Locating Women in Male-Authored Archives: Catharine Brown, Cherokee Women, and the ABCFM Papers
As a scholar whose passion is women's writing, I find that working with Native writings in early America can seem a rather relentlessly masculinist enterprise. In my research into Cherokee materials of the 1810s through 1830s, I sometimes feel, frankly, put off by the cacophony of male voices echoing through the pages of the archives. This masculine dominance in the written materials should not surprise me, since we know that women had less access to literacy and publication during this period and that women's written texts, often labeled private, were frequently not perceived as significant enough to deposit or maintain in archives. Factors surrounding the documentary record of Native peoples compound these problems. Usually penned by Euro-American men, written materials reflect their authors' often inaccurate understandings of Native cultures and gender roles. Many scholars lack the deep knowledge of Native social, cultural, and political histories to make meaning of the traces Native people—especially women—have left in written archives. They also lack the training to engage with Native-produced "texts," broadly defined. Although current scholars are rapidly verifying the existence of a long and rich tradition of Native writing, they have so far uncovered only a few Native women who wrote in English in the colonial or early republican periods. 1 Yet I am still somehow surprised that even with my abiding devotion to women's writing, I find myself working with the writings of so many men. I have spoken with other early Americanists who voiced similar feelings: they began their graduate studies interested in working with women's writings, but as their research trajectories developed and they pursued Native studies, they found themselves working more and more with male- authored texts. In my case, I was initially led to Cherokee materials by women's writings: the letters of Harriett Gold and her four sisters, which form a substantial portion of my first book, an edition of manuscript mate- rials entitled To Marry An Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 (2005). The Gold sisters debated Harriett's
Native Women Writing: Reading Between the Lines
As we celebrate Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature on this its twentyfifth anniversary, we would do well to note what is still absent, as well as what is present, despite the very best efforts of scholars in women’s studies. As others in this issue of TSWL so aptly point out, not only through their scholarship but also in their lived experiences in the academy of the last twenty-five years, women’s studies as a field has variously inspired, enraged, ignored, and celebrated women of color as historical presences as well as living, active members of the academy today. Through my scholarship on colonial Native literature and literacy, I have struggled to articulate and respond to the issues that others in this journal have eloquently documented, particularly the place of women’s texts in the larger story of literary production. My own contribution to this ongoing debate is modest: it is perhaps better defined as the story of what I have missed than what I have uncovered. However, I hope that my work on early Native women’s fraught connection to textuality has something to contribute to women’s studies more generally. My investigation of Native women’s writing started as a small piece of a larger project on narratives of Native education in colonial America. “It will be fun,” I thought—nobody’s really done much with this before. My early assessment of how this would turn out was certainly naive—it has been frustrating, fascinating, always stimulating, and often poignantly charged with a sense of loss and heartache. It is also increasingly clear why nobody has done much with this topic before: there simply isn’t much writing by Native women to examine. My focus is on seventeenthand eighteenth-century New England where, conventional wisdom suggests, the investment in literacy was higher than elsewhere. My terms are admittedly limiting: I’m looking specifically for documents written in the hand of and authored by Native women; this is a particular form of English literacy that marks its participants as members of a rapidly growing colonial world. This restrictive delineation of my project eliminates rich documents like “as told to” reports, petitions attributed to women but written by a scribe, and oral court testimony by women. It also excludes indigenous forms of communication like wampum belts, basketry, weaving, and other crafts. These are rich sources of information, and they perform some of the functions of writing, such as recording events and relating messages,
The administration of the courts
Section 28 of Article VI of the State Constitution provides that the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals is the Chief Judge of the State and its chief judicial officer. The Chief Judge appoints a Chief Administrator of the Courts (or Chief Administrative Judge of the Courts if the appointee is a judge) with the advice and consent of the Administrative Board of the Courts. The Administrative Board consists of the Chief Judge as chair and the Presiding Justices of the four Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court. The Chief Judge establishes statewide administrative standards and policies after consultation with the Administrative Board and approval by the Court of Appeals.