CHAPTER 33

The Construction of a Negative Identity

Kim Anderson

Kim Anderson (Cree Métis) is an associate professor of family relations and applied
nutrition at the University of Guelph. She is well known for her book A Recognition of
Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, which was followed by Life Stages and Na-
tive Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine. Anderson has conducted several
research projects in collaboration with the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship
Centres (OFIFC), most recently on projects about Indigenous knowledge transfer in ur-
ban communities, and gender and life stage factors in urban Indigenous governance.

Princess, Princess, calendar girl, catcalls, and the landscapes with names like “Squaw
Redskin temptress, Indian pearl. Valley.” Where do the Indian princess and squaw
Waiting by the water images come from? How did they become so wide-
For a white man to save. spread, and how do they affect the day-to-day lives
She’s a savage now remember— of contemporary Native women?
Can’t behave! 1 As I explored these questions, I discovered that
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.

both the Indian princess and the dirty, easy squaw

T hese lines, taken from Monique Mojica’s play

Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, capture the
essence of how Indigenous women in the Americas
are stereotyped: as sexual temptresses, aligned with
nature, savagely promiscuous, and in need of salvation
from the white man. Every North American is famil-
iar with the imagery and connotations of the Indian
princess and the “squaw,” and as Indigenous women
of the twenty-first century we continue to endure the
Halloween Pocahottie costumes, the “dirty squaw”
were invented and then reinforced because they proved
useful to the colonizer. The Indian princess upholds
settler entitlement to the land as she is the one who
invited the white man in. The “uncivilized” squaw
justifies the violence involved in this process. To me,
these images are like a disease that has spread through
both the Native and the non-Native mindset. In trac-
ing this development, I hope to highlight a renewed
understanding of Native womanhood that will help
us to recover our strength, self-esteem, and dignity.

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 308  Part 3  Gendered Identities
ROOTS OF A NEGATIVE
FEMALE IMAGE
In both Western and Indigenous frameworks, Native
women have historically been equated with the land.
The Euro-constructed image of Native women,
therefore, mirrors Western attitudes toward the
earth. Sadly, this relationship has typically developed
within the context of control, conquest, possession,
and exploitation. The Euro-Canadian image of Native
women has been constructed within this context and
has evolved along with the evolving relationship of
European people to this continent.
When they first arrived on Turtle Island in the
sixteenth century, Europeans produced images of
Native womanhood to symbolize the magnificent
richness and beauty they encountered. This was the
phase of the great mother, the Indian Queen. Cherokee
scholar Rayna Green described the personification of
“America” typical to this period (1575‒1765):
Draped in leaves, feathers, and animal skins,
as well as in heavy jewelry, she appeared ag-
gressive, militant, and armed with spears and
arrows. Often she rode on an armadillo, and
stood with her foot on the slain body of an
animal or human enemy. She was the familiar
mother-goddess figure—full bodied, power-
ful, nurturing but dangerous—embodying
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the wealth and danger of the New World.2
“Exotic, powerful, dangerous and beautiful,” this
Native female symbol represented both “American
liberty and European virtue,”3 but as the European
settler became more familiar with the land, the queen
was demoted. Colonial claims to the land would work
only if the queen became more accessible, less pow-
erful, and within the grasp of the white man. Out of
this need, the “Indian princess” was born. The queen
was transformed from a mother-goddess figure to a
girlish-sexual figure, for who can own a mother or
dominate the gods?
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 308
“Indian princess” imagery constructed Indigenous
women as the virgin frontier, the pure border wait-
ing to be crossed.4 The enormous popularity of the
princess lay within her erotic appeal to the covetous
European male wishing to lay claim to the “new”
territory. This equation of the Indigenous woman with
virgin land, open for consumption, created a Native
female archetype that, as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has
pointed out, could then be “used for the colonizer’s
pleasure and profit.”5
Richard Slotkin’s work offers valuable insights
into how such fantasies of border crossing underpin
settler/invader identity building and nationalism in
the United States. He writes about the myth of the
American frontier, where the white hero must cross
the border into the lands of the “primitive” where he is
regenerated through acts of violence.6 These notions of
border crossing, possession, and achieving a sense of
renewal and belonging are dependent on the conquest
and consumption of Native women and are ubiqui-
tous in North American his-story and storytelling.
They have been promoted through other popular
his-storical characters like Sacajewea, the Shoshone
woman who purportedly led explorers Lewis and
Clark into the interior of the North American
continent.7 In Canada, we have Tekakwitha, the
seventeenth-century “Mohawk Saint” who is eroti-
cized by the white males who have written about her
because she represents another version of transfor-
mative borderlands.8 Further abroad, the story is the
same. In her essay connecting Pocahontas in North
America, Malintzin in Mexico, and Krotoa in South
Africa, Pamela Scully writes: “The overly sexualized
native woman surfaces in the sources of European
exploration in places as diverse as North America, the
South Pacific, East Indies and West Africa.”9
The erotic image of Native female as “new” ter-
ritory to be conquered persists to this day. You need
only glance at posters of Walt Disney’s Pocahontas to
be confronted with a contemporary example of this
archetype. We see a voluptuous yet innocent-looking
Native (but not too Native) “girl,” who will soon be
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 Chapter 33   The Construction of a Negative Identity   309
conquered and consumed by the adventurous young
white male. In her book Killing the Indian Maiden:
Images of Native American Women in Film, M. Elise
Marubbio points out that images of the princess and
sexualized maiden persist into films she reviewed
into the 1990s, and that the end of the story typically
involves the death of the Native woman.10 Chris Finley
has written about the problematic representation of
Sacajawea in the 2006 film Night at the Museum,
where Sacajawea is “a Celluloid Maiden character that
loves white men and aids in conquest.”11 While it may
be possible to interpret characters like Pocahontas
or Sacajewea as strong Indigenous leaders,12 the
mainstream interpretation of these mythic characters
is quite the opposite: Native women (and, by asso-
ciation, the land) are “easy, available, and willing”
for the white man, and conquest, consumption, and
disappearance are the end result.13
Whereas the Indian princess has been popular
and has a long history, her “darker twin,” the “squaw,”
is also ubiquitous.14 As with other colonial his-stories,
once Indigenous peoples began to resist colonization,
new archetypes emerged. Indigenous women world-
wide became symbols of the troublesome colonies,
and in the Americas the squaw emerged. Carol
Douglas Sparks has traced the princess-to-squaw
devolution in colonizer accounts of the Navajo.15 The
virgin-princess, so commonly found in white male
adventurer records of the nineteenth century, is soon
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
transformed. While the princess held erotic appeal for
the covetous imperial male wishing to claim the “new”
territory, the squaw drudge justified the conquest
of an uncivilized terrain: “Americans found squaw
drudges far more comfortable than these outspoken
and powerful women, whose presence defied colonial
rationalizations. Not only could the squaw be pitied,
but her very existence justified American intrusion
into her land and society.”16
In her book, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of
Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West, Sarah Carter
demonstrates how both the Canadian state and the
national press deliberately promoted “dirty squaw”
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 309
imagery in the late 1800s.17 At the time of settler
invasion in western Canada, “dirty squaw” fiction
was useful for a number of reasons. The uncivilized
squaw provided a backdrop for the repressive measures
against the Native population of the time. Like the
men who were depicted as savage warriors, the women
were reported to be “violent instigators of atrocities”
(against whites),18 thereby justifying colonial violence
against Indigenous peoples. The image of the Native
woman as the beast of burden in her society was drawn
up to demonstrate the superiority of European wom-
anhood and femininity (after all, white women did not
“labour”), and the necessity for replacing Native wom-
anhood with European womanhood. David Smits has
written about how “the squaw” was thus constructed
in contrast to the civilized, white “Victorian lady.”19
As Native peoples were increasingly forced off
their homelands, and women lost their status and
role as producers within the economic structure of
their societies, they were further cast as lazy and
slovenly. Women were no longer able to provide for
their families because they had lost the means to
produce primary goods, such as clothing and food.
They became dependent upon purchased goods and
an economy in which they held no power. The dirty
squaw conveniently took the blame for the increasing
poverty in Indigenous communities and deflected
attention from government and public complicity
in the devastation of Indigenous peoples. If Native
women were constructed as “squaws,” dirty, lazy,
and slovenly, it was faster to cover up the reality of
Native women who were merely struggling with the
increasingly inhuman conditions on reserve:
In the unofficial and unpublished reports of
reserve life … it was widely recognized that
problems with reserve housing and health
had little to do with the preferences, temper-
ament, or poor housekeeping abilities of the
women. Because of their poverty, the people
were confined in one-room shacks, which
were poorly ventilated and were impossible
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 310  Part 3  Gendered Identities
to keep clean because they had dirt floors
and were plastered with mud and hay. One
inspector of the agencies noted in 1891 that
the women did not have soap, towels, wash
basins, or wash pails, nor did they have any
means of acquiring them. Similarly, it was
frequently noted that the women were short
of basic clothing and had no textiles or yarn
to work with. Yet in official public state-
ments, the tendency was to ascribe blame to
the women rather than drawing attention to
conditions that would injure the reputation
of government administration.20
Similarly, if Native women were portrayed as
poor parents, it was then excusable for the state to
remove Native children and place them in residential
schools and foster homes.
Native female sexuality was also transformed into
the “squaw” who was “lewd and licentious” and mor-
ally reprehensible. This representation was projected
onto Native women to excuse the mistreatment they
endured from white settler males. Within the context
of late nineteenth-century morality, it was easier to
blame Native women than to challenge the behaviour
of the heroes on the frontier. The narrative espousing
how “easy” Native women were was developed to
cover up the fact that white males were involved in
unmarried sexual activity and that state officials were
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
perpetrators of sexual assault. This tactic is common
in rape cases and is well entrenched in the Western
consciousness: blame women for the sexual deviance
of certain men. As part of the Native woman-blaming
campaign, the Toronto Daily Mail of February 2, 1886,
railed: “The character of the men of this country has
been assailed.”21
The squalor of the media-driven uncivilized easy
squaw was further intended to guard against interra-
cial marriages, thus protecting racial “purity” in the
new country: “There were fears that the Anglo-Celts
might be overrun by more fertile, darker and lower
people, who were believed to be unable to control
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 310
their sexual desires.”22 The moral reform movement
of the late 1880s in the West embraced images of the
dirty squaw in an effort to keep the races segregated
and to keep the white race pure. The dirty, dark
squaw not only justified the deplorable treatment
of Indigenous peoples, she also created a gauge
against which white femininity could be measured
and defined. Where Native women were powerful
physical workers, white women were encouraged
to be weak and frail. The Native woman thus was
reinvented as a drudge. Where Native women had
sexual liberty, white women were restricted from
pleasure. The Native woman was then perceived as
easy. Where Native women resisted the increasing
restrictions and poverty of reserves, white women
were expected to be models of domesticity, indus-
triousness, and obedience. The Native woman had
to be reconstructed as deficient in order to prop up
the image of the white woman.
Since contact with the Europeans, Native women
have been trapped within a dichotomous world view,
where everything is either good or bad, dark or light,
pure or corrupt. The Euro-constructed Indigenous
woman with her dark ways, her squalor and corrup-
tion makes the construction of whiteness all the more
attractive in the North American subconscious. In
terms of female identity, the Native woman must
endure the Western framework of virgin-whore,
which was translated to princess-squaw and slapped
on top of the complex understanding of Native wom-
anhood that had existed for tens of thousands of years.
This his-story continues to interfere with the lives of
contemporary Native women.
GHOSTS OF THE SQUAW
AND THE PRINCESS
The majority of Native women will tell you that they
have been called a “squaw”; this label has been applied
to Native women right across North America. There
are accounts from women of nations as widespread as
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 Chapter 33   The Construction of a Negative Identity   311
the Mi’kmaq (Rita Joe) and the Pawnee/Otoe (Anna
Lee Walters).23 Native girls begin to hear racial/sexual
slurs from an early age, often before they even under-
stand the terms themselves. Anishinaabe professor
Shirley Williams says she remembers hearing white
boys singing, “Squaws along the Yukon aren’t good
enough for me.” The boys would follow up with,
“Would two dollars be enough?,” playing on the myth
that Native women are “easy.” […]
The “squaw” remains alive and well in the North
American imaginary. The February 2, 2015, cover of
“Canada’s National Magazine,” Maclean’s, featured
a photo of Cree writer and broadcaster Rosanna
Deerchild, with the caption “They call me a stupid
squaw, or tell me to go back to the rez.”24 Deerchild
notes that she is harassed every few weeks on the
streets of Winnipeg, stating “someone honks at me, or
yells out ‘How much’ from a car window.”25 This squaw
image is not only stamped on the North American
subconscious when it comes to Native women, but
also on land, place, and products such as “squaw
brand sifted peas” and “Siwash squaw apples.”26 In
her article “The S-Word: Discourse, Stereotypes,
and the American Indian Woman,” Debra Merksin
writes that she found 4.8 million hits in a Google
search of the term squaw, and that “most are linked
to resorts, casinos or about landforms.”27 Efforts on
the part of Indigenous peoples and allies to change
such labelling are often resisted. Merskin points out
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
that Native Americans have not had the same success
at changing stereotypes as other marginalized groups
and that the racist and sexist messages in this labelling
reify “the hierarchical position of dominant Euro-
American culture by controlling access to resources
and power.”28 […]
When negative images of Native women are so
ingrained in the North American consciousness that
even children participate in using them, it is easy
to see how Native women might begin to think of
themselves as “easy squaws.” Janice Acoose describes
how these negative images affected her consciousness.
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I learned so passively to accept and inter-
nalize the easy squaw, Indian-whore, dirty
Indian, and drunken Indian stereotypes that
subsequently imprisoned me, and all Indige-
nous peoples, regardless of our historic, eco-
nomic, cultural, spiritual, and geographical
differences.… I shamefully turned away from
my history and cultural roots, becoming, to a
certain extent, what was encouraged by the
ideological collusiveness of text books, and
the ignorant comments and peer pressure
from non-Indigenous students.29
Many Native female writers—including Joanne
Arnott, Beth Brant, Maria Campbell, Janet Campbell
Hale, Beatrice Culleton, Paula Gunn Allen, Lee
Maracle, and Anna Lee Walters30 —have provided
accounts of how they or other Native women have
fostered destructive and hateful attitudes toward
themselves. This self-hatred is rooted in internalized
racism, which comes from the negative self-concepts of
racist stereotypes like the squaw. Internalized racism
spreads like a disease through Native communities.31
It makes us doubt the validity of the existence of our
people, and thus ourselves.
Whereas the squaw is overtly negative, the Indian
princess can be trickier to unpack. This is because the
Indian princess today is often disguised as the honour-
ing of an Indigenous female icon. In 2000, the United
States released the “Sacagawea dollar,” a commem-
orative coin, demonstrating the Shoshone woman’s
“eagerness to lead the way.”32 In other instances,
commemoration of the archetypical “Indian maiden”
involves adopting her identity. Rebecca Blevins Faery
has written about her experience of going to Pocahontas,
Iowa, to witness the opening of Disney’s Pocahontas.33
At this event, the white settlers of the town dressed up
in beaded headbands, sang pioneer anthems, and sold
white-looking dolls of Pocahontas. Where does such
an inclination come from? Indigenous scholars such as
Phillip Deloria and Shari Huhndorf have documented
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 312  Part 3  Gendered Identities
how North American traditions of “playing Indian”
allow settlers to claim a sense of entitlement to the ter-
ritory and assuage negative feelings about the violence
that has facilitated their occupation.34 Too often we
find ourselves confronting these situations. I remember
being taken off guard by a Pocahontas number at one
of my daughter’s dance shows—an honour that made
me want to crawl under the seat. But at least I had the
advantage of having read Indigenous and other critical
race theorists to know why it feels so wrong to be faced
with such images.35
Although the Indian princess can appear in such
manifestations as children’s Halloween or dance cos-
tumes, she is more often than not sexualized. As with
the squaw, this imagery validates racist attitudes about
the promiscuity and sexual availability of Indigenous
women. This understanding finds its way into our lives
and our communities. Sometimes, it means constantly
having to fend off the advances of people with an
appetite for the “Other.”36 It may involve a continual
struggle to resist crass, sexualized interpretations of
one’s being. It often involves violence, or the threat of
rape. In her autobiography, Métis performing artist
and writer Morningstar Mercredi tells a story that
demonstrates the connection between sexualization
of Native women, settler conquest and consumption,
and nationalized identity. She writes about living in
western Canada, where “walking down most city
streets guarantees a proposition”37 and recalls being
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
solicited by a white worker in an oil camp, who tells
her “They say you’re not a real Canadian till you’ve
had an Indian woman.…”38
Plains Cree/Métis professor Emma LaRocque
asserts that “the dehumanizing portrayal of the squaw
and the over-sexualization of Native females such as
Disney’s Pocahontas surely render all Native female
persons vulnerable.”39 After telling me, “Since child-
hood, I have had to walk through a maze of racist and
sexist assaults on me,” she told me a story that offered
a striking image of the perceived worthlessness of
Native female existence as it has too often been under-
stood by the dominant society:
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My first experience of when I was conscious
of this kind of assault happened when I was
about ten years old. I was sitting in a café
in my hometown, reading a comic book, as
I [was] wont to do. Minding my own busi-
ness. I don’t know where my parents were,
but I just remember a big, fat, red-faced white
guy coming in. Leering at me. I don’t even
think I could identify what that look was
because I had been so safe at home and in my
community. I had never been attacked, and
I didn’t know what on earth that was. This
guy, he throws a quarter. I still remember,
and I still see that quarter rolling right past
my Coke bottle. He threw a quarter and he
said, “Want to go for a ride, little squaw?”
LaRocque acknowledges the danger she was in
at that moment, and how racist stereotypes endanger
Native girls and women: “To this day, I am profoundly
grateful he did nothing else. He could have just picked
me up and taken me away. Nobody would have known
the difference.” She asks, “Where do these men get off
on attacking little children, teenagers, regular-aged
women and grandmothers? It has to come from some
conditioning, some horrendous sociological, racist,
and sexist conditioning, to be so inhumane to your
co-human beings. It is really stunning.”
Negative images of Native women, whether
in historical accounts, anecdotes, jokes, movies, or
Canadian literature,40 are at the root of stories like that
of Helen Betty Osbourne, a sixteen-year-old Native
woman who was picked up by four white men and
brutally raped and murdered in The Pas, Manitoba,
in 1971. This story remains fixed in the conscious-
ness of many Native women as it demonstrates how
mainstream society interprets violence against Native
women, especially when it is committed by whites. In
my conversation with Gertie Beaucage (Anishinaabe),
she pointed out that Osbourne was killed because she
was expected to be “easy,” and yet she resisted the
sexual assault of the white men who attacked her.
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 Chapter 33   The Construction of a Negative Identity   313
As Emma LaRocque has further pointed out, “In
the minds of ‘good boys who did bad things,’ it is not
the place of ‘squaws’ to resist white power, especially
power snakily connected to the male ego.”41
The Osbourne case eventually received a mod-
erate amount of publicity because of the injustices
it represented. There are, however, many more
Native women’s tales that would reveal the min-
imal worth placed on Native female lives. In our
conversations, Lee Maracle (Sto:lo) and Catherine
Martin (Mi’kmaq) have demonstrated to me that the
notion that Native women are there for the sexual
taking has been acted out from one side of the con-
tinent to the other. Maracle recalls her childhood on
the West Coast:
In my village, every single weekend …
men came into the village, picked up little
children, took them to the gravel pit, raped
them—sometimes killed them—and were
never prosecuted. I personally was chased
in automobiles by white men. And when
I went to swear out a complaint, they said
it was in my imagination. I had charged a
white man with assault, and I was called not
a credible witness. Those things happen in
our personal lives.
Maracle attributes this to the “permission that
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
white society gave to white men to enter our commun-
ities, murder, pillage, rape, and plunder us at will.” […]
Hereditary Wet’suwet’en Chief Theresa Tait lives
in central British Columbia. When I spoke with her
about this issue, she told me that in the previous dec-
ade there had been at least five Indigenous women
who had been killed in her local area, with little
investigation and next to no media coverage about
these incidents. In the years since I first spoke with
Tait, Indigenous women and their allies have worked
diligently to raise awareness and demand action to
address the travesty of the more than 1,000 cases of
missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada,
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 313
and the lack of attention to the issue. In spite of
reports by Amnesty International (2004), the Native
Women’s Association of Canada (2009), and the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (2014) and countless
efforts of grassroots activism, the Canadian state has
only recently begun to address missing and murdered
Indigenous women as an issue warranting immediate
investigation in the form of a national inquiry.42
Native women seeking justice against the violence
in their lives are overshadowed by the image of the
squaw. In her study of how race figures into sexual
abuse trials, Sherene Razack notes that Indigenous
women are treated as “inherently rapeable” because of
assumptions made about Native female promiscuity
and the insistence that a rape victim who has passed
out because of alcohol is considered to have suffered
less of a violation.43 A Native woman who is drunk is
deemed particularly unworthy of humane treatment,
and Native women who are involved in abusive rela-
tionships may not feel comfortable calling the police
in the case of domestic violence because they may
be seen as “at fault,” or deserving of the abuse.44 As
recent evidence has proven, calling the police might
put an Indigenous woman’s safety further at risk.
In 2011, for example, a northern Manitoba Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer arrested
an intoxicated Indigenous woman, but then took her
out of her cell and brought her home “to pursue a
personal relationship.”45 According to the RCMP
adjudication documents obtained by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), “Fellow officers
teased and goaded him by text message to see ‘how
far he would go,’” and his senior officer told him “You
arrested her, you can do whatever the f--k you want
to do.”46 For this, the offending officer was given a
“reprimand” and docked seven days’ pay.47
As Indigenous women’s testimony here and
elsewhere indicates, these violent, racist, and sexist
practices are not isolated incidents, nor are they
historical. In 2013, the international organization
Human Rights Watch released an 89-page report
entitled Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive Policing
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 314  Part 3  Gendered Identities

Figure 34.1: The Triangle of Oppression

Dominant ideas, assumptions, and values

“EASY SQUAW”

Structures, systems Individual behaviour

(courts, health care system) (name calling, sexual abuse)

Impact on Native women’s lives

(low self-worth, violence, sexual abuse)

and Failures in the Protection of Indigenous Women and
Girls in Northern BC, detailing, among other abuses,
physical and sexual assault on Indigenous women by
the police.48 The connection to stereotypes is evident
when considering their findings that “At times the
physical abuse was accompanied by verbal racist or
sexist abuse.”49 The impact on Native women’s daily
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
of individuals, they will continue to be rendered
worthless in public institutions such as courtrooms or
hospitals, or in relations with police. If we treat Native
women as easy or drunken squaws on the street, or in
environments or institutions that are supposed to serve
or protect women, we perpetuate negative stereotypes
that will further enable individuals to abuse Native

lives is profound: “Concerns about police harassment
led some women—including respected community
leaders—to limit their time in public places where
they might come into contact with officers.”50 The
construction of a negative identity can rule a Native
woman’s experience, as these stories demonstrate. The
triangle of oppression (see Figure 34.1), developed
by the Doris Marshall Institute,51 is a useful tool for
analyzing how the oppression functions.
Each point of the triangle supports the others
to maintain the oppression of Native women. If
Native women are constructed as “easy squaws” and
are locked into this imagery through the behaviour
females, and so on. Negative Native female images are
part of a vicious cycle that deeply influences the lives
of contemporary Native women. We need to get rid
of the images, the systems that support them, and the
abusive practices carried out by individuals.
NOTES
1. Monique Mojica, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
(Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991), 21.
2. Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of the
Indian Woman in American Culture,” in Native Women’s

Hobbs, M., & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2018). Gender and women's studies, second edition : Critical terrain. Canadian Scholars.
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 Chapter 33   The Construction of a Negative Identity   315
History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to
Research and Writing, edited by Rebecca Kugel and Lucy
Eldersveld Murphy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2007), 7‒26.
3. Ibid.
4. This was a typical application of Indigenous women in other
colonial contexts, as explained in Ann McClintock, Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context
(New York: Routledge, 1995).
5. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner
and Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1996), 145.
6. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 14.
7. Kim Anderson, “Native Women, the Body, Land, and
Narratives of Contact and Arrival,” in Storied Communities:
Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Political
Community, ed. Hester Lessard, Rebecca Johnson, and
Jeremy Webber (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 167‒88.
See also Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, “Sacajawea and Her
Sisters: Images and Native Women,” Indian Country: Essays
on Contemporary Native Culture (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2005), 125–150.
8. Valaskakis, “Indian Country”; Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint:
Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
9. Pamela Scully, “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous
Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World,” Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005): 151.
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
10. Elise M. Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of
Native American Women in Film (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2006).
11. Chris Finley, “Violence, Genocide, and Captivity: Exploring
Cultural Representations of Sacajawea as a Universal
Mother of Conquest,” American Indian Culture and
Research Journal 35, no. 4 (2011): 198.
12. Beth Brant, Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk (Toronto:
Women’s Press, 1994), 83‒103; Clara Sue Kidwell, “Indian
Women as Cultural Mediators,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 2
(Spring 1992): 97‒107.
13. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other
Essays, 106. See also Anderson, “Native Women, the Body,
Hobbs, M., & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2018). Gender and women's studies, second edition : Critical terrain. Canadian Scholars.
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 315
Land,” and Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden.
14. Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex,” 20.
15. Carol Douglas Sparks, “The Land Incarnate: Navajo Women
and the Dialogue of Colonialism,” in Negotiators of Change:
Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, ed.
Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 135‒56.
16. Ibid., 147.
17. Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of
Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1997), 158‒93.
18. Ibid., 160.
19. David Smits, “The ‘Squaw Drudge’: A Prime Index of
Savagism,” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North
America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing,
ed. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 27–49.
20. Ibid., 162.
21. Ibid., 183.
22. Ibid., 191.
23. Rita Joe, Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi’kmaq
Poet (Charlottetown: Ragweed Press, 1996), 62; Anna Lee
Walters, Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing
(Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1992), 211.
24. Nancy Macdonald, “Welcome to Winnipeg, Where Canada’s
Racism Problem Is at Its Worst,” Maclean’s: Canada’s
National Magazine, February 2, 2015, 22.
25. Ibid.
26. Debra Merskin, “The S-Word: Discourse, Stereotypes,
and the American Indian Woman,” The Howard Journal of
Communications 21, no. 4 (2010): 354.
27. Ibid., 348.
28. Ibid., 360.
29. Janice Acoose, Iskwewak-Kah’Ki Yan Ni Nahkomakanak:
Neither Indian Princesses nor Easy Squaws, Second Edition
(Toronto: Women’s Press, 2016).
30. Joanne Arnott, Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing
(Vancouver: Press Gang, 1995), 76; Brant, Writing as
Witness, 13, 119‒20; Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1973), 47, 90; Janet
Campbell Hale, Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 139‒40; Beatrice
Culleton, In Search of April Raintree (Winnipeg: Pemmican
4/24/2018 12:12:23 PM
 316  Part 3  Gendered Identities
Publications, 1983); Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop:
Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 48‒49; Lee Maracle, I Am
Woman (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1996), 14‒19;
Anna Lee Walters, Talking Indian, 52.
31. Barbara-Helen Hill, Shaking the Rattle: Healing the Trauma
of Colonization (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1995).
32. It is easy to find online information describing the
“Sacagawea dollar.” See, for example,
http://www.pcgs.com/News/Dollar-Coins-Sacagawea-
Design-Unveiled-At-White-House.
33. Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity,
Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 145‒52.
34. Phillip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998); Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians
in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001).
35. I found it very helpful when I first read about “eating the
other” in bell hooks. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and
Representation (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1992),
21‒39.
36. Ibid., 25.
37. Morningstar Mercredi, Morningstar: A Warrior’s Spirit
(Regina: Coteau Books, 2006), 129.
38. Ibid., 127.
39. Emma LaRocque, “The Colonization of a Native Woman
Scholar,” in Women of the First Nations: Power, Wisdom,
and Strength, ed. Christine Miller and Patricia Chuchryk
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1996), 12.
40. See Acoose, Iskwewak.
41. Emma LaRocque, “Tides, Towns, and Trains,” in Living the
Changes, ed. Joan Turner (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press, 1990), 87.
42. Amnesty International, Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights
Response to Discrimination and Violence against
Indigenous Women in Canada (London: Amnesty
International, 2004); Native Women’s Association of
Canada, Voices of Our Sisters in Spirit: A Research and
Policy Report to Families and Communities, 2nd ed. (Pointe-
Claire: Ohsweken Gibson Library Connections, 2009); Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, Missing and Murdered Aboriginal
Hobbs, M., & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2018). Gender and women's studies, second edition : Critical terrain. Canadian Scholars.
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 316
Women: A National Operational Overview (Ottawa:
Government of Canada, 2014).
43. Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender,
Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998), 68‒72. See also
Sherene Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized
Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of
Law and Society 15, no. 2 (2000): 91‒130.
44. Anne McGillivary and Brenda Comaskey, Black Eyes All of
the Time: Intimate Violence, Aboriginal Women, and the
Justice System (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999),
100.
45. Holly Moore, “Mountie Takes Aboriginal Home from Jail Cell
to Pursue Relationship,” CBC News Online, January 8, 2015.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Human Rights Watch, Those Who Take Us Away: Abusive
Policing and Failures in the Protection of Indigenous
Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada
(Toronto: Human Rights Watch, 2013), http://www.hrw.org/
reports/2013/02/13/those-who-take-us-away.
49. Ibid., 8.
50. Ibid.
51. Rick Arnold, Bev Burke, Carl James, D’Arcy Martin, and Barb
Thomas, Educating for a Change (Toronto: Between the
Lines and the Doris Marshall Institute for Education and
Action, 1991), 91‒92.
REFERENCES
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Women’s Press, 2016.
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in
American Indian Tradition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Amnesty International. Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response
to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in
Canada. London: Amnesty International, 2004.
Anderson, Kim. “Native Women, the Body, Land, and
Narratives of Contact and Arrival.” In Storied Communities:
Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Political
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 Chapter 33   The Construction of a Negative Identity   317
Community, edited by Hester Lessard, Rebecca Johnson,
and Jeremy Webber, 167‒88. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
Arnold, Rick, Bev Burke, Carl James, D’Arcy Martin, and
Barb Thomas. Educating for a Change. Toronto: Between the
Lines and the Doris Marshall Institute for Education and
Action, 1991.
Arnott, Joanne. Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing.
Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1995.
Blevins Faery, Rebecca. Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race,
and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.
Brant, Beth. Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk. Toronto:
Women’s Press, 1994.
Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
1973.
Campbell Hale, Janet. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter.
New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Carter, Sarah. Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural
Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West. Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1997.
Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and
Other Essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1996.
Culleton, Beatrice. In Search of April Raintree. Winnipeg:
Pemmican Publications, 1983.
Deloria, Phillip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998.
Finley, Chris. “Violence, Genocide, and Captivity: Exploring
Cultural Representations of Sacajawea as a Universal
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
Mother of Conquest.” American Indian Culture and Research
Journal 35, no. 4 (2011): 191‒208.
Green, Rayna. “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of the Indian
Woman in American Culture.” In Native Women’s History
in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research
and Writing, edited by Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld
Murphy, 7‒26. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the
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hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Toronto:
Between the Lines Press, 1992.
Hobbs, M., & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2018). Gender and women's studies, second edition : Critical terrain. Canadian Scholars.
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Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American
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Kidwell, Clara Sue. “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,”
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LaRocque, Emma. “Tides, Towns, and Trains.” In Living
the Changes, edited by Joan Turner, 76–90. Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 1990.
—. “The Colonization of a Native Woman Scholar.” In
Women of the First Nations: Power, Wisdom, Strength, edited by
Christine Miller and Patricia Chuchryk, 11–18. Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 1996.
Macdonald, Nancy. “Welcome to Winnipeg, Where Canada’s
Racism Problem Is at Its Worst.” Maclean’s (February 2,
2015), 16‒24.
Maracle, Lee. I Am Woman. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers,
1996, 14‒19.
Marrubio, M. Elise. Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native
American Women in Film. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2006.
McClintock, Ann. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality
in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995.
McGillivary, Anne, and Brenda Comaskey. Black Eyes All of the
Time: Intimate Violence, Aboriginal Women, and the Justice
System. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Mercredi, Morningstar. Morningstar: A Warrior’s Spirit. Regina:
Coteau Books, 2006.
Merskin, Debra. “The S-Word: Discourse, Stereotypes, and
the American Indian Woman.” The Howard Journal of
Communications 21, no. 4 (2010): 345‒66.
Mojica, Monique. Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.
Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991.
Moore, Holly. “Mountie Takes Aboriginal Home from Jail Cell
to Pursue Relationship.” CBC News Online, January 8, 2015.
Native Women’s Association of Canada. Voices of Our Sisters
in Spirit: A Research and Policy Report to Families and
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Communities, 2nd ed. Pointe-Claire: Ohsweken Gibson
Library Connections, 2009.
Razack, Sherene. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender,
Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998.
—. “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice:
The Murder of Pamela George.” Canadian Journal of Law
and Society 15, no. 2 (2000): 91‒130.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Missing and Murdered
Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview.
Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2014.
Scully, Pamela. “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa:
Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic
World.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3
(2005).
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
20th Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.
Smits, David. “The ‘Squaw Drudge’: A Prime Index of
Copyright © 2018. Canadian Scholars. All rights reserved.
Hobbs, M., & Rice, C. (Eds.). (2018). Gender and women's studies, second edition : Critical terrain. Canadian Scholars.
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GenderWomenStudies2e-interior-final.indd 318
Savagism.” In Native Women’s History in Eastern North
America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, edited
by Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, 27‒49.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Sparks, Carol Douglas. “The Land Incarnate: Navajo Women
and the Dialogue of Colonialism. In Negotiators of Change:
Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, edited by
Nancy Shoemaker, 135–56. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Valaskakis, Gail Guthrie. Indian Country: Essays on
Contemporary Native Culture. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 2005.
Walters, Anna Lee. Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and
Writing. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1992.
Source: Anderson, Kim. (2016). Excerpted from “The
Construction of a Negative Identity.” In A Recognition
of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood, 2nd
edition (pp. 79–92). Toronto, ON: Women’s Press.
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