Historical Heroines by Rosenberg Michelle; Picker Sonia D.; & Sonia D Picker

Author:Rosenberg, Michelle; Picker, Sonia D.; & Sonia D Picker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2018-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Madam Sacho (18th Century)

So where are the Iroquois (or the Haudenosaunee to use their preferred name)? What did they have to say? What did the women have to say?

Unfortunately the scant stories that exist are mostly written from the colonists’s perspective. It is difficult to hear the Haudenosaunee women, including Madam Sacho, who illuminated a particularly dark episode in the colonisation of Native America and Canada.

During the American Revolution under the leadership of the much-revered (slave-owning) George Washington there had been a slew of violent, brutal skirmishes between the colonists and the Iroquois. In addition many Native Americans had chosen to help the British and were proving to be a tenacious threat to the luscious green pastures of the brand new American dream. The colonists’ response, known as ‘Sullivan’s Campaign’, was ruthless, cruel and wantonly destructive. The campaign may have been spearheaded by Major General John Sullivan, but it was given the go-ahead by Washington.

Of course the situation was not black and white or indeed red, white and blue. It was a bitter campaign fought between desperate people and fear doesn’t lend itself to flowers and trust circles. It followed a series of bitter raids during which the Native Americans had pitilessly ravaged settlements killing men, women and children.

Fear was very much at the heart of this devastating strategy. Washington’s men were ordered to raze every Iroquois settlement to the ground, to kill the men, burn the crops and carry off women and children in the hope that they would run away or be cowed into submission. Although most fled, it was an unrelenting destruction of crop pastures that the colonists were hoping to farm themselves.

It was in an abandoned settlement that an old, wizened woman appeared before a group of soldiers. She was alone in a village that was the Native American version of the Mary Celeste, utterly deserted, kettles hanging above fire pits and life set to pause. Some men wanted to kill her but respect for her age and gender prevailed. With the help of an Oneida interpreter, she told the troops that her village had held a council in which the men said they must flee, although some women wanted to stay and guard the crops but in the end they left. She told the soldiers that the women had gone towards Seneca Lake. None of this answered why she was there alone but the men left her with food and shelter despite being low on rations themselves – perhaps burning those crops wasn’t the smartest idea.

Why was she there? Perhaps she planned to misdirect the soldiers to a false location whilst her people sought safety in a different direction. Certainly, she told them that many of the women had gone towards Seneca Lake and almost 400 men went searching to no avail. Thanks to a limited patriarchal imbued imagination, the men would have failed to credit some ‘poor old dear’ with the influence and nous to stay and misdirect the army, if that was her reason.

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