Inspired by Native women’s rights

By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

We’ve heard a lot about men taking rights away from women. We’ve also heard about the racial slur for Washington’s football team. As all of this is happening, I met Ray Halbritter of the Oneida Nation in town to talk about changing the mascot of the football team. I heard a reporter ask why the team’s name was offensive. He mentioned the polls as though polls should determine what is racist. I wonder why people with white privilege question what’s offensive to those who’ve suffered discrimination. I ask that same question about men who deny women the same rights they have.

While studying the Oneida Nation, I ran across stories about rights Native women had before we did and that inspired the U.S. women’s rights movement.

I found many examples of Native women exercising rights that white women could hardly imagine. Lucretia Mott witnessed women sharing in discussion and decision-making as men reorganized their governmental structure. Her feminist vision increased by that experience and she traveled from the Seneca nation to Seneca Falls. There she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held the first women’s rights convention. It’s said that when the Seneca adopted a constitutional government, they retained the tradition of full involvement of women. No treaty could be valid without the consent of ¾ of the “mothers of the nation”.

One man on the Seneca reservation told a reporter to tell his readers they have a sincere respect for women – their own women as well as those of the whites. He told of seeing young white women going unprotected on reservations in search of botanical specimens best found there and Indian men helping them. He wondered where else in the land could a girl be safe from insult from rude men she didn’t know. In 1909, one man asked non-Native readers if the modern American woman petitioning and pleading for her political rights, ever stopped to consider that red women who lived in New York 500 years earlier had far more rights and enjoyed a much wider liberty than the 20th-century woman of civilization.

Native women had property rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described seeing a man approach her Indian playmate’s mother. The two conversed and the man handed her money. They went to the barn and selected a horse. The man rode off on the horse. Stanton asked what had happened, and the woman said, “Well, I sold the man one of my horses. Stanton asked, “What will your husband say when he gets home?” The woman said, “Well, it was my horse, and I can do with it as I please.” What a revelation that was for a white woman who had not imagined it was possible any woman could hold property and dispose of it without the approval of a man! U.S. laws at the time gave married women no rights to property, to their earnings or to any inheritance. They didn’t even have rights to their children; a husband could “will away” guardianship to whomever he chose.

As early as 1888, a white woman addressed the International Council of Women and spoke of the greater rights of American Indian women, pointing out that those women realized they would lose many of their rights if they became U.S. citizens! She said one Indian woman told her:

“As an Indian woman, I was free. I owned my home, my person, the work of my own hands, and my children should never forget me. I was better as an Indian woman than under white law.” When I look at what some legislative bodies are trying to do to the rights of women and people of color today, I sometimes think that there really is such a thing as the good old days!

This article originally published in the October 21, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.