Metawney of Coweta, Muscogee Women, and Historical Erasure in the Eighteenth-Century Past and Our Present

Abstract

This essay uses the brief archival glimpses we get of Metawney, a Muscogee (Creek) Indian woman, to illustrate how Muscogee women shaped their world and the Native and American Souths more generally throughout the eighteenth century. From Creation Stories and gendered labor roles to the female dimensions of politics and trade, women like Metawney were central players within every element of the Muscogee world, including Muscogee interactions with Europeans, for they were the "life-givers" whose very lives, labor, and experiences fundamentally shaped the eighteenth-century Muscogee world. This is despite the fact that Europeans rarely bothered to document the gendered contours of the Muscogee world, an archival legacy that continues to hinder scholars' understandings of Indigenous women in early America. Finally, I link this archival erasure of Metawney and other women like her to the current epidemic of violence against Native American women in the United States and Canada, i.e., the violence that has prompted the Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement.