POLITICAL AUTHORITY Native Women in the Southeastern United States lived in clan systems, where the five largest groups of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole had similarities to modern nation states. Within these organizations women found ways to demonstrate their political influence even though they could not hold positions of authority. Women held dominion over land and agricultural production, which gave them the ability to participate in tribal decisionmaking and political nominations. Much of the social structure of native from women, who even helped negotiate trading relationships between Europeans. Women held a large role over agricultural production and child rearing in the native societies in the Southeast.
Native Women demonstrated both formal and informal political influence. Common misconceptions of native women are that their roles confined them to agricultural work; however, they found ways to influence politics and tribal organization. Similarly to how European women during the American Revolution began to create pamphlets, newspapers, and social organizations in order to have larger political influence.
RELIGION AND INDIAN WOMEN Women played a large role throughout Native American cultures. The Tuscarora who originated along the Coastal plains of the Carolinas had creation stories where women played figures of essential importance. Symbols also represented an important part of native spirituality. The sun and moon became important symbols across a variety of early global religions; Aztecs, Egyptians and various native North Americans saw the sun as a deity. In the Algonquian, Catawba, and Cherokee religions, they understood the sun as a female figure and the moon as male. Native religions had different roles for female figures just as in social relationships, however natives gave women deities the same importance as males. For example women religious figures usually represented givers of life and fertility to the Earth.