French Views of Native American Women in the Early Modern Era: The Tupinamba of Brazil

Abstract

European travelers to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided their contemporaries with numerous, richly detailed accounts of Native American societies. Both the writers and the readers of this literature regarded its contents as factual, eyewitness reportage of newly discovered peoples. Present-day analyses of these travel accounts, however, continue to unravel a web of European prejudices, stereotypes, myths, legends, and even literary genres, which meshed with the travelers’ observations. Attempts to separate fact from fiction will always leave some room for doubt, since Europeans provided the only written sources. In addition to the problem of cultural bias, one must also consider the role of gender bias as a factor that influenced European conceptions of New World societies, since virtually all the explorers, missionaries, and early colonizers who provided written accounts of their experiences with the native inhabitants were male. To what degree did gender influence the perception of early modern Europeans in the New World? And especially, how did gender affect the portrayal of Native American women, and the evaluation of their roles in native society? This study will examine the attitudes of Frenchmen who went to Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; there they met the Tupinamba.