The nose wasn’t always singled out apparently an unfaithful Creek woman could have her ears cut off instead. Crook tried to stop the practice by imprisoning a nose-cutting husband for a year, with unknown success. In the 1870s, General George Crook reported Arizona Apache men both beat their wives and cut their noses off for infidelity. Nose-cutting of adulteresses, though hardly universal among American Indians, was fairly widespread - we have credible reports of its occurrence among the Creek, Sioux, and Navajo. If the man tired of the woman, he sent her back whence she came with her belongings. According to Maximilian, a man interested in hooking up with a woman simply agreed on a price with his intended’s father, whereupon she moved in - no formal marriage took place. In Blackfeet society, the status of women, even faithful ones, was far from exalted. Not a trivial sanction, maybe, but to my way of thinking not terribly comparable. Did her paramour, meanwhile, have any appendages cut off? Not that we hear about - he might have to surrender his horse. Repudiated by her mate, the mutilated woman was no longer marriageable and ended her days laboring for other households - perhaps counting herself lucky she hadn’t been killed outright, as sometimes occurred. The husband also cuts off the hair by way of punishment.” When ten or twelve tents were together, we were sure to see six or seven women mutilated in this manner. He said this about the men of the Blackfeet tribe: “They generally punish infidelity in their wives very seriously, cutting off their noses in such cases and we saw, about Fort McKenzie, a great many of these poor creatures horribly disfigured. The earliest mention I can find of Native American women having their noses cut off for adultery is in a memoir by Alexander Maximilian, a Prussian prince, naturalist, and ethnographer who explored the Great Plains in the 1830s. Seriously, you ever hear of cocker spaniels doing this?īut let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But how best to define the group of savages we’re talking about? Candidates:Ģ. Evidently some did, which unarguably is savage behavior.
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