6:56pm June 29, 2014

““Indian princess” imagery constructed Indigenous women as the virgin frontier, the pure border waiting to be crossed. 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 an Indigenous female archetype which, as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has pointed out, could then be used for the colonizer’s pleasure and profit. […] It is possible to interpret characters like Pocahontas, Sacagawea and La Malinche as strong Indigenous leaders, but the mainstream interpretation of these mythic characters is quite the opposite: Indigenous women (and, by association, the land) are ‘easy, available and willing’ for the white man, the ‘good’ Indigenous woman who willingly works with white men is rewarded with folk hero or ‘princess status.’ Racism dictates that the women of these celebrated liaisons are elevated above the ordinary Indigenous female status. […] But not in their own communities.”

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