ELIZABETHTOWN — Historian and author, Dr. Maeve Kane, presents a talk, “Where Tracks Are Dragged,” 7 p.m. tonight at the Adirondack History Museum in Elizabethtown.
Kane will discuss, “the Indigenous women who conducted trade through the Adirondacks, between Albany, Montreal and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territories, from the 16th century; the things they bought and carried, and what it means for Haudenosaunee sovereignty and the right to free travel in the 21st century.”
She is the author of “Shirts Powdered Red, Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries,” which was published last year by Cornell University Press.
“The whole book is on Indigenous women,” she said.
“How do they think about themselves, how do they think about their nations, and how did their works specifically change over the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, how did they protect their nation’s sovereignty. It’s all about Indigenous women as historical actors.”
BOOK CATALYST
Kane holds degrees from PhD, Cornell University 2014, MA, Cornell University 2010 and BA, Macalester College 2008.
“When I finished my undergraduate and I was looking at doing a PhD, I had a really general idea that I was interested in clothing as kind of a way to look at how people think about themselves,” she said.
“I had an original idea was to use clothing that women made before the American Revolution and use the things that they made as a way of how did white women, free and enslaved Black women, and Indigenous women think about themselves. I thought that was particularly important because there is not a lot of documents that are written by those people, especially women, especially poorer women, especially women of color.”
Documents are the primary things that historians use, and Kane started that project and got more and more into the weeds of actually doing it.
“I kept finding more and more compelling things about Haudenosaunee women specifically,” she said.
“In New York, I think people are more aware of this than in other places, than other parts of the U.S. or Canada. There’s this general sense of like Haudenosaunee women were a matrilineal society. They were in charge of land and cultivation. But there hasn’t been a lot of really specific scholarship done on what that means even within the past like 30 to 50 years. So, I started getting more into the research of what I had thought was going to be a very general project, and I just found the depth of historical evidence and the lack of scholars talking about it in the present to be a really interesting combination.
“Just how did Haudenosaunee women specifically fit into this larger story that’s very familiar in the U.S. history of like trade with Europeans, the Revolution, and ultimately kind of the story of removal, but not successfully in New York. I found there’s just so much material there than I’ve been expecting, so I decided to focus on that.”
MIDDLE WOMAN
In her talk, Kane will talk about about a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk woman named Agnese, who traveled through the Adirondacks in the summer of 1742, connecting two colonial centers of trade across imperial borders and through traditional Haudenosaunee territories. Agnese carried a pack of beaver pelts down from Montreal and returned with red fabric and fine laces.
“Maybe one of the most surprising or to me interesting things about the material that I work with is so many of these Indigenous women, and this is true for many women but particularly for Indigenous women, they only get mentioned in one place,” she said.
“So a lot of the women that I look at, they are mentioned as only a name in one document and no where else in the historical record. and Agnese is an example of one of them. She’s mentioned in the account book of this trader in Albany. An account book is kind of like an itemized credit card receipt. It was like this guy would write out like ‘Agnese bought x, y and z from me on this day, and she paid for it with this.’ Agnese is only mentioned by this trader Robert Sanders. He went on to become mayor of Albany. Sanders is relatively well known. He’s mayor of Albany, well known for people who do 18th century New York history. He has a lot of documentation, but Agnese is only mentioned in this one place. His interactions with her are really interesting because he is just so frustrated by her because she is his agent trading with this French woman in Montreal.”
Agnese, is this go-between of Marie-Magdalene Desauniers in Montreal and Sanders.
“Because it’s illegal for Sanders to cross that border into what’s then French New France and it’s illegal for the French woman to cross the border into English New York,” she said.
“But those laws don’t apply to Agnese because she’s Haudenosaunee. So, we see this little glimpse of Agnese as like Sanders’ frustration with her, but that actually tells us a lot as historians of like she has all this free movement and agency as a trader in her own right that Sanders doesn’t have even though he is so much better documented.”
Kane doesn’t know if Agnese has present-day descendants in the states or Canada.
“That’s one of the frustrations of doing this kind of history is she’s only mentioned by that name Agnese by Sanders,” she said.
“I have no idea who her family was, what clan she was. Sanders says that she was Mohawk, but I have no idea of any other details about her, how to trace her. I haven’t been able to find any of her further descendants and that’s true for a lot because Europeans didn’t write a lot of details about women in general and Indigenous women, especially. It’s really hard to figure out more about who these women were. We kind of piece together these little stories at different points in time.”
BLACK MARKET
Kane knows much more about the French woman, Desauniers, and her sisters, Marguerite and Marie-Anne.
“So, she’s one of three sisters, and they are related to men who have legitimate shops in Montreal,” she said.
“But the three sisters Desauniers run basically an illegal business. So, they don’t have like a formal shop. So this is the thing I guess that’s very interesting is because it’s illegal at the time in the 18th century for Montreal to trade with Albany and Albany to trade with Montreal. So they are using these Indigenous go-betweens because neither French laws or English laws at the time apply to them.”
The Desauniers’ business is entirely with Kahnawà:ke Mohawks, who are trading south to Albany.
“If the Desauniers talk to the French government, they say like ‘Oh, yeah, we’re just buying solely from the Mohawks. It’s what they’ve hunted in New France. It’s totally above board,’” she said.
“But if you look at the letters and the volume of materials that they’re trading, Robert Sanders is very clearly trading with the Desauniers. He is in Albany, and the Desauniers are just handling a ton of stuff that is going across the border. Part of this is because the Mohawks at Kahnawà:ke and other groups prefer English cloth at the time.”
Scholars like Kane find it difficult to tie a 17th or 18th century object to a specific person.
“So, there’s only a small handful in any collection in North America or Europe that you can say for sure this guy owned this thing,” she said.
“The other part of is that so much of what Sanders and the Desauniers and women like Agnese were trading in is just like people’s everyday clothing. It would be kind of like somebody’s favorite pair of jeans surviving for 200 years.”
Kane did not conduct any oral history interviews, but relied on a handful of published oral histories of Haudenosaunee people sharing their viewpoints.
“We have a lot of documents from the Desauniers,” she said.
“We have a lot of documents by Sanders. Agnese is the voice that’s missing between those three voices, but you can kind of see sideways from what the Desauniers or Sanders were talking about. How they talk about her and the actions they report her taking, contextualizes those in the wider story and think about why would somebody in this position do this, why is Agnese making these decisions and what might not be in context.
“I try to be very careful in the book of like this is the limit of what I know and I cannot speak for Agnese directly, but here’s what she’s did and here’s the bigger context of the picture.”
BOOK COVER
Kane’s book cover is an image of Gaha:no Caroline Parker.
“She’s a woman who lived in 19th century,” Kane said.
“She was Wolf Clan, Seneca. She’s in the book because she was the first Indigenous graduate of the University of Albany before it was a university. It was the State Normal School at the time. She was a very prominent advocate against removal of the Haudenosaunee from New York State.”
In the portrait, Parker is 21 or 22 before her enrollment in the teacher college program.
“What she is wearing in that image is this outfit that an anthropologist commissioned for the New York State Museum,” she said.
“That clothing she is wearing is actually still at the State Museum. It’s kind of similar to the Agnese situation where we like have some letters that Caroline Parker wrote, but she doesn’t write about her decision making in that outfit specifically because what happened was she was commissioned to make that outfit she’s wearing as an example of traditional Iroquois dress for the anthropologist to donate to the New York State Museum.”
Lewis Henry Morgan was the anthropologist who commissioned the regalia during the period where New York State is attempting Senecal removal.
“There’s this treaty that the Seneca have from 1794 that the U.S. federal government pays in part in red calico cloth,” she said.
“In Caroline’s receipts for the cloth that she bought to make this outfit, she itemizes every single other item that she’s wearing – the wool, the velvet, the silk ribbons, the beads – the cost for those things. But the dress, the top piece of what she’s wearing in that image, is made of red calico cloth and it is not present in her receipts. There is this very noticeable absence.”
Parker did not pay for the red calico cloth.
“She never says anywhere that she took her family’s portion of the treaty payment cloth to use this, but it’s such a notable kind of connection to this debate in the 19th century over this treaty that was in danger,” she said.
“I think she was using this set of clothing to make an argument about the traditional Iroquois women’s dress is grounded in this treaty relationship with the U.S. federal government, which means that the Haudenosaunee could not be removed out of New York. and ultimately, it was successful. The Seneca was successful in getting back some of the land that was in danger by New York State at the time.
“Parker herself goes on to remain a very strong advocate against removal in New York State, to the point that her obituary appeared in the New York Times when she died in 1892. That was the most notable thing about her.”