The Role of Native American Women in Cultural Continuity and Transition

Bea Medicine

Native women traditionally responsible for:• Socialization of Children• Mediation with Whites – Cultural Broker/Cultural

Mediator• Evaluators of language

http://www.naturallynative.com

Cultural Mediators

The Jamestown Legacy:

Pocahontas Algonquian Indian, Virginia. 1595 - 1617

“Pocahontas not only served as a representative of the Virginia Indians, but also as a vital link between the native Americans and the Englishmen. Whatever her contributions, the romantic aspects of her life will no doubt stand out in Virginia history forever.”The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities http://www.apva.org/history/pocahont.html

• Brokers were defined less by what they did than by who they were – gained identities through long service in multiple contacts

• Broker’s experience liminal – effects could always be compromised

• In anth lit, brokerage represented as either as: A) a creative act that enhances identity (Handsome Lake, Seneca) or a marginalizing process that alienates broker from cultural roots

• Women have often been especially effective – and controversial – brokers

• For Native women, brokerage often translates only to becoming wives or concubines. Ramifications today?

American Indian Women as “mediator between their own community and white society”

• Often vested in this role because of their facility in the English language

• dislike, criticism and frustration from males for learning the English language “too well”, getting too close to white society a sign of assimilation and consequent rejection of one’s own cultural values. Males emasculated resulting in conflict – verbal , physical

•Indian women did not as frequently loose their traditional language in boarding schools as men, called upon as speakers

•“The thrust to biculturalism and bilingualism was seen as a means to understanding the superimposed culture with a strong background in the Native one. Females fulfilled both.”

http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/the_new_world

Patricia DePerry, President of the Great Lakes Intertribal Council and Chairwoman of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, giving her State of the Tribes Address. http://www.wpr.org/news/stateoftribes-2007.cfm

Tribal sovereignty is "a decree ordered by the United States government when treaties were signed," said DePerry. "It's not up for negotiation; it is not up for discussion. It is the law." DePerry is the first female to serve as chairwoman of the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council,

Cultural Broker: Ella Deloria

• http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_010100_deloriaella.htm

Ella Cara Deloria, 1889-1971

A Yankton Dakota whose native name was Anpetu Waste Win (Beautiful Day Woman) was born on the Yankton Dakota Reservation at Lake Andes in South Dakota.  Known primarily for her linguistic and ethnographic work with the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota (Sioux nations), Ella was most "remembered by reservation residents for her contributions as an educator" (Medicine, 45). Nephew Vine Deloria, Jr. http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/women/deloria/deloria.htm

Contemporary Native Artistic Responses

• The story of Native women and their relation to power and authority between precolonial and postcolonial advance of patriarchy(p.307).

• For native peoples and particularly native women, popular stereotypes of the Indian princess or squaw drudge are non-recouperable sites of early Native womanhood. Like “Sapphire” ir “Brown Sugar” these Indian female images are ciphers and cultural inventions that cannot be reappropriated by native women without complicity in or service to their enterprise. (p. 313)

• What… would Native women’s history look like if Native Americans had been able to circulate and safeguard their written histories? (p. 315)

Lori Blondeau, COSMOSQUAW (1996-)

Lori Blondeau, performance artist COSMOSQUAW and The Lonely Surfer Squaw

" With tongue-in-cheek humour, Blondeau captures the word that wounds and redeploys it in COSMOSQUAW and The Lonely Surfer Squaw, making of it something startlingly subversive, compulsively entertaining and highly political. Fighting stereotypes with stereotypes, however, can be risky business, and her invented personas often spark heated debates about the need for positive images—as opposed to the use of subversive repetition—to reroute and reconfigure inherited patterns of thinking in contemporary culture.” Lynne Bell, Canadian Art Winter 2004

http://www.canadianart.ca/articles/Articles_Details.cfm?Ref_num=259

Lori Blondeau, The Lonely Surfer Squaw (1997-).

Seeking the SpiritBea Medicine & Liucija Baskauskas

1999

What qualities are necessary for a ritual to be ethnically "authentic"? Dr. Bea Medicine, a Native American anthropologist and her ... all » Lithuanian colleague, Dr. Liucija Baskauskas explore this issue as they visit a group of Russians who have met for their annual two week Pow Wow in an isolated wooded area outside of St. Petersburg. The Russians, predominantly couples with young children, tell us they initially became interested in Native American culture via Hollywood films. Back on a reservation in South Dakota, upon viewing a video of the dances and elaborate costumes of the Russians, a Lakota woman good-naturedly jokes, “They must've seen A Man Called Horse". We see at close range the careful attention to detail the Russians have invested in the recreation of the look and the feel of Native America ritual and life. When asked why they are doing this they tell us it is for their children. They are seeking the "right way to live", in order to impart authentic Native American values to their offspring and to escape the cycle of consumerism and the negative aspects that they see in their own culture.  «