of relatives, shamans, or midwives. European observers seemed to have been both puzzled and fascinated by the fact that the mother rarely cried out in pain during the delivery. Many concluded that Indian physiology differed from European, but some looked to Indian cultural attitudes for an explanation. In this, they were correct.

  Most Indian societies expected stoicism from a woman in labor. Some, like the Micmac, whom Chrestien Le Clercq studied, took steps to help a woman ensure her silence by stifling her cries. A Micmac mother in pain could ask to have her mouth stopped up, or if the pain persisted, she could call on shamans to assist her with medicine. Most Indian women suppressed their desire to cry out, seeing childbirth as a test of their courage in the face of adversity, much as men saw warfare and the hunt.

  A newborn was frequently given a drink of animal oil, intended to flush the infant’s digestive system, and perhaps to feed its “guardian spirit.” The baby was then dipped in cold water and returned to its mother’s breast. Indian children were weaned much later than the sons and daughters of the English colonists, sometimes not until their fifth or sixth year. Breast-feeding was probably used as a birth-control method, as it was among the European settlers, and in some tribes a complete abstinence from sex for up to three years after the child’s birth was practiced to control family size. If a woman became pregnant during her nursing years, drug-induced abortion was an acceptable means of spacing children within a family.

  Indian infants spent much of their first year of life swaddled upon a cradleboard. During the day, the mother carried the child on this wooden board, strapped close to her breasts or on her back, with the child facing forward, its head above its mother’s shoulders. At night the child was taken out of its swaddling and either put to rest naked between the mother and father or laid in its own bed of soft skins or leaves. Northern tribes favored a night cradle or hammock made of a skin tied by its four corners to the wooden support and poles of the lodge in which the baby could be rocked to sleep.

  The cradleboards were utilitarian, for they served the needs of women who worked in the fields. But they were objects of beauty and symbols of affection as well—carved and painted, adorned with beadwork, and often decorated with porcupine quills or feathers. Hopes and expectations for the child were expressed along traditional gender lines, with a tiny bow attached to a son’s cradleboard and a female ornament to a daughter’s. The skins used to make the child’s clothing and blankets were also painted and decorated. Children themselves were beautified according to the aesthetics of the community. For some, this meant pierced ears, from which porcupine quills, feathers, or wampum were hung; for others, it meant the curving of the feet, done by positioning on the cradleboard so that the toes turned in; for others, especially among the Choctaw and Catawba, it meant a reshaping of the head by two masses of clay applied to the forehead and back of the head, which pressed and flattened it into a pleasing form.

  Although practices and customs differed, a general pattern emerges from the accounts of their birth and child-rearing practices. Pregnancy was seen as a natural process that imbued a woman with great power, and childbirth was a testing of her capacity to bear pain bravely. Each child was entitled to its mother’s exclusive attention during its infancy and early years, an entitlement assured by the mother’s sexual abstinence. The cradleboard allowed the mother and child to remain together, even when she returned to her agricultural work, and this link between mother and child, socially supported, was physiologically reinforced by the practice of breast-feeding for three to six years.

  Child-rearing practices reflected the desire to reproduce community values: the ideal character, male or female, combined individual independence and autonomy with a highly developed sense of obligation to the group. Interestingly, late-eighteenth-century leaders of the newly independent United States would urge that the same values be instilled in the children of their new nation, insisting that the republic would not survive unless its citizens were independent but civic-minded, autonomous but patriotic.

  To the colonial English, however—many of whom advocated breaking a child’s will in the earliest years, and most of whom condoned spanking, whipping, and other forms of corporal punishment—Indian parents seemed overly permissive and indulgent. Neither fathers nor mothers struck their children, and few threats were ever heard. Instead, children’s characters were molded by frequent praise or positive reinforcement, and by shaming and ridiculing for unacceptable behavior. Even mothers who “dry scratched” a misbehaving child with fish teeth meant to embarrass him or her publicly with the visible marks on the arm or shoulder rather than to inflict pain. Guilt was also effectively used, as it was in Quaker households in Pennsylvania. Mothers put the burden of their own reputation on their children, arguing that a bad child advertised a failed parent to the entire community. This emphasis on personal dignity and public honor produced a problematic sensitivity among many children, who were known to threaten suicide if a parent’s reprimand humiliated them too deeply.

  Independence and self-reliance were sometimes inculcated through an emphasis on physical resiliency. Mohawk Indians left young children naked in cold weather so that their bodies would adapt to discomfort. Some societies identified and then carefully trained potential leaders by deprivation and challenge. In southeastern New England, these selected children endured both physical and mental tests, ending with a ritual involving hallucinogens and physical abuse. In the Southeast, girls as well as boys endured a testing ritual called Huskanaw, a ceremony of discipline to identify future leaders. Young boys and girls were sent to a House of Correction, where they were given intoxicants and deprived of food and light for five to six weeks in order to drive out childhood memories and weaknesses. Such tests of endurance and drug-stimulated rituals of visions sometimes became part of the celebration of puberty.

  The character of Indian women and men was, like the character of the English of both sexes, shaped by their treatment as children, at the hands of those they loved, respected, or feared. Indian women like Wetamo learned to value independence of action and judgment, stoic acceptance of adversity, or at least public acceptance of it, and to desire the approval of their community through service and loyalty. Adult life produced no disjuncture with these values for women, for in marriage they were not called upon to renounce autonomy or self-reliance nor were they excused from civic obligations.

  To see and understand themselves clearly, Native American women looked to the traditional images of their gender in work, family relationships, and religious cosmology. In the accounts of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, in the defining and the honoring of the sacred and the spiritual, and in the parts women played in the enactment of ritual and ceremony, they found much of their identity. The degree to which women were central rather than marginal both to their people’s religious vision and to the conduct of their rituals was roughly correlated to the kinship and household structure of the tribe.

  In the matrilineal Iroquois society, women enjoyed both respect and formal authority. The Iroquois creation story hinges upon the actions of a woman who falls from the Sky World and creates the earth. On this earth she gives birth to a daughter, who in turn bears twins embodying good and evil, and from whose breasts spring the “three sisters” who sustain life—corn, beans, and squash. The inclusion of women’s daily life within the sacred circle can be seen clearly in Seneca rituals that stressed life-sustaining natural forces. The Women’s Dance, for example, centered on the cycle of corn; women danced while men chanted about the planting, growing, harvesting, and use of corn in the Iroquois diet. In winter, Seneca held the Thanks-to-the-Maple ceremony, officiated at by women whose role it was to tap the trees and process the syrup for consumption. At this ceremony, the Chanters of the Dead, a priestly body led by a woman, sang songs that belonged exclusively to that group. The Chanters of the Dead played a central role throughout the year, helping women or men who were troubled by dreams of relatives or friends who had died. In a culture that paid close attention to the unconscious as it was manifested in dreams, the Chanters were important religious figures.

  Among Wetamo’s people, women were more peripheral to religious vision and less likely to hold formal religious authority. The shamans of the Wampanoag were male, as were the shamans of the Canadian tribes. Yet, in witchcraft, when spiritual energies were wielded as curse rather than celebration, women were equally as powerful as men. Huron sorcerers, both those who bewitched and those who lifted the curse, were of either sex; soothsayers who foresaw the future through rituals of pyromancy and hydromancy could be women as well. Catholic priests, attempting to convert the Indians of Canada—but often frustrated by the Native American’s capacity to incorporate Christian symbolism, biblical figures, and Christian theology into their own religious context rather than renounce their “heathenism”—were especially annoyed when women laid claim to positions of religious authority. “It is a surprising fact,” wrote one missionary, “that this ambition to act the patriarch does not only prevail among the men, but even the women meddle therewith.” The ready acceptance of these women as religious leaders among the Micmac, for example, was based on a long tradition acknowledging women’s spiritual powers. “They look upon these women as extraordinary persons,” the priest conceded, “whom they believe to hold converse, to speak familiarly, and to hold communication with the sun, which they have all adored as their divinity.”

  English colonization cast a long shadow over Wetamo’s personal history. During her lifetime, the pace of change set by these newcomers was both swift and deadly: the Wampanoag saw their claim to the land eroded, their independence of action denied, and their culture bent to the demands first of military preparedness and then devastating war. In the end, the shadow covered Wampanoag society completely, leaving only a few survivors, who ended their lives as slaves in the West Indies or refugees among other tribes. Change, gradual or dramatic, adaptive or destructive, was part of the equation in the lives of all Algonquin women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. No portrait, no matter how rich in detail or how illuminating, is accurate if it leaves the impression of stasis rather than flux.

  Historians have documented the most dramatic changes wrought by the European invasion of America, especially the decimation of the Indian population by disease and later by warfare. Other forces operated more slowly to transform Indian cultures, redefine work and gender roles, reshape family, and reinterpret the relationship of the natural and the supernatural. Contact between Europeans and Native Americans, for example, often produced demographic changes that resulted from intimacy rather than mortality or combat.

  In Canada, French fur traders and farmers created families with Algonquin women; in the Carolinas and Georgia, Englishmen did the same. The “She-Bed-Fellows” of these English traders played more than sexual and domestic roles; they were liaisons in the local community. The result of this arrangement was the creation of a wholly new, specialized role for some Indian women. As “Trading Girls,” women were expected to satisfy English traders and earn money “by their Natural Parts.” The designation of a small group of women as trading girls helped preserve the racial integrity of the Native American communities, for no other women were made available to the traders but these. Few other English colonies developed a significant mixed population. In some the Indians were under no compunction or necessity to enter relationships with white men. In others warfare effectively diminished the availability of Indian women, and in others Englishwomen were plentiful.

  Englishwomen entered Indian communities, too, primarily as captives who, like Mary Jemison, chose to remain and create families among their adoptive people. The impact of these women was muted, for assimilation was unambiguously welcomed and encouraged. Jemison’s membership in the Seneca required no adjustment of racial attitudes or examination of community identity, for the process of adoption was well established by the time the English arrived in America.

  Ironically, the Indians’ encounter with English culture often intensified and distorted existing social patterns rather than introduced novel ones. For example, the fur trade between Indians and the English left work and gender roles undisturbed at first. Men. hunted and trapped, as they had always done. Women led more sedentary lives, which included the preparation of the skins or meat. But England’s demand for furs was insatiable and the appeal of European products soon led to a dependency on these manufactured goods that transformed many tribal cultures. Thus the expanding fur trade forced a redistribution of resources and energies and altered gender relationships and family structures. Indian men spent more time away from the village in pursuit of beaver, marten, or fox, and determined the location and permanence of a village, and the pursuit of good trapping ground pushed entire communities into the nomadic life once restricted to adult males.

  These changes disrupted traditional gender arrangements: the stable village life that women directed was more difficult to sustain, and the logic of matrilineal and matrifocal family organization was weakened as whole communities dispersed or became peripatetic. Women’s work activities were redefined and given new priorities. The scraping, dressing, trimming, and sewing of skins into salable goods took precedence over agricultural tasks, sometimes leading the tribe to abandon self-sufficiency and rely on other tribes for its food supply.

  By the eighteenth century, Anglo-American culture had enveloped Algonquin culture, pressing new norms and values upon the women and men of the remaining East Coast tribes. Native Americans faced the options of adaptation, resistance, or marginalization, each with its costs and its advantages. What Anglo-American culture never held out to them was the promise of full acceptance, which Indian societies had always proffered to those who entered their world.

  If the Indians’ choices were limited, their responses were nevertheless various. Among the Seneca, whose strategies for survival have been traced by scholars, traditional life retained its vitality until the English colonists won their political independence. The Iroquois Confederation had cast its lot with the British, and American victory meant the loss of political and military independence for the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Tuscarora, and Mohawk tribes. Iroquois men, whose gender identity was closely tied to the tasks of war, trade, diplomacy, and politics, faced a difficult adjustment. Many Seneca withdrew deeper into their own subculture, but reformers like Handsome Lake pressed for adaptation to Anglo-American ways. Handsome Lake’s followers were urged to redesign their family to meet Anglo-American standards and ideals, including patriarchal nuclear families, the buttressing of the father-son relationship, and the quest for domestic tranquillity. The weakening of kinship ties and the sanctification of the husband-wife relationship, reinforced by Handsome Lake’s injunction against divorce and the use of abortifacients, required that women cede autonomy and accept dependency. The Seneca who became Handsome Lake’s disciples reshaped the world of the Algonquin beyond recognition.

  For many Native American communities, the tug of war between traditional and dominant patterns of behavior and beliefs became a way of life in itself. To the Indian women of the late eighteenth century, Wetamo’s unambiguous perception of English culture as invasive and entirely alien must have seemed simpler than this now familiar but still dangerous colonial society.

  4

  IN A “BABEL OF CONFUSION” WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES

  MARGARET HARDENBROECK WAS BORN into a Dutch trading family in the early seventeenth century. Her parents, Maritje Caterberg and Adolph Hardenbroeck, were based in Evervelt, Netherlands, but their lives were tied to the new colonies of North America and the Caribbean and to the prosperity these places promised. Their immediate family was small; they had only two sons, Abel and Johannes, and, of course, Margaret. The three children were schooled in writing, reading, and arithmetic, and Margaret, no less than her brothers, learned to apply these skills to the entrepreneurial world her parents inhabited.

  Margaret appears to have been the most adventurous of the Hardenbroecks, for she was the first member of the family to leave home and settle in the Dutch outpost of New Amsterdam. She arrived in 1659 and presented herself to the authorities as the agent of a cousin who was an Amsterdam trader. She quickly established herself as a presence in the colonial port, appearing in court to collect her cousin’s debts and establishing a brisk and varied trade in pins, cooking oil, and vinegar, all exchanged for the colony’s most marketable resource, furs.

  Soon after she arrived, Margaret met and married Pieter Rudolphus DeVries, a fellow merchant. Her new husband was no struggling settler; his success and status in the trading community was established by his ability to pay fifty guilders to the city for the privilege of joining the ranks of its Great Burghers. Neither her marriage nor later her motherhood interrupted Margaret’s mercantile activities, however. While Pieter plied lumber, paper, bricks, tobacco, sugar, wine, and prunes, his wife continued to build her connections within the fur trade. When Pieter died in 1661, Margaret and her infant daughter, Maria, inherited his property and his business.