Savage Systers

Savage Systers: Native Women, Violence, and Power in Colonial America overturns the conventional story of America’s frontier. Too often relegated to the margins of history, Native women have been cast as submissive figures, auxiliaries to the real business of men. This book dismantles that fiction. Drawing on encounters between the Creeks of the Southeast and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, Savage Systers reveals a world in which Native women wielded power through means that shocked European observers: ritualized torture, scalp dances, brutal initiation rites, even infanticide and cannibalism. Far from aberrations, these acts embodied forms of feminine authority rooted deep in tribal culture. In deciding whether a captive lived or died, whether a stranger was rejected or absorbed, Native women determined the fate of peoples and nations. By placing women at the center of the colonial encounter, this book challenges the stereotypes of Pocahontas and Sacagawea. It exposes the limits of Euro-American gender categories. Violence was not the opposite of femininity; it was one of its fiercest expressions. At once unflinching and groundbreaking, Savage Systers restores Native women to their rightful place in the history of North America: not as symbols, but as sovereign actors whose power reshaped the colonial world.