Native American Heritage Month

Chickasaw Gender Roles and Slavery During the Plan for Civilization

Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In the first post, Jeff Washburn (University of Mississippi) discusses the evolution of gender roles within Chickasaw society during the early 1800s. The founding of the United States altered the relationship between the Chickasaw and white Americans. Adopting a “plan for civilization,” President George Washington and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, commissioned Indian agents, like Benjamin Hawkins in 1796, to encourage the adoption of scientific agricultural techniques and a yeoman farming society in an attempt to encourage Southeastern Indians to sell off excess hunting lands for white settlement. This program was also meant to change Chickasaw gender roles and family leadership, both of which were the domain of women, to conform to white American concepts of paternalism and male leadership. The Chickasaw, however, adapted the plan for civilization to their […]