Eighteenth Century captives judged by Chickasaw women

By Richard Green, Contributing Writer

The bound prisoners are shoved and pushed into full view of the assembly of Chickasaws. Warriors had captured these three Choctaw men during a raid on their hunting camp. The Choctaws know the consequences of being captured all too well. Either they will be tortured and killed, sold into slavery or enslaved by a Chickasaw family who may sever the leg tendons of the prisoners to make escape difficult if not impossible. Adoption by the tribe is a slim possibility for one or more.

A select group of their captors will decide their fate, and if death is decreed, they may help carry out their torture and execution. They push and shove the three men into the village’s ceremonial grounds, beating them repeatedly with dry cane and pine. Then using grapevine, they bind the captives’ arms and tether them by the neck to a warpole erected vertically in the ground. A burning piece of wood is fastened to the war pole a little above their heads; this is the symbol that their fate has been sealed.

Actually, there was probably no suspense because the captives were more than likely the objects of the rite of revenge. Because they or some of their kin likely had killed Chickasaws from this village, these Choctaws had to atone. Male captives were usually killed because they were known or assumed to have shed Chickasaw blood. Exceptions might be made for very young males with few if any tattoos, signifying their inexperience as warriors.

The group of judges and their helpers pile the cane at the base of the war pole and set it afire with torches. Then, several among them encircle the pole at a distance of about 15 yards--the approximate length of the prisoners’ tethers--singing and shaking gourd rattles containing pebbles. As the fire builds up, the prisoners scramble outward, but run headlong into the fiery torches of their executioners. All the while, the executioners sing and tribal members seem to enjoy the spectacle, even laughing scornfully at a prisoner if he shows any weakness of spirit. Ideally, warriors should suffer in silence, or rebuke their captors or go down fighting.

When a captive’s burns induce unconsciousness or shock, they try to revive him by pouring cold water on him. If he comes around, the fiery torture ceremony continues. When he no longer can be revived, they scalp and put him to death. They tie the scalp to a branch extending from the roof of the house of the warrior whose death has been avenged.

What makes this account by English trader James Adair so extraordinary is that the judges/executioners were all women. And, in fact, Adair wrote that the torture carried out by the women was much more graphic than he cared to describe.

Still, Adair’s relatively restrained description must be unsettling to modern-day Chickasaws who believe the lives of 18th century Chickasaw women consisted of unrelieved drudgery, raising crops and children and keeping house. How did such aggression fit into an otherwise placid tableau of female activities?

One might think that the warriors would finish what they started by dispatching the captives themselves. But the key to understanding this apparent paradox is to focus not on the women’s violent acts but on the fact that the warriors brought the captives home so that the women could decide their fate.

This wasn’t simply a concession or courtesy made by the male to the female, say two Chickasaw women with extensive knowledge of tribal history and culture. Jeannie Barbour and Glenda Galvan believe it was a custom likely rooted in prehistory, a part of the tribe’s division of labor, in which men and women both played important but always distinct roles.

In Chickasaw culture, warriors raided enemy camps and villages and captured small numbers of men, women and children. Adjudicating, torturing and executing prisoners was women’s work. According to Barbour, these diverse roles are but one example of the fact that Chickasaw men and women lived in two different universes. “About the only time they came together was to produce children,” she says. While Galvan basically agrees, she adds that although “their roles were separate, the labor was in balance, which was necessary for the tribe’s well-being.”

Unfortunately, Adair didn’t reveal, or more likely, didn’t know, who these women were or represented. But, Barbour and Galvan believe that the women most likely would have been avenging family or clan members if the captives were known. These 18th century women were carrying out a sacred obligation, say Barbour and Galvan, whose knowledge is based on oral histories and family stories, written accounts and a considerable amount of thought.

If the prisoners were not known, the sentence was probably executed by a group of women at the behest of the clan mothers, beloved elders, says Barbour. They may have belonged to a council (for lack of a better word) within the tribe with a name that no colonial scribe ever knew. Barbour says that younger women’s enthusiasm for or willingness to do the work may have increased their status in the eyes of the clan mothers. “This would stand to reason because we know that hard work on behalf of her family increased her status among the elders.”

Not a single female name associated with these responsibilities exists in the colonial records. Likely, the Europeans, and later Americans, didn’t understand the importance of these female decision-makers. Even if they had, Barbour and Galvan agree, women probably would have still been considered irrelevant because the outsiders didn’t recognize that women played a vital yet behind-the-scenes role in the tribe’s political decisions. Yet, Galvan says no important tribal matters were decided without consultation from these clan mothers.
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Adair doesn’t say when this scene occurred. But he implies that he witnessed it, so this would have occurred in the two decades between 1743 and 1762. This was during a period when the Chickasaws--almost encircled by French allied tribes--were fighting for their survival as a tribe. In the 1750s, the number of warriors had dipped to an 18th century low, estimated at 350.

The dire need for more warriors must have been a factor in the women’s life-and- death decisions. It seems reasonable to Galvan and Barbour that the clan mothers would have balanced the tribe’s need for additional warriors with the risk of adopting captives that might kill Chickasaws if they got the chance. In a matrilineal tribe (in which lineage is traced through the mother), Galvan says it was also the women’s duty to place the captives whose lives they spared with the appropriate family or clan.

As is widely believed today, clan affiliation was more important than tribal membership. It would be fascinating to read an account of how the clan mothers handled such matters. For example, how about a captive from an enemy tribe, but who belongs to the same clan as some of the captors? All we can do is guess, which isn’t worth much given our limitations in recognizing what would have been important to 18th century Chickasaws. Adair probably would have shed some light on this in his book, but as a non-Indian, he was probably barred from such deliberations.

There is precedent for such external factors impinging on this decision-making process. When the English pushed into Chickasaw country in the late 17th century, they offered firearms in exchange for slaves who would be shipped to the Caribbean to work the English sugarcane fields. After what may have been prolonged debate, a strong faction of warriors opted in favor of the English proposal, and then according to English officer, Thomas Nairne, it was “catch as catch can.”

To obtain the firepower they needed to keep the upper hand on the Choctaw and other enemy tribes, Chickasaw warriors expanded the custom of capturing or killing other Indians mainly for revenge and began capturing larger numbers for commercial reasons. This minimized the women’s ancient decision-making role. And according to Choctaw historian Michelene Pesantubbee, the loss of this responsibility had a significant impact on the influence of women because the “fate of captives determined how balance would be restored to a family or clan that had lost someone through warfare.” Captives, she writes, could be used to restore balance to the living relatives or to the spirit of the one who was killed.

It is unlikely that the women’s decision-making on captives was eliminated entirely. There would be no need to abolish what had been a venerable, powerful part of tribal culture. But when the tribe’s survival was imperiled by colonial encroachments and political maneuvering, the women’s decision-making role may have reflected the tribe’s need to adjust to a menacing and insidious threat.

It is also unlikely that the women’s power was wrested away by the male political leaders. Presumably, women would have voted in roughly equivalent numbers with the warriors that this de-emphasis in decision-making was necessary. Furthermore, the change need not have been viewed as permanent. Conditions did change after the 1720s. English traders no longer wanted so many Indian slaves, they wanted deerskins to meet the clothing and fashion needs in Europe.

By the 1730s, the French leadership--wanting to gain dominance over the lower Mississippi Valley--decided that the Chickasaw tribe had to be exterminated. First, they put together an alliance of tribes and attacked the Chickasaw homeland in mass. When those attacks failed, they used their alliance to fight a lengthy war of attrition against the Chickasaws. By the 1750s, the French strategy was working. To maintain enough warriors to defend their homeland, Barbour says, the tribe had to adopt warriors from other tribes. So, instead of making largely life-and-death decisions about their captives, the tribe’s emphasis had to be on adopting them.

The institution to do that already would have been in place. The clan mothers’ council would wax or wane throughout the remaining decades of the 18th century depending initially on whether the tribe was relatively at peace or fighting a hot war. But, by the end of the century, the Chickasaws were facing a new threat: removal from their homeland. Galvan and Barbour agree that during this era the women’s influence within the tribe lessened. Decision-making--involving land cessions--had shifted more into political and diplomatic spheres, the visible province of the tribe’s male leadership.

United States expansion gradually had been creating an imbalance between traditional male and female roles within the tribe. Traditional teaching held that such an imbalance could not be tolerated for long without tragic consequences.
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Author’s Note: This article is the first of an occasional series on the roles played by Chickasaw women on the eastern side of the Mississippi.

Sources
Interview with Jeannie Barbour and Glenda Galvan, Oct. 31, 2005
Samuel Cole Williams, Adair’s History of the American Indians, (New York: Promontory Press, 1986).
Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).
Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
Michael P. Morris, The Bringing of Wonder, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
Eirlys Barker, “Much blood and treasure”: South Carolina’s Indian Traders, 1670-1755, dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1993. One copy at the Chickasaw Tribal Library, Ada.