Pocahontas, Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley. When we think of women in the “wild west,” these are the images that come to mind. The Indian princess is a serene, noble savage. The cowgirl is a smart-talking, gun-slinging dynamo. These stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in our popular culture that we scarcely give them a second thought. A collection of popular culture images of Aboriginal and western women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, currently showing at the Presentation House Gallery, unveils and challenges these representational stereotypes.The show features over 200 photographs, postcards, calendars and other historical images of “Indian princesses” and “cowgirls” which graphically depict the historical representation of women, race and the colonial west.
In the struggle for national identity, Canada and the United States began constructing their own creation myths and fanciful stories. For both of these countries, manufacturing a national identity involved an aggressive, if not genocidal, form of cultural appropriation of First Nations peoples and culture.
Appropriation involves strategies for occupation. This entails a reworking of both real and imagined spaces appropriate to the needs and fantasies of the occupier, as well as a fundamental need to cloak the acts of appropriation in appreciation. Unfortunately, throughout the history of colonization it has primarily been women who have been made amenable to occupation by refiguring and redrawing them in an appreciated, though stereotyped, image.
The squaw is transformed into an acceptable figure of desire by turning her into a lighter-skinned, less threatening twin—the beautiful and heroic princess—while the cowgirl is transformed into a “white savage” who transgresses both sexual and spatial boundaries. This double strategy not only masks Native peoples with European appearances, but is also used to represent the untamed nature which resides in both the frontier and white cowgirl.
The imaginary constructs found in European notions of femininity and wild savagery are grafted onto First Nations and frontier women, bringing civilization to the wild and the wild to civilization in a more palatable form. In essence, Native women become more “feminine” and white, and white frontier women become more “wild” and native.
According to Gail Valaskakis, one of two guest curators, “The discourse of the Indian as noble and savage, the villain and the victim… is threaded through the narratives of the dominant culture and its shifting perceptions of the western frontier as a land of savagery and a land of promise.” Like the cultural narratives of the western frontier which sustained them, textual representations of real First Nations peoples reveal stories of conquest and its legacies. “The Indian social imaginaries expressed in literary, artistic, academic and media images circulate in the discourse of our everyday action and events. In the conflicting power relations of different communities and interests, they work to construct identities with different ideologies and meanings that become central sites of cultural struggle,” said Valaskakis.
The images on exhibit demonstrate how First Nations identity and cultural struggle are grounded in representation and appropriation, representations which have been appropriated by others in a political process that confines the Native past as it constructs the Native future.
“The ambiguous representation of Indian women which we associate with the western frontier has been with us since the earliest colonization of the Americas,” said Valaskakis.
As representations changed, the images of First Nations women as Indian princesses who embodied mystery and exoticism began to emerge. During the post World War I era, the Indian princess is repeatedly portrayed alone in the pristine wilderness, scantily clad in a buckskin or tunic dress, sporting a jaunty feather over two long braids. Most striking, however, is that all of the models are notably white-skinned women.
The masculine transgression of cowgirls in wild west fiction depicted the romanticism of an underlying “Indian nature.” Pictures of cowgirls, adventure heroines and outlaw women were first produced for wild west, rodeo and vaudeville shows, dime novels and monograms as a means to promote sales. However, in actual frontier society, many women deliberately took on this fictional role through the act of “playing Indian.”
Playing Indian was an opportunity for white women to escape the conventional and often restrictive boundaries of society. Rodeo and wild west show cowgirls generally featured “butch” women wearing pants and performing death defying stunts on horseback. These performances mimicked the fantasy of the Native huntress and warrior as imagined in the minds of nineteenth century onlookers.
“Historically, the adventure-loving frontierswoman was explained away as an Indian ‘warrior maiden,’ then as a sexual rebel, and finally, like her counter point the cowboy, as a product of the open range,” said Burgess, co- curator.
However, the relationship between these three stereotypical incarnations is not strictly temporal. “Their respective characteristics,” noted Burgess, “existed in tension with each other, just as they do now, teasing out the gender anxieties produced by the changing sexual freedom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
Article originally published in The Peak.
Indian Princess and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier
Essays by Gail Guthrie Valaskakis and Marilyn Burgess, and one artist's project by Rebecca Belmore 1995, 83 p., 46 ill. (23 colour), bilingual publication, $20. Valaskakis’s essay proposes an analysis of historical and contemporary images of Indian princesses, while Burgess examines the myths of the cowgirl in North American culture. Belmore’s bookwork was created especially for the publication.
