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Great Father and Great Mother were titles used by colonial powers in North America during the 19th century to refer to the President of the United States, the Monarch of Canada, the King of Spain, or the King of France during interactions with indigenous peoples. Contrary to depictions in popular culture, there are no recorded instances of the terms "Great White Father" or "Great White Mother" being used, and such terms would be unlikely to have been adopted by indigenous Americans who generally did not have a concept of race. The addition of the word "white" may have entered popular lexicon via western adventure novels.
History
First Nations peoples and Native Americans most often organized themselves by clan and family; ties of kinship were considered central to intertribal relations and the understanding of tribal political power. In the Iroquois Confederacy, for instance, the relations between individual bands were metaphorically described using paternal (parent to child), or fraternal (sibling to sibling) terms to indicate the importance of two groups in relation to each other. Within this context, and to make themselves better understood during treaty negotiations, British representatives often referred to Jehovah (aka God or the Lord) as "the Great Father,"
It was also possible to refer to King George III and Queen Victoria as "the Great Father" and "the Great Mother," respectively, and to the native people as his or her "Red Children." David Laird invoked the phrase while explaining Treaty 7 to the Blackfoot:
The anthropologist Raymond DeMallie has explained that - due to the nature of Native American society - the use of kinship terms such as "Great Father" and "Great Mother" was a cunning diplomatic tactic, and not an assertion of Native inferiority. In many cases the representatives who negotiated treaties on behalf of the "Great Father" referred to themselves as the "brothers" of indigenous peoples; among some tribes it was a grave offense to refuse anything to a brother.
In the United States, the primacy of the Great Father was promoted through elaborate displays of military pageantry, the use of mystical language to describe the far-removed President, and the distribution of "peace medals" bearing the portrait of the sitting head of state (giving gifts, such as peace medals, further reinforced the paternal nature of the relationship as gift giving, in many Native cultures, was typically reserved for parent-child interaction). As in Canada, Native peoples were referred to as the "children" of the Great Father; so intense was the myth created surrounding him that chiefs brought to Washington, D.C. to meet the President often manifested symptoms of terror prior to an audience. Lean Bear, upon being presented to Abraham Lincoln at the White House, reportedly found himself suddenly unable to speak. Winnebago chief Hoowaneka recalled his audience with John Quincy Adams by explaining "I thought I was in heaven, and the old man there, I thought was the Great Spirit."
An example of an invocation of the term "Great Father" by an American official can be found in a decree given by Thomas L. McKenney to the Menominee, in which McKenney declares he has received instructions from the Great Father to appoint a penultimate chief with whom the United States could negotiate.
On occasions when territory would pass from one colonial power to another, the new power might refer to the former Great Father in past-tense, as when William Henry Harrison addressed the Shawnee, declaring that "my children, let us look back to times that are past. It has been a long time since you called the King of Great Britain your father." In the United States, additional titles would sometimes be invoked to explain the political authority of the President to Native Americans, often as a "chief" of many "fires" (fire used as a metonym for state). In 1791, for instance, Henry Knox greeted the Miami on behalf of "General Washington, the Great Chief of the Thirteen Fires," while John Adams would come to be known to the same tribe as the "Great Chief of the Seventeen Fires."