Cherokee women’s sexual freedom and their considerable political, economic, and domestic power shocked most European observers from the time of first contact in 1540. Cherokees accepted sexuality as natural, and their dances were sometimes overtly sexual in nature. For example, in the friendship dance, men and women enacted the stages of courtship and became openly intimate. During the course of the dance, the male dancers began to make sexual gestures like touching their female partners’ breasts and finally even the clothing over their genitals.1 The Cherokees did not see nudity as a cause for shame and did not have laws against fornication or adultery. Their language lacked any words for heaven or hell, damnation or salvation, or grace, repentance, or forgiveness.2
Since Cherokee women had more freedom and power than their counterparts in Europe, Europeans viewed this reversal of patriarchal values as deviant, uncivilized, sinful, and deeply threatening. Survival depended on the balance of male and female contributions. Cherokee men and women had gender-specific tasks and complementary responsibilities in the productive and reproductive spheres: men hunted and women cultivated the earth and gathered food. The division of labor based on one’s sex did not imply hierarchy, but equality. Social identity and rules of conduct were tied to clan; the tribe was matrilineal. The recognized clans today are Deer, Wolf, Bird, Long Hair, Wild Potato, Blue, and Paint.3
Although the land was held communally, Cherokee women owned their dwellings and domestic hearths, and husbands lived in the women’s houses.4 Women were influential in political affairs. The females of each clan selected an elder woman to serve on the women’s council, a highly influential body. The Beloved Woman, who also represented her clan, presided over the council.5 Frequently, Beloved Women who had been courageous in battle decided the fate of prisoners.
Travelers, traders, and missionaries recorded their observations about Cherokee women’s appearance, sexual practices, marriage customs, menstrual taboos, and labor. Generally, their accounts portrayed the women’s sexual freedom as licentious and dangerous and their crucial economic role as evidence of their oppression by Cherokee men. When Europeans first encountered the Cherokees, they wrote about the radical differences in their cultures.
The Cherokees’ encounter with the gold-seeking Hernando de Soto and his men marked their first contact with Europeans and Africans. De Soto’s Spanish army arrived on May 30, 1540, at Guasili (or Guaxule), a village in western North Carolina. His expedition also went through Georgia and Tennessee villages that were later identified as Cherokee. De Soto believed the villages were under a Coosa chiefdom, while a Chalaque nation was described around the region where North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia meet near the Keowee River.6 The Spaniards encountered the queen of Cofitachiqui (a Muskogean woman of great wealth), whom they captured and made a prisoner. She managed to escape with some of the slaves in de Soto’s entourage. Years later, in 1567, another Spanish expedition, led by Juan Pardo, encountered the Cherokees. As a result of the two entradas, the Cherokees and other tribes contracted diseases that decimated their populations.7
In the following eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents, James Adair, Henry Timberlake, John Haywood, William Bartram, Louis Philippe, and Daniel Butrick reveal their impressions of the Cherokee people and Cherokee women. Their accounts tend to be brief, as they had limited access to the women’s world. Like other travelers and traders, Louis Philippe saw Cherokee women as libertine and as oppressed by the men. Adair, Timberlake, Haywood, and Butrick sought to prove that the Cherokees were descended from the ancient Hebrews. In contrast to the others, Bartram perceived Cherokee women as happy and equal to their husbands. The following selections reveal glimpses of the daily lives of Cherokee women and a great deal about the European values of the observers.
ENDNOTES
1 Frank G. Speck and Leonard Broom in collaboration with Will West Long, Cherokee Dance and Drama (1951; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 65–68.
2 William G. McLoughlin, Champion of the Cherokees: Evan and John B. Jones (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 35; Raymond D. Fogelson, “On the ‘Petticoat Government’ of the Eighteenth-Century Cherokee,” in Personality and Cultural Construction of Society, edited by David K. Jordan and Marc J. Swartz (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 170.
3 John Howard Payne Papers, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, vol. 4: 92, 4: 65, 4: 270, part 2.
4 John Ridge, Washington City, Feb. 27, 1826, John Howard Payne Papers, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, vol. 8: 109.
5 John P. Brown, Old Frontiers: The Story of the Cherokee Indians from Earliest Times to the Date of Their Removal to the West, 1838 (Kingsport, Tenn.: Southern Publishers, 1938), 18.
6 Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., and Edward C. Moore, editors, The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North America in 1539–1543, vol. 2 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 308–9.
7 Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 23–29.