Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries by Maeve E. Kane, and: Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America by Mairin Odle (review)

Reviewed by: Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries by Maeve E. Kane, and: Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America by Mairin Odle Kate Fullagar Maeve E. Kane, Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2023). Pp. 366; 12 b/w illus. , 5 maps, 15 charts. 64. 95 cloth. Mairin Odle, Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). Pp. 168; 13 b/w illus. 39. 95 cloth. Two new books focus on the way that bodily alterations—some over the skin, some under the skin—revealed the political nuances of settler colonialism in North America. Maeve Kane's Shirts Powdered Red centers on Haudenosaunee women facing European colonization, traversing three centuries from 1600 to 1900. Mairin Odle's Under the Skin covers a slightly narrower time frame, from the 1580s to the 1780s, but encompasses multiple Native American societies. Both books are densely researched and written, and each yields insights into the complexity of colonial-Indigenous interaction through the early modern period. More intriguingly, perhaps, each also yields some telling insights into the state of eighteenth-century imperial studies. Both authors begin with a discussion of a watercolor portrait of an Indigenous woman. Kane opens with "Mohawk Woman" from the 1780s, attributed to George Heriot. She suggests in her introduction that this image encapsulates "the historical reduction of non-European people to anonymous others with no histories of their own" (5). She points out that the woman in the image wears entirely European-manufactured clothing, which erases the subject's own choices, and divorces her from "any information about her own history" (5). This blankness, Kane laments, represents much of her own findings when pushing the colonial evidence about Native American people too far—usually such endeavor ends up only highlighting what has been lost or forgotten. She goes on to state that her book will End Page 381 thus not attempt to tease out the experiences of women like the one depicted, but instead will seek to "examine how and why Indigenous people like the Mohawk woman. . . have been so often rendered anonymous" (13). Odle opens with an earlier watercolor—one by John White from the 1580s. It is also of an Indigenous woman, though White's subject does not wear recognizably European garments. Rather, the focus here is on what happened under the subject's skin, rather than to it. The depicted woman is extensively tattooed on her face and arms. Odle remarks that White was, in copying these tattoos, "attempting to decipher the messages such marks might carry" (13). Odle's book, however, does not primarily pursue the colonial perception of Native adornments on Native bodies but instead studies the colonial practice of adopting so-called Native adorning customs for their own bodies. In addition to tattooing, Odle investigates scalping, intrigued by how these indelible customs were taken up by newcomers and then imbued with colonial meanings: "this book, then, " she writes, "is about embodied experience but also the creation of narratives to explain those experiences" (4). Kane, thus, claims to eschew the history of experience in her book's beginning, understanding that the attempt to do so in the case of colonized peoples is not only futile but also perhaps a symptom of colonial hubris itself. Odle is more comfortable claiming a history of experience, because she says it will be the experience of the more powerful colonists. Strangely enough, however, while both books under review here are hugely admirable and enjoyable, each seems ultimately to counter its central contention. Kane winds up attempting to speak for Haudenosaunee women to quite a substantial degree. She argues that they played larger roles in colonial America than appreciated by using trade in materials as a way of maintaining Indigenous identity and sovereignty. Correspondingly, Odle extrapolates the significance of corporeal adornment far beyond its practice. She argues that it is in the stories about the meanings of body modification that we can find the true instability of the colonial project. That neither author was entirely accurate. . .