Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

The Origin and the Definition of the Stereotype

The oldest artwork, that we know of, showing the nature of the Native Americans as seen by whites, is a woodcut called The People and Island Which Have Been Discovered (circa 1505) (see Fig. 1), which shows how supposedly savage the Native Americans are. In this woodcut the author depicts cannibalism and “open love making” (Berkhofer Plate 2). Johann Grüninger depicted an event of killing one of the men of Vespucci’s crew in an engraving, which was part of the German edition of The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci to Piero Soderini, called Clubbing Member of Vespucci's Crew (1509) (see Fig. 2). The engraving depicts several naked Native American women around a white man. Three of them are standing in front of the white man and they are touching him. It is apparent that the women are smiling at the white man and are quite pleased by his presence; they don’t have a problem with physical contact. The painting by William Blake Europe Supported by Africa and America (1796) (see Fig. 3) shows a Native American woman supporting a white woman, but at the same time she is held on a rope or a leash and it is clearly understood from the picture that the Native American woman is under control by the white woman. You can see that this picture works as a metaphor for expressing the superiority of Europe over America as well as of the whites over Native Americans.

The most influential medium before film, however, was the literature. When you take into consideration the available sources from the time of the first contact Europeans made with Native Americans, it is clear that Native Americans and more concretely Native American women were depicted inaccurately, uncomprehendingly and subjectively. This depiction was at the root of the emergence of the stereotype dealt with in this thesis. Robert Berkhofer in his well-known book dealing with the stereotypes connected with Native Americans, The White Man’s Indian, cites Vespucci’s Mundus Novus, a journal published circa 1503. Vespucci describes Native American women having “bodies which are tolerably beautiful and cleanly”, but at the same time the women being “very libidinous”. Vespucci also claims about the women that “when they had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves” (Berkhofer 9) thus claiming that Native American women took the first chance they had to have sex with white men and that they couldn’t have helped themselves, because they were so lustful. Vespucci is not the only man who mentions Native American women at that period of time and in that manner. Deborah Small and Maggie Jaffe created a publication, which is skeptic towards the discovery of America by Europeans in 1492, and this skepticism is nicely illustrated and supported by quotes from various sources. According to Small’s and Jaffe’s 1492: What Is It Like to be Discovered? Peter Martyr, Spanish historian of Columbus era, wrote in Decades de Orbe Novo VII (1530) this: “In accordance with the general Nature of women, who prefer the things of others to things of their own, these women love CHRISTIANS most of all” (Small, Jaffe). In another instance “In his official history, Oviedo tells us about the sexual predilections of the native women of Hispaniola: ‘[They] were restrained with the native men, but they gladly gave themselves to the Christians. Anaceona, in particular, was ‘very indecent in the veneral act with the Christians’ and ‘the most dissolute woman of her rank or any other to be found in the island’” (Small, Jaffe). You can see how heavily subjective the sources can be, since Las Casas, one of the few people who probably truly cared for the Native Americans, in his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies (1542) contradicts Oviedo’s depiction of Anaceona, a Native American ruler, by claiming: “So noble and fine a lady, so gracious to the Christians and long suffering of their insults” (Small, Jaffe).

Mainly at the time of the first contact of Europeans with Native Americans there was little information about various cultures of Native Americans and so people could depend only on the records such as mentioned above. Even in the following centuries Europeans did not show much interest in cultures of Native Americans and if someone was interested in a specific group of Native Americans, they often failed to understand them. Another example of this type of misunderstanding or simplification can be seen in the writings of John Lawson, who wrote in 1709, that “those American Indian girls that have conversed with the English and other Europeans, never care for the conversation of their own Countrymen afterwards” and that white traders “find these American Indian girls very serviceable to them” (Bird 73). Further the stereotype of sexually available Native American women can be found in the journals of The Lewis and Clarke Expedition, which explored the western United States from 1804 to 1806. On one occasion, for example, they write that “The Sioux had offered us squaws, but while we remained there having declined, they followed us with offers of females for two days. The Ricaras had been equally accommodating; we had equally withstood their temptation; but such was their desire to oblige that two very handsome young squaws were sent on board this evening, and persecuted us with civilities” (Lewis, Clarke 105). In their view, the women were so eager to please the men of the expedition that they persisted in offering up themselves for two days.  

The “golden era” of the stereotype of easy Native American women in literature came in the nineteenth century when you could choose from hundreds of adventure novels with various plots about detectives, soldiers, agents, cowboys, and Indian fighters. The stereotype was frequently used in these kinds of novels, which were inexpensive and for this reason they were called “dime novels”; they could be bought for few cents. According to Bird, another reason why the stereotype was so living in the nineteenth century was the fact that it was becoming more normal for the society to see, hear and read about sexual references, such as naked breasts at women. There was for example the tradition of half-naked Native American women posing at photographs (72-73). The relationship between a white male and a Native American female was dealt with in numerous dime novels and plays. For instance a play called The Squaw Man (1905) is a story about Native American woman Nat-u-ritch who falls in love with white English man. She saves his life and they have a son, but at the end of the play she kills herself. Ann S. Stephens’ dime novel Malaeska: The American Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1861) is the story of a Native American woman named Malaeska, who marries a White man and gives birth to a son, who later kills himself because of his parents “unnatural marriage” (73). Edward Willett's Silver-spur (1870) tells a story of Dove-Eye, a half-breed Native American woman, who at first attacks the main hero, Fred Wilder, but “this initial misunderstanding is soon overcome and the two are betrothed” (H. Smith 127-28).

The Squaw is the most sexualized figure of all the stereotypical depictions of Native American women in film. She offers herself to white men, she is lewd; she has both white and native sexual partners, often she has many children. The squaw is sexually promiscuous and so she does not hold the same position as the Indian Princess, who supposed to be virginal. Kim Anderson, whose writings deal mainly with indigenous feminism, writes about the Squaw figure or the Squaw drudge figure in this manner: “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” (Anderson 231). The Squaw image was useful to the new settlers, because it justified the measurements taken against the Native Americans and as Anderson adds: “She eased the conscience of those who wished to sexually abuse without consequence” (229).

It is not surprising that the stereotype of sexually available women became so deeply rooted in the new medium of film, given that the stereotype was thriving in the nineteenth century. At the time film was invented and Hollywood studios began to produce hundreds of films it was only natural the stereotype would be perpetuated. Film added a new dimension to the dime novels, journals and paintings. Because it was becoming acceptable for the society to perceive various sexual references in art, it was easy for film studios, for the producers, directors and scriptwriters to fully exploit this old stereotype, while at the same time to enrich and diversify it in a bad way. Some of the stereotypical images of Native American women were known before film, but had to be modified in order to suit the new medium, while there were new stereotypical images developing with the new medium.