Thanks. It was an interesting but also ambiguous article. Some times they suggested the acts that were reported were exaggerated.
Now women are capable of sado-masochistic behavior too. In Sacajawea she alludes to a a Native women of another tribe who sexually molests her children.
So yes. Women can be violent too. Of course they can. But it’s just not the same as when a man flies into a rage and starts smashing things and up ending tables and stuff.
Anyway, here are some excerpts I pulled from the article:
”...the purposes behind it have so far eluded historical explanation and the subject falls into no current categories of analysis: it is perceived as neither a valid part of native warfare, nor as part of the standard package of “typical” or “appropriate” female behaviours” <<<From a westernized POV.
”This paper begins by looking at a rare late seventeenth-century account of white female violence in colonial America” (Bolding mine)
“This discussion is not intended to suggest that ritual torture happened every time captives were brought back to a village, and neither is it stating that torture was practised by every tribe and by women only”
”explanations stalled at“madness”, “fury” or “savagery”, western explanations for female behaviour that stepped outside of conventional and approved boundaries.”
”Another historian of native peoples has also challenged the significance of ritual torture by native women, suggesting it was exaggerated by observers who had never witnessed women’s participation in torture andexecution in Europe.”
“Accounts of these horrors appear in Early American narratives yet find no definitive home among histories of women or warfare.”
Something to consider was the the Early Western American (white) POV, the Indians were “savages.” Maybe they just saw what they were expecting to see.
Thanks for taking the time to post it for me.