Did Native Americans cut off the noses of adulterous wives?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Re: Did Native Americans cut off the noses of adulterous wives?

I* don’t know if this is the right forum for this but I cannot imagine that pitting The Master is not ill advised…*

Cecil comes off as very defensive with his response. I think it is possible to answer a factual question about the behavior of a group of people - no matter how abhorrent that behavior might be - without being defensive and apologetic (the disclaimers about how “the human race” is equally culpable, the need to insert other nose-biters - The Nose Biters would be a good band name, but I digress)…

If someone decides that this factual information about one facet of some Native American tribes is evidence (in their minds) that Native Americans as a group/rule are a bunch of savages, well, that’s their problem, not Cecil’s.

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I certainly can’t speak for Cecil, nor pretend to read his Mind, but my guess is that he thought a simple, factual answer would be less interesting. He sometimes uses the column to wax philosophic, he often expands a simple question/answer to include other interesting bits.

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I find it amusing that the first two posters in a thread about cutting off body parts are a"left ear" and a “right hand”.

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Personally, I thought it was a good point; historically docking, branding and other kinds of mutilation have been used as punishment in all sorts of cultures (hey, it’s cheaper than prison) so it’s at least worth a footnote.

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Native Americans also had other punishments for adulterous wives and adulterous husbands. I did a report on the Cheyenne in college and remember that gang rape could- at the husband’s discretion- be the punishment for adultery, while a man who committed adultery with another man’s wife could be killed or banished with impunity. A married man who committed adultery with an unmarried woman was bound to marry her and provide for her, but rape was a capitol offense.

Abraham Mordecai was an early white settler of Alabama, referred to as “a Jew of bad character” in early histories of the state. He was missing part of each ear due to being caught committing adultery with a Creek Indian’s wife and was told to count himself lucky he wasn’t killed.

The French who settled in the southeast met almost exact opposite views of marriage among the Indians than the ones they knew at home. To the French, virginity was expected in a bride, but after marriage adultery by the man was to be expected and by the woman wasn’t the end of the world. Sex was something done in privacy with a closed door if possible and under sheets and quietly if not, and of course all children bore the father’s name but also were considered members of their mother’s lineage. The marriage was expected to last until one party died- divorce was unacceptable in most cases and reserved only for extreme cases.
To the Creek Indians, a virgin bride was no shame but it was far from a necessity or prerequisite and it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to have a child at the time of her first marriage. Once married, NO ADULTERY, repeat NO ADULTERY- it was about the worst offense you could commit other than rape. There was no real shame about having sex where others could see and hear- it was considered perfectly natural. Children belonged to the mother- period; who your father was had relatively little importance even if he was a great chief because you were a member of your mother’s tribe, not your father’s, and you did not marry within the tribe; your mother’s brothers were far more important in making connections. While adultery was a capital offense, divorce was no big deal: if you were a woman and wanted to divorce your husband, you gathered his belongings and deposited them outside of your house (which ALWAYS belonged to the woman) and that was that- he had no choice about obeying if he wanted to remain in the village. If you were a man and wanted to divorce, you simply didn’t go home to your wife- you went to your mother or sister or some female relative’s house and that was that, though it was considered proper to provide meat for her until she remarried. Both parties had to wait until one planting festival and one harvest festival passed (depending on which came first this could be a few months or almost a year) and after that you were free to remarry. The Creek chief Alexander McGillivray’s sister (and mother of the war chief Red Eagle/William Weatherford) had at least 3 husbands within about a 5 year period in the 1770s/1780s, and her mother had at least 3 over the 1740s/1750s due to this relatively casual divorce. Polygyny was allowed but it was very rare because the only way it could really work was if the brides were sisters or close relatives (since the man always moved in with the woman, no exceptions) and most weren’t willing.

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This is highly offensive, unsubstantiated and reinforces stereotypes of Native Americans.

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Please read this article then go to www.straightdope.com and www.newtimesslo.com and complain. This is not only stereotyping but racism as well. Thank you for taking the time to complain and demand an apology from these idiots.
Bear Warrior
Did Native Americans cut off the noses of adulterous wives?
May 21, 2010

Dear Cecil:

Is it true Native Americans cut off the noses of adulterous wives? Sounds like European propaganda about “savages.”

— Lisa W.

Cecil replies:

Evidently some did, which unarguably is savage behavior. But how best to define the group of savages we’re talking about? Candidates:

  1. Native Americans.

  2. The human race. Seriously, you ever hear of cocker spaniels doing this?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First the facts.

The earliest mention I can find of Native American women having their noses cut off for adultery is in a memoir by Alexander Maximilian, a Prussian prince, naturalist, and ethnographer who explored the Great Plains in the 1830s. He said this about the men of the Blackfeet tribe: “They generally punish infidelity in their wives very seriously, cutting off their noses in such cases; and we saw, about Fort McKenzie, a great many of these poor creatures horribly disfigured. When ten or twelve tents were together, we were sure to see six or seven women mutilated in this manner. The husband also cuts off the hair by way of punishment.”

Repudiated by her mate, the mutilated woman was no longer marriageable and ended her days laboring for other households — perhaps counting herself lucky she hadn’t been killed outright, as sometimes occurred. Did her paramour, meanwhile, have any appendages cut off? Not that we hear about — he might have to surrender his horse. Not a trivial sanction, maybe, but to my way of thinking not terribly comparable.

In Blackfeet society, the status of women, even faithful ones, was far from exalted. According to Maximilian, a man interested in hooking up with a woman simply agreed on a price with his intended’s father, whereupon she moved in — no formal marriage took place. If the man tired of the woman, he sent her back whence she came with her belongings. He kept the kids.

Nose-cutting of adulteresses, though hardly universal among American Indians, was fairly widespread — we have credible reports of its occurrence among the Creek, Sioux, and Navajo. In the 1870s, General George Crook reported Arizona Apache men both beat their wives and cut their noses off for infidelity. Crook tried to stop the practice by imprisoning a nose-cutting husband for a year, with unknown success. The nose wasn’t always singled out; apparently an unfaithful Creek woman could have her ears cut off instead. I’ve even seen it said the cuckolded husband might bite his straying spouse’s nose off, but admittedly this comes from a secondary source.

To this point we’re mostly seeing evidence for premise number one above, which attributes such savagery specifically to Native Americans. However, it’s not difficult to make the case for premise two: the savages here are people in general — or at the very least, male people in general. Christopher Columbus ordered his men to cut off the nose and ears of any native guilty of theft. After the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, Andrew Jackson’s soldiers cut off the noses of 557 slain Red Stick Creek Indians, and some skinned the bodies to make souvenir bridle reins. So nonnatives weren’t known for their high-class behavior either. Maximilian says white men who’d taken Indian wives punished adultery the same way Blackfeet males did. Perhaps he only meant they hacked off their hair rather than their noses, but who knows?

Instances of nose-cutting and other punitive mutilation can be found throughout the world, making it reasonable to include the entire species in the savagery indictment. In Afghanistan today, for example, cases have been reported of abusive men cutting off the ears and noses of their wives to punish various acts of perceived disobedience, or sometimes seemingly on general principle. The Afghan Taliban meanwhile threatened to cut off the ears and nose of anyone who voted in the 2009 elections. I observe no cases of Afghan women mutilating their husbands, though surely some must have grounds. On the contrary, in the few cases of Afghan violence initiated by women I’m aware of, the women set fire to themselves in protest or despair.

Getting back to Native Americans, not all tribes punished adultery brutally. Cuckolded Cherokee men, it’s said, just sent their wives away. More generally, in some tribes, women enjoyed considerable autonomy stemming from the traditional division of labor: men did the hunting and fighting, women farmed. Europeans supposedly upset this egalitarian arrangement by insisting the men take over the farming work, thus reducing women’s status. I’m not saying this makes nose-cutting the fault of the white man. I merely note that, in the long-running project of treating women like dirt, there’s lots of blame to spread around.

— Cecil Adams

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Since you don’t bother to refute a word of it, I suppose we can accept this as your acknowledgement that everything Cecil wrote is true.

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That is highly offensive, unsubstantiated and reinforces stereotypes of first time posters, and I suspect also specifically designed to promote friction between dwarves and elves.

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quosi is the second person who has registered to start a thread protesting what Cecil wrote, and I would not be surprised if there are more.

I said something like this in that thread, quosi, but as somebody who has been reading the column for years, Cecil went out of his way to say that Native Americans were no worse than anyone else when it comes to brutal punishments of women (or other groups, but a lot of the time it’s women) who violate taboos. Some contemporary groups still have things like honor rapes and honor killings, so this is not unique to Native Americans of centuries ago. He made that point at great length, to a degree that’s unusual. The OP of this thread picked up on that, too, although I don’t have a problem with the angle Cecil took.

I can understand that Native Americans are very sensitive to this kind of thing and to people using the word “savage” in particular. Here’s the thing: if this behavior went on, it’s fair to call it savage. It’s a vindictive, violent, disfiguring punishment that most of us would agree is far out of proportion to the crime. “Savage” is a percectly good word to describe something like that.

That’s if it happened. The online column, unlike the newspaper column, does list the sources Cecil used. They are here:

I don’t know if these are good sources or not because I don’t know much about Native American culture. If there are flaws with their accounts, and there might be, quosi and others should point them out. That’s what the Straight Dope is all about. [In that other thread I also posted another source that indicated the Lakota did sometimes punish women this way. They performed a religious ceremony where they were instructed not to do it/]

If this actually did happen, you don’t get to say “you can’t say that, it’s offensive,” and try to shame people into keeping quiet about it. The truth is the truth. It’s also true that people shouldn’t stereotype Native Americans based on this, but the proper way to do that is to put the practice in perspective - which is what Cecil did - and not try to suppress the information.

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Anyone who has read any history knows that savage, sadistic punishments have long been used in primitive societies to suppress behavior that the powers that be feel threatens the existing social or political order: crucifixion in ancient Rome; hanging, drawing, and quartering or burning at the stake in Elizabethan England; castration and lynching of blacks in 20th century America. As recently as the year 1800, anyone convicted of treason against the king of England could be subjected to hanging until nearly dead, then being castrated and disembowled and forced to watch those body parts being burned, before being beheaded, quartered, and gibbetted. (I will let the interested reader google the definition of those terms.) The theory underlying these punishments is the same as that underlying acts of terror or fire-and-brimstone preaching: make the punishment severe enough and people will do what you tell them to.

So savagry is certainly not limited to Native Americans living several hundred years ago. I’m not so sure that historically it has been directed primarily at women, though. In many cases, women were spared the most brutal punishments. For example, King Henry VIII beheaded several of his wives (a relatively quick, painless death if done correctly), but had their lovers (real or imagined) hanged, drawn, and quartered. Of course, there are also many, many instances of abusive behavior, public and private, toward women. Bottom line: the evidence for Cecil’s general point is depressingly abundant.