New York Governor DeWitt Clinton spelled the name, Ho-de-no-sau-nee, which meant “the People of the Longhouse, from the circumstance that they likened their political structure to a long tenement or dwelling.”21
Gage recognized another name the Haudenosaunee use for indigenous people: “To themselves the Five Nations were known as the Ongwe Honwe, that is, a people surpassing all others.”22
“The Iroquois call themselves the real people,” Minnie Myrtle wrote, “and in speeches or conversation, if allusion is made to white people, they say invariably ‘our younger brethren.’”23
It is instructive to find that these self-chosen, inclusive names, well known to non-Natives a hundred years ago, have somehow become lost in the dusty archives and seldom appear in books today.
Haudenosaunee is the name (and accepted spelling today) for the Six Nations of the Confederacy, but it is not recognizable to most non-Native people, so completely has the power to name been usurped. Should we use the self-chosen name, knowing few will understand or should we use the imposed name that has nearly universal recognition? A third option presents itself: use both. We could begin with the commonly recognized name, Iroquois, and follow it with the chosen name in parentheses, like this: The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Influence on the Early Woman’s Rights Movement. However, parentheses are an aside, a brief interruption in the flow of the narrative. Notice the difference when we present the names the other way around: The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on the Early Woman’s Rights Movement. Haudenosaunee now stands as the proper term; the word Iroquois is included to assist those who do not recognize it.
Language Evolves to Reflect the Way People Change
Savage—a EuroAmerican word implying a lower degree of civilization—was widely used in the 19th Century to describe Native people.
The name the people call themselves, which is the “Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse.”
How did this word pass out of use? We look to the suffragists and their acquaintances for a part of the answer.
Minnie Myrtle lived with Laura and Ashur Wright, missionaries to the Seneca nation whose writings were quoted by Stanton. Myrtle questioned the use of the term “savage” in her popular 1855 book, The Iroquois;or, The Bright Side of Indian Character: A people like the Iroquois who had a government, established offices, a system of religion eminently pure and spiritual, a code of honor and laws of hospitality excelling those of all other nations, should be considered something better than savage, or utterly barbarous.
Myrtle quoted an eminent Spanish legal authority, Zurita, who spent nineteen years among the Aztecs, and was as indignant that they should be called barbarian as she was when the Haudenosaunee were similarly labeled:It is an epithet which could come from no one who had personal knowledge of the capacity of the people or their institutions, and which in some respects is quite as well merited by Europeans. If the Aztecs did not deserve the term barbarians, surely I shall be thought just in denying the term savage to belong to the Iroquois; and from their mythology, if nothing else, it is evident that they were destitute neither of genius nor of poetry.24
Eventually such challenges to the white supremacy embedded in the word savage caused the term to drop from common usage. The presence of equally offensive words in our present language reveals how far we have yet to go in our evolution toward equality.
Squaw,an insulting slang term which French fur trappers created from an Algonquin word referring to female genitalia, is an example of a word on its way out of the English language. Two teenage Ojibwa girls led a successful crusade to have Minnesota remove the word from all place names in the state. The issue is not new. Native American women have been protesting the use of the offensive term for at least a hundred years, as this 1890 story in the Onondaga Standard demonstrates:By the way, a little note here will not be found out of place to those readers who expect at some future day to come into contact with Indians, when they shall have to, perhaps surrender all the nicety of good usages to appear favorable in the estimation of the Indians, only to be embarrassed by the horrible outbreak of calling an Indian woman ‘Squaw,’ and find when too late two piercing jet black eyes resting upon some troubled countenance, as much as to say, “What is a squaw? Why do you call me a squaw? You are a squaw yourself! It is a vulgar expression; don’t use it; the Indians don’t use it; why should others? ”25
The Oregon Geographic Names Board is changing the name of a prominent peak from Squaw Butte to Paiute Butte. A South Dakota official faced sanctions from the Governor for telling a joke using the insulting term. Within our children’s lifetime, we will probably see this offensive word eliminated from public use. Unfortunately, many suffragists must not have been aware of its meaning, for they used the word. It will appear in this book as they wrote it with a [sic] beside it to remind us of its inappropriateness.
Haudenosaunee Women: An Inspiration to Early Feminists
The woman’s rights movement was born in the territory of the Haudenosaunee in 1848. Were the suffrage leaders influenced by Native women? Was there a connection between the authority and responsibilities held by Haudenosaunee women and the vision of the woman’s rights movement?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Lucretia Mott were among the leaders of the woman’s rights cause. Stanton and Mott organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Gage joined the movement in 1852 along with Susan B. Anthony. During her lifetime, Gage was recognized as the third member of the suffrage leadership “triumvirate” with Anthony and Stanton, but today she is less well known. Recognizing Gage’s formative role in developing feminist theory opens a new story of women’s rights.
Gage wrote extensively about the Haudenosaunee, especially the position of women in what she termed their “matriarchate” or system of “mother-rule.” She was working on a book about the Haudenosaunee when she died in 1898. In 1875, while president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Gage wrote a series of newspaper articles on the Haudenosaunee. The editor of the New York Evening Post said that Gage expressed “an exhibition of ardent devotion to the cause of women’s rights which is very proper in the president of the... Suffrage Association and gives prominence to the fact that in the old days when the glory of the famous confederation... was at its height, the power and importance of women were recognized by the allied tribes.”1
Spanning a 20-year period, Gage introduced readers to the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy in articles, the newspaper she edited (The National Citizen and Ballot Box,1878-1881) and her magnum opus (Woman, Church and State, 1893). She explained the form of government of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora and their confederacy of peace.
The famous Iroquois Indians, or Six Nations, which at the discovery of America held sway from the Great Lakes to the Tombigbe river, from the Hudson to the Ohio... showed alike in form of government, and in social life, reminiscences of the Matriarchate.2
The clarity of understanding of Indian nation sovereignty that Gage displayed in an editorial in her newspaper in 1878 is a source of wonder to Native people today:Our Indians are in reality foreign powers, though living among us. With them our country not only has treaty obligations, but pays them, or professes to, annual sums in consideration of such treaties.... Compelling them to become citizens would be like the forcible annexation of Cuba, Mexico, or Canada to our government, and as unjust.3
Haudenosaunee and EuroAmerican Women in 1848
Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the major theoreticians of the woman’s rights movement, claimed that the society in which they lived was based on the oppression of women.
Haudenosaunee society, on the other hand, was organized to maintain a balance of equality between women and men. Shown here are the contrasting differences between the two worlds of women who lived side-by-side in this region of upstate New York in 1848.
War chief holding woman’s nominating wampum belt.
How Well Did These Cultu
rally Different Women Know Each Other?
Even though they lived in very different cultural, economic, spiritual, and political worlds during the early 1800s, EuroAmerican settlers in Central/Western New York were, at most, one person away from direct familiarity with Iroquois people. The Haudenosaunee continued their ancient practice of adopting individuals of other nations, and many white residents of New York (including Matilda Joslyn Gage) carried adoptive Indian names. Friendships and visiting were commonplace activities between Natives and non-Natives. Newspapers routinely printed news from American Indian country. Each local history book began with a lengthy account of the first inhabitants of the land. These three leaders of the woman’s rights movement—Stanton, Gage, and Mott—were among those who had a personal connection with the Haudenosaunee.
Lucretia Mott visited the Seneca Nation in June 1848
Lucretia Mott and her husband James visited the Cattaraugus community in June 1848, just before taking part in the historic Seneca Falls Convention in July.
Matilda Joslyn Gage was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation
“I received the name of Ka-ron-ien-ha-wi, or ‘Sky Carrier,’ or She who holds the sky.” She wrote. “It is a clan name of the wolves.”4
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin was named for an Oneida Chief and her closest Seneca Falls neighbor was an adopted Onondagan.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin, Peter Skenandoah Smith, was named for an Oneida friend of the family, Chief Skenandoah. In addition, her nearest Seneca Falls neighbor, Oren Tyler, came from Onondaga, where he “had friendly dealings” with the people there and was adopted by them. He spoke their language fluently, and parties of Onondagans passing through Seneca Falls to sell their bead work and baskets “sought out their ‘brother,’ as they called Capt. Tyler, who always befriended them.”5
Three generations of the Wolf Clan.
Forerunners
Gage, Stanton, and Mott were not alone among reformers to respect Native ways of life, nor were they the first. Many nineteenth-century feminists felt a strong kinship with Native Americans. Frances Wright, for example, was the first woman to publicly speak before audiences of men and women in the United States on woman’s rights—twenty years before there was an organized woman’s movement. Together with Robert Dale Owen, she edited a reform paper, the Free Enquirer,in the late 1820s. Practicing a decidedly pro-Indian editorial policy, their paper carried articles on the Cherokee alphabet, an interview with the Seneca sachem Red Jacket, a comparison of Christian and Indian “superstitions” (Christianity lost badly by contrast), and a strongly-worded protest against a threatened attack on the Winnebago and Potawatomi nations by the United States army. “The whites are more apt to commit first aggressions than the Indians,” the editors contended. Owen was deeply committed to woman’s rights. He and Lydia Maria Child, another prototype feminist most commonly known for her anti-slavery writing, were particularly moved by the fact that Indian men did not rape.
Women Writers
Many non-Native women studied and wrote about the Haudenosaunee—professional ethnographers such as Alice Fletcher and Erminnie Smith, along with amateur ones—women like Gage—who had developed an interest in, and friendships with Haudenosaunee women. Several dozen of these women often wrote with a depth of understanding which would, no doubt, have been recognized and respected into this century had they been men.
Laura M. Sheldon Wright, wife of a missionary at Cattaraugus, for example, published a Dictionary of the Seneca Language around 1835.67
Harriet Maxwell Converse, the woman who arranged for Gage to be adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation, wrote extensively for New York papers. While her Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois (1908) has been criticized for being romanticized, her newspaper articles were straightforward and highly descriptive. They also document her extensive support and lobbying work for the Haudenosaunee. Converse “has ready for the press a volume of lyrics, sonnets, and Indian myth songs,” Harriet Phillips Eaton wrote Gage in the 1890s. Eaton, who was Gage’s cousin, also wrote about the Iroquois.8
Helen F. Troy was adopted by Thomas and Electa Thomas into the Snipe Clan of the Onondaga nation in 1894 and given the name Garwen-ne-sho or “Spirit Dipping into the Silent Waters” in 1905. The New York Herald announced that “Mrs. Troy is at present at work on and is soon to have published an elaborate translation of the ‘Book of the Sacred Wampum,’ or the Iroquois Bible, also a dictionary for use in the colleges, of the Onondaga and Mohawk tongues with their equivalent meanings in English.” The book was the result of fifteen years of research.9
Erminnie A. Smith was appointed by the Smithsonian Institution to study the Six Nations in 1880. She “lived among the Indians to study their habits and folklore and was so well-liked by the Tuscaroras that she was adopted into the White Bear Clan” and given the name of Ka-tie-tio- sta-knost, meaning “Beautiful Flower.” At the time of her death six years later, she was working towards completion of an Iroquois dictionary containing 15,000 classified words—6.000 of the Tuscaroras, 3,000 of the Onondagas, and a thousand each of the Oneidas and Senecas. She was just beginning her work with the Cayuga’s language when she died.10
Her assistant, J. N. B. Hewitt, a Tuscarora who became a respected expert at the Bureau of Ethnology, completed the dictionary, calling Smith “a superbly gifted scholar.”11 Horatio Hale said Smith “had pursued studies which in Ethnology alone would make any man famous.” The first woman elected to the New York Academy of Sciences, Smith was also a member of the Association for the Advancement of Science, the English Anthropological Society, and one of the leaders of the woman’s club, Sorosis—of which Gage was also a member. A contributor to various scientific journals,12 Smith’s Mythsof the Iroquois, originally published in 1883, is in print again today.13
Mary Elizabeth Beauchamp was the sister of William M. Beauchamp, who, according to The Dictionary of American Biography “became, among white men, the greatest authority on the history and institutions of the Iroquois. In a sense he was the successor of Lewis Morgan in this field.” Mary Elizabeth, who also wrote about the Haudenosaunee, was her brother’s secretary. In one of her newspaper articles, she wrote:I believe I have mentioned the fact that women are treated with great respect among the Onondagas, and in fact are usually supposed to rule. When I came to teaching my little folks to read the catechism, I found that in the Fifth Commandment, they invariably put the mother before the father,even after repeated reading and corrections.14
William Beauchamp mentioned in Iroquois Folk Lore that he had procured for the State Library an “interesting series of Seneca tales from Miss Myra E. Trippe of Salamanca, NY. Unfortunately,” he continued, “they were destroyed, along with the Moravian Journals I sent there at the same time.”15
While Gage read Morgan, Lafitte, Schoolcraft, Catlin, and Clark on the Iroquois, she knew the Beauchamp family. There were strong family ties between the two. Gage wrote for Beauchamp’s father’s paper, and his daughter-in-law wrote a song, “The Battle Hymn of the Suffragists” in honor of Gage.
Newspapers
A wide range of information on the Haudenosaunee was readily available through newspapers. The local Syracuse paper, the Onondaga Standard—which Gage read—reported everything from condolence ceremonies to council proceedings to spiritual ceremonies. When legislation was introduced to break up the land of the Six Nations into individual ownership, protests that came from the Onondaga nation were published in full by the paper, along with the names of all the signatures to the petitions.
The level of sophistication of these newspaper stories indicates that the average reader in upstate New York 100 years ago possessed knowledge about the Iroquois that, among non-Natives, is held by only a relatively small number of scholars today. The newspaper articles assumed, for example, that the readers knew the process by which a chief was raised up and what comprised a condolence ceremony.16
When Gage picked up her daily paper,
she read how the Haudenosaunee ginseng trade with China was threatened by political events in that country. A dispute when two chiefs were raised up simultaneously brought non-Native readers into the question of which was the legitimate one. When Anton Dvorak came to the United States to write his New World Symphony, he suggested that indigenous music is the true voice of America; a Syracuse University professor gave a lecture supporting that thesis from his study of Iroquois music.
With so many writers and newspaper stories creating such a sophisticated level of general knowledge, it comes as no surprise that when reformers like Matilda Joslyn Gage looked for a model upon which to base their vision of an egalitarian world, they quickly found their well-known Native neighbors. And what did they find? What was revealed to the suffragists about women’s relative status in these two contrasting worlds? What did they have eyes to see?
The Untold Story
I did not set out to look for this connection, this link between early suffragists and Native peoples. In truth, if someone had suggested it to me when I taught my first women’s studies class in 1969, I would have scoffed at yet one more “romantic Indian” story. I had a single question, basic to feminist history: How did the radical suffragits come to their vision, a vision not of Band-Aid reform but of a reconstituted world completely transformed? Surely I should know the answer—after all, I had helped found one of the nation’s first women’s studies programs (at California State University, Sacramento) and received one of the first doctorates for work in women’s studies (from the University of California, Santa Cruz). I was credentialed but I was baffled.
Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists Page 3