Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24.1 (2003) 1-18

The Woman's Lodge
Constructing Gender on the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest Plateau

Mary C. Wright

Gender and all manner of status and societal roles have come to be seen as constructed. People help define the categories of human groupings by their behavior, their expectations, their ideas, their resistance, and by the way they treat each other. The understanding of woman as a biologically determined being is challenged (some would say overturned) by cultural definitions resulting from human actions. And, of course, this defining of gender differs by group or culture and changes over time.

Female gender construction began at the woman's lodge among the Indigenous peoples inhabiting the Pacific Northwest Plateau at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A constellation of gender definitions, beliefs, and behaviors radiated from that place. In these woman-built structures all women passed their menstrual periods, girls' puberty rituals took place, children were birthed, baskets and other woman-produced articles were made, and teachings of what it meant to be a woman were passed from generation to generation.

The Plateau is an arid, often mountainous region drained by the Columbia, Fraser, and Snake rivers, or roughly occupying a region defined today by eastern British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, all of Idaho, and parts of Alberta and Montana. A wide range of Indigenous peoples made their home in the region, such as the Nez Perce in Idaho state, the Yakama of Washington state, and the Thompson, Lillooet, and the Okanagan in Canada. All included a woman's lodge among their buildings and their cultural practices. In a 1930s project defining the Plateau as a distinct cultural area, anthropologist Verne F. Ray found menstrual seclusion and girls' puberty rites, both sited in the woman's lodge, universal in the region. So much so, that he identified them as defining characteristics of Plateau culture. ¹

Investigating the women's lodge as a place and as space proves to be a productive approach to understanding how gender was constructed for Plateau women. Cultural geographers have long studied human spatial patterning. Feminist geographers, expanding cultural geography's study of human spatial [End Page 1] patterning, find women's use of space different from men's and women's places endowed with special meanings, protections, and practices. Applying some of the same inquiries and considerations of gender and space for non-European peoples, in this case the Indigenous peoples of the Plateau, shows the profound impact of gender on human construction of place and, visa versa, of spatial implications for the construction of gender. ²

Control of the woman's lodge indicates the overall importance of women in the society at large, even as it serves as a marker of that power. The societal and cultural importance of Indigenous Plateau women can be traced to their economic contributions and control of distribution, the strength of the bilateral kinship system (where heredity and identity are calculated along both male and female lines), equal spiritual opportunities, and other cultural markers such as mobility and access to divorce. ³ Underneath these outward manifestations of women's power in the community at large were those behaviors and beliefs constructed internally, among women themselves, in the woman's lodge. ⁴

American Indian women of the Plateau region built and controlled significant space within Native culture. ⁵ Shelter took two forms among the Plateau people. The winter lodge, built in sheltered valleys, was a pit house entered by ladders in the center, with a dugout basement and overarching rafters covered with mats and earth. The summer or traveling lodge was smaller, more likely to be circular, without the deeply depressed flooring and with a different rafter structure. Women collected marshland tules and constructed mats needed for both structures. Buffalo robes later came to replace the mat covering for some groups. Women prepared the thirty to forty robes needed for the lodge and owned them. ⁶ The lodge's robes were valued at sixty to one hundred...