Page 211 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R ONTI E R PL A C E : G E N D E R MATTERS

to such alliances, which resulted in the use of the epithet "squaw man,"
receive trifling or sympathetic handling in the media.
White woman-native man relationships, however, must have raised
the anxieties of white men. If a white woman chose to marry a native
man, what was the attraction that influenced her decision? White
women would not gain status, wealth, power, or the approval of soci­
ety. Could it be that white women f o und attractive and just the sup­
posedly inferior native male?188 W o rse yet, was it possible that white
women chose Indian mates or pined f o r their native husbands because
these men were sexually competent and virile? Media raised this ques­
tion by occasionally eroticizing Indian men. By the late nineteenth­
and early twentieth centuries, white women of Victorian purity read
captivity narratives, in which the Indian male's prowess was unspoken
yet powerful. 189 If white men acknowledged this possibility, their views
of their own superiority would slide. Loss of white men's superior sex­
uality would be equivalent to loss of control. White men might have to
admit that Indian men were not so inferior after all, thus destroying the
primary rationale f o r their anti-Indian policies. If, indeed, women were
drawn to elements of native life and to individual Indians, white men
would have to add to their list another f e ar related to Indian men. 190
T y pically, white men dealt with this issue by denying the existence or
the validity of white f e male-native male liaisons. Just because white men
ignored the situation, it did not go away.
What of the missionary woman married, in legal and religious
terms, to an Indian man? Where are the media treatments of such
women as Elaine Goodale Eastman?Where is the saga of a f e male settler
who becomes the wife of an Indian and the mother of "half-breed"
children W ? hen nineteenth-century media dared to broach this theme,
it described f e male captives who wished to return to Indian husbands
and children. The explanation f o r such behavior was that these women
had been dehumanized by contact with American Indians or that they
were ashamed to f a ce white society because of their debasement. When
late twentieth-century media considered the topic in such movies as
Soldier Blue and Tell Them Willie Boy I s Here, however, it was with a tinge
of shame and censure f o r those involved. For instance, in 1909 in
California, Willie Boy had to flee the reservation because the agent

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