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Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934
In this interdisciplinary study of gender, cross-cultural encounters, and federal Indian policy, Margaret D. Jacobs explores the changing relationship between Anglo-American women and Pueblo Indians before and after the turn of the century. During the late nineteenth century, the Pueblos were often characterized by women reformers as barbaric and needing to be "uplifted" into civilization. By the 1920s, however, the Pueblos were widely admired by activist Anglo-American women, who challenged assimilation policies and worked hard to protect the Pueblos’ "traditional" way of life.
Deftly weaving together an analysis of changes in gender roles, attitudes toward sexuality, public conceptions of Native peoples, and federal Indian policy, Jacobs argues that the impetus for this transformation in perception rests less with a progressively tolerant view of Native peoples and more with fundamental shifts in the ways Anglo-American women saw their own sexuality and social responsibilities.
Deftly weaving together an analysis of changes in gender roles, attitudes toward sexuality, public conceptions of Native peoples, and federal Indian policy, Jacobs argues that the impetus for this transformation in perception rests less with a progressively tolerant view of Native peoples and more with fundamental shifts in the ways Anglo-American women saw their own sexuality and social responsibilities.
- GenresHistory
284 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1999
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August 24, 2015
Review of Engendered Encounters - Margaret D. Jacobs
3.5 Stars to be exact, but since the first sentence was "This book started as a dissertation..." - it gets the 3 star rating instead of the 4!]
Thesis: "This book presents a story of how and why notions about native Americans changed in the first decade of the 20th century, particularly among one of the groups of Americans most responsible for influencing and carrying out federal Indian policy – white women, both female moral reformers and anti-– Modern feminists. This is also a story of what meaning and purpose Pueblo Indians gave to their experiences with white women in the scene decades. By analyzing these interactions, we can gain some insight into how many Americans at the turn of the 20th century – White and native – may have reconceptualized gender and racial differences. "
Despite the depressing start, this book actually was a fairly pleasant read as academic works go. Jacobs focused on the Pueblos during the late 19th and early 20th C. which was a period of rapid cultural change both for the indigenous peoples and for the larger US society. During this time official US indian policy shifted from one of cultural extermination to helping Indians use their culture as a way to sustain themselves economically. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs was the main enactor and enforcer of these policies, much of the work on the ground was done by white women who were recruited from the middle and upper classes. (25) These women politically aligned into two major camps: that of the moral crusaders (who were the earliest women involved), and somewhat later the anti-modern feminists.
Moral crusaders were devout Christian women who were sent out with the intended mission of stamping out indigenous cultures and training Indians how to behave like best mythical version of the idealized white middle class - all in the pursuit of "uplifting" the indigenous race, esp. Native women in the Southwest, and assimilating them into white culture. To accomplish this, one of their main goals was to redefine the gender system of the natives - to keep women at home in clean, well-ordered houses (true womanhood) and send the men out into the fields to become yeoman farmers, while the children were shipped off to government run boarding schools to be taught, at least in theory, the ways of white society while they were young, with the hope that they would return and change their families and communities from within. This movement came to a head just at the time in US history when the yeoman farmer was becoming an untenable pursuit and women were itching to redefine their role to encompass more than a private sphere of virtuous motherhood.
Enter the anti-modern feminists in the 1910s. They surveyed the indigenous cultures and saw value in their traditional systems. These liberated women saw elements of freedom, especially sexual freedom in (in this case) among the Pueblo peoples, that they wanted white society to adopt. They also liked what they perceived as the "primitive" these people lived, not beholden to manufacturing or store-bought products. Some of the liberated reformers embraced a version of the native life, becoming "Indian wannabes" as it suited them and used indigenous peoples and their ways of life to critique modern society. Unfortunately, this led these reformers to see "traditional" Indians as the only "true" Indians and they dismissed others who embraced elements from the wider US culture as corrupted Indians who had lost their culture. This impulse ignored the fact that natives had been subject and adopted changes from other cultures for the entirety of their existence, especially for the Pueblos beginning in the 16th C. when the Spaniards came, but also more crucially from the Apaches and the Navajos who invaded their territory. The reformers however seemed blind to these influences and wanted to preserve what they first saw as THE "traditional way of life". On the positive side, anti-modern feminists challenged white superiority and the idea that indians were a vanishing race.(58)
Jacob's illustrated how these reformers operated and clashed through following the lives, travels, and work of several female reformers who represented both moral and anti-modern feminists. Jacobs specifically illustrated how each type of reformers' work and views clashed in regard to cultural dances and the rise of the Indian Arts and Crafts movement. As the Pueblo cultural became open to tourism and tourists they struggled to keep secret and secret their ceremonies. (134) elders published the Indians who depicted ceremonial dances that were normally kept secret, they also punished Indians who spoke with anthropologists and other researchers and divulged tribal secrets and sacred locations.
Other things to note:
2 – By the 1920s white women saw native cultures as superior to modern America.
– "The passage in 1934 of the Indian Reorganization Act for the Indian New Deal… Reverse the policy of assimilation and attempted to put into practice the beliefs of 1920s white activists the Indian should be allowed to preserve their culture."
3 – By the 1930s Indians were no longer considered to be relics of a bygone era, but whites had a vision of what being an Indian meant which was hard for natives to shake –-> whites still "Knew what was best" for NAs.
6 – "The Pueblos also shared other ways of organizing and understanding their society. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, they seem to have practiced a well-defined sexual division of labor."
– Researchers have recently determined that the division of labor within the Pueblos society did not necessarily lead to the devaluation of women. In fact, women had an enhanced status within Pueblo culture.
9 – In an odd ruling, the Supreme Court decided in 1876 that the pueblos were not "tribal" and therefore federal indian laws did not apply to them. "This meant that Congress did not recognize Pueblo land; therefore, their land could be preempted and purchased by non-Indians." More issues were created when the land with that aside for the portables they were not consulted and many sacred sites were not saved. Without their land base, Hopis were unable sustain their traditional subsistence based agriculture.
11–19th century scientists developed theory of polygenesis which led to whites believing other races were inferior and a hierarchy of cultures with white at the top, blacks on the bottom, and natives somewhere in between.
12 – Louis Henry Morgan believed matrilineality meant that pueblo women had loose sexual morals – no fathers were apparent in the society. Promiscuity was tied to savagery.
13- reformers assumed that like in white cultures, casual marriages and divorces left pueblo women in vulnerable positions, but this was not the case.
14 – under Boas anthropologists developed the theory of cultural relativism which "tried to illustrate the different cultures developed divergent, but not inferior, standards." Under normal circumstances, this intervention would have been positive, but anthropologists were extremely invasive in their methods to get info and stole cultural items and secrets.
17, 108, 127, 129 – modernization split the Pueblos. Traditionalists (hostiles) v. "Friendlies" cultural dances became a divisive issue, The boarding school education Indians grew to oppose the dances as well.
3.5 Stars to be exact, but since the first sentence was "This book started as a dissertation..." - it gets the 3 star rating instead of the 4!]
Thesis: "This book presents a story of how and why notions about native Americans changed in the first decade of the 20th century, particularly among one of the groups of Americans most responsible for influencing and carrying out federal Indian policy – white women, both female moral reformers and anti-– Modern feminists. This is also a story of what meaning and purpose Pueblo Indians gave to their experiences with white women in the scene decades. By analyzing these interactions, we can gain some insight into how many Americans at the turn of the 20th century – White and native – may have reconceptualized gender and racial differences. "
Despite the depressing start, this book actually was a fairly pleasant read as academic works go. Jacobs focused on the Pueblos during the late 19th and early 20th C. which was a period of rapid cultural change both for the indigenous peoples and for the larger US society. During this time official US indian policy shifted from one of cultural extermination to helping Indians use their culture as a way to sustain themselves economically. Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs was the main enactor and enforcer of these policies, much of the work on the ground was done by white women who were recruited from the middle and upper classes. (25) These women politically aligned into two major camps: that of the moral crusaders (who were the earliest women involved), and somewhat later the anti-modern feminists.
Moral crusaders were devout Christian women who were sent out with the intended mission of stamping out indigenous cultures and training Indians how to behave like best mythical version of the idealized white middle class - all in the pursuit of "uplifting" the indigenous race, esp. Native women in the Southwest, and assimilating them into white culture. To accomplish this, one of their main goals was to redefine the gender system of the natives - to keep women at home in clean, well-ordered houses (true womanhood) and send the men out into the fields to become yeoman farmers, while the children were shipped off to government run boarding schools to be taught, at least in theory, the ways of white society while they were young, with the hope that they would return and change their families and communities from within. This movement came to a head just at the time in US history when the yeoman farmer was becoming an untenable pursuit and women were itching to redefine their role to encompass more than a private sphere of virtuous motherhood.
Enter the anti-modern feminists in the 1910s. They surveyed the indigenous cultures and saw value in their traditional systems. These liberated women saw elements of freedom, especially sexual freedom in (in this case) among the Pueblo peoples, that they wanted white society to adopt. They also liked what they perceived as the "primitive" these people lived, not beholden to manufacturing or store-bought products. Some of the liberated reformers embraced a version of the native life, becoming "Indian wannabes" as it suited them and used indigenous peoples and their ways of life to critique modern society. Unfortunately, this led these reformers to see "traditional" Indians as the only "true" Indians and they dismissed others who embraced elements from the wider US culture as corrupted Indians who had lost their culture. This impulse ignored the fact that natives had been subject and adopted changes from other cultures for the entirety of their existence, especially for the Pueblos beginning in the 16th C. when the Spaniards came, but also more crucially from the Apaches and the Navajos who invaded their territory. The reformers however seemed blind to these influences and wanted to preserve what they first saw as THE "traditional way of life". On the positive side, anti-modern feminists challenged white superiority and the idea that indians were a vanishing race.(58)
Jacob's illustrated how these reformers operated and clashed through following the lives, travels, and work of several female reformers who represented both moral and anti-modern feminists. Jacobs specifically illustrated how each type of reformers' work and views clashed in regard to cultural dances and the rise of the Indian Arts and Crafts movement. As the Pueblo cultural became open to tourism and tourists they struggled to keep secret and secret their ceremonies. (134) elders published the Indians who depicted ceremonial dances that were normally kept secret, they also punished Indians who spoke with anthropologists and other researchers and divulged tribal secrets and sacred locations.
Other things to note:
2 – By the 1920s white women saw native cultures as superior to modern America.
– "The passage in 1934 of the Indian Reorganization Act for the Indian New Deal… Reverse the policy of assimilation and attempted to put into practice the beliefs of 1920s white activists the Indian should be allowed to preserve their culture."
3 – By the 1930s Indians were no longer considered to be relics of a bygone era, but whites had a vision of what being an Indian meant which was hard for natives to shake –-> whites still "Knew what was best" for NAs.
6 – "The Pueblos also shared other ways of organizing and understanding their society. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, they seem to have practiced a well-defined sexual division of labor."
– Researchers have recently determined that the division of labor within the Pueblos society did not necessarily lead to the devaluation of women. In fact, women had an enhanced status within Pueblo culture.
9 – In an odd ruling, the Supreme Court decided in 1876 that the pueblos were not "tribal" and therefore federal indian laws did not apply to them. "This meant that Congress did not recognize Pueblo land; therefore, their land could be preempted and purchased by non-Indians." More issues were created when the land with that aside for the portables they were not consulted and many sacred sites were not saved. Without their land base, Hopis were unable sustain their traditional subsistence based agriculture.
11–19th century scientists developed theory of polygenesis which led to whites believing other races were inferior and a hierarchy of cultures with white at the top, blacks on the bottom, and natives somewhere in between.
12 – Louis Henry Morgan believed matrilineality meant that pueblo women had loose sexual morals – no fathers were apparent in the society. Promiscuity was tied to savagery.
13- reformers assumed that like in white cultures, casual marriages and divorces left pueblo women in vulnerable positions, but this was not the case.
14 – under Boas anthropologists developed the theory of cultural relativism which "tried to illustrate the different cultures developed divergent, but not inferior, standards." Under normal circumstances, this intervention would have been positive, but anthropologists were extremely invasive in their methods to get info and stole cultural items and secrets.
17, 108, 127, 129 – modernization split the Pueblos. Traditionalists (hostiles) v. "Friendlies" cultural dances became a divisive issue, The boarding school education Indians grew to oppose the dances as well.
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