Shirts Powdered Red

Beginning with a purchased shirt and ending with a handmade dress, this book shows how Haudenosaunee women and their work shaped their nations from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century. By looking at clothing that was bought, created, and remade, the book brings to life how Haudenosaunee women used access to global trade to maintain a distinct and enduring Haudenosaunee identity in the face of colonial pressures to assimilate and disappear. Drawing on rich oral, archival, material, visual, and quantitative evidence, the book tells the story of how Haudenosaunee people worked to maintain their nations' cultural and political sovereignty through selective engagement with trade and the rhetoric of civility, even as Haudenosaunee clothing and gendered labor increasingly became the focus of colonial conversion efforts throughout the upheavals and dispossession of the nineteenth century. The book offers a sweeping, detailed cultural history of three centuries of Haudenosaunee women's labor and agency to shape their nations' future.