Shirts Powdered Red

At the time of the American Revolution, over 250,000 Native Americans lived east of the Mississippi River and identified themselves as part of over 80 different nations. Many of those nations had centuries of experience negotiating with and navigating the shifting alliances of the French, Spanish, Dutch, and British governments. When these European powers arrived to build alliances and trade with the Haudenosaunee of what is today upstate New York, they were surprised to discover the significant power and influence held by the women within each one of these six nations.

In Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange Across Three Centuries, historian Maeve Kane shows how the women of the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations, exercised their political power and agency within their communities — and also how their voices and political involvement have often been as overlooked in historical narratives as they were unexpected to colonizers. Kane explores how globally traded goods and clothing serve as historical evidence of this authority, complementing limited documentary records. 

After the Treaty of Paris of 1783 ended the Revolutionary War, United States diplomats were anxious to establish their sovereignty over the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, fearing that some nations would continue to maintain British alliances and encourage local rebellion. However, unlike the British, who recognized and navigated the existing gender equality within Native American tribes, the Americans chose to ignore the role of Haudenosaunee women in government. Instead, they opted to engage only with the male leaders of these nations, sometimes with unpredictable results. Despite these efforts to silence them, female native leaders continued to assert their influence and participate actively in diplomatic negotiations.

Excerpt

Women's influence in Haudenosaunee politics and diplomacy was inescapable. Onahgí:weh distributed food to war parties and diplomatic envoys from lineage stores, effectively vetoing or supporting military and diplomatic ventures via their control of food stores and agricultural production. More directly, onahgí:weh named and deposed the hodiyanéshu' who represented their lineages and who met with British and American diplomats in council, and a designated male "Speaker for the women" addressed gatherings of men on behalf of the onahgi: weh. The outward-facing men's councils met separately from meetings of women. These men's councils are much more visible in the historical record because male outsiders were occasionally allowed to attend, and the men's councils addressed issues of warfare and diplomacy at treaty councils. Outside observers were not allowed to attend councils where onahgí:weh named and directed their male speaker for the women. In Haudenosaunee gendered governance of the period, the consensus was paramount, and the representation of women's voices maintained the balance that was essential to Haudenosaunee governance philosophy.  

…In the final years of the war and the years that followed, American negotiators attempted to explicitly erase Haudenosaunee women from diplomatic negotiations and attempted to fit Indigenous diplomacy into the gendered division of political civility. Prerevolutionary British diplomacy had never been overtly welcoming of Indigenous women’s presence, but neither had British diplomats been overtly hostile to women’s presence. In large part, this stemmed from British acknowledgment that in order to keep the Haudenosaunee as allies, the British had to work within the structures of Haudenosaunee diplomacy. American diplomats had no such compunctions about compromising with what they saw as a defeated enemy.  

…To Haudenosaunee diplomats, American hostility to women’s presence was evidence of either profound ignorance or rudeness, acting as though women were no longer even living by not acknowledging their role in diplomatic negotiations. In negotiations with British diplomats who did not seek to exclude women, Haudenosaunee speakers had rarely felt the need to explicitly tutor their Anglo counterparts in the gendered etiquette of cross-cultural diplomacy. By 1790, Americans had nearly twenty years’ collective experience in Haudenosaunee diplomacy, meaning that their disregard for common diplomatic courtesies could only come from willful disregard, not ignorance. American refusal to acknowledge women’s diplomatic and political roles required explicit correction and had the contradictory effect of making Haudenosaunee women’s presence in diplomatic spaces more visible as male speakers protested their exclusion.

Maeve Kane, Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries (Cornell University Press, 2023), 194-195, 197-198