INTRODUCTION Despite growing awareness of early Great Plains observers’ preconceptions regarding native societies, many recent attempts to understand pre-reservation Indian women’s roles continue to reflect the misconceptions of these early observers and later ethnographers. The purpose of this paper is to explore problems inherent in the evaluation of Hidatsa and Crow women’s roles and status. This examination utilizes a widely accepted model of Great Plains women’s roles and status to facilitate that appraisal. Although aspects of this analysis pertain to Great Plains people generally, this paper will focus on the Hidatsa and Crow specifically. The first European visitors tended to see native women in light of their own European cultural heritage. To some they seemed slaves of their husbands and brothers; a few saw them as free children of nature. Very few early observers noted differences in women’s roles among tribes, and even fewer attempted to examine Native American society through the women’s eyes. Even the few early Euro-American female writers, such as Margaret Carrington, were, for cultural and personal reasons, more interested in warfare, government, clubs, and societies-organizations regarded by European and Euro-American reporters as male dominated. With occasional exceptions, such as Linderman’s Pretty-shield and small parts of Denig’s Five Indian Tribes, anthropologists and historians did not become interested in native women’s roles and status or in women’s perspectives of their own society until the 1960s.

The historical portrayal of Iroquois women is of importance to all women’s history but especially to the history of Indian women. If historians have ”lost” Iroquois women, widely recognized to hold positions of power in their society, how can we hope to find other Indian women, with less obviously powerful roles, in the histories of their people? We find two important questions here. The first concerns the extent to which historians have actually ignored, misrepresented, or marginalized Iroquois women. The second question pertains to the methods and basis of such misrepresentation and neglect. In this paper I cannot possibly examine all of the literature or explore these questions in depth. It is, rather, my intention to present certain aspects of the problem of Indian women’s invisibility that the study of Iroquois women illuminates. Ethnologists have long recognized the relatively powerful position held by women in Iroquois society. With the possible exception of the Pueblo people and the Mandan, no other Indian women are so widely recognized as enjoying a comparably influential role within their society. If Iroquois women are lost from the historical record, the methods and circumstances by which this loss was possible should be easier to discover in their case than in histories of people for whom women played a less prominent role or for which the documentation of women’s roles and position is absent.