Amerindian Women
��������There is no doubt that traditional beliefs and customs possess an extraordinary tenacity and neither folkways or science are immune to the effects. Sherry B. Ortner, a noted anthropologist is of prime example. Clearly Ortner was inculturated with traditional beliefs when she offered an application of universal explanations as to how and why women are viewed as an inferior gender. Ortner writes, ?The secondary status of women in society is one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact? (Ortner 1974: 402). This statement of fact and theory foundation is soundly and completely defeated when actually applied, particularly to the many indigenous cultures of North America.
��������The footnotes by McGee and Warms that are attached to Ortner?s paper claim that this position has been abandoned by anthropologists and was a result of ?politically charged? writing (McGee and Warms 1996: 402). However, in conducting a survey I have found this phenomena to still be with us. In fact, of 107 students surveyed, 102 believed that women in Amerindian societies held an inferior position.
��������Garcilaso de la Vega, a chronicler of the Hernado (Fernando) de Soto expedition records female rulers in a culture that is perceived by contemporary anthropologists to have been ruled by male ?Sun Kings? proving conclusively Ortner?s universalism a fiction (Vega 1590: 300). It does not take an eight page paper or even a field survey to disprove Ortner?s thesis or dispel the misconceptions that plague Amerindian heritage in traditional history. This information has been available since 1590 and readily available in libraries since the 1950?s.
��������As it might be construed that the above example is one of extraordinary exception, I offer one more mundane and of broader scope.
��������One feature of the Southeastern Indian economic system which set them apart from Euro-Americans was that unlike their Euro-American counterparts, Indian women could own property over which their husbands had no control. Indeed, in the early colonial period, British traders and soldiers who went among the Cherokees bought food such as maize, chickens, wild fruit and pork from women, for they were the ones who produced and therefor owned it (Hudson 1976: 312 - 313). Women also owned the house in which they lived and could dismiss their husband by simply refusing to shelter him. In fact, during the later half of the nineteenth century, American jurists used the Cherokee woman as a model in their arguments for the emancipation of white married women (Hudson 1976: 312 - 313).��������
��������Although there is extensive historical ethnographic data like the above examples to prove women were not always viewed as inferior, the traditional ?belief? that this was so has lingered on and is now part of our culture. It is accepted by many as a well known fact, despite the evidence, because it has been passed on from generation to generation as such. In short it has become a traditional belief resilient to change in the extreme.

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