Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries by Maeve Kane (review)

Reviewed by: Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries by Maeve Kane Emily J. Macgillivray Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries. By Maeve Kane. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2023. 293 pages. Cloth, ebook. Maeve Kane's Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries examines Haudenosaunee material culture and gendered labor from contact with settlers in the seventeenth century through the creation of academic anthropology with its focus on Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Kane argues that across these three centuries, Haudenosaunee women adapted material culture and political practices to ensure their nation's survival in the face of intensified American colonial pressures. Successfully centering gender as a category of analysis while avoiding tropes of Indigenous history as a series of ruptures and breaks with tradition, Shirts Powdered Red illustrates the centrality of women's domestic and political work to Haudenosaunee self-determination in multiple eras. In her introduction, Kane clearly defines the fields of Haudenosaunee studies—of which this book is a part—and Iroquois studies. Kane explains, "a distinction exists between Haudenosaunee studies, which is conversant with the academic discipline of Native American and Indigenous studies and the concerns of modern Haudenosaunee people, and Iroquois studies, which built upon a nineteenth-century colonialist salvage ethnography foundation" (8). Haudenosaunee studies calls for histories to be informed by the motivations and concerns of Haudenosaunee people in the present day. Kane's work clearly builds on recent trends in Haudenosaunee studies and is in conversation with Haudenosaunee scholars, including Susan M. Hill, Rick Monture, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, and Audra Simpson.1 Kane's argument for continuity parallels Hill's in The Clay We Are Made Of, which illustrates how the Haudenosaunee people's relationship with the land remained consistent as technologies and settlement patterns evolved in the centuries after the arrival of Europeans.2 Moreover, drawing on Simpson's understanding in Mohawk Interruptus of refusal as a political act, Kane argues that Haudenosaunee women's decisions—to buy or refuse to buy [End Page 583] objects—were embedded within a sociopolitical landscape.3 Kane uses the politics of refusal to examine the decisions Haudenosaunee women made about material culture, including which clothes they bought as well as how they refashioned and decorated purchased items. Kane's method centers the actions of these women (who authored few written documents themselves) and problematizes the presumption that their acquisition and use of materials from overseas through cross-cultural trade were evidence of assimilation. Instead, Kane demonstrates how Haudenosaunee women's decisions about material culture and trade were intended to craft a national identity and strengthen Haudenosaunee sovereignty across centuries. Shirts Powdered Red begins in chapter 1 with the clothing of a woman who was born in the tropics and later adopted into the Seneca town of Ganounata, where she died sometime between 1580 and 1600. "Dressed as a Haudenosaunee woman with a wrapped skirt of soft-tanned deerskin" (18–19), she serves as an example of how Haudenosaunee women integrated new goods and peoples into their communities, particularly through adoption. In this chapter, Kane's focus on gender and the political work of Haudenosaunee women provides new insights into familiar written archival sources. For example, Kane uses Pierre Radisson's narrative about being captured by a raiding party of Mohawks in 1652 as an entry point to think about the political work of Haudenosaunee women who adopted and clothed him (Radisson later abandoned the women and the clothing when he ran away from the Haudenosaunee). Kane compares and contrasts Haudenosaunee women's work integrating new peoples and goods into their communities with how the Ursuline convent in Quebec attempted to rework the identity of Haudenosaunee girls to make them fit more easily within the strictures of Catholicism. In a similar vein to the Haudenosaunee, who educated and dressed captives, the Ursuline nuns focused their conversion efforts on "francisation" (43)—bathing and clothing Indigenous youth, while also providing a domestic education. However, they ultimately failed "to thread the needle of embroidering an Indigenous identity with French layers" (43), because the Haudenosaunee girls at the convent did not convert...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.