Research Guides: NYU Reads: A Mother's Work

Note

The creation of this page was presented with immense challenges due to the lack of information both in availability and scope on Indigenous women as it relates to culture and spirituality. The shortage of information exemplifies the importance in telling the stories of all women and the crucial roles they play as mothers, daughters, wisdom keepers and protectors.

Way of the Daughter

Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Grandmothers of the Light, writes of the changing roles of women as they spiral through the phases of life, like the changing face of the moon. We begin our lives, she says, walking the Way of the Daughter. This is the time for learning, for gathering experiences in the shelter of our parents.

-Braiding Sweetgrass, A Mother's Work (p.96).

How a Native American coming-of-age ritual is making a comeback
The Ojibwe tribe is reviving a long time ritual for girls who start menstruation.
Indigenous Culture Reasserts Women’s Power Through Dance
The Flower Dance is a rite of passage ceremony in Hupa culture for girls who begin menstruation.
Her Dream: Blackfeet Women’s Stand-Up Headdresses (PDF)
Rosalyn LaPier on the use of "stand-up" headdresses among Blackfeet women. LaPier's piece is located on pages 7 through 9.

Way of the Mother

We move next to self-reliance, when the necessary task of the age is to learn who you are in the world. The path brings us next to the Way of the Mother. This, Gunn relates, is a time when 'her spiritual knowledge and values are called into service for her children'

-Braiding Sweetgrass, A Mother's Work (p.96).

Moontime
It is said that the Grandmother moon watches over the waters of the earth just like how women are regarded as keepers of the water. Learn about the Grandmother moon, its significance in the lives of indigenous women and teachings.
A child raised by many mothers: What we can learn about parenthood from an indigenous group in Brazil
In the Kraho tribe, several women come together to raise a child.
Celebrating the Power of Native Women and Native Mothers
In Native American way of life, women are regarded as sacred.
How the Women of Standing Rock Are Building Sovereign Economies
Meet the women who are fostering stronger communities, re-establishing indigenous foodways and the environment.

Books

Print Books

Empowerment of North American Indian Girls by Carol A. Markstrom
Publication Date: 2008
Empowerment of North American Indian Girls is an examination of coming-of-age-ceremonies for American Indian girls past and present, featuring an in-depth look at Native ideas about human development and puberty. Many North American Indian cultures regard the transition from childhood to adulthood as a pivotal and potentially vulnerable phase of life and have accordingly devised coming-of-age rituals to affirm traditional values and community support for its members. Such rituals are a positive and enabling social force in many modern Native communities whose younger generations are wrestling with substance abuse, mental health problems, suicide, and school dropout.
*An ebook version is available via NYU Proquest*
We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies by Cutcha Risling Baldy; Coll Thrush (Series edited by); Charlotte Coté (Series edited by)
Publication Date: 2018
Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women's coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.
*The ebook version is also available via NYU Proquest*
Sifters: Native American women's lives by Theda Perdue (Editor)
Publication Date: 2001
Theda Perdue, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.
*An ebook version is also available*
Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook by Paula Gunn Allen
Publication Date: 1992
This extraordinary collection of goddess stories from Native American civilizations across the continent, Paula Gunn Allen shares myths that have guided female shamans toward an understanding of the sacred for centuries.
*An ebook version is available via HathiTrust*
The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen
Publication Date: 1992
This pioneering work, first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of American Indian traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions.
Waterlily by Ella Cara Deloria; Susan Gardner (Introduction by); Raymond J. DeMallie (Afterword by)
Publication Date: 2009
When Blue Bird and her grandmother leave their family's camp to gather beans for the long, threatening winter, they inadvertently avoid the horrible fate that befalls the rest of the family. Luckily, the two women are adopted by a nearby Dakota community and are eventually integrated into their kinship circles. Ella Cara Deloria's tale follows Blue Bird and her daughter, Waterlily, through the intricate kinship practices that created unity among her people. Waterlily, published after Deloria's death offers a captivating glimpse into the daily life of the nineteenth-century Sioux.
*An ebook version is also available via HathiTrust*
Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Publication Date: 2003
Within every woman there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora storyteller shows how women's vitality can be restored through what she calls "psychic archeological digs" into the ruins of the female unconsious. Using multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, Dr. Estes helps women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype. Dr. Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.
*An ebook version is available via HathiTrust*

Ebooks

Lakota Woman by Dog Mary Crow
Publication Date: 2011
Mary Brave Bird grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity. With her white father gone, she was left to endure “half-breed” status amid the violence, machismo, and aimless drinking of life on the reservation. Rebelling against all this—as well as a punishing Catholic missionary school—she became a teenage runaway. Mary was eighteen and pregnant when the rebellion at Wounded Knee happened in 1973. Inspired to take action, she joined the American Indian Movement to fight for the rights of her people. Later, she married Leonard Crow Dog, the AIM’s chief medicine man, who revived the sacred but outlawed Ghost Dance.
*A physical copy is available via NYU Libraries*
Crafting an Indigenous Nation by Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
Publication Date: 2019
Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote reveals how Kiowa people drew on the tribe's rich history of expressive culture to assert its identity at a time of profound challenge. Examining traditional forms such as beadwork, metalwork, painting, and dance, Tone-Pah-Hote argues that their creation and exchange were as significant to the expression of Indigenous identity and sovereignty as formal political engagement and policymaking. These cultural forms, she argues, were sites of contestation as well as affirmation, as Kiowa people used them to confront external pressures, express national identity, and wrestle with changing gender roles and representations. Combatting a tendency to view Indigenous cultural production primarily in terms of resistance to settler-colonialism, Tone-Pah-Hote expands existing work on Kiowa culture by focusing on acts of creation and material objects that mattered as much for the nation's internal and familial relationships as for relations with those outside the tribe.
Oglala Women by Marla N. Powers; Catherine R. Stimpson (Foreword by)
Publication Date: 1988
Based on interviews and life histories collected over more than twenty-five years of study on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, Marla N. Powers conveys what it means to be an Oglala woman. Despite the myth of the Euramerican that sees Oglala women as inferior to men, and the Lakota myth that seems them as superior, in reality, Powers argues, the roles of male and female emerge as complementary. In fact, she claims, Oglala women have been better able to adapt to the dominant white culture and provide much of the stability and continuity of modern tribal life. This rich ethnographic portrait considers the complete context of Oglala life--religion, economics, medicine, politics, old age--and is enhanced by numerous modern and historical photographs.
American Indian Grandmothers by Marjorie M. Schweitzer (Editor)
Publication Date: 1999
These nine essays blend documentary history, oral history, and ethnographic observation to shed light on the complex world of grandmothering in Native America. The cultural and emotional resources of their ethnic traditions help grandmothers grapple with the myriad social, economic, cultural, and political challenges they faced in the late twentieth century. Indian grandmothers are almost universally occupied with child care and child rearing at some time, but such variables as lineal descent, clan membership, kinship patterns, individual behavior, and cultural ideology change the definition, role, and status of a grandmother from tribe to tribe. Although late-twentieth-century society often impoverishes and marginalizes them, many Indian grandmothers provide grandchildren with social stability and a cultural link to native indentity, history and wisdom.
*A physical copy is also available via NYU Libraries*

Organizations

National Indigenous Women's Resource Center
The NIWRC is a non-profit using culturally based approach to raise awareness on violence against women.
Honor the Earth
Honor the Earth is a non-profit organization calling on "water protectors" to embrace their duty and repel policies that act against the environment such as the pipeline.

Additional Resources

Rematriation Magazine
Rematriation magazine is a run by Indigenous women with the goal of empowering the voices of Indigenous women and their role as water keepers in this world.