Page 55 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER P H I L OSOPHY: AMERICAN D I S C OURSE

For westward migrants, the image of bad American Indian men and
women did little to reassure timorous white women already intimidated
by tales about the areas in which they intended to make their new
homes. If white women looked to Indian women for deliverance from
Indian men, the squaw stereotype hardly encouraged such hopes .
Because pejorative interpretations of both American Indian men and
women have persisted through twentieth-century "western" films, we
can understand from our own experience just how pernicious and dam­
aging such media treatments can be. Could we expect nineteenth-cen­
tury women to have been any less gullible than ourselves?
As women's attentions swiveled from Pocahontas and other good
Indians to representatives of bad Indians, and back again, many recog­
nized the incongruities between the two. This contradictory manner of
thinking about Indians created in the minds of women migrants a good
deal of confusion and perhaps even misgivings about their western ven­
ture. By the time they struck out for the West, they had to choose
between enigmatic visions of themselves as moral but weak, or perhaps
capable in certain situations. They also had visions of Indians as supe­
rior native beings who were friendly, kind, and courageous, or appari­
tions of inferior native peoples who were bad, hostile, and vicious .
Combined with the uncertainty in their thinking from mixed messages
they received about their own natures, roles, and responsibilities, the
equally mixed messages concerning American Indians created a tremen­
dous potential for misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
How might one expect these women to act when they met their
first Indian "other"? Most would rely on racial profiling rather than on
their own observations . They would draw on long-held stereotypes and
frame their reactions accordingly. Of course, their actions only helped
polarize racial animosities. On the other side, virtually no one offered
American Indians any information concerning the hordes of white
settlers invading their lands. Because whites judged Indians as inferior
and stupid, there were no ambassadors or outreach programs to make
cultural confrontations go smoothly. Rather, Indians, who were in reality
bright and curious, would annoy and irritate Anglo women to no end
by staring at them, touching their belongings, and asking "stupid"
questions.

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