The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

the overthrow of the gynocracy. Material about the status of
women in North American groups such as the Montagnais-
Naskapi, Keres, Navajo, Crow, Hopi, Pomo, Turok, Kiowa, and
Natchez and in South American groups such as the Bari and
Mapuche, to name just a few, is lacking. Any original
documentation that exists is buried under the flood of readily
available, published material written from the colonizer’s
patriarchal perspective, almost all of which is based on the
white man’s belief in universal male dominance. Male
dominance may have characterized a number of tribes, but it was
by no means as universal (or even as preponderant) as
colonialist propaganda has led us to believe.
The Seneca prophet Handsome Lake did not appreciate
“petticoat government” any more than did John Adair. When his
code became the standard for Iroquoian practice in the early
nineteenth century, power shifted from the hands of the
“meddling old women,” as he characterized them, to men. Under
the old laws, the Iroquois were a mother-centered, mother-right
people whose political organization was based on the central
authority of the Matrons, the Mothers of the Longhouses (clans).
Handsome Lake advocated that young women cleave to their
husbands rather than to their mothers and abandon the clanmother–controlled
longhouse in favor of a patriarchal, nuclear
family arrangement. Until Handsome Lake’s time, the sachems
were chosen from certain families by the Matrons of their clans
and were subject to impeachment by the Matrons should they
prove inadequate or derelict in carrying out their duties as
envisioned by the Matrons and set forth in the Law of the Great
Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy. By provision in the Law, the
women were to be considered the progenitors of the nation,
owning the land and the soil. 5
At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Americans declared
the Iroquois living on the American side of the United States–