Fur trade and treaty records are abundantly clear that freeborn women were themselves free agents. Traders saw they actively created larger kin networks, tying their new alliances with foreign men into opportunities to strengthen their bands’ economies and political support. Aristocratic women (and First Nations recognize families who train their children to fulfill leadership roles) married high-status men, in other First Nations and among traders, to be able to negotiate with their husbands’ nations. Natoyist-Siksina (“Natawista”), a Kainai Blackfoot lady, married to trader Alexander Culbertson, was known by all as a diplomat in her own right.

Confusion sometimes arises because there were many women who had been captured and became slaves, for example Sacajawea. They did the drudge work, very visible around camps while their mistresses could sit inside tipis embroidering. Slave women were liable to rape because they had no family who would protect them. Slave raiding, as when Sacajawea and her sister were captured, and selling slaves were carried on before European invasions. Great Slave Lake and Lesser Slave Lake in northwestern Canada are so named because Cree went there to capture women and girls to sell. Contemporary First Nations people on the middle Columbia River tell that Blackfoot raided their villages to take women, while farther down the Columbia, Northwest Coast nations held men as well as women slaves. On the East Coast, Carolina colonists took advantage of the ongoing slave market to buy Indians to sell to Caribbean plantations.

The deep respect and high status of free-born women in First Nations should be recognized, and not confused with accounts of “drudge squaws” or Indian women who seemed unchaste, likely to have been slaves.