By Eustina Kim, Michelle Lee, and Vicki Truong
Introduction and Corpus Overview
In our capstone class led by Dr. Ashley Sanders Garcia (Vice Chair, Digital Humanities Program), we investigated the significance and distinctions of gender roles in Native American communities. Using both humanistic and computational approaches, we explored a corpus including early Native American treaty council notes and other historical records. We were interested in seeing how textual documents could be transformed into quantitative data to determine insights and trends that may not be evident with only human reading. Using text mining methods in Python, we examined how the notion of gender not only shaped individuals in Native communities, but also transformed the perception of entire tribes. Thus our motivating question was: “Using computational analysis, how can we examine the concept of gender defined among Native American tribes (specifically the Delaware) and how did men’s and women’s roles differ?”
Traditionally, the roles of men and women in Native American tribes during the 18th century were very distinct. Men often took on responsibilities as the leader, hunter, and decision makers. They attended council meetings with other tribes or non-native peoples and acted as their tribe’s representative, making decisions about trade, land, and war. In contrast, women often took on tasks like planting and harvesting, cooking, and making clothing. Both gender roles were equally important for their family and community’s well-being.
Similarly, the notion of gender and gender norms were associated with certain tribes. For example, the Delaware are a noteworthy tribe because they had a reputation as a nation of women. They were labelled so by the Five Nations in an attempt to demote them after they conquered the Delaware in battle (Weslager). As a result, the Delaware lost autonomy over their abilities to defend themselves and were designated relatively neutral peacemaker roles (Speck). The use of labelling a group as women as a way to lower the social status is interesting given what Euro-Americans have written about gender roles in Native American communities. Much of the documentation that depicts their social and societal roles comes from Euro-Americans such as Moravian missionaries. There is a parallel between the Delaware being designated as women and Native American women’s roles because they both have domestic connotations. They portray women as being mostly responsible for food and land, which “formed two fundamental material conditions of first encounters between Indians and whites” (Fur). Men were seen as being the providers and fighters, and had more free reign to roam. Women were essential parts within Native American communities, but they were overshadowed by men when it came to diplomatic encounters. Women were not shut out from influencing village relations, but in the Delaware tribe, inter-village relations were usually handled by sachems, who were male chiefs that negotiated with other villages (Fur). Men and women both had pivotal roles in Native American communities at the time, but men were at the forefront of the action. To identify and analyze the significance of gender roles in Native American techniques, we used a few digital humanities techniques which produced the following results.
Computational Text Analysis
Concordance Results
We used concordance, which is the method of finding terms in a text and displaying the context surrounding the terms, to gain a preliminary look into how the terms “man”, “men”, “woman”, and “women” are used in context in the corpus. “man” and “men” have a collective 5905 matches, while “woman” and “women” have a collective 901 matches. These basic male-related terms are represented almost 7 times as much as these basic female-centered terms.
Overall, the female-centered terms were most often used next to domestic terms such as “children” and “house”, but they also appeared next to terms such as “pity”. The male-centered terms occurred near a more diverse group of terms, including “leader”, “warrior”, “great”, and “killed”. As a whole, these terms relate to leadership positions, especially relating to war. This is perhaps indicative of women taking on more domestic roles versus men taking on conflict and active roles.
Something to note is that we only showed the first 15 lines of the concordance output as to not clutter the document, and there isn’t a ranking system for concordance output. Instead, we will turn to collocation analysis in order to better understand the most relevant n-grams for gender-related terms beyond the basic ones explored in concordance analysis.
Collocation Results
To further explain the results from applying collocation analysis on gender-related terms, we observe that generally, bigram and trigram results for the same key terms will result in similar collocation phrases.
The terms related to women that we used included “woman”, “women”, and “squaw”.
Women were often associated with children, and were typically depicted as “poor”, “helpless”, and “defenceless”.
From these collocation results, we determine that women are not explicitly portrayed to have much authority within their Native communities. That is to say, women may play a distinctive role in their communities, but due to the lack of mention of women in this corpus, the results may imply that their roles are less conspicuous compared to their male counterparts. Thus women are painted as more vulnerable and submissive. However, it could be helpful for further investigation to also include even more terms that relate to women to gain a more holistic insight of the results.
In contrast, the terms related to males/men that we used included “man”, “men”, “brave”, “braves”, “warrior”, and “chief”. Compared to women, men were usually depicted in a more positive light.
Specifically men who were warriors, referred to as Braves, were painted as strong leaders, honorable fighters, and greats within their communities. In addition, men most commonly took on the role as chief to represent and make decisions for their tribes as the “head”, “magistrate”, or “commander”.
We also looked at “elder” to see if we could determine any distinctions of gender related to age. Interestingly, none of the collocation results for “elder” related to women. Instead, most of the terms referred to the familial term “brother”, verbs like “listen”, “spoke”, and “follow”, and wampum belts.
This reveals a few key points about the corpus. Firstly, we must address that this corpus mostly captures experiences and relationships among men. Therefore, women are detracted from these narratives because they are mentioned much less frequently in the documents. Second, from the “elder” collocations, we determine that men are the ones who appear at meetings and are the main representatives for their community. They deal in the exchange of wampum belts, which is a very important symbol of relationship legitimacy for Native tribes.
Overall, we can conclude with the observations that men are generally more represented in the documents. When women are mentioned, they are usually more discriminated against compared to men, according to our findings in the corpus. Finally, from previous contextual understanding, old age is usually a well-respected sign in native communities, although our results only show patterns of age in relation to men.
Some interesting collocations to note: [handsome, squaw]; [eel, river, chief]; [turtle, elder, brother]; [warrior, x, mark]; [unbaptized, woman].
Word2Vec Results
We used the most_similar function under word2vec to find words that appear in similar context as the gender related words of our interest.
The terms “man” and “men” seem to appear in similar contexts as words related to family such as “woman”, “women”, “children”, “family”. Interestingly, male-related familial terms such as “brother” and “father” did not appear together with “man” and “men”. The lack of such words could signify that it was a role of a man to protect their families, especially women and children. In addition, words like “warrior”, “trader”, “hunters” signify different roles of men in the society.
The results between the words “brave” and “braves” were quite different. The term “brave” seems to be related to other adjectives with similar meaning such as “upright” and “virtuous” while “braves” seems to be most related to Native American tribe names. We think the difference comes from the fact that the word brave can be used as an adjective and a noun while braves can only be used as a noun. When used as a noun, brave means “a North American Indian warrior.” It would be interesting to do further research on the names that appear in the result.
The terms “squaw” and “squaws” seem to show different roles that women played in the community. More specifically, “squaw” appears in similar context as words like “epaulettes”, “shell”, “vines”, and “teachers”. The results are more apparent for “squaws”, where many words are related to making clothes such as “spin”, “weave”, “looms”, “clothes”. These words signify that making clothes were largely seen as a woman’s role in the community.
The results for “elder” and “younger” were similar in that they both appeared in similar context as male-related familial terms. For instance, “brother”, “brothers”, “grandfather”, and “uncles” appeared in both of the results. It is interesting that these words appear here, not with “man” or “men”. This could also signify that the corpus does not talk about women of different ages and tend to group them together. This is also evident in results for the word “young” because it shows that “women” and “woman” were used in similar contexts. This could mean that women were often grouped together with young children.
Conclusion
Overall, this analysis examines the usage of gender-related terms in historical records of the Native American community in the 18th century using various computational techniques. The concordance and collocations results mainly show that men are more represented in the corpus and are related to more diverse terms while women are often grouped with terms related to children and domesticity. The word2vec results seem to show more specific roles of men and women in the community. While men were related to roles such as “warrior”, “trader”, and “hunters”, women were related to clothes-making terms such as “spin”, “weave”, “looms”, “clothes”. Both genders had central roles in their communities, but they were documented disproportionately through a Euro-American lens.
Sources:
Kraft, Herbert and Kraft, John. “Lenape women making pottery.” Official Site of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, Nora Dean, 7 Aug. 2016, http://delawaretribe.org/blog/2016/08/07/. Accessed 12 June 2020.
Fur, Gunlog. A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
Speck, Frank G. “The Delaware Indians as Women: Were the Original Pennsylvanians Politically Emasculated?” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 70, no. 4, 1946, pp. 377–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20087860. Accessed 10 June 2020.
Weslager, C. A. “The Delaware Indians as Women.” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 34, no. 12, 1944, pp. 381–388. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24531500. Accessed 10 June 2020.