Sunshine Skyways

The two most two popular images of American Indian women are Pocahontas, the beautiful Indian woman who saved the life of and fell in love with Captain John Smith, and the quiet squaw enslaved to her husband.[1] Other less popular images are the exotic oversexed seductress and the viscous torturer of prisoners (Bataille and Sands, Green, Harjo and Bird). None of these images accurately depicts the lives of American Indian women. The fullness and complexity of American Indian women’s experiences have been reduced to simplistic images that are consistent with a patriarchal perspective of what women should be as in the case of Pocahontas or what women become in an uncivilized society.

E. Adamson Hoebel’s The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains is an example of American Indian women being denied the fullness and complexity of their experiences. In Hoebel’s account, Cheyenne women did not go into battle, were not medicine women, and were never tribal leaders. However, Grinnell suggests otherwise in his The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. There are accounts of women fighting, charging the enemy and counting coup (Grinnell, p. 157, Volume I).[2] Furthermore, Grinnell suggests the possibility that Cheyenne women may have played more prominent roles in the political decision-making and spiritual activities of the tribe but if so, their roles would have changed over time. Grinnell cites the “traditions of women chiefs and of women who have possessed remarkable mysterious powers or have shown great wisdom in council” to support the theory that Cheyenne women could have been more prominent in political and spiritual affairs of the tribe (p. 156, Vol. I).

Buffalo Calf Trail Woman[3] and Yellow Haired Woman[4] were two Cheyenne women warriors who should not be overlooked. Buffalo Calf Trail Woman “had killed in battle and had ridden against the soldiers of both Generals Crook and Custer (Sandoz, p. 17). She saved her brother at the Battle of the Rosebud. According to an account found in Stands in Timber and Liberty (pp. 188, 189),[5]

Some of the bravest Cheyenne warriors — White Shield, Comes in Sight, White Bird, and the Sioux Red Cloud and Low Dog — were riding back and forth letting the soldiers shoot at them. Louis Dog was watching and he said he couldn’t see how the soldiers missed them… Comes in Sight’s horse was shot when he was halfway across the gap. He landed on his feet running zigzag. His sister had ridden with the warriors that day. She was watching him and saw the soldier scouts start down to kill him. She came on the run as soon as his horse somersaulted over, and Comes in Sight jumped on behind her and they got away. The Cheyennes named the battle for that. They always call it ‘Where the Girl Saved Her Brother’.”

As told by John Sipes, Jr., the great, great grandson of Buffalo Calf Trail Woman, in an interview for Rocky Mountain PBS, she was born in 1844 in Yellowstone country, Wyoming.[6] Buffalo Calf Trail Woman was a warrior and owned a warhorse. She was 5 feet, 4 inches tall, 140 pounds, and was a great rider known for her “stamina to ride and ride and keep fighting.”[7] She was enough of a military threat to the United States that she became a prisoner of war.[8]

Yellow Haired Woman was an outstanding warrior as well. She made a direct stand in an important battle between her people and the Shoshonis in 1869 (Neithammer). According to Neithammer, Yellow Haired Woman was in the midst of the battle when she rode up to a Cheyenne and Shoshoni that were engaged in a struggle. Yellow Haired Woman “dismounted, drew her butcher knife, and stabbed the Shoshoni twice” (Neithammer, p. 168). Yellow Haired Woman later killed a Shoshoni prisoner by stabbing him through the armpit, and then scalped him.

Women who could shoot a rifle or bow, such as Buffalo Calf Trail Woman and Yellow Haired Woman, fought the enemy. According to Sandoz (p. 62), “Buffalo Calf Road and Yellow Woman gave their small ones to the others with babies... Then the two went gravely to the rifle pits, where Bull Hump’s Leaf and several other women who could shoot the guns or bows were already waiting.”

Some Cheyenne women who followed male warriors into battle did not fight but sang instead (Sandoz). Nonetheless, these women were in the midst of the fighting. One such Cheyenne woman was Pretty Walker who was said to be able to “go calmly into the path of bullets as her father” who was Chief Little Wolf (Sandoz, p. 18).

It follows that if Hoebel ignores women warriors, he would not mention stories of a women warrior society. Grinnell offers partial support for the existence of a women warrior society; however, he suggests that women who have been in battle may have constituted a class instead of a society.

Support for a women warrior society appears in the interview with Sipes,
book by Niethammer, and a recent obituary. According to Sipes,

[T]he warrior women had their own guild, had their own songs, their own medicines, war shields. [Buffalo Calf Trail Woman] did carry a war shield which was part of her
preparation for war. The Old Ones say that she had her own medicine that was given to her by a medicine, well it would
not have been a medicine man, it would have been a medicine woman that worked in that guild of the warrior women which
is as I explained, they had other Cheyenne warrior ladies that did fight also.

According to Niethammer, the women warrior society was a small society of Cheyenne women, most of whom had been to war with their husbands. The society was said to hold secret meetings, which no one else could attend. Yellow Haired Woman became eligible for the women warrior’s society when she killed and scalped the Shoshoni prisoner (Niethammer). The third piece of evidence comes from an obituary for Florence Whiteman who was believed to be the last member of the Northern Cheyenne women warrior society, known as the Elk Scrapers (Newsday, April 25, 2001).

Only a chosen few were admitted into the women warrior society. According to Sipes, one could request membership, but one had to qualify to be accepted. Once accepted, the society would start to train her. “It was big training” (Sipes). At the same time, these women were having babies and maintaining their lodges.

Acknowledgement of women warriors and a women warrior society puts into question Hoebel’s depiction of Cheyenne women. All of the warrior societies were by and for men according to Hoebel. Any female participation was restricted to “four virgin daughters of tribal chiefs as maids of honor to participate in their ceremonies and to sit in the midst of the circle of war chiefs when they meet in common council. Select girls of ‘the very best families’ who exemplify the Cheyenne ideal of chastity and perfect conduct are thus held up for others to emulate” (Hoebel, p. 41). What he produces is an image of women as saints or Miss America/Miss Cheyenne contestants. “Womanhood, though it is denied direct access to power and authority, receives high deference and reward” (Hoebel, p. 41).

Hoebel is not the only historian/anthropologist who has marginalized American Indian women in the military, spiritual-medical and political life of a tribe. The United States’ Bureau of Indian Affairs (Bureau) would not recognize women chiefs and the Bureau actively disenfranchised tribal women through dissolution of traditional social structures (Green). From the sixteenth to the twentieth century little was written about Native American women who resisted colonialism and were leaders of their tribes (Bataille and Sands).

It is ironic that Hoebel states (p. 87), “Human perception and human evaluation are colored and shaped by the underlying cultural postulates which are the foundation of knowledge and belief,” yet he does not admit that his knowledge of the Cheyennes is colored and shaped by a European-American cultural lens. Instead, he argues the Cheyennes’ experiences are shaped by their culture. Hoebel implicitly suggests that he is a scientific observer, and what he knows about the Cheyennes is the Truth, which is not influenced by any culture.[9]

Hoebel’s omission of Cheyenne women warriors and medicine women is consistent with patriarchal views that a woman’s realm is in the home, where she prepares food, makes clothes, bears children, prepares the tipi, and quietly supports her husband. He also understates the significance of the Cheyennes’ matrilineal society. Hoebel is not unique in this regard. Many historians/anthropologists have distorted matrilineal, matriarchal, and matrifocal societies. According to Bataille and Sands (p. xi),

Because matrilineal and matriarchal societies were both mysterious and threatening to the Euro-American patriarchal system, most early documentation of Indian women’s experience is misinformed and ethnocentric, more attuned to the colonists’ norms for female behavior than to the actuality of indigenous cultures or any interpretation of them Indian women might have articulated.

Images of American Indian women as princesses and saints, slaves to tribal men, exotic seductresses and viscous torturers appear to be more acceptable than images of American Indian women as tribal chiefs, medicine women and warriors based on the popularity of the former images. In her bibliography about Native American Women, Green states that the two hundred years of occasional and derogatory writing about Native American women before 1900 produced few details about Native American women; however, the references to Pocahontas produced Pocahontas novels, plays, biographies and critical literature for the twentieth century. Written accounts and oral histories by American Indian women and men were ignored in favor of “the mythologizing found in diaries, missionary accounts, travel tales and popular folklore (songs, stories, etc.) and the mythology grew without reference to those accounts that eschewed mythology” (Green, pp. 2,3).

There were Cheyenne women warriors. Women like Buffalo Calf Trail Woman, Yellow Haired Woman and others that could shoot a gun or bow were mothers, wives and warriors. That is not a myth. Some Cheyenne women fought courageously in battle for their nation against other American Indian tribes and United States military forces acting for a U.S. government bent on taking their land and eliminating the Cheyennes’ way of life. The myth is that American Indian women were and are Pocahontas and saints, slaves, seductresses and torturers.

ENDNOTES:

1. Examples of early nineteenth century images are Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 description of American Indian women as living in complete servitude, Francesco Arese's 1837 description of Sioux and Menominee women as slaves of their husbands, and Frederick Marryat's depiction of Indian women as hard-working women who never complain and are "amply recompensed by a smile from their lord and master in the evening" (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/detoc/fem/indian.htm). The Walt Disney cartoon film Pocahontas shows an American Indian woman with a Barbie-doll-like figure, who is more brown-skinned than red, and whose love is so great that she falls in love with the enemy. She is truly the noble savage wanting and needing to be civilized by a patriarchal society charmed by her beauty and innocence.
2. In fairness to Hoebel, one could argue that he does suggest women were warriors when he states, "Women, too, gather to count coup on the enemy" (p. 21). However, he does not elaborate and the statement becomes hidden.
3. Also called Buffalo Calf Road Women, Buffalo Calf Woman or Mochis.
4. Also called Yellow Woman or Ehyophsta.
5. This story is also found in Grinnell, p. 157, Volume I.
6. Mr. Sipes is a Cheyenne Chief and Cheyenne historian.
7. Buffalo Calf Trail Woman survived the Sand Creek Massacre, but lost her entire family. During the slaughter, she picked up her father's rifle and was able to escape. She kept the rifle and in time used it against the U.S. Army. No doubt the memories of the horrors perpetrated by the Colorado militia at Sand Creek contributed to her fighting spirit.
8. Another story about Buffalo Calf Trail Woman fighting soldiers appears in Viola.
9. Unlike the rationalists who believe that theory or knowledge determines experience, Hoebel is an empiricist. He implicitly suggests that his knowledge comes from objective observations. However, he fails to see that knowledge shapes experience and experience shapes knowledge, and that all knowledge is subjective.

Bibliography

1. Bataille, Gretchen M. and Kathleen M. Sands. American Indian Women: A Guide to
   Research, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, 1991.
   
2. Green, Rayna. Native American Women: A Contextual Bibliography, Indiana University
   Press, Bloomington, 1983.
   
3. Grinnell, George Bird. The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life,
   University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1972.
   
4. Harjo, Joy and Gloria Bird. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native
   American’s Writings of North America, W. W. Norton & Company, New York,
   1997.
   
5. [ ] . Obituary for Florence Whiteman, Newsday, April 25, 2001.
   
6. Sandoz, Mari. Cheyenne Autumn, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1966.
   
7. Sipes, John Jr. “Interview with John Sipes, Jr” for Rocky Mountain PBS Documentary
   Tears in the Sand. http://www.karma.org/tears/interv2.html
   
8. Stands in Timber, John and Margot Liberty. Cheyenne Memories, 2nd ed., Yale
   University Press, New Haven, 1998.
   
9. Viola, Herman J. It is a Good Day to Die: Indian Eyewitnesses Tell the Story of the
   Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1998.