Marriage alliances between natives and newcomers

From the earliest encounters, marriage between indigenous women and European men recurred throughout the Americas. These unions, whether legally binding or following local custom, became key to indigenous women’s ability to reposition themselves within colonial society.

The incorporation of the victor and the vanquished through marriage had been central to pre-contact empire-building in the Americas. Incas and Aztecs intermarried with the elites of conquered enemies to cement imperial rule. The Qapac Inca often took a wife from the leading family of a defeated polity, and married his daughters to conquered elite men.⁸ Moreover, as a ritual expression of sovereignty, the Qapac Inca awarded wives to his sub­jects (bride service), both noble and commoner. Control of bride service and labour tribute relied on a weakened differentiation between the political and the domestic. Rather than identify men with the former and women with the latter, both were ‘explicitly, centrally and indivisibly part of the political economy of the Inka state’.⁹ In pre-contact central Mexico, three kinds of marriage alliance existed: a primary marriage reserved for a woman who exercised ‘a great deal of influence’ and came from the family of the most valued ally; secondary marriages to ‘shared women’ from cities that became willing allies; and tertiary marriages to women gained through conquest.¹⁰ Women thus provided the glue that bound indigenous empire together.

Following the established precedent, the scene of indigenous rulers presenting the European conquistadors with women to look after their material and sexual needs recurs in the narratives of early encounters, including those of Hernando Cortes in Mexico (1519—1521), Francisco Pizarro in Peru (1532—1533) and, in the case of North America, John Smith in the Chesapeake (1608), and Lewis and Clark in the Upper Missouri (1804). In Mexico, the lords of Campeche gave Cortes and his lieutenants a present of young non-elite women to serve them, in addition to providing noble women as their wives.¹¹ Women were the first to become intimately acquainted (in all senses) with the newcomers. The Spanish conquest imposed new layers of expectation on these women, among the first indigenous subjects to experience baptism, which required them to adopt Christian names, and observe Catholic practices while repudiating old customs, rituals and beliefs.

That indigenous leaders in disparate locations followed the same pattern points to a generalised indigenous perspective of male and female as mutually indispensable parts of a structural unit with separate but complementary spheres. Scholars employ concepts like ‘gender parallelism’ and ‘gender complementarity’ to refer to this balance between male and female roles. Each partner contributed distinct talents: the man protecting kin through warring activities, and the woman producing food, clothing and, most importantly, new lives. Marriage in these societies can be equated with attaining citizenship.

Indigenous leaders sought to incorporate Europeans into their kinship groups in order to create relationships of reciprocity. From the conquerors’ perspective, inter-ethnic marriage provided access to local power networks and indigenous wealth, especially land. Through marriage, concubinage or temporary sexual hospitality, indigenous women were drawn into intimacy with men (sometimes already married) who found themselves far away from their families. Indigenous women filled the emotional and intimate void created by the absence of European women, in exchange gaining a place in the new order.