A Nation of Women
Gender
and Colonial Encounters
Among the Delaware Indians
Gunlög Fur
"Fur's use of Swedish records and her imaginative approach to the Moravian records make this book rich in new information on Delaware History and a major contribution to the literature in women's history."—Nancy Shoemaker, University of Connecticut
A Nation of Women chronicles changing ideas of gender and identity among the Delaware (Lenape) Indians from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth century, as they encountered various waves of migrating peoples in their homelands along the eastern coast of North America.
In Delaware society at the beginning of this period, to be a woman meant to engage in the activities performed by women, including diplomacy, rather than to be defined by biological sex. Among the Delaware, being a "woman" was therefore a self-identification, employed by both women and men that reflected the complementary roles of both sexes within Delaware society. For these reasons, the Delaware were known among Europeans and other Native American groups as "a nation of women."
Decades of interaction with these other cultures gradually eroded the positive connotations of being a nation of women as well as the importance of actual women in Delaware society. In Anglo-Indian politics, being depicted as a woman suggested weakness and evil. Exposed to such thinking, Delaware men struggled successfully to assume the formal speaking roles and political authority that women once held. To salvage some sense of gender complementarily in Delaware society, men and women redrew the lines of their duties more rigidly. As the era came to a close, even as some Delaware engaged in a renewal of Delaware identity as a masculine nation, others rejected involvement in Christian networks that threatened to disturb the already precarious gender balance in their social relations.
Drawing on all available European accounts, including those in Swedish, German, and English, Fur establishes the centrality of gender in Delaware life and, in doing so, argues for a new understanding of how different notions of gender influenced all interactions in colonial North America.
Gunlög Fur is Professor of History at Växjö University, Sweden.
University of Pennsylvania Press Cloth Aug 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4182-2 | $39.95 | 280 pages | 6 x 9 | 17 illus. A volume in the Early American Studies series
Colonialism in the Margins: Cultural Encounters
in
New Sweden and Lapland
by Gunlög Fur
This
book explores Swedish encounters with American Indians in the New Sweden
colony on the Delaware River during the second half of the seventeenth
century. To place Swedish-Indian interactions in perspective a
comparison is made with Swedish-Saami colonial relations during the same
time period. These were two expressions of Great Power ambitions that
place Sweden firmly within the context of European colonialism, but also
meant the two outstanding examples of Swedish encounters with indigenous
populations. Focus is on issues of land ownership and transactions, on
trade, and on cultural encounters. 
The book is of particular interest to historians of colonial encounters in America and Sweden, but also in a larger context concerning European colonialism and its heritage today.
About the author
Gunlög Fur, Ph.D. (1993) in History, University of
Oklahoma, is Associate Professor of History at Växjö University in
Sweden. She has published on colonial encounters and gender in Northeast
America and Northern Scandinavia.
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Power on the Periphery
Chapter 2. Interaction in the North
Chapter 3. Swedish Overseas Expansion
Chapter 4. Rightful Owners—The Swedish Colony and Indian Land
Chapter 5. Two Kinds of Middlemen
Chapter 6. Strangely Kept and Protected
Chapter 7. Alignments—The Interim Years
Chapter 8. Stories—Swedish Colonial Encounters in a Comparative
Perspective
Bibliography
Index
Readership
Historians and ethno-historians interested in colonial America, northern
Scandinavia, and the colonial heritage of early modern Europe as well as
general readers with an interest in the Swedish colony and Indian
history.
Publication year: 2006 Series: The Atlantic World
ISBN-13 (i)The ISBN (International Standard Book
Number) has been changed from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007: 978 90
04 15316 5
ISBN-10: 90 04 15316 0 Cover: Hardback
Number of pages: xii, 300 pp. List price: €
99.00 / US$ 139.00