A Woman's Place

A Woman's Place

“I am from the Sleepy-Rock People clan, born for the Bitter Water clan,” says Laura Tohe, in a traditional Diné (Navajo) introduction that first introduces her maternal clan and then paternal clan.

It means she is born from her mother Laura Florence and for her father, Benson Tohe—an important distinction that not only is at the heart of Tohe’s Native American heritage, but also at the heart of her academic research.

Tohe is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University. She studies the role of Native American women in society. More specifically, she studies how contemporary Native people continue to maintain the strength of traditional matrilineal cultures in their daily lives, their literature, and their oral storytelling.


In the early 1950s, a young Indian woman gathered up her five small children and fearlessly walked away from a failing marriage. They went to live near her mother on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. Their home—a traditional hogan of wood poles and bark and earth—had neither plumbing nor electricity.

“With less than a high school education, my mother took a job as a cook with the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. She cooked over institutional stoves, washed heavy steel pots, and served food to boarding school students,” recalls Tohe, the oldest daughter among those five wee children.

“My mother with her trays and cumbersome pans and I with my word processor are just one generation apart.”

Tohe was born and raised on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. Because her parents were divorced, she and her brothers were raised primarily by their mother, grandmothers, and aunts. A life so heavily influenced by women role models is common in the Navajo world. Traditional Navajo culture, in fact, takes its clan identity from the female, not the male.

Changing Woman is the principal deity in Navajo religion—she gave the tribe their first clans and guidelines for how they should live their lives. She represents woman’s continual transformation through the many roles she takes on in her lifetime. Through Changing Woman, the matrilineal system of the Navajo was established.

For example, Navajo women historically owned family possessions such as the livestock, land, and house. Along with such ownership also came the responsibility to care for and maintain those possessions, Tohe explains in an article she wrote for wicazo sa review: A Journal of Native American Studies. In turn, women often would groom one of their daughters to someday inherit those possessions as well as to take on the role of caregiver.

“In the Navajo language, we don’t have a word for feminism,” Tohe says. “The Navajo people believe in the influence, the knowledge, and the wisdom that women have. As a result, Navajo women did not have to fight for their place in society. They have always been respected as leaders of their families and community. It surrounded them constantly.”

Such traditions and beliefs heavily impact the written and oral stories of Native people. Tohe incorporates lessons on history and culture into the literature courses she teaches, such as “Navajo Literature and Cultural Studies” and “Native American Women’s Literature.” She finds that her non-Indian women students, particularly, sit up and take notice when this bit of history is first introduced.

“They really enjoy learning about other cultures where women are valued and honored for who they are, rather than considered second class, not valued for the work they do, and thought of only as objects,” says Tohe. “They enjoy hearing about and reading those women’s stories.”

The Navajo are just one of many Native American tribes whose traditional religion and philosophies center on female deities and role models. Yet, despite the importance of women in Native American cultures, there are only a few books published that collect Native women’s voices. Knowing this, Tohe jumped at the opportunity when she was invited to co-edit an anthology of Native American women’s literature.

“I was raised among storytellers. I am very much influenced by hearing the stories of my family, of my ancestors, and of Navajo beliefs,” says Tohe, who draws upon such stories when writing her own poetry and prose.

“A story is our umbilical cord to the past. The experiences of our ancestors influence, in many ways, who we are and the choices we make. Those experiences, those stories, are always being repeated. So, if you don’t know those stories, then you’re at a loss. You’re an empty person.”

With this belief as a guide, Tohe solicited poetry and prose from Native women writers that “celebrated, recorded, and explored aspects and traditions of Native American women’s communities.” Her co-editor for the project was Heid Erdrich, a professor of Native American literature at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.

The anthology’s theme of community was realized not only in the writings it published, but also in the process by which those works were obtained. Mailings, e-mails, phone calls and word-of-mouth were the tools Tohe and Erdrich used to spread the word of their project. They tapped into their personal networks of friends and colleagues, as well as the broader community of Native American writers and storytellers. In the end, more than 150 manuscripts poured in from emerging and established writers across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

“We received so many wonderful manuscripts—women speaking about the complexities of their lives, their struggles, their joys, their tragedies, their loves, their relationships, their children,” says Tohe. “The hardest part of creating the anthology was deciding which stories to pick. In the end, we could only publish about 50.”

Leveraging off their theme of community, Tohe and Erdrich divided the final manuscripts into four categories for the anthology: Changing Woman, Strong Hearts, New Age Pocahontas, and In the Arms of the Skies. The categories represent the many roles a woman takes on in life, her inner strength, the stereotypes she faces, and the nuances of femininity, marriage, and romance in Native American culture.

In 2002, The Minnesota Historical Society Press published their final work, Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community.

While the anthology is now complete, the stories do not end. In the tradition of her ancestors, Tohe continues to share the compelling tales of Native American women and their communities through her creative writing, literary teachings, and academic research. Her current work in progress is a collection of poetry and stories called Talking Woman.

“It is often the women who form the backbone of their communities,” says Tohe. “Their voices, as heard through their written and oral stories, represent the transformative abilities of being female, of being changing women.”—Jessica McCann