Native Americans
The Louisiana Gallery displays decorative arts and artifacts representative of the state’s historic heritage. The diversity of the Louisiana Gallery mirrors that state’s cultural and ethnic history.
From the arrival of European explorers until the onset of the Civil War, thousands immigrated to a land first occupied by small tribes of Native Americans. French, Spanish, Acadian exiles from Canada, and Africans were joined by English, Irish, and others. Each ethnic group contributed language, traditions, and customs which eventually merged into a unique and distinctive culture.
Selected graphics and paintings offer vignettes of Louisiana’s history. The remainder of the gallery contains household furnishings, and other material objects which provide glimpses of domestic life and help interpret the lives of women.
Americans have long been intrigued with their past, but only in recent years have historians looked beyond public, political, or military historical accounts to women’s history. It is not surprising, therefore, that few recognize the important role women played in the development of Louisiana. Their story is indeed a work in progress.
In their lives, women played many roles: wife, mother, instructor, cook, seamstress, nurse, household manager, and occasionally, financial provider. These roles cut across boundaries of time, place, class, ethnic heritage, and status. In charting women’s history, stereotypes abound, but the realities are far more interesting.
Graceful rivers like the Tangipahoa or Natchitoches are reminders of Native Americans who occupied Louisiana long before the arrival of French and Spanish explorers. In north Louisiana, the twentieth-century discovery of an enormous ceremonial earthwork, Poverty Point Mound, provided startling evidence of an ancient society dating about 700 B.C. Stones, materials, flint points, beans, carvings, and occasional fragments of pottery were recovered from the mounds. Some materials appeared to have been traded or imported from great distances.
The most plentiful objects recovered were small clay balls made by women and children and baked into hardened forms. Women cooked meals by placing the heated balls in food. These simple artifacts document the presence of women and their importance in sustaining family life.
Native American women passed quietly
through the world leaving little evidence of their lives. They
gave birth and cared for children, gathered and prepared food,
nourished their families, and manufactured household furnishings
and clothing. These basic tasks were essential to family
and tribal unity.
The permissive tranquility suggested in the portrait, Princess Murat, belies the story of an independent and stalwart soul. In 1826, Catherine Daingerfield Willis, great-grandneice of George Washington, married Prince Achille Murat, exiled nephew of Napolean Bonaparte, in Florida. Nine years later, the couple moved to Louisiana where Murat purchased a home in New Orleans, began a law practice, and bought an interest in a sugar plantation near Baton Rouge. All of his Louisiana ventures failed, resulting in the additional loss of his Florida plantation. Achille and Catherine returned to Florida, where Achille died in 1847. Catherine faced enormous financial obligations, but twelve years later, she had paid her husband’s debts and purchased her own home. In 1852, she was recognized as a Princess of France and awarded a substantial stipend.
Catherine Murat’s determination and drive is duplicated innumerable times in the lives of Louisiana women. One of the most striking examples is Rachel O’Connor, a woman planter who successfully managed a large Louisiana plantation for over twenty years. Rachel was forty-nine when she assumed management of Evergreen Plantation in West Feliciana Parish after the deaths of her husband and son. Both men died of alcoholism and she was haunted for years by the debts of her wastrel son. Despite recurring bouts of illness, she managed the plantation, acquired more land, and cared for the slave community with sincere devotion. Her letters reveal years filled with hard work, meticulous planning, and constant worry about the well-being of family and friends. As a planter, she succeeded where many men failed, perhaps because of her abiding love of her land and people.
Catholic nuns pioneered education in Louisiana. In 1727, only nine years after the founding of New Orleans, Ursuline nuns arrived in Louisiana to serve the sick and to teach and train the “casket girls”. These orphaned girls, who carried their belongings in caskets or small trunks, arrived from France as prospective wives of settlers.
The Ursuline Convent in New Orleans provided the best female education obtainable in the colony. Through the years, the nuns not only instructed young ladies from well-to-do families, but also housed, fed, and taught orphan girls. Sisters of the Sacred Heart founded schools such as St Michael’s Convent in Convent, Louisiana, where the small cypress desk displayed in this gallery was used.
Views about female education varied with time and circumstances. Girls were often taught at home by mothers or tutors. Some were taught by French governess or in small private schools. Others attended Common Schools in neighboring towns and boarded with family or friends.
Although fathers in isolated areas might consider female education dangerous, wealthy parents sometimes sent their daughters to France. Young ladies also enrolled in southern or eastern boarding schools, particularly as female seminaries proliferated in the nineteenth century. Regardless of circumstances, most parents viewed female education only as a preparation for marriage, motherhood, and home management.
In eighteenth and nineteenth-century
Louisiana, changing governments, immigration patterns, and dislocation
of Native Americans wrought change and growth. Despite these
outside forces, women were expected to operate and control their
household space, and provide comfort and nurture to their families.
Regardless of class or ethnicity, Louisiana women were bound by the common ties of domesticity. In a remarkable interchange of household and family responsibilities, planters’ wives were linked with female slaves in a chain of tasks. One nineteenth-century female owner described the tasks of various female slaves who cooked, nursed children, raised chickens, spun and wove fabric, churned, fed cattle, laundered, housecleaned, and worked in the vegetable garden. In turn, the mistress assisted slave mothers in childbirth, cared for these infants, nursed servants and their children in her home, and sewed clothing and other household textiles for their families.
On small farms, along with their household chores, women often milked, raised chickens, and sold eggs as a means of income. They also spun, wove, and made clothing and household textiles, or supervised servants in this task.
Louisiana women upheld the traditions and customs of their ethnic heritage and transmitted cultural values. They preserved religious faith. In remote locations with no priests or ministers, they sometimes baptized babies and provided the only religious instruction to their children. They were the dominant force in the home.
Many French cabinetmakers worked in Louisiana. In New Orleans and other urban areas, cabinetmakers also imported and sold French furniture in their shops. Farmers, planters, free blacks, or slaves who were skilled carpenters also constructed furniture or supervised others. Identical furniture forms might be constructed in native woods of cypress, walnut and cherry, or imported mahogany and rosewood.
Furniture, when interpreted in terms
of domesticity, provides glimpses of a woman’s domain. Here
the mahogany chairs and sofa suggest public space for entertaining,
visiting, and displaying one’s good taste in a hospitable
manner.
As more girls received formal needlework instruction in school, cabinetmakers fashioned the work table as specialized women’s furniture. In this gallery, one accompanies an armoire which provided safe storage for linens and clothing sewed, marked, laundered, and cared for by women. The cradle, desk, and prie-dieu recall the responsibilities of motherhood, the constancy of child care, and the earliest instructions of childhood.
Finally, the draped bed represents marriage, childbirth, illness, repose, and the grief of the death-bed. From an era of epidemics and untreatable disease, it stands as a reminder of life’s transience.