Undergraduate Research Journal
Abstract
Women and war have existed in history since the beginning of time. Yet in most modern historical accounts, women’s participation and significance in war conflicts is not present or is severely undermined. Often the conflict itself is presented to fit an agenda of the presenter or contributor. In modern American history, students are presented with a Pilgrim thanksgiving dinner with the Algonquin and then it fast forwards roughly 100 years to the American Revolution. The rest is commonly not acknowledged. Feminist author Roe Bubar sums it up well: “The problem is the narrative is told from a nation-building perspective in which the fight for equality and democracy is specifically highlighted and made natural while the stories of the so-called ‘‘others’’ become histories that do not complement the dominant or master narrative quite so well and thus are contested, ignored, erased, and left out.”[1] The mass genocide of a nation of indigenous is often left out. Unsurprisingly, then, the stories of indigenous women are also ignored. This paper, in contrast, presents the significance of female Algonquin Native American women during King Phillip’s War (1674-1678).
The goal of this paper is to give life to indigenous women’s counter narrative through a feminist lens, accomplished by focused ethnography. Although historians have acknowledged radical violence against the Indians, only now through modern feminist gender analysis and ethnography are we able to apply recent feminist theories to determine the Puritans’ intersectional use of religion, racism, and heteropatriarchy to demonize female native populations.
[1] Roe Bubar, “Decolonizing Sexual Violence.” International Review of Qualitative Research 6, no. 4 (2013): 529.
Recommended Citation
Persson, Derek
(2022)
"Gender Analysis of King Philip's War,"
Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 26, Article 4.
Available at:
https://openspaces.unk.edu/undergraduate-research-journal/vol26/iss1/4