Wife
We only know this particular woman as the wife of Mató-Tópe and the mother of young Mató-Berockä. Like most male outsiders who left written and visual records of their visits to Native communities, Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s social contacts were limited to other men, although he did describe a number of publicly observed social practices pertaining to village women. However, since Mató-Tópe held a leadership position, this woman would have supported his numakshí (“man-to-be-good”) leadership role through her labor. She also wore the coup marks of Mató-Tópe on her painted hide, marks that she would have had the rights to through kinship.
Wied-Neuwied notes on December 29, 1833 that this woman, and not Mató-Tópe, was the purchaser of various goods at Fort Clark. Women of the Awatíkihu (Five Villages) were responsible for turning the community’s raw materials—its hunted animals, skins, wood, seeds, fields, and foodstuffs—into finished products. Such processes were often long and labor intensive, punctuated by ceremonial rites, communal labors, and teaching the young. A woman’s work usually responded to or anticipated future ceremonial, kin, and clan obligations, such as mónute (food) for a numakshí’s guests, objects and feasts for burials, or the gathering of goods for óhate (society) purchases. In the matrilineal villages of the Awatíkihu, where a child’s clan and inheritance line was determined through the mother, women owned and negotiated the values of all nonceremonial property, including earth lodges, tools, garden products, and dressed hides. As the Awatíkihu was a major trade center of the continental West, it was largely the villages’ women who created and managed the goods of the alliance.
Related themes:
- Awatíkihu (Five Villages)
- counting coup
- kin
- Mató-Berockä
- Mató-Tópe
- miti ko-mne-ka (“one who is the village door”)
- mónute (food)
- pi'he (smoke)