 THE SCENE IS A POPULAR DRUG STORE, anywhere in the United States. In one direction is a display of cartoon images of Pocahontas, the voluptuous Indian princess. On another wall, a bright poster features a noble, Indian elder gazing toward a setting sun. A doe-eyed maiden, in flowing white buckskin, smiles enticingly from her home among the "collectable" art prints. Meanwhile, the shelves of romance novels display bare-chested, love-lorn warriors among the pirates, cowboys, and regency dandies. In contemporary popular culture, American Indians have become potent cultural symbols, and more specifically, Indian men and Indian women have come to fill separate and different places in the popular white iconography.
In this chapter, I wish to trace the development of this gendered imagery by addressing male, then female, construction. Moving from historical origins to contemporary media manifestations, I suggest that to understand the way American Indian imagery functions in contemporary white culture, we must consider how American Indian men and women have become both sexualized and desexualized, not in relation to each other, but in relation to the white gaze. I begin with an overview of the way American Indians have been represented.
Constructing the Indian: The Role of Anthropology
It is not new to point out that mass-culture images of American Indians are images created by white culture, for white culture.1 In earlier times, that alien image was feared and hated, fed by and feeding a popular culture that mythologized the massacre of whites by savage, uncontrollable Indians. The “captivity narrative,” in which honorable white women and children were degraded and destroyed by lustful savages, became a staple of popular journalism and fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and echoed on into the twentieth.2 Alongside that image, of course, has been a parallel narrative of the Indian as the noble, spiritual keeper of the land and wisdom. Whichever narrative is in the ascendancy, Indians themselves have little voice in the story. Their role is to be the object of the white gaze and the focus of white myth.
Current media representations of American Indians are understandable only if seen as the legacy of a complex mesh of cultural elements, including formal history, literature, material artifacts, folklore, photography, cartoon, art, mass media, and anthropological discourse. The work of early anthropologists among Native American peoples was crucial in codifying the idea of the Indian as Other. Their ethnographic descriptions became the core of museum exhibits, world fairs, Wild West shows, and early silent films, ultimately leading to current popular depictions.3 The anthropological convention of the timeless "ethnographic present" effectively placed Native cultures into a kind of time warp, from which, in the white consciousness, they have not emerged. From nineteenth-century tourist displays to contemporary movies, television, and romance novels, white audiences have found pleasure in the traditional clothing, nobility, and sacred rituals that anthropologists and early photographers first portrayed.
Traditional American Indian cultures are among the most thoroughly studied anywhere; overwhelmingly, these ethnographies have been of the classic, objective type, providing a wealth of detail about costume, customs, myths, and rituals, but very little sense of the people as people. This is especially true of the huge wave of "salvage ethnography" that swept across the Great Plains at the end of the last century, inspired by Franz Boas-the work of anthropological pioneers like Clark Wissler, Alfred Kroeber, Paul Radin, and Robert H. Lowie. Their goal was not primarily to understand contemporary Native cultures, but to record them before they were lost. As Dippie writes, "Ethnography was the anthropological equivalent of wilderness preservation. It drew upon the belief in the Vanishing American and substantially reinforced it."4 Volumes of American Indian ethnographies produced accounts of peoples programmed by cultural rules, calmly going about their (ultimately doomed) business.
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