Longtime Council Member poised to become first woman to serve as Seneca Nation President
SALAMANCA, N.Y. — Tina Abrams, a longtime councilor of the Seneca Nation of Indians and a member of the Wolf Clan, won the Seneca Party’s nomination for president on Friday, becoming the first woman the party has ever put forward for the Nation’s highest office.
The nomination, delivered at the party’s biennial caucus, does not by itself make Ms. Abrams president. The general election is Nov. 3. But in a Nation where the Seneca Party has for years swept the executive slate, Friday’s vote is the closest a woman has come to the presidency since Seneca women first regained the franchise in 1964 — 44 years after the 19th Amendment, and more than a century after a written constitution stripped them of a political authority their ancestors had exercised for generations.
Ms. Abrams, first elected to the Council in 2001 and, in 2012, the first woman named co-chair of that 16-member body, has spent a quarter-century in public life on the Allegany and Cattaraugus Territories. She chairs the Nation’s annual Veterans Powwow, sits on the Remember the Removal Committee that commemorates families displaced by the Kinzua Dam, and in 2019 served as Northeast Region vice president of the National Congress of American Indians.
In the spring she became the first Indigenous woman honored as a New York State Senate Woman of Distinction.
“I have dedicated my life to my people and my community,” she said when she entered the race in July. “As president, I will do everything I possibly can to make sure that our voices are heard, our priorities addressed, our goals accomplished, and that our sovereignty is always protected.”
The office she now seeks is one of the last elected posts in the Nation that a woman has never held.
A Power Older Than the Ballot
The irony is older than the nomination itself. Long before there was a Seneca Nation president — indeed, long before there was a United States — Seneca women were not petitioners for political voice. They were its source.
Under the Great Law of Peace, the constitution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, descent runs through the female line. Clan mothers nominate the male chiefs who sit in council, counsel them, and may depose them. Women held title to the land they farmed. Children belonged to their mother’s clan. In matters of war and peace, women could withhold the dried corn that made a campaign possible — a veto written not in statute but in the logistics of survival.
That arrangement was not a curiosity on the New York frontier. It was a working government. Lucretia Mott spent a month among the Seneca at Cattaraugus in the summer of 1848 and watched women take part in discussion and decision as the Nation remade its political order. Weeks later she helped convene the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, some 80 miles to the east. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage later pointed to Haudenosaunee women as proof that equality was not a European invention waiting to be imagined. It was already being lived next door.
The same year, the Seneca Nation of Indians adopted a written constitution modeled on the American republic: a council, an executive, courts, elections. The document was, in one sense, an act of self-preservation after the Buffalo Creek dispossession and the pressure of land speculators. In another, it was a profound amputation. Voting was reserved to men. The clan mothers’ formal power over chiefs was replaced by a ballot they could not cast. One vestige survived: no sale of Nation land would bind without the assent of three-fourths of “the mothers of the Nation.” Even the reformers could not quite write the women out of the soil.
The Long Campaign Back
Seneca women did not wait quietly. In 1848 and 1849 they petitioned for a share of treaty annuities on equal terms with men and chiefs. They spoke in council through the late 19th century. They owned land, appeared in court, and kept the household economies that the new government still depended on. What they did not have was a vote.
The first recorded council vote on women’s suffrage came in 1935 at the Allegany Council House. It failed. Referendums failed again in 1959, by 30 votes, and in 1962, by 118 to 76. The men who controlled the franchise kept saying no.
The pressure that finally cracked the wall was not only moral. It was Kinzua.
In the early 1960s the United States Army Corps of Engineers pressed ahead with a dam on the Allegheny River that would drown a third of the Allegany Territory, including the longhouse at Coldspring and the graves of ancestors, in violation of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. Seneca women staffed the committees that planned the removal, testified in Washington, and organized the reconstruction of communities that the flood would erase. The Nation asked them to do the work of citizenship while still denying them its first instrument.
Martha Flanagan of Cattaraugus, who had been turned away before, brought a petition of 162 women’s signatures to council in March 1964. “I have learned to be persistent,” she said. “I have had to wait a good long time for many of the things I have wanted, and I want this very, very much for the good of our Nation. I have been turned down before, but turning me down is like picking me up.”
On Allegany, Hilda Kettle led the effort. Rovina Abrams went door to door. Veronica Thompson, Helen Harris, Wilma Roberts, Martha Bucktooth, Miriam Lee, and a line of Pierce women from Cattaraugus — Lorenza, Carolyn, Bernice — did the unglamorous work of turning names into votes.
On May 23, 1964, the men of the Nation voted 169 to 99 to amend the constitution. Seneca women could vote. A second referendum in 1966 opened elective office. The first woman to hold one was Martha Flanagan. President George Heron, who had argued for the change as far back as the 1940s, warned his fellow men that the new voters would “make good by it.”
They did. Women have since served as clerk, as treasurer’s allies on the ballot, and in large numbers on the Council. Pauline “Snap” John and Bethany Johnson held the clerkship. Ms. Abrams became co-chair. What remained closed was the presidency — and, for a long time, the chief marshal’s star.
Women have run for president as independents. Sally Snow did so in 2016. None had ever won the Seneca Party nomination, the gate through which nearly every modern Seneca Nation President has passed.
Ms. Abrams’s family is threaded through that history. Her grandfather and her father were among the men who fought, in 1964, to give Seneca women the vote. The daughter and granddaughter of that campaign is now the party’s candidate for president.
General election will be held in November
Friday’s nomination will be read, correctly, as a milestone. It will also be read, inside the territories, as a contest over competence and faction.
Odie Porter, a councilor and vice chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, had sought the same nomination, with the endorsement of the sitting president, J. Conrad Seneca. Ms. Porter, asked earlier this summer whether a woman in the presidency would be historic, declined the premise as the whole of the story. “For Seneca people and also Haudenosaunee people, the balance of power with men and women have been equal for thousands of years,” she said. “I think it’s a matter of this is a title, and I think we have a number of women leaders who have been top leaders for a long time.”
Both things can be true. The title is new. The authority is not.
All but certain to be elected in November, Ms. Abrams will take an office invented in 1848 to look like an American governorship, and she will take it as a Seneca woman whose political lineage runs in the other direction — through clan mothers, through the mothers who had to approve the sale of land, through the women who lost the vote in the year of Seneca Falls and won it back in the year of Kinzua.
The constitution of 1848 promised “greater safeguards to the pursuit of life, liberty and” the rest of the borrowed sentence. It took 116 years to put half the Nation inside that sentence. It has taken 62 years more to put a woman’s name at the top of the Seneca Party ticket.
The general election is six weeks away. The mothers of the Nation have been waiting rather longer than that.
Be the first to comment