Indian Princesses and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier

by guy-kirby letts
 

    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 Indian
    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 squ*w 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 wildwest, 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." .......
Possibly meant Sacajawea?