1 Gender and Material Culture in Historical American Indian Societies Max Carocci Ever since the feminist turn in anthropology ethnographic work got enriched with detailed and balanced accounts of both male and female lives, and ideologies. Theoretical critiques of the male bias in the discipline defined a clear break from old parameters in which gender, sexuality, and sex were imagined to be co-terminus, and unproblematic. After this intellectual break, research also partially carried out among American Indians, re-articulated many of the notions that had thus far framed discussions of Amerindian genders beliefs and practices. This critical process encouraged a new way of thinking about Native North American femininities and masculinities; that is, as socially constructed as any other form gender took anywhere else in the world. Gender came to be understood as a set of cultural meanings assigned to sex differences. This radical change indicated new pathways toward a more nuanced understanding of male and female activities among American Indians, including their arts, and material culture. Some of the earliest cross-cultural studies of gender categories identified that many Native American cultures had more than two classificatory terms to describe gender identities. These terms may be variously assigned to males, females, in-between genders, and hermaphrodites (e.g. Voorhies 1975; Albers and Medicine 1983; Blackwood 1986; Whitehead, 1986). Anthropologists recorded a variety of gendered combinations generated by the variety of relationships individuals might have with people of either different or similar sex to their own (see also Lang 1998). Navajo, for example, had five genders (Thomas 1997), but most tribes in North America usually recognised three to four genders (Roscoe 1998). Gender, in fact, among many Native peoples was a malleable category. Although in most Native American languages there does not seem to exist the clear distinction between sex and gender postulated in anthropological circles, the notion that a person becomes gendered via socialisation posited in theory is however evident in all indigenous societies observed ethnographically. Through the colonial period becoming gendered in indigenous American Indian societies could happen independent of one’s sex. While numerically in most societies the great majority of people were socialised according to normative notions of gendered roles and behaviours (e.g. appropriate use of linguistic categories, set of activities performed, specific dress, prescribed social obligations etc.), there was always the possibility that this may change