Episode 406: Threads of Power: How Haudenosaunee Women & Fashion Shaped History

Historians use a lot of different sources when they research the past. Many rely on primary source documents, documents that were written by official government bodies or those written by the people who witnessed the events or changes historians are studying.

But how do you uncover the voices and stories of people who didn’t know how to write or whose families didn’t preserve much of their writing?

Maeve Kane, an Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany and author of Shirts Powdered Red: Gender, Trade, and Exchange Across Three Centuries, ran into this very problem as she sought to recover the lives of Haudenosaunee women. Maeve overcame this challenge by researching a different type of historical source—the cloth Haudenosaunee women traded for and the clothing they made and wore.

About the Show

Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.

It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Episode Summary

Maeve Kane is an Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany. Her research focuses on questions of community and identity formation, and she uses material culture, archaeology, economic history, and digital history to examine those questions. She is the author of the book, Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries.

During our exploration of Haudenosaunee women and the trade they conducted, Maeve reveals information about Haudenosaunee communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and women’s roles in those communities. Details about using cloth and clothing as historical sources and what these sources reveal to us about the political and economic prowess of Haudenosaunee women. And, the important role Haudenosaunee women played in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trade with Europeans and the ways they used trade, cloth, and clothing to keep Haudenosaunee culture alive and vibrant.

What You’ll Discover

Overview of the matrilineal structure of Haudenosaunee communities
Women’s roles in Haudenosaunee communities during the 17th and 18th centuries
How Haudenosaunee women work to keep Haudenosaunee culture alive
Women’s roles in wampum making
Cloth and clothing as historical sources
Clothing as an inherently political object
Haudenosaunee clothing prior to European contact
Haudenosaunee clothing after European contact
The labor of making clothing
Haudenosaunee trade relationships with European empires and colonies
Haudenosaunee diplomacy
The dish with one spoon
The Haudenosaunee cloth trade
The important role of Haudenosaunee women in trade
The Albany-Montreal Trade
The power of women in the Albany-Montreal trade
The myths & reality of Haudenosaunee dependence on European trade
Indigenous adaptation of European goods to meet their tastes and needs
Ga-ha-no Caroline Parker

Links to People, Places, and Publications

Time Warp Question

In your opinion, how do you think your research into the power of Haudenosaunee women to trade with Europeans and to use those trade goods to uphold and maintain their Haudenosaunee culture helps us better understand the American Revolution and its impact on Haudenosaunee nations and communities?