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Native American Women in Pekka Hamalainen’s New History




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Native American Women in Pekka Hamalainen’s New History

Pekka Hamalainen’s  Lakota America:  A New History of Indigenous Power, published in New Haven, Connecticut by the Yale University Press in 2019 contains in its pages, according to the index, about twenty (20) references to Native American and Lakota women in his 530 page book.  The book has text in 392 pages, 5 pages of “abbreviations” and 133 pages of “Notes” (academic term for “work by others” that you borrow).  So, what is “New” about Lakota history told about Lakota men by non-Lakota men?  A “New” history would include Lakota women and not ignore their contributions to Lakota life.

Historians like Hamalainen continue to focus on the history of Lakota men in the Lakota culture as if Lakota women were invisible.  In Hamalainen’s case, women were worth mention less than 20 times.  Those references are:  women in agricultural tasks (3 mentions); women and the Battle of Greasy Grass (3 mentions); women and the Lakota horse culture (4 mentions); Lakota women offered to traders (1 mention and 1 footnote); Lakota women married to white traders (1 mention); Lakota women and their role in wartime (1 mention); Native American women taken as slaves by war parties (1 mention); Lakota women as victims in the Wounded Knee massacre (1 mention); Lakota women and wealth of (3 pages).

Including two other mentions of women on two separate pages where in one of the entries he takes it from our own winter count where Lakota women are included.  In the second mention Hamalainen makes of Lakota women, you read one of the many grand announcements (conjectures) he makes (without any real historic proof or connection) like “It was not before long that Lakota women pitched tipis on the west bank, carving out first footholds in what would soon become known as the American west” (p.97).

Hamalainen’s depiction of Lakota women in these roles makes him the target of accusations of sexism; defined in the dictionary as prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination typically against women, on the basis of sex.  Most American historians writing about Native American women fall into that category because of patriarchy (favors men).  In the U.S. patriarchy, a social system where men hold power and historically dominate women in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property, permeates all aspects of life.  Especially for those it has sought to control, including Native Americans.

Since its founding, the U.S. has imposed patriarchal beliefs on Native American people who did not share these same beliefs about Native American women.  In most Native American cultures, including the Lakota people, women were just as important to survival in a harsh physical world dependent on both genders.  For thousands of years, Lakota people relied on both genders to thrive in their homelands.  The skills of both genders were necessary as depicted in our own Lakota history and Lakota oral tradition narratives.

Yet, we continue to have historians like Hamalainen writing about Lakota women in ways that continue to perpetuate sexism and ultimately the kind of violence that Native American women continue to face in the U.S. today.  The awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) and the staggering statistics facing young Native American women today are a stark reality that everyone writing about Native Americans should know and fight through balanced writing about Native American women.

Just going through the index and reading the titles (see the second paragraph above), Hamalainen’s book is a long way from empowering Native American or Lakota women.  In his first mention, he referred to the way Dakota women dried wild rice and boiled it (page 18); in the next page he talks about how Dakota women guarded the corn fields.  These depictions fall in to the American historian’s belief that women were domestic drudges capable only of menial work.

When America was founded by European settlers, because European men farmed and the women didn’t, they forced the Native American men into farmering as Cherokee history tells us.  If farming was being done by the dominant gender, women in Native American communities had been farming for thousands of years.

If you read Hamalainen’s depiction of the grisly things Lakota women did after the Battle of Greasy Grass, the stereotypes of “savage” is reinforced.  The other role women had was to run or “evacuate” in his words (p. 365-366).  From a Lakota perspective we know of Black Elk’s story of his own mother standing ready on her horse (she did not flee but waited with dignity) and how he, Black Elk rode up to her to stand with her when he was afraid, during the battle.

In Hamalainen’s writing, Lakota women had one major role which was to erect tipis (p. 370).  When they were not erecting tipis they were offered to white men.   Hamalainen writes that “Sicangus again offered Clark a woman for the night, asking him to “take her and not Dispise them,” and again he refused” (page 135).   He mentions the Sicangu again in a section where he talks about a “trading post run by James Bordeaux, a veteran merchant who had married two Sicangu sisters (p. 222).

Even in his section on the “Wealth of Women” he writes, “The number of wives became a key measure of male success” (page 182) and from Hamalainen’s view this may have undone the Lakota “male” who saw other “males” as rivals and not as comrades (p. 183).  Earlier, Hamalainen writes that the Iroquois often took women as slaves.  He ends his “New History” with the often quoted statistic of women as victims in the Wounded Knee massacre (p. 379) where Hamalainen doesn’t even bother to reflect the accurate count but lumps women with children (“170 of them massacred”).

In general Hamalainen’s depictions of women, Native American women, and especially Lakota women are from a male-centric (limited) viewpoint.  A true history would round out the whole experience of Native American culture as it existed and thrived before European settlement; where women are given an equal role in an accurate depiction of Lakota life.

 

–Delphine Red Shirt

redshirtphd@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

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