ABSTRACT
Native American societies—in their varying models of egalitarianism, gender equity, and conciliar government—resisted the English sovereign hive hierarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter recovers the divergent views of bees among Indigenous cultures of North and Central American, including discussions of Hopi katsina songs, Mesoamerican stingless apiaries, Wyandotte elders’ stories about European stinging bees, and the beadwork of Pocasset sachem Weetamoo. It outlines the ways in which several Native American cosmologies represent bees and other nonhuman beings, particularly when it comes to cultivation and use of nature. More specifically, lifeways—predominant social ethics about how to live properly—unify the connection between animate and inanimate forms of life. The chapter explores the value of women’s communal labor and insect contributions to human cultures as well as the linguistic links between the bee and women’s diplomatic work. Native American and Mesoamerican cultural knowledge about bees not only offers critical perspectives on various lifeways in the first century of contact but also represents distinct approaches to the Indigenous sovereignty that continues to challenge settler colonialism.
