Stoic, Savage, Sex Symbol

Stoic, Savage, Sex Symbol

by Keiti Rueter

The long tradition of white cis-males pathologizing and fetishizing ‘others’ has been carried into the ‘New World’ and its sour fruits are still alive today. In modern media Native Americans are represented by a few, unforgiving, tropes: the silent, stoic Indian; the war ready, painted savage; and the scantily clad, sexy squaw. None of these images represent a fully realized individual, let alone a culture of people. These images are reflections, however, of white-settler anxieties and prejudices that needed to dominate to substantiate their rule.

The ‘sexy-squaw’, the ‘poca-hottie’ has become so common of an image in pop culture it has been immortalized by tacky Halloween costumes and ill-conceived tattoos. But both the historical significance and harsh realities that such casualness to sexualized appropriation has perpetuated is not lost on Native populations. Garton’s discussion in Histories of Sexuality about imperialism and colonialism in the Orient can be applied to the New World, as well: ‘A key dynamic of imperialism was the sexual subjection of oriental women by Western men. Sex was both a signifier and practice for asserting dominion over other peoples (p.130).’ European colonizers’ fetishization of the red-woman, and the subsequent rape of, and sexual abuses against these women was a methodology of dominion. By the 1840s-late 1990s, Canada and the U.S.’s residential schools, which were federally enforced-and often church ran- ‘aggressive assimilation’ homes/schools for children, made sexual and physical abuse victims out of scores of underage indigenous, as well. This fetishization has been carried on in the legacy of Wal-Mart costumes and, is in part, the cause of the extreme statistics that paint the reality for indigenous women and children in the United States and Canada, today:

‘More than 1 in 2 American Indian and Alaska Native women (56.1 percent) have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime.’ (From the 2016 National Institute of Justice Research Report of 2010 findings: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249736.pdf)

‘Among the American Indian and Alaska Native women who have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, almost all (96 percent) have experienced sexual violence by an interracial perpetrator.’ (Ibid.)

About Canadian residential schools: ‘31,970 sexual assault claims have been resolved by an independent assessment process, while another 5,995 claims are currently in progress.’ (http://www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/schools.html)

Thus normalization of such appropriated images have led to the normalization of sexual assault on tribal lands.

And following Garton’s examination of the white-imperialists’ ideas of African male ‘savagery’ it is noted that the same ideas are regurgitated about Native American males. Movies such as The Searchers (1956) and the traveling performance troupe Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show have portrayed indigenous men as savages that steal and rape white wives and daughters. This dangerous ideology has been a factor, besides the general expansion of the West, to legitimize the slaughtering of Native men. And still, today, this rhetoric is repeated. Politicians, our president even, have seemingly no misgivings about accusing central Native Americans of sexual deviancy and crimes while failing to recognize the historical and current truth: white men have raped and are raping Native women, men, children, lands, resources, and funding.