Des rapports qui existent entre les deux sexes, chez les peuples d’espèce cuivrée, du nord de l’Amér

CHAP. 15: > Of the relations that exist between the two sexes, among the peoples of the copper-colored species, of the north of America. — Of the relations between parents and their children. — Of the morals that are the consequences of these relations.

The relations that exist between the two sexes, among the natives of the north of America, resemble much more those that servitude establishes between master and slave, than those that marriage produces among civilized peoples. Physical strength being, among these peoples, almost the only recognized cause of superiority, women are debased because they are weak. Among the peoples placed furthest to the north, and among the tribes of the south whose civilization is no more advanced, their debasement is such that, in each horde, they appear to form an inferior species, little different from domestic animals. They are not admitted to take part in the dances or other amusements of the men; they appear there only to prepare and present their drinks to them [384]. They are excluded from the enclosure where religious ceremonies are celebrated; but they dance or sing around it [385]. They prepare the men's food; but they are not permitted to eat with them. Even the wives of chiefs can eat only after all the men, without excepting those who are attached to them as servants, have taken what suits them. In times of scarcity, they are counted for nothing, and sometimes they die of hunger before the men have imposed any privation on themselves. They can, it is true, subtract some part of the food they prepare; but if they were surprised committing such an infidelity, they would be severely punished for it [386]. A man would believe himself in some way dishonored if he drank from the cup from which his wife has drunk, or if, when he is seated, she passed over his legs [387].

There are, for women who have reached their puberty, certain periods when they are forbidden to dwell in the same tents as the men; they then build themselves a hut at some distance, and remain there for four or five days. As long as they are in such a state, they can neither touch the weapons or other utensils of the men, nor approach the places where they hunt or fish, nor even follow them from afar on the same path: not only do the husbands consider them impure, but they imagine that they communicate their impurity to what they touch [388]. Among certain tribes, a husband who has approached his wife within twenty-four hours, even when she is in her ordinary state, considers himself defiled, and would not dare to permit himself to touch a calumet. It is especially after childbirth that women are considered impure; their impurity lasts for thirty days if they have given birth to a boy, and forty days or six weeks, if they have given birth to a girl. During this time, they are relegated to a hut far from the men; and if the tribe is on the march, they are obliged to follow it from afar [389]. The debasement in which the women are plunged is manifested by the very appearance they present; for, while among some tribes the men offer a clean and decent exterior, the women show themselves to be of a disgusting filthiness [390].

A father considers himself the owner of his daughter: he marries her or rather he sells her, without consulting either her taste or her will; the presents he receives from the individual to whom he delivers her are only the price he has put on her [391]. A man being able to procure the means of existence for a family only when he has acquired strength and experience, parents ordinarily sell their daughters only to individuals who have reached the age of thirty-five or forty; and as in delivering them they receive their value, and moreover they relieve themselves of the care of feeding them, they sell them at the age of ten or twelve, and sometimes much earlier [392]. The parents, instead of selling their daughters, are sometimes content to rent them out to men for a certain time; for however small these tribes may be, prostitution is not rare there; the women are given over to it from the most tender age, and it is ordinarily the parents who are the agents of it [393].

A man can possess as many women as he has the means to buy or to abduct: for polygamy is practiced, without restriction, among all the copper-colored tribes of America. The plurality of wives is, among these peoples, as among all those where it is in use, the privilege of power. A chief endowed with great strength or a particular talent for fishing or hunting often possesses eight, ten, and up to twelve of them. There is, in this regard, no difference between the nations that live under the coldest climate and those that live under the hottest climate, if moreover they are not more advanced in civilization one than the other. The chiefs of the tribes who live beyond the sixty-fifth degree of northern latitude, on a soil covered with snow for nine months of the year, have as great a number of them as those who live in Florida under the thirtieth [394]. Several have only two or three; but, as it does not appear that the total number of women exceeds that of men, some are reduced to doing without, and most to having only one [395]. Polygamy is no less in use on the west coasts than it is on the east coasts or in the interior of the continent [396].

The practice of polygamy means that kinship is rarely, among these peoples, an obstacle to marriage. An individual sometimes marries two or three sisters at the same time; among some tribes, it is even enough for a man to have married the eldest of the family to be authorized to demand all the sisters. The man who loses his wife marries his sister-in-law; the woman who loses her husband is married by one of her brothers-in-law [397]. There are tribes among which a man becomes the husband of his sister, where a father marries his daughter, a son his own mother [398].

If the natives of America take several wives, it is not that they are passionate for them; they are, on the contrary, completely indifferent toward them. Whether it be that the facility they have in satisfying their nascent passions prevents their energy, or that the miseries of the savage state against which they are obliged to struggle ceaselessly prevents its development, or that the debasement of women destroys their empire, it is certain that the men feel almost no affection for them: among them, love in its greatest strength barely bears the characteristics of a simple benevolence [399]. They consider them as properties that have more or less value, according to whether they are more or less useful to them; the esteem they grant them is in proportion to the strength they have, or the labors they can perform [400]. They exchange them, they sell them, they gamble their favors; in short, they dispose of them like the vilest animals [401]. In the fights they engage in among themselves to dispute possession of them, they wait patiently for strength to have decided which is the master to whom they belong. Whatever their attachment to the vanquished, or their repugnance for the victor, they are obliged to renounce the former and follow the latter [402].

The motive for which men aspire to possess several women is to make them do the work that their position requires: those who can drag or carry the heaviest burdens are those who obtain the preference [403]. In the countries where agriculture has begun to make some progress, it is the men who give the soil its first preparation, because they alone have sufficient strength for that; but, that done, they no longer involve themselves in anything: all agricultural labors are the responsibility of the women [404]. If the men go hunting or fishing, a portion of the women are obliged to follow them there, to prepare their food, pitch their tents, carry their provisions, the game, the furs, and everything that could encumber them in their march [405]. While they are overwhelmed under the burdens they carry, the men walk free before them, with no other encumbrance than their weapons [406]; sometimes they are even on horseback, while the women carry the baggage on their backs, and their children on top of it [407]. The state of pregnancy does not suspend the labors to which they are condemned: they continue them until the moment of their childbirth, and resume them almost immediately after [408].If, on their distant expeditions, the men judge that the women they have brought are no longer necessary to them or are an obstacle to their designs, they abandon them in the middle of the forests and snows, without troubling themselves about what will become of them. The lamentable cries that the fear of getting lost in the wilderness and perishing from cold and misery wrings from these unfortunate women, far from exciting the interest of their fathers, brothers, or husbands, does not even interrupt their joy. If some show any regret, it is only for the youngest children whom they abandon with the mothers [409].

In such a state of servitude, women cannot have a will of their own; at the first sign from their master, they must obey: the slightest remark, the slightest resistance would be punished with cruel chastisements and sometimes even with death [410]. Obedience must be the same, whatever the order they receive, whether it be to follow a new master to whom they have been sold, or to nurse young bears in place of the children they have lost; for, when the men take these animals when they are too young to be eaten, it is by their women that they have them nursed, until they have acquired the proper size [411].

It seems that men who treat their wives with such contempt, who sell them, exchange them, take them back, and dispose of them like their furniture, should be strangers to the sentiment of jealousy; yet there are few peoples among whom this sentiment manifests itself with more energy and produces more terrible effects than among the natives who inhabit the northern extremity of America: all these peoples, and especially those whose country is covered with ice or snow for three-quarters of the year, are equally susceptible to it [412]. A simple doubt, especially when they are in a state of drunkenness, is enough to make them assassinate their supposed rival [413]. The peoples of the northwest who live under the same latitude, between the fiftieth and sixty-fifth degree, show themselves to be equally jealous; a man who believes his wife has been unfaithful to him is capable of stabbing her and devouring his child [414]. In upper Canada, a husband who believes his wife has committed adultery kills her or tears off her nose and ears with his teeth [415]. Jealousy appears not to exist among some peoples of lower Canada, in California, and between the tropics. If this sentiment is found there, it is so weak that Azara believed the natives were not susceptible to feeling it [416].

However miserable women may be under the power of their husbands, there is for them a still greater misfortune: that of being abandoned to their own resources. Such are the calamities attached to the state of a hunter or fisher people, that if a man happens to die, his family perishes from misery, unless another is willing to take charge of it; the death of a chief is sometimes followed by the death of six or seven women and all the children who belong to him [417]. Among some tribes, a man sometimes takes charge of the family of a friend or a brother, whose wife he marries [418]; but if no one is found to take charge of them, it is rare that they escape destruction. However, repudiation is admitted and often practiced among all these peoples [419]. The woman who is thus sent away by her husband sometimes poisons herself to shorten the duration of her sufferings, unless she is received by her parents, or finds another husband [420].

Finally, the evils that habitually weigh upon women in the state of barbarism are such that they often induce abortion, to bear the labors to which they are condemned, or to not give existence to beings as miserable as themselves [421]; sometimes also, moved by a feeling of pity, they kill their daughters at the moment they are born, in order to deliver them from the misfortunes attached to their sex [422]. The pains and fatigues they experience, and the brutality with which they are treated, destroy their constitution early, and give them, in a way, the stupidity of animals. At thirty, they are in the age of decrepitude [423]; and with the exception of the domestic duties to which they are accustomed early, says Hearne, their mind and their senses are as numb and as cold as the zone under which they live [424].

Women being delivered by their parents, at a very tender age, to men whom they have not chosen and who are ordinarily three or four times older than they, or else being the prey of the strongest men, and experiencing from their husbands only contempt and harshness, cannot have a very strong affection for them; they cannot be faithful to them either by principle of honor or by attachment; all that the husband is permitted to expect from them is obedience to his orders, and the observation of his commands, in all circumstances where there is more danger in infringing them than advantage in violating them: women can have, in a word, relative to their husbands, only the vices or the qualities of slaves, and it is, in effect, thus that their moral character is formed.

There are, however, travelers who have praised their fidelity and their attachment to their husbands; according to Lahontan, they would rather be dead than have committed adultery [425]; and, in Weld's judgment, there is no nation on earth where married women are more chaste and more devoted to their husbands [426]. This attachment and this fidelity must have appeared all the more extraordinary to these two travelers, as among the same peoples they found all unmarried women to be extremely licentious. The first says that the girls are wild, and that the boys often have their flings with them [427]. The second attributes the slowness of these peoples' progress in population to the conduct of their women. “The pernicious custom they have,” he says, “of prostituting themselves from the most tender age, cannot fail to corrupt the humors and contribute to their sterility [428].” This difference, between the conduct of girls and the conduct of women, is easily explained.

We have seen previously that there are no peoples more skilled in dissimulation and perfidy than the natives of the north of America: they know how to hide their hatred under the appearance of benevolence; they are base and flattering when, by this means, they can obtain what they could not acquire by force; and in matters of artifice and falsehood, the women surpass the men. Being ceaselessly surrounded by dangers, and the slightest cause for complaint they give their husbands exposing them to the cruelest treatments or even to death, one would have to be surprised if they did not show themselves to be submissive and devoted, whatever their secret feelings, and if they were less false toward them than they are toward strangers who have no power over them. Thus, whenever the fear they habitually experience happens to weaken, they show themselves in a completely different light.

The same women on whom praise has been lavished when they have been seen only under the influence of their husbands, manifest an unbridled license as soon as they believe they have nothing to fear from them: they show the coarseness of brutes [429]. It is sometimes even enough for their husband to be a short distance away for them to run eagerly toward strangers, and to replace the severe and fierce air they adopt in the presence of the individuals of their tribe with an animated smile, a solicitous affability, and advances too expressive for it to be possible to mistake the intention [430]. If a husband is absent, his wife ordinarily replaces him with another who demands the same submission and exercises the same tyranny over her. [431] Repudiation, so common among the tribes furthest to the north, has no other cause than misconduct, libertinism, and the mutual antipathy of the spouses [432]. The hatred of women for their husbands is sometimes so strong that it extends even to the children, and is one of the causes for which they induce abortion [433]. Men who live under a very rigorous climate, being exposed to more pains and fatigues than those who live under a temperate climate, acquire a harsher character toward the beings who surround them. Their wives are therefore obliged to show more consideration and hypocrisy; but they have less affection for them, and do not have purer morals than the women of the south [434].

The relations that exist between parents and their children are less harsh than those that exist between spouses; a man is ordinarily less brutal toward his son or his daughter than he is toward his wife. But the difficulties presented by the state of a hunter or fisher under a rigorous climate render the condition of children very miserable, and cause a great number of them to perish. The filth that covers or surrounds them, the bad air they breathe in the huts, the difficulty of giving them food appropriate to their age, the lack of treatment or care in their illnesses, and the tortures that, among some tribes, the parents make them endure to shape their heads or limbs, produce a great mortality among them [435]. However, the mothers take care of them as much as the labors with which they are overwhelmed, the inclemency of the seasons, a habitual deprivation of food, and a complete ignorance of the means to treat them will allow. When they lose them, they sometimes manifest keen regrets, although it is not always difficult to console them [436].

But the fathers are only weakly interested in their children, especially in those who do not belong to their sex; when their wives have given birth, they remain for a month or six weeks without seeing them, neither them nor their children. The reason they give for this is that these children are so ugly at birth that, if they saw them, it would be feared that they might inspire in them an antipathy that time could no longer destroy [437]. Children, among these peoples, experience none of the constraints that education renders necessary among civilized nations. As soon as they can crawl on their feet and hands, they are left to roll naked in the water, in the mud, in the snow [438]. A father, says Volney, caresses his own as any animal caresses its young. When he has tossed them about and embraced them, he leaves them to go hunting or to war without thinking of them anymore; he exposes himself to peril without worrying about what will become of them [439]. If a man repudiates his wife, he often leaves her all the children, and thinks of them no more [440].

If a father seems to barely know his children, the children, for their part, have little attachment and respect for their parents: they show affection for their mother, because she raised them, but their father is barely known to them [441]. Among the peoples who live under the most rigorous climate, as soon as a man can no longer work, his children despise and neglect him; in their meals, not only do they serve him last, but they serve him only what is worst; they give him to cover himself only the skins they have rejected, and which are the most crudely sewn. This contempt for old parents is so general that half of their old people of both sexes die for lack of care [442]. Among some tribes who live around the fifty-eighth degree, near Hudson Bay, when an individual is too advanced in age to provide for himself, his children dig a grave, place him in it, and strangle him; if he has no children to render him this service, it is rendered to him by his friends [443]; sometimes, instead of causing the old to perish by violence, they are abandoned; the same is done with the sick, although it is not without example that some are cared for [444]. But, whatever their indifference or their harshness toward their old parents, when they lose them they mourn for them, they utter lamentable cries, they cut off their fingers as a sign of despair: it is a matter of etiquette [445]*.

The conduct of children toward their old parents seems difficult to reconcile with the influence attributed to the elderly in almost all savage tribes; but there is nothing contradictory in this: we have seen that, among some tribes, women exercise a very extensive influence over the minds of their husbands, without for that being treated with more consideration; the elderly are in much the same case. Nations among whom nothing is written know nothing except by experience or by tradition: on the numerous occasions when they need to know the places where they will find game or fish, the most favorable season for hunting or fishing, the limits of their territories, the wars or treaties that have taken place with other tribes, they must consult the elders, the only ones who have experience, who know events long past, or who can foresee future events. This necessity of deferring, in a host of circumstances, to the judgment of the elderly, doubtless gives them a great influence: hence a son who despises the opinion of his father has respect for the opinion of his grandfather [446].

But this respect or this deference that is had for the opinion of the elders is without influence on their own destiny; it is a homage that the youngest render to their personal safety and to the need for their preservation, and not a sentiment of gratitude. Children, when they have acquired enough strength to provide for their needs, treat their fathers without consideration, and even beat them sometimes. They treat the other elderly in a coarse manner: they are without regard for them on all occasions when they believe they have no need of their experience [447].