More Contextual Documentation

I filled in the blanks from my previous post and have added a couple more things. I am including two maps and one painting (above that I thought just looked cool).

New Entries

Two books that give insight into the Seneca Indians are:

Abrams, George H.J. The Seneca People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1976.

This book is a primer in the Seneca people, from their origin and history to illustrations, maps and twentieth century photographs.

Porter, Joy. To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker. Norman:
U of Oklahoma P, 1967.

This book has a section on Parker’s adoption ceremony and gave detailed descriptions of it. Since Jemison was adopted by the Seneca during a tribal ceremony, I believe looking at other such adoptions ceremonies would be helpful.

The role of Native women in a tribe is key to understanding Jemison’s agency as an Indian woman:

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.

From this essay I learned the term “declension narrative” which means a narrative history which demonstrates a change cast in terms of decline. Shoemaker says this is “prominent in t he history of Iroquois women” (39). In this essay, Shoemaker reveals how the political, economic and individual freedoms of Iroquois women have changed during colonization.
Pre-Revolutionary War, Iroquois women controlled the means of production and their “power came from the group’s matrilineal, not matriarchal, social organization” (40). As clan mothers, women had political influence since the oldest women of specific lineages chose successors to office from men in their clans.

Here is information on Sheninjee and Hiokatoo that I hope will help:

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary
Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.

James Hughes, a retired teacher and historian from Syracuse, New York writes about Mary Jemison in this issue of New York History produced by the New York State Historical Society. He gives detailed information on both of Mary Jemison’s Indian husbands: Sheninjee and Hiokatoo. It is through her marriages to powerful Indian men that Jemison gains some of her agency. From her marriage to second husband Hiokatoo, Jemison, “as the wife of a powerful leader of the Seneca Nation…becomes prominent in tribal councils, exhibiting both the strengths of her own race and those acquired from her adopted people” (147).



This is a map of the "Iroquois Land Cessions during colonial times, and early United States changes in Iroquois and Seneca land control" (Abrams 28-29).



This map shows the Seneca Indian Reservations from the Treaty of 1797 (Abrams 49).

Contextual Documents

In between bouts of dizziness, etc., I'm trying to keep up with everything (okay...I'm about to give up on my ecofeminism independent study). Hopefully these new meds will stop my world from spinning (at least I spin with the Earth...that's a little ecofem, isn't it?). Here's some early work on a couple of contextual documents. Like I tell my students: in order to understand what's going on in front of you, you need to be aware of what's going on around you.

To understand Mary Jemison and her Indianness, one must understand both her history and the history of the tribe she chose to remain with. In order to understand how her Indianness is the source of her strength and determination, the reader should know the people and landscapes that Jemison chose to call home. To gain understanding, I will examine four chapters from White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity in the American Frontier by June Namias. From her book I’ve gathered information on the history of the Indian practice of taking captives, how Anglo-American culture along with ideas of gender constructed the writings about the new American frontiers and how the white female captive in particular became the subject of a new literature. Namias states: “rather than being marginalized, subordinated, or totally missing, white woman captives are the subject of a vast array of materials. In this literature, white women participate fully in the so-called rise of civilization” (Namias 23). This participation, and Jemison’s in particular, demonstrates how white female captives were not always the victims as some authors would portray them. Seaver, for example, repeatedly sets up Jemison as a damsel in distress, yet I have found examples in the text where Jemison’s agency is apparent from her decision to remain with the Seneca to her eventual ownership of acres upon acres of land.

Namias’s book also presented some background material on the man who Jemison told her life story to. James Everett Seaver was a physician and “pioneer of sorts” (Namias 151). Knowing about the man who constructed Jemison’s narrative is helpful.

The chapter on Jemison’s narrative gives insight into the reason why some white women chose to remain with their captors. Namias cites the work of James Axtell which might prove interesting upon further investigation.

Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity in the American Frontier. Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993.


To understand Mary Jemison, you need to know about the Seneca people. One of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Seneca occupy native lands in upstate New York which were set aside by the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794. I found a good starting point at:
http://www.senecaindian.com
which led me to:
http://www.sni.org.
Both of these Web sites give a good overview of the Six Nations of the Iroquois and provide additional resources that I will be investigating. Turns out I lived just a few miles away from one of the six nations, the Onondaga Nation, when I attended SUNY Cortland.


The role of Native women in a tribe is key to understanding Jemison’s agency as an Indian woman. Two texts that I believe are important are:

Bilharz, Joy. "First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women." Women and
Power in Native North America. 101-112. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1995.

Bilharz’s chapter provides insight on the status of Iroquois women and how the “claims of relatively high status for Iroquois women are usually based on such economic and/or political roles as female ownership of land, control over horticultural production, and nomination of Confederacy chiefs” (102). Iroquois women were the ones who worked the land so that gave them the rights to it. Female communal work parties cultivated crops and livestock. Men simply cleared the land initially and the women became the horticulturists and rightful owners. Jemison becomes of owner of hundreds of acres of land as a member of the Seneca tribe.

Shoemaker, Nancy. "The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women." Journal of Women's
History 2.3 (1991): 39-57.
(I am waiting on this article from interlibrary loan.)


Mary Jemison was married to two Native American men: Sheninjee and Hiokatoo. Jemison was forced to marry Sheninjee, but she grew to love him and when he died a few years after they were married, she mourned her loss. She later married Hiokatoo and stayed married to him until his death decades later. I am currently looking for more information on Sheninjee and Hiokatoo and hope the following will help:

Hughes, James. "Those Who Passed Through: Unusual Visits To Unlikely Places. Mary
Jemison." New York History 87.1 (2006): 144-148.
(I am waiting on this article from interlibrary loan.)

Okay, I need to go lay down now. :)

Doomed!

While trying to find biographical info on Seaver, I discovered that in 2002 a writer named Deborah Larson took "The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison" and turned it into a novel. Publisher's Weekly said: "Larsen's lyricism and imagery are haunting, and her poet's sensibility is omnipresent, especially in her descriptions of the natural world. Yet the first-person reflections that Larsen intersperses throughout somehow don't quite live up to the sensational story. Mary's voice is likable but not fully developed, and not nearly as compelling as Larsen's more straightforward descriptions of Seneca life and the encounters between Native American and white society. After the real-life Jemison told her story to a physician and local historian, James Seaver, she reportedly said, "I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was." Larsen's tale soars with poetic language, but does not quite succeed in filling in the missing half."

You're not kidding! As if I'm not having enough trouble figuring out which part of Jemison's story is hers and which part was "enhanced" by Seaver, now I have to trip over this mess. After reading Seaver's account, Larson's fictionalization seems a bit to flowery to me. Here's an excerpt:

Mary had loved the family axe as a glittering extension of her own arm. Her father had sharpened it the morning they were taken, and she had been splitting wood, cutting the thick white oak with ease, cleaving filamented piece from piece for the sake of chilly evenings and for cooking. She imagined the flames tentative at first and then thrusting up, spending themselves in the foreign air for the comfort of her family.

And then for what seemed like no reason at all (because her father had said they could make it on their own until late spring, when the closest fort would send a militia to fend off Indian raiding parties), she saw feet in moccasins not far from the woodpile at the base of a shagbark hickory. She lifted her eyes to the impassive eyes and sculpted planes of what she would later learn was not an "Indian's" face but that of a Shawnee.

She spoke no word at this time, though a rage started up within her. So. Feet in moccasins.

So, feet in moccasins were now pressing into the very ground that belonged to her family, and she wondered how Father would explain them away.

How could he, how could he have left them as prey to what after all had hurtled across the horizon, to what with sureness had crept through their fields? No, he had actually led his family. How could he? How could he have led them, as it is written in Scripture, like "sheep to the slaughter"?

Was it for this that she had been conceived?

And born Mary, for so she had been born and named in the yellow air below-decks of the ship Mary William, out of Ireland, bound for Philadelphia. Thomas Jemison and the pregnant Jane Erwin Jemison had sailed out onto the loose, flecked fields of the Atlantic, preferring the clear American wilderness to the Irish civilization of the day. Away from Ireland, they would feel free to want something that was actually obtainable. They wanted a farm.

They landed; they moved straight on out of Philadelphia to a tract of land not far from what would become the town of Gettysburg. What they marked out as their farm lay on the tangled banks of a creek named Marsh. Later they moved to larger fields, on one of which stood a good house and a log barn, and it was here now where Thomas had let them all fall into the hands of six Shawnee and four Frenchmen and where his mouth had been suddenly stopped of his stories, of his resonant Irish jests.

This is how in April of 1758 a Shawnee came to be wearing her mother's indigo shawl; this is why Mary found herself watching a Frenchman pocket the family coins; why another Shawnee packed with great precision yesterday's corn cakes into a sling-like bag which he hoisted to his shoulder as they all took off across her beloved fields.

They just left, then, for somewhere that must have been north and west.

Mary was in the grip of a Shawnee. She was not dead yet, but she knew that if she didn't move fast enough he could simply cut her down and away. His companions would understand what he meant them to know by means of a mere flashing of his eyes in her direction: too much trouble, those eyes would signal; too much trouble, the white girl, too slow.

She closed her own eyes then and stumbled along, deciding to give her captor that trouble. He felt it; he jerked her and then jerked her hard again, as if she were a snag on his fishing line. She didn't care.

Let him jerk her, let him jerk her arm until it hung loose at her shoulder, and then dressed as he was in her mother's shawl he could shoot her or split her skull with his hatchet.

She heard her father's voice: "Mary."

"Mary," he said. "Open your eyes. Watch where you are being led."

Then the young Irishwoman opened her eyes and saw them all–her parents; her brothers, Robert and Matthew; her sister, Betsey; the neighbor and her three children. Then it was not so easy for her to be stubborn, to ask for death; to see them moving far off ahead of her now into the woods she had named for her cow: Boss's Wood.

Besides, if she was to die she didn't want Father's back to her, she wanted him to see her die, to see: let him see and behold where all his good cheer, where his cracked optimism had got them.

Captured by the Shawnee raiding party and headed out across her family's fields.

The fields stood in the mild April sun looking just as they did before her capture.

Mary stared: how could they look as they did? And she answered her own thought: because, the fields are just themselves.

At the time of the French and Indian War the south-central Pennsylvania fields sometimes curved halfway up hillsides. With the unseen roots of a thousand things–Queen Anne's lace, wild garlic, common grass, the corn and flaxseed her father had sown–the soil was held close to the gray shale that made up the sweepings of land. From beneath the rock, the earth's pull kept the heavy red clay from flying up into a sky marked by scuddings of clouds.

Before her capture, Mary had begun to think that although some things of fields–lilies, vines, choking patches of weeds–are mentioned in Scripture, yet they are not Scripture. The things of the fields are themselves. As Scripture is itself and holds only a partial account of the murderous, of good will, and of their frequent twinings.

God, she had ventured to think, may have given her the New World fields to balance the Scriptures and as a perfect refuge from the Presbyterian catechism.

"Consider the lilies how they grow": the Scripture said, "they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." And the lily lives just as it did in Israel, even though it has never brushed up against so much as one page of Scripture. That alone could keep her from going mad.

The lily in a field was a fact. For, she had thought, not even Scripture–in all its glory–was arrayed as one of those.

Excerpted from The White © Copyright 2003 by Deborah Larsen. Reprinted with permission by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yikes! :)

Mary Jemison: Unconditionally Tragic or Agent of Native Feminine Strength

As I do more research, I realize how problematic Jemison's narrative can be. Where is it Jemison's story and where is Seaver influencing the text? I had to keep reminding myself that it's a woman's story told through the pen of a man. There are places where you hear Seaver's voice screaming through the text, but I also hear Jemison's voice loud and clear.

Here's my idea for my paper proposal:
Native American definitions of race tend to lean more on the cultural rather than biological aspects. Individuals who participate fully in a particular Native society’s cultural practices could become accepted members of a tribe. Mary Jemison, a young white girl taken captive by the Shawnees and later adopted by the Seneca, demonstrates in James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, how one Euro-American can challenge patriarchy by choosing not only to remain with the Indians, but become one. As a female Indian, Jemison has more agency than she would as a white woman who returns to white society. Ezra F. Tawil claims Jemison has diminished agency, especially with her marriage to second husband Hiokatoo: “the marriage is described in terms entirely devoid of not only conjugal affect, but also of Jemison’s agency” (Tawil 105). As Seaver’s text shows, Jemison is actually afforded additional agency through this marriage. After Hiokatoo, a respected veteran warrior dies, Jemison receives all the “kindness and attention” (Seaver 129) as his wife. Seaver attempts to position Jemison as a white woman in need of rescue as opposed to a woman who has chosen to adopt and become part of a culture she has come to honor and respect. Seaver ventures to construct Jemison through her white womanhood and as a “tragic victim” (Wyss 4). In this essay, I will demonstrate how Mary Jemison is an Iroquois woman and how her agency is heightened by her choice to remain with the Seneca and how this challenges the dominant hegemonic thinking by going outside the traditional captivity narrative by having “any resolution other than the safe return of the mother to Anglo-American society” (Wyss 3). In Jemison choosing to remain with the Seneca and live as a Native American, she is granted additional agency as an Indian woman.

In this essay I will challenge Tawil’s claims against Jemison’s agency while showing how Seaver’s influence on the text paints a portrait of a white damsel in distress. I will do this by showing how Jemison, as an active participant in tribal ceremonies, through her land ownership and her familial decision-making, is afforded more rights as an Indian woman amongst the Native peoples than as a white woman in Euro-American culture. Susan Walsh illustrates how Seaver attempts to dismantle Jemison’s agency by leaving out of his Introduction “this Seneca woman’s self sufficiency” (Walsh 52). Hilary E. Wyss points out how Seaver uses Jemison’s story to show the “cruelty and savagery of those who abducted an innocent girl-child rather than the adaptability and strength of the woman” (Wyss 3). I will also use as evidence Michelle Burnham’s essay, “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and U.S. Nation-Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” to show how Jemison’s story “indicates the extent of her transculturation” (Burnham 325).

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is an interesting text from the standpoint of it being the story of a woman as written by a man and no matter how many times Seaver attempts to construct Jemison as a tragic victim, there are examples of Jemison’s strength and determination on how she chose to live her life. Rather than focusing on Jemison’s whiteness, as many readers and scholars do, this essay will focus on her Indianness as the source of her strength and determination.

I had a couple of moments where I was able to wrangle the pigeons, but I fear the chaos of confused pigeons is about to reappear. :)