Wives and Husbands: Gender and Age in Southern Arapaho History

Abstract

The anthropologist Loretta Fowler has written extensively on the dialogic relationship between culture and historical experience as exemplified by the Arapaho people, one of the few tribal nations of the Great Plains who possessed an age-graded society, with formal social rankings that structured people's lives from birth to old age. While Native American societies generally revered age and privileged elderly persons, the Arapahos’ age-graded social organization concentrated political, economic, and religious power in the hands of the elderly to an unusual degree, while encouraging younger persons to progress through the age rankings that would eventually reward them with personal esteem, political influence, and ritual authority. In Wives and Husbands, Fowler considers the interplay between age grading and gender. Anthropologists have long conducted fieldwork in Arapaho communities, and Fowler ably mines the resulting trove of field notes, oral interviews, and publications. Her analysis decisively reshapes our understanding of the culture of the Southern Arapahos, the portion of the tribe that moved to an Indian territory reservation after suffering attacks by American military forces (most infamously the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864). While anthropological studies have emphasized how Arapaho men navigated the opportunities and restrictions of an age-graded society, Fowler locates abundant evidence of the equal sociopolitical and ritual importance of Arapaho women. This ethnographic analysis of the Southern Arapahos offers a needed corrective to long-standing depictions of Plains Indian life. In contrast to a male-centered society that valorized hunting and warfare and relegated women to the disempowered sidelines, Fowler finds that Arapaho men and women inhabited a world predicated on gendered partnerships. Arapahos understood the institution of marriage as creating an enduring partnership in which a man and woman not only mutually supported a household but also jointly advanced through the age-graded ranks, obtaining complementary forms of status, prestige, and leadership. She further observes that not only did women advance through age-graded social ranks as men did but each gender also relied upon, and in fact needed, the other for that advancement. Arapaho wives and husbands thus formed a very different type of social unit than the conjugal unit of Anglo-American society, then or now. This analysis alone is worth the price of the book, as Fowler urges anthropologists and historians to reconsider evaluations of the so-called Plains buffalo-cultures as concentrating all power in male hands while devaluing women.