Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous
North America, 1400–1850
Edited by Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the “berdache,” a man living as a woman or a woman
living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these
cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars
who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender,
sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that
span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these
aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans.
Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America,
1400–1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within
Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how
Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices
at odds with established traditions.
Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies,
these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities
today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.
June 2011, 200 pages
Contributors
Roger M. Carpenter • Gabriel S. Estrada • M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo • Dawn G. Marsh
Jan V. Noel • Sandra Slater • Dorothy Tanck de Estrada • Fay A. Yarbrough
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Sandra Slater is an assistant professor of history and an affiliate faculty
of women’s and gender studies at the
College of Charleston.
Fay A. Yarbrough is an associate
professor of history at the University of
Oklahoma and the author of Race and
the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the
Nineteenth Century.
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