Native American Manhood

Of all the historical images of the American Indian man, perhaps none has endured as well as that of the lone warrior.  Whether recalling the Sioux war chief Sitting Bull or the horse-mounted militants of 1950s westerns, Americans tend to imagine Indian men fighting valiantly on the frontier or stoically accepting inevitable military defeat.  This one-dimensional representation masks the complexity of Indian manhood, both historical and contemporary.  For more than four hundred years, Native American men have played a host of other roles that have shaped American history in concrete ways and that offer important insights into the construction of masculine identities and the social structures that support them.

Contact and Colonization in Early America

Some of the most telling episodes in the first century of Indians’ interactions with European newcomers center on the two societies’ clashing understandings of masculinity.  Almost all Indian societies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries trained boys by example, ritual, and shame that becoming a man meant developing skills as a successful hunter and potent warrior.  In many cases, this meant participating in a vision quest, a rite of passage undertaken at puberty during which adolescent boys would seek inspiration and power through altered states of consciousness.  After this or a similar rite of passage, a young man would participate in his first hunting or raiding expedition.  Thereafter, social custom demanded that he avoid all domestic and agricultural duties, deemed emasculating and demeaning for men.  Among the many Indian societies that relied heavily on agriculture for subsistence, such as the Iroquois or Pueblo, this customary prohibition checked men’s power by excluding from their control a village’s most important material resources.  In these cases, however, men governed many of the spiritual resources believed to be necessary for healing, successful harvests and hunts, and community safety.

Many Europeans brought to North America concepts of manhood that accorded poorly with Indian gender roles.  French explorer Jacques Cartier, for example, wrote in 1535 that the Iroquoian men of the St. Lawrence Valley were lazy and exploitative because “the women do all the servile tasks,” including chopping wood and harvesting corn.  To the English of Virginia in the early seventeenth century, Indian men were “idle” not because they were inactive, but because they neglected to take responsibility for agriculture as European men were trained to do.  Thus, early English colonists justified their seizure of Indian lands by pointing to the failure of Indian men to subdue the earth with the plow.

Indians also scorned European men.  To begin with, European men did not physically measure up to the standards of Indian masculinity.  Not only were European men generally shorter and in poorer physical condition than Indian men, but Indians also detested the facial hair worn by Europeans to signify their transition to adult manhood.  In 1632, for example, a Jesuit missionary wrote that the Natives believed that facial hair “makes people more ugly and weakens their intelligence.”  When European men took to the hoe, the plow, or the scythe, Indians judged them to be effeminate and thus easily defeated.

Yet many Indian men did not conform to the ideal types prescribed by their social customs, and the ambivalence with which Indian societies dealt with these cases reveals a great deal about their concepts of masculinity.  Europeans observed among many Indian peoples men who have come to be known as “berdache,” biological males who assumed the clothing, demeanor, and sexual role of women.  Historians have long debated the status of these men within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian societies.  According to one interpretation, the berdache symbolized harmony between the sexes and the potential for fluidity in gender roles.  In this view, these men were “two-spirit peoples” who possessed metaphysical powers of both sexes in one body and therefore occupied a position of special importance.  Others have adhered more closely to the term “berdache” (meaning “slave” or “prostitute”) suggesting that these men were marginalized and victimized for their deviation from gender norms.

Although surviving evidence may never permit a conclusive answer to this question, the documents yield two important insights.  First, the particular attention paid to these men by Native and European cultures, whether positive or negative, reveals the importance of masculinity in Native social organization.  The social status of these men depended for better or worse on the basic integrity of gender divisions since they were defined by their position outside the norm.  Second, the actual status of the berdache seems to have varied among Indian societies depending on the relative power exercised by men and women within a given village, tribe, or nation.  The greater the authority exercised by women, the less disempowering it was for these men to assume a female role.  For example, among the Pueblo of New Mexico, where women controlled property and grain, Spanish observers reported less abuse and derision of the berdache than they witnessed among the Nahua (Aztec), a much more male-dominant culture.

However, it would be misleading to suggest that only conflict and difference characterized Indian-European understandings of masculinity.  Throughout the colonial period, Natives and Europeans also forged economic and military alliances that relied heavily on some shared assumptions about men and masculinity.  Particularly when it came to war, Indian and European gender norms reinforced each other.  Indian men appealed to a common language of manhood to goad others into fighting or to demean conquered enemies.  When the Delaware Indians refused to join the Iroquois as allies in war, the Iroquois taunted: “You delaware Indians doe nothing but stay att home & boill yor potts, and are like women, while wee Onondages & Senekaes goe abroad & fight.”  The Iroquois used the same tactic to convince reluctant English colonists to “fight like Men.” 

Nineteenth Century

With the removal of the French from North America in 1763 and the defeat of the British in the American Revolution, Indians faced new pressures that continued to reveal and influence Native masculinity.  During the nineteenth century, Americans moved with unprecedented rapidity into Indian country, provoking Indian resistance in areas previously allowed to remain under Native control.  Following a long tradition of captivity narratives, American publishers thrived on tales of rapacious Indian men skulking at the woods’ edge for vulnerable white women.  These images of Indian men provided the justification many sought for forcibly removing Indian peoples from the lands desired by white settlers and speculators.   During the 1820s and 1830s especially, state and national governments adopted a policy of forced relocation, symbolized by the tragic march of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears in 1838.

Ironically, during the same period, other segments of American society began to embrace a more romantic vision of Indian men as the vanishing remnants of an epic past.  In James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41), for instance, a few caricatured Indian men served as emblems of a disappearing race doomed either to death or removal to the West.  Others, such as the Transcendentalist and Romantic movements, appealed to an idealistic image of the Indian male to critique what they saw as the emasculating effects of urbanization and industrialization.

As white Americans consumed these contrasting, yet mutually reinforcing, images of Native men, hundreds of thousands of real Indian men struggled to adapt to new social and demographic pressures.  Within those groups most resistant to American encroachments, male revival leaders such as the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa or the Seneca visionary Handsome Lake struggled to lead their communities against increasing odds.  Especially within historically matriarchal Indian cultures, male revival leaders faced stern resistance from women accustomed to playing a greater role in village politics, family relations, and religion.  Because the United States increasingly associated Indian politics with violent removal, however, it became harder for Indian groups to separate the masculine function of warrior from the more gender-neutral realm of village politics.

By midcentury, most Indian nations east of the Mississippi faced either sharp population declines or dangerous relocation onto unfamiliar lands.  Given the close relationship between Indian gender divisions and the range of subsistence activities within a community, ecological and demographic pressures powerfully influenced Indian masculinity.  At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, the eastern Sioux were shifting from a more gender-balanced hunting and gathering economy to one centered almost entirely on male bison hunting.  Conversely, many Indian women expanded their economic role as male hunting activities became much more difficult to sustain in their new western homeland.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. government worked to coerce Indians to adopt farming as their primary means of subsistence.  Indian men therefore faced a dual threat to their sense of masculinity.  Government agents and even sympathetic reformers questioned the manhood of Indian males who refused to farm and “provide” for their families.  However, in many cases, peers within Indian communities persisted in shaming those men who agreed to do the “women’s work” of caring for crops.  Access to government and community resources often depended on a man’s willingness to choose one masculine ideal over another.

Between 1854 and 1890, more than 50 major battles and massacres reinvigorated Indian men’s role as warrior, among Indians and non-Indians alike.  Especially during and after the Civil War, American armies invaded Indian country, killing thousands and destabilizing Indian communities all across the West.  When a coalition of Indian men defeated the army of General George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876, they gained prestige among their own people and reinforced prescribed masculine roles in warfare.  To non-Indian Americans, however, this manifestation of Indian masculinity only confirmed the importance of changing Indian men from fighters into passive farmers or industrial workers.

Following the American defeat of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, Indian men again faced a crisis of masculinity that the warfare of the past generation had only temporarily masked.  In fundamental ways, Indian communities at the end of the nineteenth century had to reinvision the role of men within Indian cultures.  Disruptions in subsistence activities, demographic and geographic change, and new legal and political realities encouraged the redefinition of masculine roles.  White Americans, however, continued to consume images of masculinity that encouraged “primitive” virility, as long as it did not get in the way of white progress.  In this era, popular culture perfected the image of the vanishing Indian warrior even as it encouraged white men to reclaim some of the “savage” masculinity of a fading past.

Twentieth Century and Beyond

Indian men in the twentieth century found diverse answers to the problem of masculinity in a changing world.  For some, survival meant finding ways to fit historical definitions of manliness, including bravery and fearlessness, into viable means of subsisting.  Thus, during the 1920s, a large number of Mohawk men found work doing the dangerous, high-altitude welding required to build New York City’s high-rises.  These Mohawk “sky walkers,” as they came to be known, gained renown for their brave handling of these dangerous tasks, earning the respect of more traditional men and women at home and the praise of employers who struggled to fill these treacherous positions.  Given the increasing concentrations of Indian peoples in cities across the country, such innovative adaptations of historical mores to new circumstances proved highly valuable as models for other Indian men. 

In other cases, definitions of masculinity simply changed.  Among the Navajo, for instance, farming became an increasingly legitimate occupation for men, no longer associated with women as it once had been.  Although livestock herding accounted for much of the Navajos’ wealth, farming provided most of their subsistence.  By the twentieth century, men played the dominant role in both.

These and similar changes in gender roles forced Indian communities of the twentieth century to formulate a sense of identity and continuity with their past that could reconcile shifting definitions of masculinity with efforts to reinvigorate past traditions.  Living in a world where fixed gender norms and exclusive spheres of authority no longer met social and legal standards of propriety, Indian men struggled to reclaim those portions of their past that allowed for such fluidity. 

In November 2001, the all-female Sweetgrass Road Drum Group traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to perform at a powwow organized by the University of St. Thomas.  The Indian men who organized the festival sent them away, claiming that drumming was a traditionally male activity and that the women’s participation would thus render the powwow inauthentic.  Incensed, the female drummers promptly filed suit for sexual discrimination.  The case touched off a firestorm of debate in Indian communities about the history of Indian gender divisions and the propriety of maintaining historical divisions in “traditional” activities.  This case and the controversies it has inspired indicate the ongoing importance of male gender definitions among American Indians and suggest that issues involving masculinity will continue to shape Indian life.

Bibliography:

Brown, Kathleen M.  “The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier,” in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., American Indians.  New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, 48-63.

Jaenen, Cornelius.  Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.  Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976.

“Powwow Dispute Highlights Male-Female Divide in Indian Country,” The Associated Press State and Local Wire, December 18, 2001.

Shoemaker, Nancy.  “An Alliance between Men: Gender Metaphors in Eighteenth-Century American Indian Diplomacy East of the Mississippi,” Ethnohistory 46 (Spring 1999): 239-263.

Thomas, David Hurst, Jay Miller, Richard White, Peter Nabokov, and Philip J. Deloria.  The Native Americans: An Illustrated History.  Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1993.

White, Richard, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 45 (September 1978): 319-343.

Further Reading:

Crow Dog, Leonard and Richard Erdoes.  Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men.  New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

Deloria, Philip J.  Playing Indian.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Gutierrez, Ramon.  When Jesus Came, the Cornmothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

White, Richard.  The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Related Topics:

Agrarianism; Breadwinner Role; Colonial Era; Crisis of Masculinity; Family; Homosexuality; Industrialization; Leatherstocking Tales; Military; Property; Race; Religion; Spirituality; Transvestism; Urbanization; War; Western Frontier; Westerns

—Brett Rushforth