Many Faces of Gender: Roles and Relationships through Time in Indigenous Northern Communities

This is an interdisciplinary volume that addresses the dearth in descriptions and analyses of gender roles and relationships in Native societies in North America’s boreal reaches. This collection complements existing conceptual frameworks and develops new methodological and theoretical approaches that more fully articulate the complex nature of social, economic, political, and material relationships between indigenous men and women in this region. The contributors challenge the widespread notion that Native women’s and men’s roles are frozen in time, a concept precluding the possibility of differently constructed gender categories and changing power relations and roles through time. By examining the prehistorical, historical, and modern records, they demonstrate that these roles are not fixed and have indeed gradually transformed. Ideal for anthropologists and archaeologists interested in cross-disciplinary studies of gender, households, women, and lithics.