Page 54 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER O N E

horse. Cody also made a point of setting up a separate camp for Indian
performers and, at the end of shows, inviting audience members to stroll
around, talk with Indians, and view "Indian life." 1 2 6
Indian reformers opposed Cody mightily. Although they stopped
him from displaying the scalp and headdress, they never won their
campaign against the use of "show " Indians. They maintained that
Cody and other W i ld West entrepreneurs represented Indian men as
savage warriors and women as passive yet cruel squaws, destroying the
Indian Bureau's work in turning Indian men and women into produc­
tive and "civilized" people. Reformers especially feared that viewers
would believe Cody's claims that his W i ld West presented Indians as
realistic rather than recognizing them as actors who not only never
died, but sold souvenirs and programs after shows. Reformers even
criticized the establishment of an Indian village on every show lot,
saying that these villages gave white visitors inaccurate impressions of
Indian life. 1 2 7
Cody recognized, however, that people wanted Indian attacks on
wagon trains, burning cabins, and scalping, and Cody the businessper­
son had to keep his eye on the bottom line. Thus were Anglo girls and
women treated to vivid but inaccurate characterizations of the native
peoples they would meet in the West. Many an impressionable little girl
carried into adulthood her memories of tomahawks and scalp locks,
expecting on her trip west to see them at any moment.
In other words, white people created the simplistic category of
"Indian." In a monumental act of cultural appropriation, whites took
such images as the warrior, the Indian pony, and the buffalo and shaped
them to fit whites' ideas of the Indian "other." During the late nine­
teenth and early twentieth centuries, white women who wanted to
"help" Indian women gain self-sufficiency through their crafts also com­
mercialized in the white marketplace such Indian symbols as baskets and
pots. Indians who were not allowed to be politically sovereign were
. 1 8
stripped of their cultural sovereignt y 2 Representing Indians and their
world had been subsumed by whites. As the O j ibway Lenore Keeshig­
T o bias said in 1990: '''Indian' is a term used to sell things-souvenirs,
cigars, cigarettes, gasoline, cars . . .. 'Indian' is a figment of the white man's
imagination." 1 2 9