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).

Women must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing.
-Hélène Cixous, France, 1976

Wikipedia

The Internet has revolutionized the world. It has created a free and easy way to access information. However, it can be hard to sort through all of the information available. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page tries to solve this problem by providing one comprehensive systematic place to go to find out information on many topics. With, according to Wikipedia, more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 7.9 million articles in 253 languages Wikipedia is an active and vibrate community. With the policy that anyone can edit its articles, Wikipedia grows quickly however it also has problems with vandalism. These problems are usually easy to spot and be corrected. However, a greater problem is the editors’ viewpoint being promoted instead of balanced research.