Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries by Maeve Kane (review)

Maeve Kane’s Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries examines Haudenosaunee material culture and gendered labor from contact with settlers in the seventeenth century through the creation of academic anthropology with its focus on Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Kane argues that across these three centuries, Haudenosaunee women adapted material culture and political practices to ensure their nation’s survival in the face of intensified American colonial pressures. Successfully centering gender as a category of analysis while avoiding tropes of Indigenous history as a series of ruptures and breaks with tradition, Shirts Powdered Red illustrates the centrality of women’s domestic and political work to Haudenosaunee self-determination in multiple eras.