Women and Power in Native North America

"Silence surrounds the lives of Native North American women...The wives, sisters, and mothers of the Native nations do appear in traditional ethnographies but only where they are expected, and the meanings of their lives are left to the readers' imaginations. We never hear their voices and are never told their tales" (Klein and Ackerman 1995: 3).

"The appropriate role of women has been in public dispute in Western culture for at least the last century, and the question of power and gender is, therefore, an issue. In societies where no such dispute is prominent, silence would be expected. The tendency to fill in this silence with powerlessness is the Western bias" (Klein and Ackerman 1995: 4).