9 Native American Women From History

9 Native American Women From History You Should Know Disney introduced the world to a romanticized version of Pocahontas, and Sacagawea gleams from the golden dollar coin. But they are the only Native American women most non-natives have heard of, and even their stories have been obscured by legends and half-truths. Today we will uncover the remarkable lives and contributions of nine Indigenous women of the past, from tribal leaders to warriors, artists to advocates. Through their experiences, we will take a walk through many vital, but often overlooked, chapters in American history. Gigon-Sasse Before 1600, five tribes occupied the area between the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. They spoke a common language and shared a culture, but they competed for resources. According to oral tradition, Gigon-Sasse lived along the warrior's path. She was famous for her hospitality, and many battle-weary warriors stopped at her home to rest. She offered not only good cooking, but also wise counsel. She was able to bring factions together in peace around her hearth, rather than in violence on the battlefield. Among these visitors was a leader named Daganawidi, later known as the Great Peacemaker. Together they envisioned a way to bring the many Iroquois groups into harmony. It will take the form of a longhouse in which all live under one chief mother. They shall have one mind and live under one law. Thinking will replace killing, and there shall be one commonwealth. The visionaries also enlisted the help of famous warrior Hiawatha. They forged the Haudenosaunee, meaning People of the Long House, also known as the Iroquois Nation. Their covenant may have influenced the U.S. Constitution written in 1789. Gigon-Sasse was in charge of assigning men to leadership roles. She launched the tradition of women selecting future chiefs, and she was called the Mother of Nations. It is not clear exactly when she lived. Scholars place these events sometime between 1142 and 1600. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in what is now the Bahamas, officially ending an era referred to as Pre-Columbian. Members of the Teano tribe called their island Guanahani. Columbus enslaved many of them. As his crew explored more Caribbean islands, they captured Arawak people and demanded that they reveal the source of their gold earrings. After eight months, Columbus sailed home and presented imprisoned native people to hispanic sponsors, King Fernando and Queen Isabel. Word of his voyage spread quickly, and soon many other Europeans set a course to make their fortunes by exploiting the resources and people of the so-called New World. The land was christened America in 1507 after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Over the next century, contact between Europeans and the first Americans gradually increased. What spread much faster was disease, against which natives had no acquired immunities. Smallpox, typhus, and measles wiped out an estimated 95% of the population. Pocahontas was born in 1596, the daughter of Wahunseneca, paramount chief of the Pohatan people. She was beloved by her father but was not in line to inherit his position. The Pohatan followed matrilineal inheritance, so the chief's sister's children inherited instead. Her birth name was Amanute, gift. Pocahontas was a nickname, meaning playful one. As a child, she ran around with the children at the English fort of Jamestown, founded in 1607. Pocahontas acted as an ambassador and brought food to stave off famine, for which the colonists thanked God rather than her. Captain John Smith recorded meeting Pocahontas when she was about 12. They did not have a romantic relationship. Years later, in England, he wrote that her father had intended to club him to death, but Pocahontas saved his life. Most historians believe this tale was fabricated and might have been Smith's misunderstanding of a ritual meant to initiate him. In her teens, Pocahontas married a warrior named Cocoam and may have had a daughter. Relationships between the Pohatans and English broke down into violence. Cocoam was murdered, and Pocahontas kidnapped, assaulted, and held for ransom. During her years in captivity, she learned English and was baptized with the name Rebecca. In order to gain her freedom and forge peace, she agreed to marry English tobacco planter John Rolfe. Their union temporarily ended the war. Pocahontas gave birth to a son, Thomas. In 1616, the Virginia Company decided to bring 11 Pohatans to London to display how they had, quote, tamed and baptized the savages. Pocahontas met King James I and Queen Anne of Denmark, and attended a mass at the Palace of Whitehall. She was hailed as a foreign princess and treated as a curiosity. She, John, and their son lived in England for a year, and Pocahontas met John Smith again at a party. In 1617, they boarded a ship bound for Virginia, but while still on the River Thames, Pocahontas fell ill from either tuberculosis, smallpox, or, as her sister suspected, poison. In her final moments, she told her husband that all must die, but she was glad that her child lived. She was 21. Pocahontas was buried at St. George's Church on the banks of the Thames, where a statue of her stands today. John and two-year-old Thomas returned to Virginia. First Lady Edith Wilson and Senator Janine Shaheen are among his descendants. The legend of Pocahontas was greatly sanitized and romanticized. She launched in the European imagination the idea of the noble Indian princess. But as indigenous concepts of leadership and inheritance differ greatly from those of European royalty, this totem misunderstands and westernizes her culture. The term Indian princess is now dismissed as inaccurate. Pocahontas was made even more famous by the 1995 Disney movie, which again greatly distorts the facts and culture. It is now widely criticized for sexualizing her and perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Witamu was born in 1635 along the shores of the Tanton River in modern-day Rhode Island. From a young age, she learned fighting, diplomacy, and leadership from her father. She went on a vision quest to mark the beginning of her adulthood. Because her father had no sons, she took his place as chief. This was not unheard of among the Wampanoag, but it shocked the English. Witamu was married five times but lost four husbands to disease. Her second spouse, Wamsuta, was the eldest son of paramount chief Masasoit. In 1621, he allied with the English colonists at Plymouth and saved them from starvation. This has become known as the First Thanksgiving. While negotiating with the English, Witamu's husband became ill and died. His brother, Medicom, whom the English called King Philip, took over and married Witamu's sister. Witamu traveled extensively in the name of diplomacy and was well-respected, but relations soured as the English repeatedly violated their peace treaties. In 1675, Witamu was traveling with her entourage in canoes when they were attacked by settlers. She decided to ally with Medicom and take a stand. She wed fifth husband Quinnipin, son of the Narangaset chief, thus forming a peace treaty between the two tribes. Witamu was named war chief and led 300 warriors into the Battle of Blood Rock. During this conflict, colonist Mary Rowlandson was taken prisoner. After she was ransomed, she wrote an account of her time with the Wampanoag, which became a bestseller. She painted native people as violent savages, though she did record that she was never sexually assaulted, and she described Witamu as a commanding figure who dressed to convey her authority. Witamu's reputation grew to legendary proportions. In 1676, while leading a charge against the English, she drowned in the Tanton River. Her body washed ashore and the English beheaded her corpse and displayed it on a pike. When her people saw what had become of her, they lamented the death of their queen. Hopo Kau, or Glory of the Morning, was born in 1711 on Doty Island in what is now Wisconsin. She was the daughter of the chief of the Ho-Chunk tribe and a member of the Thunderbird clan. Hopo Kau became a chief. The French were colonizing the vast territory they called Louisiana, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Appalachian to the Rocky Mountains. Fortunes were made selling fashionable furs in Europe, and the French were eager to sign trade contracts with native tribes for the furs they hunted. Around 1730, Hopo Kau married a French fur trader named Sabufois de Cary. They had a happy relationship and three children. He was well regarded among her people. In 1754, French and English colonists got fighting over hunting grounds and involved their native allies in the French and Indian War. Hopo Kau's husband was killed in battle, and she never remarried. When the British won the war, she negotiated a favorable truce. She lived to be over 100 years old. A handful of visitors to the Ho-Chunk wrote of the ancient queen who presided regally over her people. According to tradition, sometime after 1832, Hopo Kau was walking in the pines when she heard an owl call her name. That night, a raging blizzard engulfed the village, and thunder shook the homes. Hopo Kau, wrapped in furs, died with a smile on her face. It is said that the thunderbirds had called her home. Nanyahi was born among the Aniwia people, known by the English as Cherokee, in modern-day Tennessee. When she was 17, her husband was killed in a battle against the Muscogee. Nanyahi picked up his rifle and led the Cherokee to victory. Like many First Nation tribes, the Cherokee had much different gender roles than Europeans. Women were equals and had power in government. They were in charge of the vital act of farming, while men hunted. Cherokee women were also sexually equal. They could enter and leave unions freely, and were not restricted by Christian notions of shame and sin. And they controlled their own children, who took their names and inherited their property. Many European men were keen to marry Cherokee women and share in their wealth, but they often found it challenging to live with a woman who would not remain silent in the kitchen. Nanyahi married an Irish trader, Bryant Ward. She took the name Nancy and they had a daughter, Betsy. But Bryant left them and returned to his first wife. Nanyahi was awarded the title Beloved Woman and given a voting seat on the Cherokee Council. Her time living with Bryant positioned her to be an ambassador to the settlers. They were surprised that a woman had been entrusted to this vital mission, but Nanyahi was equally shocked that the American delegation had no females. In 1775, the Revolutionary War broke out. Many tribes sided with the British against the rebel colonists, who were a much more present threat to them. But Nanyahi encouraged peace. She warned settlers of planned attacks by her own people and released captured settlers. She nursed a captive pioneer woman, Lydia Bean, who in turn taught her new loom weaving techniques and how to raise cows for dairy. Nanyahi passed these skills on to other women in her community. Despite Nanyahi and her family being captured themselves, her tireless efforts eventually bore a peace treaty. This allowed the colonists in the area, called the Overmountain Men, to leave their homes and join Washington's Continental Army to defeat the British in 1783. Sacajawea was born in modern-day Idaho in 1788. She was a member of the Nui people, called Shoshone by the US. At 12, she was captured by the Hidatsa and taken to North Dakota. There she and another girl, Otter Woman, were sold to a French trapper, Toussaint Chabonneau, who forced them both into a non-consensual polygamous marriage. In 1803, the newly formed United States of America purchased imperial rights to the Louisiana Territory from the French crown. Though this area was already inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people, the US considered their land doubled and intended to send their own growing population westward to take over. President Thomas Jefferson formed the Corps of Discovery, whose objectives were to study the area's geography, flora and fauna, and to learn how it could be exploited. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were put in charge. In North Dakota, they hired Toussaint as a guide, largely because his wife spoke the Nui language. In February, 16-year-old Sacajawea gave birth to a son, Jean-Baptiste. In April, she strapped him to her back and set forth with the expedition. She proved essential to its success. The all-male group would have been treated as a hostile war party by people they encountered, were it not for the presence of a woman with a baby. When a boat capsized on the Missouri River, Sacajawea saved Lewis and Clark's journals. When they reached the Nui people, she found that their new chief was in fact her brother. He sold her horses for the journey across the Rocky Mountains. When the men ran out of food, Sacajawea taught them to find and cook camas roots. They arrived at the Pacific Ocean near the mouth of the Columbia River and made a camp for the winter, then headed back east in the spring. Sacajawea and her husband accepted Clark's invitation to settle in St. Louis, Missouri, and they had another child, Lisette. It was recorded that in 1812, Sacajawea died at 24 of a fever. Though her husband survived her, Clark adopted both of her children. However, Native American oral tradition maintains that Sacajawea did not die, but rather left her husband, crossed the Great Plains, and returned to her people. They say she lived to the age of 96, dying in 1884. Initially, the United States had good intentions of legally purchasing western land, but when native occupants weren't willing to sell, the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness crumbled. U.S. agents pulled various dirty tricks to force tribes off their land. They got leaders drunk or assigned random people as chiefs and made them sign unfair agreements, creating a bureaucratic paper trail of legally stolen land. Then settlers moved in and took over, while First Nation people were cornered into small reservations or pushed further west. In 1817, Nanyahi, now an elder stateswoman, had finally had enough of trying for peace. She sent a declaration from the Women's Council to the head men of the Cherokee Nation, demanding that they not sell a single additional acre. The men agreed, but two years later, they were forced out anyway. Nanyahi died in 1823 at the age of 85. She did not live to see the men of her nation continue their path towards conforming to European gender roles by adopting a new constitution in 1827 which stripped Cherokee women of political rights, nor did she have to watch her children and grandchildren, plus the Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw people pushed off their fertile land in the southeast. U.S. soldiers, under President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, forced 60,000 people to march 5,000 miles to modern-day Oklahoma. Up to 16,000 people died of disease, starvation, and exposure on the Trail of Tears. Not all European Americans condoned this atrocity. Catherine Beecher encouraged women to appeal to the government to stop the genocide. 1,400 women signed her petition, but as women had no vote, they had little power to stand against the growing movement of Manifest Destiny. Native Americans across the continent continued to resist. Among them were many strong women, including Pine Leaf, a Crow chief who married four women to keep house for her while she rode off to battle, and Lozen, an Apache warrior who joined Geronimo's resistance in New Mexico and Arizona, but died of tuberculosis in a prisoner of war camp. Buffalo Calf Road Woman was born to the Tutsistas people, christened Cheyenne in Montana in 1844. In the 1870s, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, so naturally the United States wanted them. The Cheyenne allied with the Lakota, Dakota, and Arapaho and went to war to protect their ancestral lands. During the Battle of Rosebud, Buffalo Calf's brother, Chief Comes in Sight, was wounded and left behind in a retreat. Buffalo Calf rode onto the battlefield at full speed, straight at the U.S. Army. She grabbed her brother and carried him to safety. Her courage rallied the Cheyenne, and they defeated the U.S. Army. They call the battle the fight where the girl saved her brother. Nine days later, Buffalo Calf fought alongside Crazy Horse at the Battle of Little Bighorn. She was an exceptional markswoman, and with her club, she knocked Lieutenant Colonel Custer from his horse, forcing him to fight on foot until he was killed. Though the Native Coalition won the battle, they ultimately lost the war and were relocated to Oklahoma. Buffalo Calf and her family joined the northern Cheyenne exodus in an attempt to return to their ancestral land. Her husband, Black Coyote, attacked two U.S. soldiers in Montana, killing one of them. He was captured and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, he received word that Buffalo Calf had died of the white man's coughing disease. In despair, he hanged himself in his cell. Susan LaFleche Picotte was a member of the Omaha Nation. By the time of her birth in 1865, her people had been forced onto a 470-square-mile reservation in Nebraska. Her parents were of mixed Native and European heritage. Susan and her four sisters spoke Omaha at home and revered their traditions, but their parents encouraged them to assimilate in ways that would help them advance. They were given English names and not traditional forehead tattoos. This was further enforced at her boarding school, which had the explicit mission of re-educating Native children to adhere to white society. When Susan was a child, she witnessed a sick Omaha woman die because a doctor refused to treat her. Native women were often healers, but few American medical schools would educate women. The Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania accepted her, but her family didn't have the money. So she wrote to the Women's National Indian Association and was awarded the first scholarship in American history. She graduated valedictorian and returned to the At 29, she married Sioux Henry Peacock, and they had two sons. He supported her financially while she worked long hours treating poor patients. Susan was an outspoken supporter of the temperance movement. Many on the reservation, including her husband, had become alcohol-dependent. She got a measure on the ballot to make her county dry, but it failed when white liquor dealers bribed Omaha voters with whiskey. Susan taught public health and sanitation to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, which killed hundreds, including her husband. She had a two-year struggle with bureaucracy to secure the land her sons had inherited, and she realized the extent of the fraud being perpetrated against her people. As a leader in the community, she helped many others secure their own property. Susan traveled to Washington to tell officials at the Office of Indian Affairs that they treated her people like children rather than citizens, and that their dependence was the government's own fault. Shortly before her death, the first private hospital on a reservation was opened and named in her honor. She died of bone cancer in 1915 at the age of 50. Zitkal Sa, meaning Red Bird, was born in 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota. She was raised by her mother after her French father abandoned them. She wrote of her childhood as a happy time, safe in the care of her mother's tribe. At 8, she was recruited to attend White's Indian Manual Labor Institute. She felt miserable having her culture stripped away, being forced to pray as a Quaker, and having her long hair cut short. But she loved to read, write, and play violin. When she returned home, she no longer felt she belonged. She rejected the school's goals of training girls to be housekeepers, and instead went to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. She traveled to the 1900 Paris Exhibition to play violin. Zitkal Sa became a teacher at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. She wrote articles for Harper's Magazine about Native American life and the indignity of the boarding school system. She opened many Americans' eyes to problems they did not know existed. She argued with her own school's administration that pupils should be prepared for more than a She returned to South Dakota to care for her dying mother, and to collect traditional stories, which she translated into two books, American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends. She married tribe member Raymond Telefaz Bonin, who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and was assigned to the Unta Ore Reservation in Utah. The couple lived there for 14 years and welcomed a son, Raymond Ohaya. Zitkal Sa continued to write magazine articles on Native issues, including why she rejected Christianity in favor of her tribe's spiritual beliefs. She and composer William F. Hansen collaborated on the Sun Dance Opera, the first Native American opera. Her husband fought in Europe during World War I. While he was away, she was appointed National Secretary to the Society of American Indians. She took her son to Washington and became even more politically active. She served as editor and contributor to the American Indian Magazine. She lectured across the country to promote the Indian Citizenship Act, which passed in 1924, giving all Native Americans U.S. citizenship, though their voting rights were not fully enforced until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She ran voter registration drives on reservations. Zitkal Sa and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926, which lobbied for Native people's civil rights. She was president of the council for 12 years. Zitkal Sa was also active in the women's rights movement. Suffragettes called attention to the freedoms and rights enshrined by Chiconese and enjoyed by women of the Iroquois Confederacy and many other indigenous groups, while arguing that all women should have these same rights. Sacajawea, in particular, was hailed as a symbol of female courage and ability. Zitkal Sa co-authored Omaha's Poor Rich Indians, a scathing report exposing American corporations, which had been systematically defrauding tribes of their land. It influenced Congress to pass the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which encouraged tribes to reestablish self-government. Zitkal Sa died in 1938 at the age of 61 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Her many contributions were largely forgotten when the NCAI was reorganized under male leadership, but her incredible work as one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century has since been highlighted and honored in a number of ways. A park, a crater on Venus, and a Google Doodle have all been named in her honor. A 2022 opera based on her life called Minagi Kin Dawon is the first sung in the Dakota language, and in 2024, Zitkal Sa's face was put on a U.S. quarter. There are many more Native American women of the past and present making important contributions to their communities and the world, but indigenous women and girls still face danger and injustice. Even today, they are significantly more likely to be victims of sex trafficking, harassment, and assault, and are six times more likely than other women to be murdered. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Movement, or MMIW, raises awareness about this ongoing tragedy. In their honor, I will be donating revenue from this video to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. They provide national leadership to end violence against Native women and children through grassroots advocacy, culturally grounded resources, assistance, training, and policy. If you would like to help too, please click the donate button in the description. Want even more tea on history? Check out the History Tea Time Podcast. If you enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe, comment your thoughts, and check out my other history videos. You can also join my Patreon to support my work and get early access to all of my multi-part series. Thank you for watching!