American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.