Native American women in Colonial America

[2][3] Other women were delegated the task of caring for children and preparing meals; their other roles varied between tribal groups.

Thus, women played a major role in the family and exerted significant control over social and economic factors within the tribes.

[4] Life in society varies from tribe to tribe and region to region, but some general perspectives of women include that they "value being mothers and rearing healthy families; spiritually, they are considered to be extensions of the Spirit Mother and continuators of their people; socially, they serve as transmitters of cultural knowledge and caretakers of children and relatives.

"[5] Many Native American tribes believed that they originated from a woman, with many of their legends and creation stories depict a "mother earth.

"[6] Women were entrusted with overseeing a tribe's agricultural systems, and were responsible for harvesting and cultivating the vegetables and plants for their people.

After harvesting a tract of land until the soil lacked nutrients to continue, women would be tasked with deciding when and where to clear new fields, allowing the used ones to regenerate.

[8] Some Native American peoples were known for having women sit in positions of political power beyond simply controlling the food or being "agricultural scientists.

Before contact with European colonizers, several Native American cultures were matrilineal, meaning that women, rather than men, passed on clan membership to their children.

[10] Historian Katy Simpson Smith described eighteenth-century Cherokee motherhood as a "social, economic, and political institution" which included "not only the relationship between biological mother and child, but also women's broader kin networks, their productive connection to fertile land and economic subsistence, and their political role as mothers of the Cherokee nation."

[16] In many Native American cultures, although male family members arranged marriages, wives controlled whether or not they wanted a divorce.

[6] In the Haudenosaunee tribes and Cherokee Nation, a woman could leave her husband's belongings outside their door to show that she wanted a divorce.

"[19] In the Lakota tribes, there was the legend of the "Double Woman Dreamer" who behaved in masculine ways and had special powers.

[23] A portrait of Pocahontas was made depicting a woman in stiff European clothes, stripped of her native identity.

This role has been tied up with an abstract virtue that white men lust after and created a dangerous environment where they are seen as sex objects, thereby excusing violence against Native women then and still today.