The Sisters of Providence, a congregation of Catholic nuns, felt exhausted by the challenges of traveling in the Rocky Mountains. In 1867, they recounted one such experience: “The tale of their voyage would seem almost fictitious. The season of spring having been later than normal, they found themselves passing through the Mountains while the snow was melting, which made the paths impracticable. They had to cross rivers by swimming on horseback, holding the necks of their horses. Other times on tree trunks, which served as rafts.”[1] Despite their willingness to endure ordeals of travel, they perceived the animals, the elements of nature, and the necessity of camping—all of them as immense challenges in their labor. The nuns were doing things that white women did not typically—or at least ideally—do in the 1860s and 1870s. On another trip, the journey left them “exhausted,” in part because they traveled not by boat or stagecoach, “but on horseback and through dark forests.”[2] The nuns saw riding horses, a common and often necessary mode of travel in the U.S. West, as gender troubled.
Despite their qualms, riding horses was often necessary in the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century; even so, the nuns had to draw a line somewhere. Their line was riding horses astride. Indeed, Mother Joseph, leader of the Sisters of Providence in the U.S. West, wrote in condemnation of nuns under her authority riding horseback astride, after hearing reports of nuns in eastern Washington Territory doing so. She queried, “Should we labor in a place where the Sisters… must ride a man’s saddle into town, transgressing a proprietary not allowed women of the world?”[3] Mother Joseph quickly forbade this “violation of modesty,” specifically riding astride and not sidesaddle.[4] This injunction rested on both racialized and classed ideas of gender that nuns brought with them from Montreal and sought to embody in the West.
In my first book, I explored Catholic nuns’ labors in the U.S. West, especially their relations with local people, the land, and settler colonialism. I demonstrated that part of the reason the Sisters of Providence insisted upon riding sidesaddle was because Native women rode astride. By framing this common and often necessary mode of travel in the U.S. West as a transgression, the nuns also convey their beliefs about their superiority relative to Indigenous women in particular. This recognition of gendered transgression was imperative for the nuns’ communal auto-hagiographies. These gendered transgressions relied on assumptions of racial superiority and maintaining clear delineations between themselves and Indigenous women; indeed, this was crucial to how these narratives worked. On one side, the nuns rode sidesaddle, while on the other, Indigenous women rode astride. The nuns’ sense of decorum refused to cross this marker, yet their choice also carries an implicit assumption of racial superiority. By riding the nuns made huge sacrifices, yet they maintained their alleged superiority because they did not ride astride like Indigenous women. One scholar describes these kinds of assertions of gendered accomplishment as “the frontier benchmark of a racially defined civilization.”[5] The Sisters of Providence rooted their gendered sacrifices in their belief in their own racial eminence and moral fortitude.
In this paper, I expand my research to examine the nuns’ relationship with horses, in the context of the horse cultures of the tribes that they lived among on the Flathead Indian Reservation, including the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend Oreille. Specifically, I think about how horses themselves, as well as the tribes’ long established relationships with horses, challenge and reorient the practices and ideas of the nuns I describe above. What can the Sisters’ anxieties about horseback riding tell us about broader tensions in the settler-colonial West, particularly regarding gender, race, and the nonhuman world?
Methodologically, the paper will be informed by religious studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, and Indigenous studies. While I have worked in these fields, I am especially looking forward to having this conversation with the scholarly community at the AAR, as I often present this research in spaces where people are not primarily considering religion in an academic fashion. By situating the Sisters of Providence within the multispecies histories of the U.S. West, I anticipate being in conversation with the above fields and contributing to broader understanding of tensions in colonial interactions with animal life.
Notes:
[1] Draft Chronicles of Providence Academy, 1867, 30.
[2] Chronicles of Providence Academy, 1866, 208-209.
[3] Letter from Mother Joseph to Mother Praxedes, 1877, Mother Joseph Correspondence, Box 9, Providence Archives, Seattle. There were laws and ordinances that sought to require women to ride sidesaddle into the twentieth century. Tracey Henshew, “ ‘Here she comes wearin’ them britches!’ Saddles, Riding Skirts, and Social Reform in the Turn-of-the Century Rural West,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Vol. 70:4 (Winter 2020): 39-53.
[4] Letter from Mother Joseph to Mother Praxedes, 1877, 219-220.
[5] Susan R. Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 71.
In this paper, I demonstrate that the Sisters of Providence insisted upon riding sidesaddle because Native women rode astride. By framing this common and often necessary mode of travel in the U.S. West as a transgression, the nuns also convey their beliefs about their superiority relative to Indigenous women in particular. I am expanding my research to examine the nuns’ relationship with horses, in the context of the horse cultures of the tribes they lived among on the Flathead Indian Reservation, including the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend Oreille. Specifically, the paper examines how horses themselves, as well as the tribes’ long-established relationships with horses challenge and reorient the practices and ideas of the nuns described above.