ABSTRACT: One knowledgeable commentator was early 18th-century Jesuit missionary Joseph- François Lafitau, who lived for five years among the Haudenosaunee at the Kahnawahke mission near what is now Montreal. While the group at that time had more than a century of interchanges with Europeans, it still possessed many of its pre-contact attributes. Lafitau’s writing, a foundational text for scholars of Haudenosaunee gender, attests to female hegemony in many specific areas, in startling contrast to the position of women in most societies. In Moeurs des sauvages Amériquains, he wrote in 1724: Some of these themes are echoed in the contemporary work of scholars such as Haudenosaunee scholar Barbara Alice Mann and Université de Montréal anthropologist Roland Viau. Mann, author of Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas, has documented the way some observers, and scholars who came after them, ignored clear evidence of unusual female agency-partly because their patriarchal assumptions meant they simply could not believe what they saw. Viau likewise affirms evidence of the highly unusual position of Haudenosaunee women. He points out the frequency of marriages in which brides were older than grooms, as well as the preference for female infants. In 1713, a young Chipew/an woman named Thanadelthur was taken captive during a raid by Cree In what Is now northern Manitoba. She escaped and, after a difficult journey arrived at York Factor)’ Thanadelthur spoke three languages and became an invaluable aid to Hudson’s Bay Company governor James Knight. Night sought to increase trade with the Chipewyans, but longstanding animosity with the Cree,York Factory’s main fur suppliers, made it all but impossible.Thanadelthur brokered a May 171 6 peace accord, a three-way negotiation between 150 people that included Chipewyan representatives, several Cree bands and Hudson’s Bay Company representatives. Illustration:Amanda Dow from the book Blackships/ Thanadeithur by Rick Book published by Heartland Associates.
Herizons, Spring 2015, Vol.28(4), pp.6-7,3