Abstract
Thus most turn-of-the-century ethnographic studies represented little improvement over earlier descriptions of American Indian women's lives recorded in the journals, diaries, and letters of Euro-American travelers and traders. In her study of these texts, Katherine Weist finds remarkable consensus about the role and status of Northern Plains Indian women. Most of these men described American Indian women's work as "menial" and viewed the women themselves as "beasts of burden," "slaves," and "brutes" who were "sexually lax," "uncultivated," and "inferior" and who lived a life of "barbarism" and "drudgery" (Weist 29-31). Weist's study of government documents likewise reveals that government agents referred to the women's nomadic life as "degraded" and "savage" (37), basing their judgments on their own notions of womanhood, which required a stable home and hearth (and ignoring the government's own role in the Indians' "removal"). By the late nineteenth century, American Indian women's lives were almost universally seen as an affront to the "cult of true womanhood,"(6) which was characterized by the "virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity" (Weist 38). Turn-of-the-century Euro-American popular art and literature mirrored these attitudes. It is important to note, however, that American Indian women had not always been represented in such negative terms, as Annette Kolodny's analysis of sixteenth-century explorers' accounts reveals. Because they were gracious and friendly toward the European men who landed on their shores, the women were viewed as emblematic of a landscape filled "`with love and kindness and...as much bounty,'" as one English captain put it, and thus were integral to a cherished fantasy of "harmony between man and nature" (Kolodny 5, 4). Even when that dream failed in reality -- the land/woman was violated -- it was perpetuated in the arts, with the American Indian woman represented as a member of royalty. Rayna Green traces the image of Indian Queen back to the late sixteenth century when artists began to use her "full-bodied, powerful, nurturing but dangerous" figure as a symbol of the "earthly, frightening, and beautiful" New World ("Pocahontas Perplex" 702, 701). As the colonies moved toward independence, the image of Queen was transformed and Americanized into the "less barbarous," "distinctly Caucasian" Princess (702), a figure who was drawn in classical lines and pictured with symbols of liberty and Colonial America.(7) Another, equally limited, model of the American Indian woman existed at the other end of the spectrum, however. In the nineteenth century, the American Indian woman was often constructed as "Squaw": a "dark," "savage," "fat," "lewd" woman whose vices were "drunkenness, stupidity, thievery" and who served as a "mere economic and sexual" convenience for men (711). These dichotomized images -- Princess/Squaw; Aristocrat/Savage; Virgin/Whore; Powerful (dehumanized) Symbol/Powerless (still dehumanized) Slave -- persisted into the twentieth century, making it impossible for the American Indian woman to be seen as real.