 The denial of American Indians' sexual identities in relation to each other has been an important element in the objectification of the Indian. Anthropology has also had a role in this. Just as emotions tend to be purged from the ethnographic record, so does sexuality. The classic ethnography contains information about incest and marriage rules, but it provides little sense of people who are active sexual beings. Frequently, Indian sexuality was classified as somehow inferior or more primitive than the refined expressions of Western love. For example, Lewis Henry Morgan, in his classic work on the Iroquois, wrote, “of that passion which originates in a higher development of the powers of the human heart, and is founded upon a cultivation of the affections between the sexes, they were entirely ignorant. In their temperaments, they were below the passion in its simplest forms.”15 The apparent denial of sexuality among ethnographic subjects reinforced a cultural tradition of viewing Indian men and women (separately) as the sexualized objects of the colonialist gaze.
The Objectification of the Indian Male
THE DOOMED WARRIOR
As Berkhofer points out, depending on the era, the Indian male has usually been seen as either the “noble savage” or his alter ego, the “ignoble savage.”16 What Berkhofer does not emphasize is that in both guises, the male image has always had a strong sexual dimension. During times of conflict between whites and Indians, Indian males became sexual threats, epitomized most clearly in that most pervasive of myths—the captivity narrative. The captivity narrative is clearly a major cultural tradition in North America that confirmed the notion of Indian as Other, whether that Other is evil or noble. As June Namias points out, the Indian, whether male or female, was not only noble and savage, but also both exotic and erotic, and all those dimensions were present even when Indian males were demonized. Part of the conception of the “primitive native” has been an often-repressed awareness of “animal sexuality.” In the colonial period, Indians were seen as wild, passionate, alluring, and blessed with a “dark beauty”: “The concoction of the noble, the wild, and the exotic appeared to whet the English sexual appetite, at the same time inspiring trepidation among several white captives.”17 Rape of white captives appears to have been rare in the colonial period; captive Elizabeth Hanson, for example, writes that “the Indians are very civil towards their captive women, not offering any incivility by any indecent carriage.”18 Nevertheless, Puritans like Cotton Mather quickly came to equate Indians with the Devil, with sexual predation taking an increasingly larger role in the image.
After the 1820S, as whites encroached further upon Indian lands, the image of the sexual brute capable of every kind of excess became more and more prevalent.19 As Namias points out, anthropological arguments for the existence of superior and inferior races helped to justify exploitation and destruction, and “proven” sexual brutality bolstered further the rationale for destroying the Indian, who appeared in endless dime novels as a huge, highly sexualized figure. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman, speaking about Erastus Dow Palmer's 1859 sculpture The White Captive, commented that “No more suggestive incident can be imagined for either poetry, romance, or art, than the fair, youthful, and isolated hostage of civilization surrounded by savage captors.”20 Captivity narratives such as Mary Jemison's, which described the love of a white captive for her Indian husband, were unusual and often required editing or glossing for publication. Jemison writes of her first husband Sheninjee: “The idea of spending my days with him, at first seemed perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings; but his good nature, generosity, tenderness and friendship towards me, soon gained my affection; and strange as it may seem, I loved him!”21 She also loved her second husband, Hiokatoo, yet in the 1856 edition of Jemison's story, editors added material that made him appear brutal and murderous. Jemison had been married to him for almost fifty years and had written not only that “he was a man of tender feelings in his friends,” but also that “he uniformly treated me with tenderness, and never offered an insult.”22 The tone of the narrative frequently changes, as the editor steps in to describe events that Jemison could not have experienced personally; during these episodes, Indians become “savages” and their cruel deeds are described enthusiastically.
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