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Felicity Donohoe gives examples of ritual torture carried out by native North American women [warning: very graphic - nauseating - description follows] and gives a feminist discussion of its significance in ' "Hand him over to me and I shall know very well what to do with him": The Gender Map and Ritual Native Female Violence in Early America.' [Warning:  extracts from Felicity Donohoes' nauseating analysis and excuses for torture follow.] Felicity Donohoe is an academic at the University of Glasgow.

http://www.scottishwordimage.org/
debatingdifference/DONOHOE.pdf

'Constructing the Native American Woman

'So the wretch was handed over at once to the women who, like so many Furies, seized him and tied him to a tree trunk with his legs bound together. They built a very hot fire in front of and very near him and, seizing branches, they applied them to the sole of his feet which they had stretched out to the fire ... taking live coals and putting them on the most sensitive part of his body ... using their knives to cut him deeply ... plunging his charred feet and legs into a cauldron of boiling water, and then scalping him. They were unable to make him suffer more, because he died after the last torture. Buy they did cut out his tongue, even though he was dead, planning to force another English prisoner ... to eat it.

'The Abbé Maillard on the Mi'kmaq, c. 1740.

'Their punishment is always left to the women ... The victim's arms are fast pinioned, and a strong grape-vine is tied around his neck, to the top of the war pole, allowing him to track around, about fifteen yards. They fix some tough clay on his head, to secure the scalp from the blazing torches ... The women make a furious onset with their burning torches ... But he is sure to be overpowered by numbers, and after some time the fire affects his tender parts. They pour over a quantity of cold water, and allow him a proper time of respite, till his spirits recover and he is capable of suffering new tortures. Then the like cruelties are repeated until he falls down, and happily becomes insensible of pain. Now they scalp him ... dismember, and carry off all eteriors branches ofthe body (pudendis non exceptis), in shameful and savage triumph.

'James Adair on the Chickasaws, c. 1744.'

Dr Donohoe goes on to illuminate the challenge posed by the women's practice of ritual torture for patriarchal notions of gender. These patriarchal notions overlook the fact that by torturing captives, women were expressing certain things about themselves. According to Dr Donohoe, these were strong women, who refused to conform to conventional ideas of feminine behaviour:

'Observations of the activities were accounts of actions that did little to illuminate the purposes of the acts, or what women were expressing about themselves ...

'For observers it may have been genuinely difficult to comprehend such behaviour as having any direction or rationale, and rarely would such acts have been credited as demonstrating order or as playing an intrinsic part in the native war process ... any part in the western war process was linked to women as supporters and victims of male warfare rather than active participants in their own right ... Any female agency existed only as a consequence of, and in relation to, the primary actions of the male.

'Femininities, Moral Worth and Violent Expression

'James Axtell's 1974 article "The Vengeful Women of Marblehead: Robert Roule's Deposition of 1677" illustrates this point rather well, and shows a number of problems faced by historians when analysing eighteenth-century female violence. Although suffering heavy losses at the hands of Indians, the men of Marblehead, Massachusetts, had sailed home after a daring escape from Indian captivity with two Indian captives of their own. The women of the town had greeted the group then proceeded to attack and kill the captives, "their flesh in a manner pulled from their bones", despite the protestations of the townsmen. Roule's deposition related the colonists' capture, escape and the attack, and his description of the attack revealed a thinly-veiled, masculine disapproval of the women's actions. To Roule, the women's behaviour lacked moral worth. He referred to them as "tumultous" and complained of attacks on the white men who attempted to rescue the captives.'

...

'The Marblehead women's actions may not have been commonplace any more than ritual torture by native women was an everyday occurrence. The difference lies in the existence of ritual torture as an acceptable social tool of native warfare, part of a complex social role.

'The Abbé was stationed among the Mi'kmaq, and his quotation suggests that in some cases, rather than needing protection, native women inspired genuine fear among white men, which may have presented interpretative problems for white observers. These accounts indicate that time was devoted to the preparation of captives for torture. Areas were designated and platforms for the exhibition of the captive were constructed. Captives were examined and selected or rejected by experienced, sharp-eyed women. There was rarely evidence of compassion or "nurture" among these women at this point. Children were trained from an early age to perform such gruesome acts as amputations, encouraged to eat bodily parts of the victims, and to enjoy their torment. This could take hours or days, and unlucky captives were revived after passing out, and sometimes were forced to watch friends suffer before the same violence was inflicted upon themselves ...

'Accounts of these horrors appear in Early American narratives yet find no definitive home among histories of women or warfare. Philomena Goodman has argued that such historical marginalisation of women's war efforts was directly linked to fears that acknowledging female ability in male space undermined manliness.

...

'Had ritual torture been a very minor part of native lives, then perhaps traditional historical approaches to it would be understandable. However, the purposes of ritual torture, and the time and care devoted to preparation for the event, indicated that it held a great deal of significance for native peoples, and was considered a vital part of warfare. By extension, this suggests that the roles of native women were far more complex than presently believed, and that status, authority and power were to be found in places that colonists had never thought to look.

' ... the North Carolinian Saponi believed that failure to torture prisoners could result in supernatural punishments, such a [sic] major storm or crop failure, and invested with the blessing of the tribe and the power of the gods, women inflicting violence were obliged to make torments as unpleasant as possible for the captive and the benefit of the people.

' ... One Algonquin Indian told the Jesuit Jackues Buteax that the flesh of the enemy was "not good for eating". Burning, torturing, roasting and renaming of the victim into a relative, purified the enemy, and only then would he or she make acceptable eating. Other tribes cannibalised to absorb the enemy's power, or to show contempt, and another traveller recorded children being fed the still-warm blood of captives, while Huron women would feed enemy fingers to eager children.

' ... Torture was a spiritual battle of wills between captor and captive, and women who challenged enemies in this arena were the conduits of the tribes' true source of power - the spiritual realm. Torture established tribal superiority over the enemy, tested their spiritual worth and ultimately, furnished the means to break the power of the enemy.

All this is preceded in the article by an abstract:

'Abstract

'Native North American women occupy a relatively small portion of colonial American and Canadian historiography and often appear as handmaidens to masculine endeavour in the dynamic age of colonisation and expansion. The construction of their image relied heavily on Euro-American conceptions of recognised femininities but accounts of Native women's warfare activities challenged these preferred images of exotic temptresses or 'squaw' drudges. Much of the evidence now indicates that indigenous peoples recognised a far more complex and nuanced feminiity, and such concepts of alternative behaviour present a significant challenge to present historical (mis)constructions of native female identities.

'This discussion is not intended to suggest that ritual torture happened every time captives were brought back to a village, and neither is it stating that torture was practised by every tribe and by women only, What is clear is that almost all tribes used ritual torture that to some degree usually involved female participation, and that there was very often a female-only component. This female-only aspect of torture is worthy of examination because the very existence of such a mechanism in Indian societies can help illuminate native female experience in war. Furthermore, it can act as a "gateway" to exploring alternative female roles and interactions with European men that extended far beyond the present historical comfort zones of mother, wife and concubine.'

Dr Donohoe should be ashamed. Academics tend to avoid words which seem insufficiently measured, such as 'revolting' and 'disgusting' but words like this are no more to be shunned than other words which fit our experience. There are people who never find any use for words like 'beauty' or 'love' (except for such debased applications as 'Love me, love my conifer' (from an organization which promotes the marketing of conifers.) There are areas of our experience which call for such words as 'revolting' and 'disgusting.' Dr Donohoe's 'analysis' is one of them.