Radcliffe: "A Company of These Women"

Date: 

Thursday, November 5, 2015, 4:00pm

Location: 

Sheerr Room, Fay House, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge

Digital Methods and Silence in the Archives of Native Women's History

Lecture by Maeve Kane, assistant professor in the Department of History, University at Albany

In 1679, a Seneca woman, Ossissijinja, bought a coat for her husband and a shirt for her Oneida grandson. These indigenous kinship ties were recorded as part of an exchange with a Dutch trader in British New York, briefly mentioned as part of the emerging early modern Atlantic culture of credit. Ossissijinja appears in no other documentary records, an absence that is not unusual. The records in which indigenous women do appear as individuals are difficult to fit into broader analyses. “A Company of These Women: Digital Methods and Silence in the Archives of Native Women's History” explores three late 18th-century networks of social relationships between indigenous people and the ways in which digital methods can be used to examine the archival erasure of indigenous women.