The Secret Life of a Polygamous Cherokee Wife: Tracing Peninah Through Mormon Archival Silences

• In Event: Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Section Roundtable

Abstract

This paper recovers the life of Peninah Shropshire Cotton Wood, the first documented Indigenous woman convert to and polygamous wife of the Mormon faith. While existing scholarship mentions her only in passing, this work excavates her story from deep within white-washed archives and patriarchal storytelling to center Peninah as a strategic Cherokee actor navigating intersecting systems of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy, and religious patriarchy in the nineteenth-century United States.

Drawing on decolonial feminist historiography, critical race theory, and Indigenous studies, I reconstruct Peninah’s labor, kinship practices, spiritual life, and community leadership. I argue that while Peninah participated in Mormon patriarchal structures, she simultaneously resisted full assimilation by maintaining Cherokee matrilineal traditions, gender roles, medicinal knowledge, and spiritual autonomy. Her actions enabled not only her own survival amid Indian Removal and westward expansion but also the transmission of bicultural competencies to her descendants, many of whom later served as mediators between Indigenous communities and Mormon settlers.

Methodologically, the article employs decolonial “reading against the grain” techniques and critical fabulation to interrogate archival silences and omissions without reproducing settler epistemologies. Substantively, it contributes to sociological debates on religion, settler colonialism, and gender by reframing Indigenous women not as passive subjects of religious domination but as agents who actively shaped religious communities, racial projects, and colonial outcomes. By foregrounding Peninah’s agency, this study complicates dominant narratives of Mormon polygamy, Indigenous conversion, and nineteenth-century American religious patriarchy, and offers a model for recovering Indigenous women’s power within colonial archives.

Author

• Alyssa Calder-Hulme, University of Chicago