Mary Jemison: Unconditionally Tragic or Agent of Native Feminine Strength?
Native American definitions of race tend to lean more on the cultural than biological. For example, individuals who participate fully in a particular Native society’s cultural practices could become accepted members of a tribe. As a consequence of social constructs, the acceptable roles and behavior of men and women in society are circumscribed by a patriarchal principle which considered women as lesser beings than men and therefore needed to be subordinated. White men in Colonial America were the keepers of authority in family networks and a significant factor of patriarchal control was the established idea of honor. James E. Seaver in The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison attempts to uphold this notion of patriarchal control through constructing Jemison’s narrative to fit into the social construct of the dominant hegemony. In “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation, and Other Perversions, ” Stefanie Wickstrom states: “Jemison agreed to share her story with Seaver, but he did not simply publish her verbatim descriptions of her Indian husband or their relationships. Seaver constructed a portrayal of her forbidden liaisons with Indian men that reflected existing norms about miscegenation” (177).
Mary Jemison, a young white girl taken captive by the Shawnees and later adopted by the Seneca, demonstrates in Seaver’s text how one Euro-American can challenge patriarchy by choosing not only to remain with the Indians, but to become one. As an Indian woman, Jemison has more agency than she would as a white woman who returns to white society. Wickstrom contends: “Men were much more capable of resuming life among the civilized than were tainted women, who were considered damaged goods. This is explained in part by a norm that held that ‘sexual reputation comprised only an aspect of a man’s character, while a woman’s identity was wholly defined in terms of her sexual integrity” (174). 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. 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. When she is first taken captive and given to the Seneca, her fear is constructed through the removal of her whiteness:
The squaws left me in the canoe while they went to their wigwam or house in the town, and returned with a suit of Indian clothing, all new, and very clean and nice. My clothes, though whole and good when I was taken, were now torn in pieces, so that I was almost naked. They first undressed me and threw my rags into the river; then washed me clean and dressed me in the new suit they had just brought, in complete Indian style; and the led me home and seated me in the middle of their wigwam (76).
Seaver ventures to create Jemison through her white womanhood and as a “tragic victim” (Wyss 4). In this essay, I will demonstrate how Mary Jemison’s self-definition as an Iroquois woman and choice to remain with the Seneca heighten her agency and challenge the dominant hegemonic thinking. Jemison’s narrative moves outside the traditional captivity narrative and avoids “any resolution other than the safe return of the mother to Anglo-American society” (Wyss 3). In Jemison’s choice to remain with the Seneca and live as a Native American, she is granted additional agency as an Indian woman. Agency is the capacity of a woman to make choices and compel those choices on those around her. This essay challenge claims against Jemison’s agency while showing how Seaver’s influence on the text paints a portrait of Jemison as a white damsel in distress. I will do this by showing how Jemison, as an active participant in tribal ceremonies, a landowner and as a familial decision-maker acquires more rights as an Indian woman amongst the Seneca than as a white woman in Euro-American culture. 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” (3) as opposed to demonstrating the strength and determination of a white captive woman who chooses to remain with the Seneca. Arguing against this is Ezra F. Tawil in his essay “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White.” Tawil suggests that “Jemison retained the signs of her white subjectivity in spite of her marriages to Indians and her adoption of Indian ways of life. Yet her racial difference from her own children ultimately obstructs the formation of an Anglo-American household. The story of Jemison’s family thus becomes an object lesson in the incommensurability of whiteness and Indianness defined as two essentially different forms of subjectivity” (Tawil 107). Textual evidence from Jemison’s narrative demonstrates the dedication, not only to her family, but to her adopted people.
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. In early American captivity narratives, “a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God…To partake of the Indian's love or of his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul...through the captive's proxy, the promise of a similar salvation could be offered to the faithful among the reading public, while the captive's torments remained to harrow the hearts of those not yet awakened to their fallen nature” (Campbell, “Early”). The reading public was fascinated by captivity narratives because this type of literature illustrated the brutality and savagery employed against innocent white settlers by Indians and were a source history. Wickstrom asserts a dictaticism in regards to captivity narratives: “Until the early to mid-1800s, a prominent message conveyed by captivity narratives was that miscegenetic relationships between savages and white women, however tantalizing, were harmful to those involved and problematic for Euroamerican society” (176). Seaver uses this growing fear of cultural contamination in constructing his text and recreates Jemison, after her capture, as a tragic victim in need of rescue as he reveals her remembrance of viewing the scalps of her family: “Those scalps I knew at the time must have been taken from our family by the color of the hair. My mother’s hair was red; and I could easily distinguish my father’s and the children’s from each other” (Seaver 71). Later in the text Jemison reveals: “It was my happy lot to be accepted for adoption” (Seaver 78). She did not view herself as a victim in need of rescuing, but one who accepted her fate and became Seneca.
Michelle Burnham in “However Extravagant the Pretension: Bivocalism and US Nation Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” observes how Seaver contends he is the author of the text, but insists that the narrative is in her own words: “without the aid of fiction, what was received as matter of fact, only has been recorded” (Seaver 51). According to Burnham, Seaver “bestows authorship” to Jemison while at the same time “disavowing” her. This coincides with her Indianness. Seaver illustrates Jemison’s Indianness in his introduction: “her countenance is very expressive; but from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under her eye-brows as they do with the head inclined downwards” (Seaver 55-56) while continuing to construct her as a white damsel in distress. Burnham emphasizes that this back and forth between disavowel and bestowal “represents an ambivalence founded on the practice of internal colonialism” (328). Burnham asserts that Seaver was not interested in Jemison as a Seneca woman but in the using her narrative in the construction of a new nation’s history: “What she might tell him about American national history, and about the military acts of conquest on which the nation was secured” (329). Seaver states in his introduction that what interests him is to “preserve some historical facts” (Seaver 54) and Jemison was his vehicle to this record. Jemison was sought out to tell her story and instead of the editors getting a story of Indian rage and mayhem, they received a narrative “extolling Indian virtue and denouncing the genocidal introduction of alcohol into the Iroquois nations” (Walsh 49).
Why would a white woman taken captive by the Shawnee and then given to Seneca choose to remain with them despite being given numerous chances to leave? The Seneca are one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy and occupy native lands in upstate New York which were set aside by the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794.In “First among Equals? The Changing Status of Seneca Women,” Joy Bilharz 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. Iroquois women were also influential in the political nuances of tribal leadership. Nancy Shoemaker, in “The Rise Or Fall Of Iroquois Women,” acknowledges “Iroquois women acquired their reputation for great political influence partly because clan mothers, the eldest women of certain lineages, had the right to choose successors to office among eligible men in their clans” (Shoemaker 40).
For Jemison, the Seneca became her family and her identification with the Seneca people is evident throughout the text. Seaver tells us in his introduction that Jemison's “ideas of religion, correspond in every respect to those of the great mass of the Senecas” (Seaver 58). From the narrative one gains insight into Jemison’s “spiritual connection to the land, to agriculture, and especially to corn reveals important elements of Seneca belief in her life (Wyss 70). The Seneca origin story is grounded in the land, coming from the inside of the Great Hill known as Ge-nun-de-wah-ga “located at the head of Canandaigua Lake in central New York” (Abrams 6). Being adopted into a tribe holds specific significance. The motive behind adoption was “to defeat the evil intention of death by replacing the lost or dead member. In native culture, birth and death are the results of magic power; birth increases and death decreases the orenda (sacred power) of the clan or family of the group affected” (accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/history /indianadoption.htm). Adoption allows for the resuscitation of the dead in the person of another in whom is embodied the blood and person of the deceased. Jemison embodies the dead brother of the two Seneca sisters who adopted her: “it is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or – taken prisoner in battle, to give to the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy” (Seaver 77). Jemison becomes a fully-accepted member of the Seneca tribe when, during the adoption ceremony, she is given an Indian name: “his spirit has seen our distress, and sent us a helper whom with pleasure we greet. Dickewamis has come: then let us receive her with joy…we welcome her here. In the place of our brother she stands in our tribe” (Seaver 77). This native ceremony was the first that Jemison was granted access to. As her commitment to the tribe increased, her access to other tribal ceremonies also expanded.
It was Jemison’s choice to remain with the tribe: “with them was my home; my family was there, and there I had many friends to whom I was warmly attached” (Seaver 83) and her place among the tribe and her agency as an Indian woman increased when she married Sheninjee. She describes him in her narrative: “Sheninjee was a noble man; large in stature; elegant in his appearance; generous in his conduct; courageous in war; a friend to peace, and a great lover of justice” (Seaver 82). At first she was hesitant, yet Jemison made the decision to accept her marriage: “Yet, Sheninjee was an Indian. The idea of spending my days with him, at first seems perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings: but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship towards me, soon gained my affection; and, strange as it may seem, I loved him!” (Seaver 82). Together they had a son and they “lived happily together till the time of our final separation” (Seaver 82). Through her marriage her position in the tribe changed and she was afforded more power. Jemison was allowed audience with the tribal chiefs when after the death of her husband, it was thought she should be returned to white society. She refuses and recounts: “I got home without difficulty; and soon after, the chiefs in council having learned the cause of my elopement, gave orders that I should not be taken to any military post without my consent; and that as it was my choice to stay, I should live amongst them quietly and undisturbed” (Seaver 93). Some outside the tribe believed, as a widow, her place was with white society, but for Jemison, her place remained with the Seneca and her Indian children.
Jemison’s second marriage to Hiokatoo increased her power. She reaffirms her desire to remain with the tribe, who are now considered her family: “I told my brother that it was my choice to stay and spend the remainder of my days with my Indian friends, and live with my family as I heretofore done” (Seaver 120) She is given property: “I should have a piece of land that I could call my own, where I could live unmolested, and have something at my decease to leave for the benefit of my children” (Seaver 120) and was allowed to choose which land she would call her own: “He requested that I would choose for myself and describe the bounds of a piece that would suit me” (Seaver 120). This was all done formally: “The deed was made and signed, securing to me the title to all the land I had described; under the same restrictions and regulations that other Indian lands are subject to” (Seaver 121). This power not only afforded Jemison increased agency as an Indian woman, but created a future for her children. With Hiokatoo she had two more sons and four daughters. Jemison is granted audience once again before the tribal chiefs to insist on justice after her son John kills his half brother Thomas and requests “the Chiefs to hold a Council, and dispose of John as they should think proper” (Seaver 125). They comply, but find John justified for his conduct and he was acquitted. Ezra F. Tawil claims that 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 “according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was my due as his wife” (Seaver 129). The only reason for any lack of “conjugal affect” is due to his position as a decorated veteran warrior who was away from his family for long periods engaged in battle.
Jemison’s cousin George Jemison arrives and is destitute. It is through her position in the tribe that Mary is able to help provide for her cousin: “I paid his debts to the amount of seventy-two dollars, and bought him a cow, for which I paid twenty dollars, and a sow and a pigs, that I paid eight dollars for. I also paid sixteen dollars for pork that I gave him, and furnished him with other provisions and furniture; so that his family was comfortable” (Seaver 144). Due to her kindness and sense of family, she agrees to give her cousin forty acres of her land, but the “deed instead of containing only forty acres, contained four hundred, and that one half of it actually belonged to my friend, as it had been given to him by Jemison as a reward for his trouble” (Seaver 145). At this point, Jemison’s agency fails, but it was as a result of her generosity towards a family member, not her position in the tribe or her identity as a Seneca woman that was the cause.
Aside from the business mishap with her cousin George, Jemison ends up owning thousands of acres that cover “the center of the Great Slide and running west one mile, thence north two miles, thence east about one mile to the Genessee river, thence south on the west bank of the Genessee river to the place of beginning” (Seaver 156). She arranges for the sale of her land and thereby creates a lifetime income: “whenever the land which I have reserved, shall be sold, the income of it is to be equally divided amongst the members of the Seneca nation, without any reference to tribes or families” (Seaver 156). This, I believe, is her grandest act as agent of her own Indian destiny. She has the power to provide for the people for whom she considered her home.
As Seaver attempts to sustain the view of patriarchal control through constructing Jemison’s story to correspond with the social construct of the prevailing hegemony, Jemison herself presents her life as a Seneca woman in direct rejection of this notion. 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), but as Jemison’s story unfolds, her agency as a Indian woman becomes apparent. Jemison’s place among the Seneca as part of their tribe and culture reinforces her power. The more committed to the tribe she becomes, the more her agency increases. Tawil claims “her narrative could do something that that narratives such as Rowlandson’s could not: it defined the captive’s race as something that could not be lost or taken away” (Tawil 102). What Jemison did was transform from her Englishness into a fully accepted member of the Seneca nation. Instead of viewing her through her whiteness, one can see her as an Indian woman who gave birth to Indian children and performed all the duties and tasks required of Seneca women. As a result of her Indianness, one sees how her agency increased allowing her the capacity to become familial decision maker, tribal ceremony participant and businesswoman/landowner and her Indianness becomes the source of her strength and determination.
What Jack Michael does when I spend endless hours researching and writing about Mary Jemison...
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