Beginning with a purchased shirt and ending with a handmade dress, Shirts Powdered Red shows how Haudenosaunee women and their work shaped their nations from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century.
By looking at clothing that was bought, created, and remade, Maeve Kane brings to life how Haudenosaunee women used access to global trade to maintain a distinct and enduring Haudenosaunee identity in the face of colonial pressures to assimilate and disappear. Drawing on rich oral, archival, material, visual, and quantitative evidence, Shirts Powdered Red tells the story of how Haudenosaunee people worked to maintain their nations’ cultural and political sovereignty through selective engagement with trade and the rhetoric of civility, even as Haudenosaunee clothing and gendered labor increasingly became the focus of colonial conversion efforts throughout the upheavals and dispossession of the nineteenth century.
Shirts Powdered Red offers a sweeping, detailed cultural history of three centuries of Haudenosaunee women’s labor and their agency to shape their nations’ future.
Table of Content
Introduction: Clothing the People without History
1. Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact
2. Purchased Cloth and the Transformation of Labor in the Seventeenth Century
3. Cultural Entanglement and European Anxiety in the Early Eighteenth Century
4. Women’s Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
5. Gender, Race, and Civility in Eighteenth-Century Education
6. Erasure and Violence against Women in the American Revolution
7. Caroline Parker and Making a Modern Traditionality
Epilogue: Miss Mountpleasant and the Indian Wigwam
About the author
Maeve Kane is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. Follow her on X @Maeve Kane.
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