Native American Manhood

Contact and Colonization in Early America

Some of the most telling episodes in the first century of Indians' interactions with European newcomers center on clashing understandings of masculinity. Almost all Indian societies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries trained boys by example, ritual, and shame that becoming a man meant developing skills as a successful hunter and potent warrior. In many cases, this meant participating in a vision quest, a rite of passage undertaken at puberty during which adolescent [Page 335]boys would seek inspiration and power through altered states of consciousness. After this or a similar rite of passage, a young man would participate in his first hunting or raiding expedition. Thereafter, social custom demanded that he avoid all domestic and agricultural duties, which were deemed emasculating and demeaning for men. Among the many Indian societies that relied heavily on agriculture for subsistence, such as the Iroquois or Pueblo, this customary prohibition checked men's power by excluding a village's most important material resources from their control. In these cases, however, men governed many of the spiritual resources believed to be necessary for healing, successful harvests and hunts, and community safety.

Many Europeans brought to North America concepts of manhood that accorded poorly with Indian gender roles. The French explorer Jacques Cartier, for example, wrote in 1535 that the Iroquoian men of the St. Lawrence River Valley were lazy and exploitative because “the women…work beyond comparison more than the men, both at fishing, which is much followed, as well as at tilling the ground and other tasks” (Biggar, 70). To the English of Virginia in the early seventeenth century, Indian men were “idle” not because they were inactive, but because they neglected to take responsibility for agriculture, as European men were trained to do. Thus, early English colonists justified their seizure of Indian lands by pointing to the failure of Indian men to subdue the earth with the plow.

Indians also scorned European men. To begin with, European men did not physically measure up to the standards of Indian masculinity. Not only were European men generally shorter and in poorer physical condition than Indian men, but Indians also detested the facial hair worn by Europeans to signify their transition to adult manhood. In 1632, for example, a Jesuit missionary wrote that the natives believed that facial hair “makes people more ugly and weakens their intelligence” (Jaenen, 24). When European men used the hoe, the plow, or the scythe, Indians judged them to be effeminate and thus easily defeated.

...