"Periodical Habits": Native American Women, Movement, and Menstruation in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast

Abstract: This article approaches Native American women's menstruation in the eighteenth-century Southeast by centering women as historical actors. Relying on the movements of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Choctaw women, rather than white outsider's descriptions of menstruation, reveals a diversity of Indigenous experiences. Eighteenth-century colonists described Native practices of strict seclusion in menstrual huts. Yet Native American women traveled hundreds of miles away from menstrual huts on a regular basis. These women's movements mean alternate practices of menstrual care existed. Menstrual separation was a set of practices that fit within long-standing Indigenous cultural ideas about the power of gendered blood and specific uses of space during menstruation. Menstrual separation could involve the use of menstrual huts but also included practices of separation that served the many Native women who were members of hunting, war, diplomatic, and intertribal traveling parties throughout the eighteenth century.