The limits of empire: women of the Great Plains
While independence in Iberian America had resulted in the emergence of nineteen new republics by 1830, there remained sovereign First Nations in the Great Plains that could thrive through the fur trade while retaining their autonomy.
Inter-tribal war was the biggest threat to these peoples, who eagerly sought to acquire guns from traders to defend themselves from their local enemies. In the eyes of the outsiders who first documented colonial First Nations’ history, the prominence of warfare, success in which could rapidly raise the status of a man, tended to relegate women’s contributions to secondary importance, although a few women became warriors. Indeed, no structural impediments prevented women from following this path. Women commonly, although not exclusively, went on raids with their husbands. When women became respected warriors, they occupied positions within tribal councils in the same way as men.In the 1830s the American fur trade reached the Upper Missouri. Following the established pattern, indigenous women from First Nations east of the Rocky Mountains became guides, interpreters and labourers, and also married fur traders. The figure of Natoyist-siksina or Holy Snake Woman, better known as Natawista, looms large as the most influential woman within the middle ground of the fur trade. She was daughter of the Kainai leader Two Suns and sister of Seen From Afar, who took over her father’s leadership. Natawista married chief trader Alexander Culbertson around 1840 and for the next thirty years acted alternately as an advocate for her people and family, and as a diplomat on behalf of whites. Despite polygyny being the norm, her status mandated that she become the principal wife; Culbertson divorced his first Pikuni/Blackfoot wife before their marriage. Years later, the union was confirmed in a Catholic wedding. Natawista secured for Culbertson the rich profits of her relatives’ trade in buffalo robes.
Moreover, she facilitated his success as special government agent to the Blackfoot by travelling with him in 1853 among her people, encouraging them to sign a treaty with the United States. For her services to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, she received a silver cup lined with gold and engraved ‘To the Second Pocahontas’.39 While a dubious honour, given its allusion to a woman who sided with the colonisers, the symbolic gift unequivocally recognises her important ambassadorial role.Comparing the opportunities of indigenous women to insert themselves into the power networks of the Spanish Empire with those of women under the allegedly more benign settler colonialism of North America is instructive. Although only a few women wielded significant formal political power in the Spanish Empire, no woman had similar opportunities in the latter. There is a complete absence of indigenous women among the signatories of treaties between First Nations and the United States until Congress ended the practice in 1871. The lifetime authority of male indigenous leaders who signed treaties was recognised. A similar situation existed in Canada. Both Canada and the United States gave continuity to the imperial project of dispossessing First Nations peoples of their land, confining them to reservations and forcing their acculturation. Although recognising the authority of tribal chiefs elected according to custom during the early reservation era, as soon as practicable the colonisers sought to appoint leaders deemed to be ‘cooperative’ with officialdom. Women were not deemed suitable for leadership.
After the destruction of buffalo herds by over-hunting in the early 1880s, First Nations peoples had no option but to settle on reservations under the supervision of Indian Agents, who controlled their every action and prevented them from travelling beyond the limits of the reservation. Dependent on government rations for survival, their cultures came under attack.
They were forced to surrender their children to be educated in residential schools by missionaries who prevented them from speaking their own languages: a conquest of their cultures.Women were not appointed to any position of authority during the early reservation era. Although the United States was now an independent country and, from 1860, Canada was a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire, decolonisation did not apply to First Nations peoples. They legally became internally colonised subjects, in the United States as ‘internal dependent nations’, in Canada as ‘wards of the state’. Canada ceased to recognise, as ‘registered Indians’ for the purposes of the Indian Act of 1869, women who married whites, and their offspring.40 Treaty monies were paid to male heads of family; only widowed women ‘of good repute’ were permitted to collect their own treaty payments and those of their children. It is hard to imagine a more dismal and disempowered position for women, even though simultaneously their contributions to the wellbeing of their families and communities became crucial, encompassing physical and cultural survival.