• Alcohol and the Anishinaabeg: By the early 20th century, alcohol became more prevalent among the Anishinaabeg in Minnesota, leading to cultural changes and adverse effects such as domestic violence. The BIA imposed prohibition and the White Earth women petitioned against illegal liquor sales, challenging the stereotype of the "drunken Indian".

• Blackfeet Nation's Decision to Adopt the IRA of 1934: In 1934, the Blackfeet Nation adopted the Indian Reorganization Act to manage natural resources and protect their community from further white encroachment. Despite reduced self-governance provisions, the Blackfeet saw it as a means to control their economic affairs.

• Economic Adaptation of the Navajo: The Navajo adapted to the mid-20th century American economy by seeking off-reservation work. The 1950 Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act aimed to assimilate them, but it inadvertently facilitated their continued traditional practices of community support over individualism.

• BIA's Contradictory Policies: The BIA's policies aimed to assimilate Navajo workers by encouraging local economies and Americanized family structures, but these efforts were undermined by the Navajo's commitment to traditional practices and community-oriented wage pooling.

• Resistance and Renewal Among the Blackfeet: The Blackfeet Nation's experience with the IRA exemplifies a cycle of resistance and renewal, as they balanced resource management with the need to protect their community from external pressures.

• Navajo's Adaptation to Capitalism: Despite government efforts, the Navajo incorporated off-reservation wages into their traditional lifeways, using income to support their kinship-based system and retain cultural heritage.

What is the relationship between laws about women and the power of the state?  Why (and since when) have women been invisible as historical subjects, when we know they participated in the great and small events of human history?

  Joan Scott, in her essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” suggests that historians today let go of preconceived notions about gender of persons as based on the human anatomy, and instead to consider the roles that men and women have played in society as components of historical analysis.  A good example are the mixed-heritage women of Brazil.  After colonization in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish conquerors had exhausted their labor pool, finding that indigenous people did not make good slaves, or that disease, hunger, and other effects of slavery killed them in large numbers.  In response, the Spanish began importing African slaves, who, over time, intermarried with Spanish and indigenous people alike.  This has resulted in a hierarchal society, in which skin color strongly correlates with social status among Brazilian people.  As Brazil entered the modern era, and industrialization and a global economy began to dawn on the country, many of these mixed-race, poor, and underprivileged women living in the countryside were forced to work for meager wages doing such jobs as cutting and hauling sugarcane, or domestic housework for more wealthy, upper-class Brazilian citizens.   In response, they developed an internal economy and social network that today works to sustain promote cultural traditions, provide food and shelter for itinerant male workers that are often husbands, and generate resources for children hoping for a better life in school.

In her essay, Scott asks “[w]hy…have women been invisible as historical subjects, when we know they participated in the great and small events of human history?” In fact, Brazilian women over the past 500 years have gone to great lengths to protect their cultural identity and traditions, while also integrating, and living together with, a large population of ethnically diverse people.  For example, poor women of the Alto, in Northeastern Brazil, have been instrumental in building and sustaining communities that serve men who work on nearby sugar plantations.  While desperately poor, women there have built an internal sharing economy and have managed to coalesce religion and practical sentiment into a moral code that permits them to control birth rates by letting some babies perish, depending on whether they are perceived as having a strong and healthy will to live, or not.  In her ethnography Death Without Weeping, anthropologist Nancy Schepper-Hughes takes a close look at these communities and concludes that gender roles often morph to accommodate pressures, such as the pressure imposed by the deep intermixing of race that conquerors and the importation of African slaves brought to Brazilian societies, sharply defining social and economic status for people on the Alto.   Poor indigenous women there have adapted to their circumstances by creating new economies where they can share and sell resources, such as food, clothing, and other necessities or services, to squeeze out a (very) meager living.

In this way, even though women of the Alto have been invisible and absent in modern Latin American history, they have contributed to shaping of that history.  And, thus, ethnographies such as the one Schepper-Hughes has written, serve as instruments for teaching people about the ways in which “women [have] been invisible as historical subjects, when we know they participated in the great and small events of human history.”  These critical analyses of gender roles provide dimension and perspective in historiography and serve to help humanity understand the huge contributions that women make, even when they are not prominently featured as historical individuals on the world stage.

Bibliography

Scott, Joan W. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." American Historical Review. Vol. 91, no. 5. 1986.