We are Real Indians in Our Everys: Domestic Work, Wage Labor and the Making of Anthropology

In the summer of 1848, Seneca schoolteacher Caroline Parker created two sets of clothing which would come to iconically define traditional Iroquois identity and cement the foundations of American academic anthropology. Attorney and later anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan paid Parker to create sets of clothing first for his own use in playing Indian, and later to enshrine for study in the New York State Museum. Sewing during the contentious summer of 1848 as white abolitionist women met in Seneca Falls and as Parker’s own community fractured over the impending end of Iroquois women’s traditional roles in governance, Parker created a set of silk and bead trimmed moccasins, a beaded skirt, and a discordantly plain calico overdress, which she would later be photographed in as the first and most iconic image of “authentic” Iroquois dress. Though Morgan provided her with cash and requested repeatedly that she purchase the best materials available, Parker used iconic red calico treaty cloth, a statement of Iroquois femininity as inherently political, commercial, and sovereign, a statement which would be enshrined in the New York State Museum as the definition of traditional Iroquois identity as the foundations of modern academic anthropology. Parker and Morgan's relationship, in which Morgan purchased a facsimile of Indian identity and Parker used the profits from her work to fund her study of American law and government in pursuit of her nation's sovereignty encapsulates women's roles in the complex intersection of American capitalism, Indian identity and Indian sovereignty in the early nineteenth century.