Jealousy
Some time ago, a young Chippewa girl conceived a violent passion for a hunter of a different tribe, and followed him from his winter hunting-ground to his own village. He was already married, and the wife, not being inclined to admit the rival, drove this love-sick damsel away, and treated her with the utmost indignity. The girl, in desperation, offered herself as a slave to the wife, to carry wood and water, and lie at her feet—anything to be admitted within the same lodge and only look upon the object of her affection. She prevailed at length. Now, the mere circumstance of her residing within the same lodge made her also the wife of the man, according to the Indian custom; but apparently she was content to forego all the privileges and honours of a wife. She endured, for several months, with uncomplaining resignation, every species of ill usage and cruelty on the part of the first wife, till at length this woman, unable any longer to suffer even the presence of a rival, watched an opportunity as the other entered the wigwam with a load of fire-wood, and cleft her skull with the husband’s tomahawk.
“And did the man permit all this?” was the natural question.
The answer was remarkable. “What could he do? he could not help it: a woman is always absolute mistress in her own wigwam!”
In the end, the murder was not punished. The poor victim having fled from a distant tribe, there were no relatives to take vengeance, or do justice, and it concerned no one else. She lies buried at a short distance from the Sault-Ste-Marie, where the murderess and her husband yet live.
Women sometimes perish of grief for the loss of a husband or a child, and men have been known to starve themselves on the grave of a beloved wife. Men have also been known to give up their wives to the traders for goods and whisky; but this, though forbidden by no law, is considered disreputable, or, as my informant expressed it, “only bad Indians do so.”
I should doubt, from all I see and hear, that the Indian squaw is that absolute slave, drudge, and nonentity in the community, which she has been described. She is despotic in her lodge, and every thing it contains is hers; even of the game her husband kills, she has the uncontrolled disposal. If her husband does not please her, she scolds and even cuffs him; and it is in the highest degree unmanly to answer or strike her. I have seen here a woman scolding and quarrelling with her husband, seize him by the hair, in a style that might have become civilised Billingsgate, or christian St. Giles’s, and the next day I have beheld the same couple sit lovingly together on the sunny side of the wigwam, she kneeling behind him, and combing and arranging the hair she had been pulling from his head the day before; just such a group as I remember to have seen about Naples, or the Campagna di Roma, with very little obvious difference either in costume or complexion.
There is no law against marrying near relations, but it is always avoided; it is contrary to their customs: even first cousins do not marry. The tie of blood seems considered as stronger than that of marriage. A woman considers that she belongs more to her own relatives than to her husband or his relatives; yet, notwithstanding this and the facility of divorce, separations between husband and wife are very rare. A couple will go on “squabbling and making it up” all their lives, without having recourse to this expedient. If from displeasure, satiety, or any other cause, a man sends his wife away, she goes back to her relations, and invariably takes her children with her. The indefeasible right of the mother to her offspring is Indian law, or rather, the contrary notion does not seem to have entered their minds. A widow remains subject to her husband’s relations for two years after his death; this is the decent period of mourning. At the end of two years, she returns some of the presents made to her by her late husband, goes back to her own relatives, and may marry again.
These particulars, and others which may follow, apply to the Chippewas and the Ottawas around me; other tribes have other customs. I speak merely of those things which are brought under my own immediate observation and attention.