In 1644, the Rev. John Megalopensis, minister at a Dutch Church in New Netherlands, complained that Native American women were “obliged to prepare the Land, to mow, to plant, and do every Thing; the Men do nothing except hunting, fishing, and going to War against their Enemies. . .” Many of his fellow Europeans described American Indian women as “slaves” to the men, because of the perceived differences in their labor, compared to European women. Indian women performed what Europeans considered to be men’s work. But, from the Native American perspective, women’s roles reflected their own cultural emphases on reciprocity, balance, and autonomy. Most scholars agree that Native American women at the time of contact with Europeans had more authority and autonomy than did European women.

It is hard to make any generalizations about indigenous societies, because North America’s First Peoples consisted of hundreds of separate cultures, each with their own belief systems, social structures, and cultural and political practices. Evidence is particularly scarce about women’s everyday lives and responsibilities. However, most cultures shared certain characteristics that promoted gender equality.

Kinship, extended family, and clan bound people together within a system of mutual obligation and respect. Lineage was central to determining status and responsibilities, consent held communities together, and concepts of reciprocity extended to gender roles and divisions of authority.

Men were generally responsible for hunting, warfare, and interacting with outsiders, therefore they had more visible, public roles. Women, on the other hand, managed the internal operations of the community. They usually owned the family’s housing and household goods, engaged in agricultural food production and gathering of foodstuffs, and reared the children.

Because women’s activities were central to the community’s welfare, they also held important political, social, and economic power. In many North American societies, clan membership and material goods descended through women. For example, the Five (later Six) Nations of the Iroquois Confederation all practiced matrilineal descent. Clan matrons selected men to serve as their chiefs, and they deposed chiefs with whom they were dissatisfied. Women’s life-giving roles also played a part in their political and social authority. In Native American creation stories, it was often the woman who created life, through giving birth to children, or through the use of their own bodies to create the earth, from which plants and animals emerged.

Some scholars argue that, after contact, women’s authority steadily declined because of cultural assimilation. Euro-American men insisted on dealing with Indian men in trade negotiations, and ministers demanded that Indians follow the Christian modes of partriarchy and gendered division of labor that made men farmers and women housekeepers.

However, other scholars, such as SUNY Fredonia anthropologist Joy Bilharz and University of North Carolina historian Theda Perdue, argue that many indigenous women maintained authority within their communities. Matrilineal inheritance of clan identity remained important parts of many cultures long after contact, and women continued to use their maternal authority to influence political decisions within and outside of their own nations.

For example, as the United States increased pressure against the Cherokee nation to relinquish their eastern lands and move west, groups of Cherokee women petitioned their Council to stand their ground. In these communications, they sternly reminded their “[b]eloved children” that they had raised the Council members on that land which “God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions.” They admonished their children not to “part with any more lands.”

Another Cherokee woman wrote to Benjamin Franklin in 1787, advocating peace between the new United States and the Cherokee nation. She advised Franklin that political leaders “. . . ought to mind what a woman says, and look upon her as a mother – and I have Taken the prevelage to Speak to you as my own Children . . . and I am in hopes that you have a beloved woman amongst you who will help to put her children right if they do wrong, as I shall do the same. . . . ” American Indian women assumed that their unique positions in their societies gave them the right to play the mother card when necessary.

In the seventeenth century, Dutchman Adrien Van der Donck described a woman’s preparation for childbirth among the Mohawk and Mahican Indians in what is now known as New York. He stated that pregnant women would “depart alone to a secluded place near a brook, or stream of water . . . and prepare a shelter for themselves with mats and coverings, where, provided with provisions necessary for them, they await their delivery without the company or aid of any person. . . . They rarely are sick from child-birth [and] suffer no inconveniences from the same.” Many similar descriptions of solitary, painless births exist among European observers of the Native Americans, but because most of these observers were men, and men rarely attended the birth of children, these descriptions are probably inaccurate. Although each indigenous culture had its own unique beliefs and rituals about childbirth, scholars believe that many First Peoples shared certain practices involving the participation of close family members and select others within the community.

During their pregnancies, women restricted their activities and took special care with their diet and behavior to protect the baby. The Cherokees, for example, believed that certain foods affected the fetus. Pregnant women avoided foods that they believed would harm the baby or cause unwanted physical characteristics. For example, they believed that eating raccoon or pheasant would make the baby sickly, or could cause death; consuming speckled trout could cause birthmarks; and eating black walnuts could give the baby a big nose. They thought that wearing neckerchiefs while pregnant caused umbilical strangulation, and lingering in doorways slowed delivery. Expectant mothers and fathers participated in rituals to guarantee a safe delivery, such as daily washing of hands and feet and employing medicine men to perform rites that would make deliveries easier.

As the birth grew closer, women and their families observed other rituals to ensure an easy and healthy birth. Nineteenth-century anthropologist James Mooney recorded one Cherokee ritual intended to frighten the child out of the mother’s womb. A female relative of the mother would say: “Listen! You little man, get up now at once. There comes an old woman. The horrible [old thing] is coming, only a little way off. Listen! Quick! Get your bed and let us run away. Yu!” The female relative then repeated the formula, substituting “little woman” and “your grandfather,” in case the baby was a girl. Van der Donck described a Mahican concoction made of root bark that the mother drank shortly before labor began. Many indigenous peoples used similar remedies. Cherokee women drank an infusion of wild cherry bark to speed delivery.

Despite numerous descriptions of solitary births, other accounts describe births attended by a midwife and other close family members. Men were rarely allowed in the birth room, and they were never allowed to see the birth. A woman in labor stood, knelt, or sat, but she never gave birth lying down. Usually no one bothered to catch the baby, who fell onto leaves placed beneath the mother. Van der Donck and Mooney described post-delivery rituals in which the mothers ceremonially plunged the infant into the river, an act they repeated daily for two years. British Lieutenant Henry Timberlake, an envoy to the Cherokee in the mid-eighteenth century, stated that this ritual made “the children acquire such strength, that no ricketty or deformed are found among them.”

European descriptions of Native American women’s quick recovery from childbirth may have been exaggerated. But generally, Indian women’s excellent physical conditioning certainly aided in their recovery from childbirth. Barring any serious complications – which, of course, did happen occasionally – Native American women returned to their regular duties in a very short period of time.