CHAPTER 1
Sky Woman, Dawnland, Turtle Island

Gender is foundational to how people, communities, and nations understand themselves and others. In studying the past, our own ideas about gender roles and gender differences shape what questions we ask and what answers we see. This is true for all historical periods, but it is especially true for the distant past and groups who did not leave direct oral or written records about themselves. In ancient North America, what we know about the past is that Indigenous women were important political, social, and economic actors in their nations and that their labor literally reshaped the landscapes of their nations. What we can know about this period comes from a variety of sources including oral histories, archeology, and DNA research, but the way these sources have been understood has been shaped by changing the understanding of gender and women's work.

In many Indigenous North American cultures, including the Haida, Haudenosaunee, and Diné, women are important actors in stories of creation and continue to be important political actors in the lives of their communities. These creation stories, and their continued importance in the twenty-first century, help us understand the diverse history of the peopling of the Americas and women's roles in shaping their nations. Differences in women's labor and trade in the Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, and Mississippian areas of what is now the United States illustrate the vast diversity of Indigenous women's experience in areas of ancient North America. These examples have been chosen to illustrate the way that gender roles changed in response to and parallel with economic changes, environmental conditions, territorial politics, and national histories. What the history of many Indigenous nations share is an emphasis on gender balance, sovereignty as part of an original and gendered connection to land, and cultural constructions of women as central to the economic, cultural, and spiritual lives of their nations. Gender, gender roles, and the way they are defined are important organizing features of all societies, and the way gender is defined and changes depend on complex and culturally specific histories. In the ancient Americas as in the rest of the world, gender and gender roles changed for a wide variety of reasons well before contact with Europeans and set the stage for contact in important ways.

Studying the Past

The study of women in the past has been central to the historical profession for more than 70 years, and gender has always been part of how humans understand the world around us. The study of women and the study of gender are related but different. Who is or is not considered a woman has changed over time. In this book, we include trans women in our consideration of women, and we also examine the experiences of people who were assumed female at birth who may not have considered themselves women in order to analyze who was and was not considered part of the category of "woman" at different points in time, and why. The inclusion or exclusion of certain groups from the category of woman is part of the way gender has been used to enforce hierarchies of power.

Gender is the changing, unstable, and culturally specific system of meanings that communities attach to human bodies. Sex is a spectrum of physical traits such as chromosomes, genitals, and the presence or absence of breasts and facial hair, and these physical traits can change or have ambiguous expression. Humans have a wide range of natural variations in the expression of physical sexual characteristics that do not relate to their gender identity. Gender is the categorization of bodies based on a set of associated ideas that change over time and may differ between communities - the gender category of woman defined as someone who is sexually and financially independent in twenty-first century America is different than how the gender category of woman was defined as sexually chaste and financially dependent in early nineteenth-century America, for example. To say that something is gendered means that an idea is arbitrarily associated with a particular gender, like the color pink is commonly gendered feminine. Gender is therefore a social construct, meaning that a gender category is specific to the time, place, and community where it is used, and changes over time even within the same community.

The category of woman is a gender category, but it is not the only gender category. In many societies, gender is considered binary, or mutually exclusive between two separate categories such as men and women in which an individual person cannot occupy one category and have traits from the other. A gendered binary is the association of a set of traits that are understood as mutually exclusive such as black/white, active/passive, scientific/natural, and civilized/savage with gender categories. Not all cultures have two genders, and not all cultures understand gender categories as binary and mutually exclusive. Different understandings of gender are often a major part of the conflict between cultural groups because people often view their own gender system as natural.

As the historian Joan Wallach Scott argued in an article foundational to the scholarly study of gender, "gender is a primary way of signifying power" for many cultures. Gender has often been used by human societies in both literal and metaphorical ways to structure hierarchies of power. Defining another group's gender roles and categories as wrong or unnatural has often been used as a tool of colonization and domination because it dehumanizes the group defined as unnatural. Gender is therefore foundational to defining other systems of hierarchy like race.

Scholars debate when exactly the system of race we have become familiar with began. Like gender, race is a social construct and the arbitrary association of ideas with physical traits. A person's physical traits like hair color and texture, eye color and shape, skin color, and facial features are their phenotype, while race is the association of culturally specific ideas like perceived intelligence and personality with those physical traits. Although race is a social construct with no biological reality, it has often been perceived as inherited from parent to child as an inherent difference, and racial categories have been perceived as mutually exclusive. As a social construct, systems of race and racial categories have varied over time and space and had to be created and defined by people. Gender has been central to the way race and racial categories are defined. As the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw has argued, the way race, gender, class, sexuality, and other hierarchies are experienced together are best understood as intersectional. Overlapping hierarchies create systems in which not all women have the same experience of gender or womanhood because of their race, class, sexuality, gender identity, physical embodiment, or religion. Understanding these intersectional experiences and how they have changed over time is a central focus of this book.

Creation

The histories of many Indigenous nations begin with women and their relationships to land. Gender is central to the way all cultures understand the world and human relationships, but in many Indigenous cultures women are central actors in both creation stories and everyday life. Indigenous creation stories are frameworks for understanding the world, not myths or legends. One of the main functions of Indigenous creation stories is understanding women's economic, cultural, and spiritual value within their societies. Unlike the Christian European cultures that eventually dominated North American societies, in many Indigenous cultures, women's economic, cultural, and spiritual work was valued as much or more than men's, which would become a major point of conflict between Europeans and Indigenous groups after contact. Just like Indigenous nations and cultures, Indigenous creation stories vary widely. The three creation stories shared here were selected to give examples of the way Indigenous nations relate to land in different geographic areas and the way women's roles in creation stories shaped women's spiritual and social roles in their communities.

In the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story of creation as told by elders Jacob Thomas Jadajigerenhtah and Jacob Swamp Tekaronieneken to Brian Rice in 1992, Sky Woman was cast out of the world above this one by her husband, who believed she had been unfaithful to him because she was pregnant. When she fell through the sky, she brought with her seeds of corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and strawberries, the most important crops for Haudenosaunee people. Sky Woman was rescued by birds, who created a place for her by placing soil from the bottom of the world on the back of a turtle where she later gave birth to a daughter. As soil built up on the back of this turtle, it became Turtle Island and the continent of North America. When Sky Woman's daughter later became pregnant, she gave birth to two boys, Sapling and Flint, who balanced the good and evil in the world, but the birth of Flint killed their mother. After Sky Woman buried her daughter, her grave grew the corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and strawberries that Sky Woman had brought into the world, and the good twin Sapling created onkwe:honwe, or Indigenous people, from the red clay covering his mother's body. Based in this creation narrative, Haudenosaunee women are responsible for the land and its crops and appoint male...