ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago Nancy Shoemaker’s introduction to the highly praised edited volume Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women assessed the previous twenty years of scholarship on post-contact North America (Shoemaker 1995). Heavily influenced by the work of feminist anthropologists Ruth Leacock and Michelle Rosaldo’s Women and Colonization, Shoemaker explained, scholars had embraced the study of Native women’s status as defined by gender equality based on the assumptions of constructed universal male dominance and female subordination, as rooted in colonization. Coming from a Marxist criticism of capitalism, Leacock and Rosaldo’s approach to women’s status through labor emphasized their economic contributions, which necessarily declined in the face of destructive impacts of colonialism and loss of tribal political strength (Shoemaker 1995: 4-5). Shoemaker’s call for consideration of women’s adaptive strategies in Native women’s histories framed contributions to Negotiators of Change which examined the impact of colonialism on women’s status and women’s varied responses. Subsequently, studies of Native women in post-contact history continue to emphasize both women’s status and decline at the expense of attention to women’s adaptive strategies, despite this critical intervention (LeMaster 2014: 6).
