Indigenous women

“ The AIDPI stresses the importance of the “clear recognition by all Guatemalans of the reality of the racial discrimination the compelling need to overcome it”. It also recognizes the particular vulnerability of indigenous women, who suffer from double deprivation: because they are women and because they are indigenous. ”

“ A timely and adequate education and dissemination campaign, which would include recognition of the value of Mayan scientific and technological knowledge, the spiritual and cultural value of indigenous dress, and the rights of indigenous women, is an inescapable commitment which the State must comply with as soon as possible. ”

“ The State must foster a change in individual and collective attitudes to overcome the de facto discrimination by means of dissemination and education campaigns and programmes. It is especially necessary to disseminate the contents and objectives of Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization on the rights of indigenous peoples in independent countries. It is also important to make this known to State officials and to promote compliance. The Office for the Defense of Indigenous Women must be strengthened through adequate budgetary allocations. ”

“ When a native woman is about to become a mother she retires into the bush, sometimes alone, but generally accompanied by a female friend, and, owing to the strong constitution of these women, seldom remains in her retirement more than a day or so. Among the natives of Victoria, the ceremony attending the birth of a child is rather curious, and is amusingly described by Mr. Lloyd: “While upon the subject of the Australian aborigines, I must not omit to describe the very original modus operandi of the indigenous sage femme. ”

“ Australia, however, does not possess an indigenous native population sufficient for the supply of this want—or suitable, if sufficient—and as the Government has closed its doors to the admission of Papuans or Melanesians—both highly suitable races for the purpose—it naturally follows that a fitting class of white men will never settle or take their families there. No country has, as yet, been populated by men married to women of native races or half-breeds. ”

“ There had been a considerable mixture of blood between North, South, and the Transandine groups before the Spanish entry, brought about not only by wars and migrations, but by the custom prevailing among the indigenous folk of Central Chile of seeking wives outside the tribe. During the colonial period numbers of white women were systematically seized and held by the Indians, the resulting admixture of blood accounting for the comparatively blond strain seen in some of the Araucanian families. ”

“ Yet, though not of native production, though lacking the influence of constant-trending nationality, the American woman is and always has been strongly individual. While she is not an indigenous development, not a result of racial growth and broadening, yet her development has been essentially characteristic. She has reached forward upon lines of variant trend from those of her sisters of other cultures, and she is truly a product of her country in that she has been shaped by the conditions of the time and circumstances of that country's birth. ”

“ In their definition and implementation, the set of public policies whose purpose it is to foster and facilitate access to land and credit, to health and reproductive health, to access to housing, education, training and justice, must give priority to overcoming the inequalities which affect the indigenous peoples, particularly women. ”

“ As to the exercise of citizenship, a high percentage of the indigenous population, particularly women, lack personal identification documents, which affects the exercise of their most elemental rights, including the right to citizenship. ”

“ In between these two extremes come the great mass of the native women, who are drudges certainly, but willing drudges, and with their rights and privileges well defined and carefully guarded by tribal law and custom. Probably they are neither better nor worse off, according to their lights, than the majority of working wives elsewhere. ”

“ While the first effects of the impinging civilization were most deleterious to the status and nature of the aboriginal woman, there came a time when, under conditions of comparative peace, there was ampler opportunity for the best of that civilization to prove that it really had a message for red men and women as well as white, though its first words had been so marred in the saying. ”

“ I am anxious for a permanent and uplifting civilization to be engrafted on the Negro race in this land. And this can only be secured through the womanhood of a race. If you want the civilization of a people to reach the very best elements of their being, and then, having reached them, there to abide as an indigenous principle, you must imbue the womanhood of that people with all its elements and qualities. Any movement which passes by the female sex is an ephemeral thing. Without them, no true nationality, patriotism, religion, cultivation, family life, or true social status, is a possibility. ”

“ It must be borne in mind that before the white man came the Natives, like the peasants in many European countries not long ago, conducted their courtship and love-making with a show of violence which seemed to them right and proper. The idea, indeed, that any self-respecting Native girl could yield herself to a lover without, at least, a semblance of physical resistance, leading to her more or less forcible capture by the man, would have seemed, and still seems, distinctly improper to the majority of Native women in their raw state. ”

“ Let us not forget that the Indians for whom we work have been excluded from our civilized communities, until it is difficult to win them to our customs, our language and our religion; that until only about twenty-five years ago, generation after generation of our colored people had been born to bondage, and had groaned its hopeless life away in far greater misery than the same conditions brought in uncivilized Africa—misery made deeper and keener by contrasts in civilized America. Is it a wonder that the women of a slave race lost their womanly instincts ”

“ Woman’s lot among all the tribes of the Amazon is commonly regarded as a hard one. It is true that the steady grind of the day’s work falls to her share. Men work intermittently, but the work that falls to the women to do is incessant. In addition to the natural functions of the mother and the housekeeper, the duties of an Indian wife include the bulk of all agricultural labour. The husband’s energies cease when he has cleared and broken up a patch of land, reclaimed a field from the surrounding forest, an arduous task that needs more physical strength than women possess. ”

“ Not so in industry and art, where division of labor prevailed, but no sex disability. As one surveys the technical and artistic pursuits of primitive tribes, woman’s participation is everywhere [Pg 132] in evidence. The baskets of California, the painted pots of the Pueblos, the beaded embroideries of the Plains, the famous Chilkat blankets, the tapa cloth of Polynesia, all of these were woman’s handiwork. Almost everywhere she plans and cuts and sews and decorates the garments worn by women as well as men. ”

“ It is more particularly true of her influence within the precints of her domestic life, as was seen in the case of the pigmy women of the Andamese Islands. Mothers, and more especially mothers-in-law, exert noteworthy power, but this is always by virtue of station rather than of any inherent respect due to the sex itself. There are isolated examples of a more active power exerted by woman.
As a rule, women of the inferior races have no part in the government of their tribes. ”

“ Everywhere finding indigenes in the newly settled country, they can usually count on the complaisance or the submissiveness of the tribesmen. Native women have a strange fascination for civilized men, even for those who have been intimate with the European aristocracies and have belonged to them. ”

“ As among aborigines women have no will of their own, they cannot object if their husbands exchange, trade or loan them to other men. So it is customary among many tribes that if persons of importance come visiting, the daughters or the wives of the host are assigned to comfort them over night. ”

“ Throughout the northern, southern, and western states of America, on the Pacific slope, and in Canada, the growth of a mixed race of White and Indian blood has everywhere taken place in the first period of settlement, when the frontier backwoodsman and the hunter were brought into contact with the native tribes. Along the borders of every frontier state a nearly exclusive male population is compelled to accept the services of the Indian women in any attempt at domestic life. The children grow up to share in perfect equality the rude life of their fathers. ”

“ Every woman who goes and stays makes it easier for the woman who follows in her footsteps, and I can see no reason why a woman should not stand the climate of West Africa as well as she does that of India. Women are the crying need; quiet, brave, sensible women who are not daunted because the black cook spoils the soup, or the black laundryman ruins the tablecloth, who will take an intelligent view of life, and will make what is so much needed—a home for their husbands. ”

“ In fact appropriation of particular women to their own husbands, though established by every sanction of native custom, has by no means so strong a hold in native society, nor in all probability anything like so deep a foundation in the history of the native people, as the severance of either sex by divisions which most strictly limit the intercourse of men and women to those of the section or sections to which they do not themselves belong. ”

“ Of the North American aboriginal woman the knowledge possessed admits of but broad generalities as to her status and condition. The author of this volume has, however, happily extracted from the available sources what is informing as to the position of the woman so that a better conception of her will be the part of his readers. It will be seen that she has not always been the neglected and unconsidered creature that the popular mind has accepted. Instead, she has held among many tribes a higher place of power than man, and that by custom and in fact she was held in high consideration. ”

“ The Native and the white woman alike would continue to cherish the substituted child exactly as they would have cherished the issue of their own bodies. The desire to bear children is the same in all normally constituted women irrespective of colour or race, and there is no sign of any special instinct for identification in the Native woman, such as the sense of smell, which is found in all the higher animals. ”

“ In their own country the Natives are by no means lacking in respect to white womanhood. A European lady travelling in Basutoland without escort would probably be safer there than in England under the like condition. The Hon. H. Burton, Attorney-General of the Cape Colony, reports, after visiting the Transkei, that in that great reserve, where ten thousand Europeans are surrounded by a million Natives, the molestation of white women is a thing unheard of. ”

“ At every fresh stage of colonisation, or of pioneering into the wild West, the work has necessarily been accomplished by hardy young adventurers, or the hunters or trappers of the clearing. It is rare indeed for such to be accompanied by wives or daughters. Where they find a home they take to themselves wives from among the native women; and their offspring share in whatever advantages the father transplants with him to this home in the wilderness. To such mingling of blood, in its least favourable aspects, the prejudices of the Indian present little obstacle. ”

“ For not only do they reign as queens in their own homes—which are always models of what such ought to be in cleanliness, comfort and hospitality (‘Marys in the House of God, Marthas in their own’) —but also in the huts and homes of the natives, because they reign in the hearts of the native women, who adore them, and look up to them as their highest example of all that is Christian, womanly and motherly. ”

“ What motherly affection, ever present and everlasting, has done for the welfare and progress of mankind, no one can conceive, nor describe, nor illustrate.
As brief as these remarks about aboriginal woman’s activity are, they indicate, however, sufficiently her share in the founding and evolution of human culture. To appreciate this even more, we must not forget that the life of those women was one of constant care, misery and danger. The 21blissful happiness of aboriginal existence, of which we read sometimes in novels, written by poetical dreamers, was never enjoyed by these women. ”

“ We have only therefore to suppose that tribes having similar customs to those now living on the river Uaupés, inhabited the regions where the Amazons were reported to have been seen, and we have a rational explanation of what has so much puzzled all geographers. The only objection to this explanation is, that traditions are said to exist among the natives, of a nation of "women without husbands." ”

“ The father-age succeeding to the mother-age in time altogether revolutionised the relations of the sexes; transient sex unions, formerly the rule, were gradually eliminated by capture and retention of wives from outside the tribal group. The change marks a distinct step in social advance. When men as heads of families succeeded to much of the influence women had held in the tribe, barbarous tendencies, such as blood sacrifice, were checked and a higher moral standard was attained. ”

“ Battling for very life,--and, in their bewilderment and lack of racial organization, often turning their weapons against each other instead of the common foe,--the Indians were soon reduced to the condition of mere wandering and militant tribes, their culture forgotten and indeed inapplicable to the changed conditions. In this state of affairs all that was not strictly military became worthless; and so woman, save as leader or Amazon, lost her rightful position in Indian society. She now became, indeed, a mere chattel, a slave, even a detriment, however necessarily tolerated. ”