The Princess and the Squaw: The Construction of Native American Women in the Pictorial Press

Abstract

The two most important nineteenth-century illustrated weeklies, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly, represented Native American women largely through familiar racial stereotypes. In words and pictures, Indian women were depicted as idealized Indian princesses or as downtrodden squaws. Young, “civilized” Indian women were represented as good mothers, like white women, but other women—“squaws”—were identified by the hardships of their lives, especially at the hands of Indian men. Other Indian women were portrayed as silly or foolish. Over time, some Southwestern Indian women were depicted as craft workers, a category that emphasized their exoticism and cultural “otherness.” Both newspapers followed the ethnocentric prejudices of the era, constructing Native American women as symbolically useful outsiders, alternatively alluring or repulsive, but always contained within the ruling ideology of Euro-American culture.

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Corrigendum

Notes

Harper's Weekly (hereafter HW), June 29, 1907, 958.

HW, June 29, 1907, 958.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Glenda Riley, Confronting Race: Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 41.

J. Frederick Fausz, “Pocahontas (Matoaka),” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 490–491. In her essay on Pocahontas and Indian women, Rayna Green cites earlier European legends very similar to the Pocahontas-Smith rescue story. See Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” The Massachusetts Review 16, no. 4 (1975): 698–700.

Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 110. The actual identity of this woman and child is unknown; Tilton cites Philip Barbour, who writes that the portrait may represent “an 18th-century Iroquois woman and child.” See Philip L. Barbour, Pocahontas and Her World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 235.

Green writes that the “Pocahontas perplex emerged as a controlling metaphor in the American experience.” See Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” 703.

Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 23.

Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative, 131.

This study focuses on news and feature illustrations in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. It does not include cartoons or advertising imagery that depicted Indian women. Indian imagery in nineteenth-century advertising, male and female, is examined by Jeffery Steele, “Reduced to Images: American Indians in Nineteenth-Century Advertising,” in Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).

Bird writes that “popular imagery of American Indians has tended to focus on males.” See S. Elizabeth Bird, “Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media,” Journal of Communication 49, no. 3 (1999): 72. Also see, for example, John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), and William E. Huntzicker, “Picturing American Indians: Newspaper Pictures and Native Americans in the 1860s and 1870s,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 45–55.

Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 234–235. Hall writes that meaning depends on the difference between opposites, in this case, white/Indian and male/female. These “binary oppositions,” Hall argues, are subject to oversimplification, “swallowing up all distinctions in their rather two-part structure.” Moreover, one pole is usually dominant, subordinating its opposite within its “field of operations.” Thus racial meanings are created through the marking or identification of difference, a process that includes the subordinate “Other.”

The images and stories in this study were located through keyword searches in electronic databases of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly. These searches yielded several dozen illustrations.

Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, “Civil Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism: The Regime of Illustrated News, 1865–1901,” Design Issues 16, no. 1 (2000): 61–64.

Quoted in Huntzicker, “Picturing the News: Frank Leslie and the Origins of American Pictorial Journalism,” in The Civil War and the Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Debra Reddin van Tuyll (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 312–313. In the inaugural issue, Leslie wrote that he wished to impart “to the journal all the rapidity and freshness essential to the efficiency of a newspaper.” To that end, he continued, “we have completed an organization of artist agencies throughout most parts of the American continent. By their aid we shall have pictorial delineations of every remarkable event that occurs over its vast extent….” See Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (hereafter FLIN), December 15, 1855, 6.

Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 420.

Illustrations of Custer's Last Stand, for example, were all invented because no reporter or artist was at the scene to record the event, except for Mark Kellogg of the Bismarck Tribune who died in the battle. One early illustration of the Last Stand was published in the New York Graphic on July 19, 1876. The drawing, by William de la Montagne Cary, was said to be based on “sketches and description by our special correspondent,” but it was entirely invented. See Don Russell, Custer's Last (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1968), 15.

Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 63.

Huntzicker, “Picturing the News,” 310.

The account draws on the explanation by Huntzicker, “Picturing the News,” 313.

Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 40–42. Leslie saw his weekly as a newspaper and emphasized breaking news. See Barnhurst and Nerone, “Civic Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism,” 61.

Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America, 41–43. See also Barnhurst and Nerone, “Civic Picturing vs. Realist Photojournalism,” 61.

“Nothing sold a picture newspaper like a good war,” writes British historian Peter Johnson. See Peter Johnson, Front Line Artists (London: Cassell, 1978), 6.

FLIN, December 10, 1864, 178. Also see Huntzicker, “Picturing the News,” 318.

Huntzicker, “Picturing the News,” 321.

See, for example, the cover of Leslie's on July 12, 1873, which featured eleven portraits of Modoc Indians at war with the army in northern California. Ten of the portraits are of Modoc men; the eleventh was identified as “One-Eyed Dixie, the Squaw Interpreter.”

The word squaw has a controversial history and has been associated with a long list of derogatory terms for Indian women. These terms include vagina, prostitute, harlot, and similar words. I use the term here because it was used in pictorial press to describe some Indian women, especially women who were old, seemingly poor, or who appeared dirty or unkempt. A thoughtful discussion of the word and its history is in Stacey J. T. Hust and Debra Merskin, “The ‘S’-Word: Activist Texts and Media Coverage Related to the Movement to Eradicate ‘Squaw,’ ” in American Indians and the Mass Media, ed. Meta Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 128–149.

Carolyn Kitch has argued persuasively that illustrations in early twentieth century popular magazines helped define ideas about “femininity, masculinity, class status, and Americanness….” See Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4.

Historian Anthony Grafton has pointed out that the Roman writer Pliny the Elder drew on ancient legends to compile his Natural History (AD 77–79), describing far-off places inhabited by “monstrous races…men with the heads of dogs, men with one large foot under whose head they rested in the desert sun.” See Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 35, 37.

E. McClung Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess, 1765–1783,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 2 (1965), 65–81. Also see Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” 701–703, and Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930, 23.

The illustration is by Theodore Galle, after Jan vander Stradt. See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 29. Also see Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 152–154.

Deloria, Playing Indian, 29. The Indian woman as an allegorical symbol of America took several forms beginning in the sixteenth century. Many of these are discussed in Fleming, “The American Image as Indian Princess, 1765–1783.”

FLIN, June 28, 1856, 36.

Ibid., 35.

FLIN, February 17, 1866, 348.

Ibid.

HW, June 19, 1909, 18–19.

Women's magazines were particularly active in promoting activities in the domestic sphere, the so-called “Cult of True Womanhood.” See, for example, Sarah Mitchell, “A Wonderful Duty: A Study of Motherhood in Godey's Magazine,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 171–178. Also see Glenda Riley's discussion of “American Discourse on White Womanhood” in Confronting Race, 11–32.

Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America, 2, 107–108. Also see Kate Roberts Edenborg and Hazel Dicken-Garcia, “The Darlings Come Out to See the Volunteers: Depictions of Women in Harper's Weekly during the Civil War,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, ed. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 205–214. See, for instance, idealized “ladies” in maternal roles in FLIN, January 17, 1891, 453, and February 21, 1891, 43.

HW, August 22, 1857, 532.

FLIN, January 17, 1857, 104.

HW, March 2, 1872, 173.

FLIN, January 17, 1857, 104.

FLIN, February 27, 1875, 413.

FLIN, January 3, 1891, 409.

Riley notes that these ideas originated in European descriptions of Indian life and, over time, “were repeated so often that they became truisms.” See Riley, Confronting Race, 89.

HW, March 20, 1875, 240.

HW, March 20, 1875, 242.

HW, June 14, 1873, 520.

Ibid., 518.

Riley, Confronting Race, 91–92.

HW, March 18, 1876, 233.

Ibid., 234.

HW, June 21, 1884, 393.

Ibid., 395.

Ibid., 99.

FLIN, April 30, 1870, 97.

FLIN, June 18, 1870, 209.

Ibid., 211.

Ibid.

HW, September 15, 1866, 580.

The developing field of anthropology, Lutz and Collins write, emphasized colorful cultural difference, an exoticism that “involves the creations of an other who is strange but—at least as important—beautiful.” See Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91–92.

See, for example, Coward, The Newspaper Indian, Ch. 4–5.

HW, September 7, 1889, 730–731.

Southwestern pottery became a symbol of “authentic” Indian craftwork for twentieth-century collectors. See Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), especially Ch. 3, “The Spectacle of Indian Artisanal Labor.” Also see John M. Coward, “Selling the Southwestern Indian: Ideology and Image in Arizona Highways, 1925–1940,” American Journalism 20, no. 2 (2003): 22–24.

Not surprisingly, photographers were also drawn to Indian women carrying water pots on their heads. See, for example, Edward Curtis, who photographed two blanketed women in “Zuni Water Carriers,” and posed a woman named Flower Morning (Povi-Tamu) in “Girl and Jar—San Ildefonso.” These photographs are reproduced in Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 58, 133. Also see the work on an unidentified photographer who took a group photo of women at the Tesuque Pueblo in Alfred L. Bush and Lee Clark Mitchell, The Photograph and the American Indian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 175.

HW, September 7, 1889, 732.

Ibid.

Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, 90–91.

HW, June 7, 1890, 445.

Ibid., 447.

HW, October 14, 1893, 892.

HW, October 14, 1893, 891. Sharp went on to become one of the leading artists in Taos, New Mexico, where he was well known for his Indian paintings. See Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900–1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), and Laura M. Bickerstaff, Pioneer Artists of Taos, Revised and Expanded Edition (Denver, CO: Old West, 1983). For a more critical perspective, see Sherry Clayton Taggett and Ted Schwartz, Paintbrushes and Pistols: How the Taos Artists Sold the West (Santa Fe, NM: John Muir Publications), 1990.

In 1887, Leslie's emphasized the civilizing process when it published side-by-side portraits of two young—but very different—Indians. One picture showed “Miss Kitty Ross,” the smiling, well-dressed daughter of a Cherokee leader, alongside another Indian, the blanket-wrapped, stone-faced boy Crow Foot, son of the Lakota leader Sitting Bull. The caption explained that this was “A Suggestive Contrast.—The Indian in the Wild and in the Civilized State.” See FLIN, March 26, 1887, 85.

FLIN, January 3, 1880, 317.

Kenny A. Franks, “La Flesche Family,” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 324–325.

FLIN, January 3, 1880, 317.

The highly sexualized “darkened Other” became a popular female type in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as did the exotic colonial woman, both appealing to white male fantasies. See Katherine H. Adams, Michael L. Keene, and Jennifer C. Koella, Seeing the American Woman, 1880–1920: The Social Impact of the Visual Media Explosion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), especially Chapters 6–7.

Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 51. Also see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865–1912 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 50–51.