Question In Managing Sexual Behaviors in Colonial North America

62 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

into conformity: one is quite unlikely to "forget" to wear one's clothes, though one can forget to wear earrings; thus, the magnitude of errors tends to be self-limiting, and those that do occur tend to be trivial; see Butler, Gender Trouble, 163-80.

43. See Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the 'Hood and Beyond {Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

44. Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Ma- terialism (New York: Longman, 1983); Sherry Ortner, 11 Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Feminist Studies 1 (1972): 5-31 and Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press,

1~~. . . 45. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,

second edition (New York: Routledge, 1999), xx.vi. 46. See bell hooks, "Representations of Whiteness," in Black Looks, 165-78;

Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (New York: Signet, 1970); Anna Maria Chupa, Anne, the White Woman in Contemporary African-American Fiction: Archetypes, Stereotypes, and Characterizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990); Erica Chito Childs, ''Constructing Interracial Couples: Multiple Narratives and Images" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 2001).

CHAPTER 3

SEX AND

CONQUEST Domination and Desire on Ethnosexual Frontiers

COLUMBIA VERSUS AMERICA: SOOTHED OR SAVAGE BRAVE NEW WORLD?

Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci first visited the "New World" within a decade of one another. The impressions of these two Italian explorers could not have been more different. Columbus chronicled his 1492 voyage and first contacts with indigenous people, whom his mistaken geography led him to name JI Indians," in a diary he kept for his sponsor, the Spanish monar- chy. Columbus recorded his first encounter with native people in an Octo- ber 11, 1492, entry. He reported that the peoples of the Caribbean islands he and his crew visited on that and subsequent days were affable, attractive, and accommodating:

[T]o some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads ... and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. ... All of them go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and the women also .... They are very well formed, with handsome bodies and good faces .... They do not carry arms nQr are they acquainted with them. . . . They should be good and intelligent~er ... van ts, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to. thentt and I believe that they would become Christians very easily, for it seem~d to me that they had no religion .... 1

Columbus sent a team of explorers inland, and they soon returned with tales of native hospitality and homage which Columbus recounted in his di- ary on November 5, 1492:

From Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York and Oxford: Osford University Press, 2003.

[E]veryone came to see them, men as well as women; and they quartered them in the best houses. The Indians touched them and kissed their hands and feet, marveling and believing that the Spaniards came from the heav- ens, and so they gave them to understand. They gave them something to eat of what they had .... Later the men left, and the women came in and seated themselves ... around them, kissing their hands and feet and feeling them, attempting to see if they were, like themselves of flesh and bone. They begged them to stay with them for at least five days.2

Columbus himself also found the native people he encountered to be wel- coming and generous:

So many came that they covered the land, giving a thousand thanks, men as w~ll as women and children. Some of them ran this way, others that way, to brmg us bread ... [and] water in gourds and in day jugs ... and they brought us all that they had in the world ... and all so bigheartedly and so happily that it was a wonder.3

Indeed it was a wonder, since at several points of contact Columbus and his men repaid local hospitality by capturing and detaining both native men and women. Columbus's accounts of these kidnappings never questioned the morality of such actions by the "Christians" (as he often referred to his men). For instance,

[TJhey captured one woman ... in order to treat them courteously and make them lose their fear ... they brought the woman1 who was very young and pretty, to the ship and .. , the Admiral ordered her clothed and he gave her glass beads and bells and brass finger rings and returned her to land very courteously, according to his custom.4

Vespucci, who sailed to the New World a few years later, told a differ- ent story in his pamphlet, Mundus Novus, published around 1504. While Vespucci found indigenous people "well formed and proportioned," he com- plained that they "destroyed11 their "comely countenance":

[Men] bore their cheeks, lips, noses and ears ... [W]omen do not bore their faces, but their ears only. They have another custom, very shameful and be- yond all human belief. For their women, being very lustful, cause the pri- vate parts of their husbands to swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed and disgusting .... They marry as many wives as they please; and son cohabits with mother, brother with sister, male cousin with female, and any man with the first woman he meets ... [T]hey cruelly kill one another, and those whom they bring home captives from war they preserve, not to spare their lives, but that they may be slain for food; for they eat one an- other, the victors the vanquished. 5

Figure 3.1, an early-seventeenth-century drawing by Theodor Galle, based on a sixteenth-century work by Jan van der Streett entitled i.1 America/' rep-

65

FIGURE 3 .1 "Vespucci 'Discovering' America," Theodore Galle, after Stradanus (Jan van der Street), ca. 1575-1580 (Courtesy of the Burndy Li- brary, Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cam- bridge, Massachusetts)

resents an early illustration contrasting the "civilized" European-a stand- ing Vespucci who is clothed and surrounded by the paraphernalia of tech- nology, with the uncivilized America-a reclining woman who is naked and surrounded by wild animals and cannibals. Vespucci is the modern, mascu- line scientifically inquisitive traveler, America is the primitive, feminine new

world, open to discovery and exploration. 6

The New World encountered by Columbus was one in which the in- habitants were peaceful, timid, generous, and in awe of Europeans. Colum- bus praised his men for their Christian kindness in dealing with the natives, kindness that he asserted was /1 according to [European] custom." Columbus viewed native people as naive and childlike in their nudity, simple in their spirituality, primitive in their technology, and cooperative in their dealings. In contrast to Columbus's Eden, Vespucci's mundus novus was more like Sodom and Gomorrah, filled with cruel torturers, depraved cannibals, treach- erous men, and licentious women; the inhabitants of the new world were dangerous, duplicitous, promiscuous, and incestuous. The only two points of agreement between the two men's accounts are revealing. Both Columbus

66 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SBXU ALI TY

and Vespucci found the people they encountered, particularly the women1 to be quite attractive

1 especially those with light skin; and both men congratu-

lated themselves and their crews on their civilized, Christian treatment of the natives.

Columbus described the inhabitants of two islands his men visited on De- cember 13 and 14, 1492:

And as to their skin, the Christians said ... that they are whiter than the others [on other islands], and that they saw two young women as white ~s any in Spain. . .. This king and all the others went about naked as their mothers bore them; and the women did also, without any embarrassment. And they are the most handsome men and women that they had found up to that point: and very white, for if they went about clothed a~d protected themselves from the sun and wind they would be almost as white as people in Spain.7

Vespucci concurred:

The women as I have said go about naked and are very libidinous; yet they have bodies which are tolerably beautiful and cleanly. Nor are they so un- sightly as one perchance might imagine, for, inasmuch as they are plump, their ugliness is the less apparent, which indeed is for the most part con- cealed by the excellence of their bodily structure. It was to us a matter of astonishment that none was to be seen among them who had a flabby breast, and those who had borne children were not to be distinguished from virgins by the shape and shrinking of the womb, and in the other parts of the body similar things were seen of which in the interest of modesty I make no menrion.8

Vespucci's rather false modesty is followed by a comment that marks the second point of consensus between Columbus and Vespucci-the Euro- peans' sexual attraction to native women. For instance, Vespucci ~~d.h~s me~ apparently were able to set aside their shock at the naked and hb1dinous nature of native women to pursue higher purposes:

When they had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by ex- cessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves.9

According to this account only the natives were in possession of 11

excessive lust" or "prostituted themselves"' while Vespucci and his crew simply in- dulged native women's desires by providing as much "opportunity of copu- lating" as they could muster. Columbus is less explicit about sex between his men and indigenous women, though he notes that "there are women with very pretty figures," but he stresses that the European men were ordered "to be careful not to annoy anyone in anything and to take nothing from them against their will."1o Despite Columbus's claims about his men

1 s charitable

Sex and Conquest 67

and restrailled treatment of the natives they encountered, in one journal en- try just before Christmas in 1492, he reported that in an increasing number of places they visited "all the men make their women hide from the Chris# tians out of jealousy."11 This comment suggests that native people may have felt they had good reason to become wary of the attention paid to local women by Columbus and his men, a distrust that no doubt set the stage for later in- terethnic tensions and Euro-indigenous conflicts.

SEX AND CONQUEST: THE WINNING OF THE U.S. WEST

Early European travelers who followed Columbus and Vespucci wrote home describing native men and women as primitive and promiscuous. In his his- tory of the "white man's Indian," Robert Berkhofer reports that the first English language publication about the new world reflected this view:

These folke lyven lyke bestes without any resonablenes and the wymen be also as common. And the men hath conversacyon with the wymen/ who that they ben or who they fyrst mete/ is she his syster/ his mother/ his daughter/ or any other kyndred. And the wymen be very hoote and dys- posed to lecherdnes.12

As Berkhofer notes, the new printing press circulated this and similar sen- sational and graphic reports (this one translated from an early-sixteenth- century Dutch pamphlet) across Europe, and, despite the morally indignant tone of the text, the floodgates opened as Europeans eager to settle this sex- ually savage, brave New World swarmed across the Atlantic. Certainly these and later lurid accounts of Indian sexual practices and availability held a cer- tain allure to the mostly male European emigrants.

Scholars question the biases and agendas of many European reports about indigenous peoples since they served as justifications for colonial and later American policies of annihilation, "pacification," civilization, and assimila- tion of Indian populations.13 Given the loaded nature of sexual matters, sex- ual descriptions had a special capacity to impress readers and to shape pow- erful and lasting images of native America. These early sexualized depictions of native peoples combined with those of later colonial and American chron- iclers to form a general portrait of "Indian life" as morally and culturally in- ferior to European and American societies, though still of much interest to writers and their readers.

Ramon Gutierrez, for instance, found early records of Spanish soldiers and Franciscan friars filled with commentary about Pueblo peoples' sexual prac- tices. The Franciscans in particular were prolific in their reports of what they saw as Pueblo 11lewd" behavior and sexual promiscuity, including same-sex

68 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

relations, particularly among those whom some have called "berdache," "two- spirit," '1 man-woman," or "third sex" individuals.14 The Franciscans disap- proved of sexual intercourse between anyone other than married men and women in anything other than the /1 missionary position," since as the sev- enteenth-century theologian Tomas Sanchez stated, this was the "natural manner of intercourse. 1115 Despite their condemnation of native sexuality, the Franciscans violated their own vows of celibacy crossing Spanish-Indian eth- nosexual boundaries to father many mixed children.16 lndeed, native/nonna- tive sexual contact was widely reported across both the North and South American continents, and was reflected in the growth of the

11 mixed-blood"

population.17 Spanish soldiers and missionaries also reported a pattern of In- dian-white sexual negotiations, apparently for purposes of trade for objects or for power, a pattern that is repeated in later accounts of Indian-white contact.

It was not only Europeans from Spain who engaged in sexual contact and commerce with indigenous Americans. The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who set out on their westward explorations in 1.804, are replete with references to encounters with native peoples along the way; many of these (both the references and the encounters) were of a sexual na- ture, and many emphasized trade:

Thursday, November 21, 1805: An old woman & Wife to a Cheif of the Chunnooks came and made a Camp near ours. She brought with her 6 young Squars I believe for the purpose of Gratifying the passions of the men of our party and receving for those indulgiences Such Small [presents] as She (the old woman) thought proper to accept of. Those people appear to View Sensuality as a Necessary evel, and do not appear to abhor it as a Crime in the unmarried State.18

On Christmas eve of that same year, Clark writes again,

[Cuscalah, a Clatsop} offered a woman to each of us which we also declined ax- cepting of, which displeased the whole party very much-the female part ap- peared to be highly disgusted at our refuseing to axcept of their favours &c.19

What goes unmentioned in these entries is the frequent willingness of Lewis and Clark's men to enter into native sexual exchanges. In his history of the Lewis and dark expedition, James Ronda offers some corroboration from a traveler who followed in the wake of the expedition several years later. Henry M. Brackenridge reported this 1811 exchange with an Arikara

village chief:

"I was wondering," said he [the chief], "whether you white people have any women amongst you." I assured him in the affirmative. "Then, 11 said he, "why is it that your people are so fond of our women, one might suppose they had never seen any before?"20

Sex and Conquest 69

While the motives of the whites may have been transparent, what re- mains unclear is the meaning of these sexual exchanges to the Arikaras or the Clatsops or the Chinooks or the Pueblos. What were these indigenous people thinking when they crossed sexual boundariesi what were the frames of mind and state of affairs on Indian-white ethnosexual frontiers? Ronda provides a clue to solving the mentalities and motivations of various sides in ethnosexual exchanges on the U.S. frontier. It was not only whites with whom native people sought contact. Ronda comments that York, the enslaved African who accompanied his owner, William Clark, was a 11 central attrac- tion of the Lewis and Clark expedition .... York's blackness was viewed by the Arikaras as a sign of special spiritual power .... To have sexual contact with York was to get in touch with what seemed awesome spirit forces. " 21

It is important to remember that there are many different frontiers scat- tered across the time and space being discussed here-different peoples, dif- ferent eras, different locales, and many different conditions facing native peo- ples and settler populations. In light of such diversity scholars provide a number of accounts of Indian-white sexual encounters. Ronda offers four reasons why Indians might have been willing to enter into sexual exchanges with white travelers in the early nineteenth century: to trade for European goods (ironware, paint, cloth), to forge commercial links (sealed by sexual relations), to express native hospitality, especially on the plains, and as noted above, to obtain whatever spiritual power non-Indians might possess. 22 Al- bert Hurtado confirms these several agendas, but he paints a less sanguine portrait of freely given Indian sexual favors. Once again acknowledging wide variation across indigenous communities, conditions, times, and places, Hur- tado points out the relative powerlessness of many native women, and reports that sexual exchanges often were coerced, involving rape, forced prostitution, and slavery. 23 Hurtado and Ronda tell a similar story of sex- uality and slavery about one of the best known Indian women in history, Sacagawea:

Sometime in the fall of 1800, the young Lemhi Shoshoni girl, then perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, was camped at the Three Forks of the Missouri with others from her band ... the party at Three Forks was attacked by Hi- datsa raiders. . . . Among the prisoners taken were four boys and several women, including Sacagawea. Sometime between 1800 and 1804, she and one other Shoshoni captive were purchased by Toussaint Charbonneau, a trader .... When Lewis and Clark met Charbonneau at Fort Mandan on No- vember 4, 1804 .... Sacagawea was already pregnant.24

The fact that Sacagawea, a Shoshone teenager, was purchased and then impregnated by Charbonneau, a French trader, was sanitized in subsequent references to her by Lewis and Clark and others as Charbonneau' s "wife."

70 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

This normalized definition of Sacagawea as a willing wife and mother has become an enduring part of the American national narrative, one that was engraved on a U.S. one dollar coin in 2000 shown in Plate 2 of the color insert.

The relationship between Sacagawea and Charbonneau represents one point of contact in the complicated network of ethnosexual frontiers that crisscrossed what Rebecca Faery refers to as the New World's "cartographies of desire."

The desire of the colonizers for land was conflated with desire for a Native woman who was a representative or stand-in for the land itself; likewise, the effort to '1 protect" white women from the presumed desire of dark men, both Indian and African, was a coded insistence on the rights of the colonists to territory already taken or not yet taken but desired. The history of Anglo- America, then, is a map of confluent desires, sexual and territorial, that over time produced and consolidated the map of America as we know it today.25

Despite their frequent relative powerlessness, Indian women sometimes used whites' sexual desire against them. Kathleen Brown recounts the story of George Cawson, who "met his death after [Powhatan] village women 'en- ticed [him] up from the barge into their howses' and delivered him to his ex- ecutioners."26 She goes on to tell of the sexual trick of a particular Powhatan woman:

Oppossunoquonuske, a clever werowansqua of another village, similarly led fourteen English men to their demise. Inviting the unwary men to come 11up into her Towne, to feast and make merry," she persuaded them to "leave their Armes in their boat, because they said how their women would be afrayed ells of their pieces1' •••• Her genius lay in persuading them to rely on other masculine "pieces" ... [a.ndJ the men were easily killed.27

Many white sexual advances were not welcomed by native people, but were accepted in acts of desperation. The poverty resulting from forced In- dian removals from homelands and the destruction of indigenous economies left many native communities destitute. As a result, some native men turned to thievery and some native women turned to prostitution to survive. 28 In some instances, indigenous populations were so vulnerable that no money changed hands, instead native women simply became sexual prey. Theda Per- due describes the South Carolina Indian trade as

replete with native complaints of sexual abuse. One trader "took a young Indian against her Will for his Wife/' another severely beat three [native] women including his pregnant wife whom he killed, and a third provided enough rum to a woman to get her drunk and then "used her ill. 1129

The rape of Indian women often precipitated Indian-white conflicts, par- ticularly during the Gold Rush, when, according to Hurtado, rapes by whites

Sex and Conquest 71

were widespread and sometimes enacted by federal officials themselves on reservations, where native women were attacked "before the very eyes of their husbands and daughters ... and they dare[ d] not resent the insult, or even complain of the hideous outrage."30 This sympathetic portrayal of na- tive victims of white sexual assault appeared in an 1856 San Francisco news- paper, but such sympathy was the exception, rather than the rule.

There were many far more critical reports in American media about na- tive life and sexuality, often popularized in the form of Indian captivity nar- ratives where whites were the targets of Indian aggression.31 Captivity nar- ratives were among the first popular publications written in the new world. Analysts have divided them into several categories. Richard Van Der Beets and Richard Slotkin both describe early captivity narratives, whether based in fact or not, as religious allegories in which white captives undergo re- demptive suffering at the hands of Indians and find a path back to godliness upon their return to Christian civilization. 32 Roy Pearce and Rebecca Faery add to this list a political propaganda form of captivity narrative designed to defame either the French or, mainly, the Indians by dramatizing their ex- cesses of brutality, lustr and savagery. These captivity narratives were put to use "making a history, shaping a nation," and fashioning a "'suitable' na- tional history and identity, one that placed whiteness and masculinity in a superior position to other categories of identity."33

A number of analysts identify a third, and probably the most prolific type of captivity narrative-the '1 penny" or "dime" novel. Like all literature, fic- tional captivity narratives reflected the customs and assumptions of the times, and since many readers were interested in the tales told by women captives, scholars have read the narratives as morality plays about the proper and im- proper place of women in American colonial and national society depending on the era in which the narrative was written and edited. Examples of popu- lar nineteenth-century novels featuring women captives include James Feni- more Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. The familiarity of the title of this 1826 novel to contemporary Americans is evidence of the enduring popular- ity of tales of early American gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. 34

Whatever the era or genre of the captivity narrative, in cases where sex- ual assault was reported, most white women captives did not admit to being sexually attacked themselves for fear of public humiliation. Instead they de- scribed the sexual assault of other captives by Indians. For instance, Mary Smith and her husband were reportedly captured by Kickapoos and Chicka- saws in 1814. In her memoir, An Affecting Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Smith, she writes that the Indians "ravished, rifled, murdered and mutilated the inhabitants without distinction of age or sex, without any other provocation or incitement than brutal lust and wanton-

72 RACE. ETHNICITY. AND SEXUALITY

ness of barbarity 1 u 35 Caroline Harris, who was captured by Comanches in Texas in the 1830s, did describe her own experiences: "I was doomed to spend eleven months in a state of bondage and misery that beggars description! be- ing not only compelled to cohabit, but to yield to the beastly will of a Sav- age Brutel"36

Despite such graphic and frightening accounts not all captives escaped when they had the chance; in some cases they became members of tribes, migrating permanently across the Indian-white ethnic boundary and chang- ing their ethnicity in the process. So-called "transculturated" or /(white In- dians" married and chose to stay with their captors. Some did so because of the shame of returning home as sexually 11 damaged goods, '' 37 others because of Indian generosity and sympathy for their plight. For instance, one captive described being moved by a native man's act of kindness: 11 [a] young Indian, Wechela, brought me a pair of shoes, also a pair of little Mary's. He looked kindly as he laid these articles before me, intimating by his gestures that our lives were to be spared.n38

Past and present references to Indians as 11 noble savages" echo the same ambivalency toward native people reflected in many of the above accounts. Faery illustrates the contradictions of simultaneous desire and disgust con- tained in centuries of white depictions of and interactions with Indians by juxtaposing the ravished image of the white woman captive against the rav- ishing figure of Pocahantas: the Indian victim in contrast to the Indian princess.39 Robert Berkhofer summarizes these competing stereotypes of "the white man's Indian":

[T]he good Indian appears friendly, courteous, and hospitable to the initial invaders of his lands and to all Whites .... Along with handsomeness of physique and physiognomy went great stamina and endurance .... Modest in attitude .... Brave in combat, he was tender in love for family and chil- dren ... the bad Indian [in contrast, marked by] nakedness and lechery, pas- sion and vanity led to lives of polygamy and sexual promiscuity among them- selves and constant warfare and fiendish revenge against their enemies ... thievery and treachery ... hard slavery of women and the laziness of men. 40

June Namias analyzed dozens of captivity narratives and reported a du- alism in the white woman's Indian as well:

Nineteenth century captivity materials offered mixed messages for women: excitement, possible romantic bliss, but the chance of sexual harassment. The big, dark Indian was pictured simultaneously as a thrill and a sexual threat to white women and consequently a competitive sexual threat to white men.41

This dualism is illustrated in Figures 3.2 and 3.3, two nineteenth-century drawings that appeared in captivity narratives.

}4,7Z- FIGURE 3.2 "Attempt to Escape, My Capture, and Cruel Treatment/ J.?S1 (Courtesy of the Newberry Library) tJf

11$•·1""1 ;JJ .

.. ~. ~. ( ~ . . ·· .• ~ .. · ... ,·..lh···· ...... ~ ... ·.··.· .••. · .. ·G .•. ~. · .... ~'°' .. ~ .. ·r. . ~. ·.. ~. · i'i·'HJ.. . . . ""'. . ~ ~-$ · .. · !JI,··. · . .• /1111. .... · ~. ..#;. ·.1.A .· .1. . fP1:-V';# Aw~ t#J4 JJJ&> Al~ ~etNU ~ /fr::::f- 1',_""" 'tJI #~,,-~J ~;>'1"'tl. .. S~~··· A~.A•.~

74 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

FIGURE 3.3 ''Miss Lockhart Carried Away by the Camanche Chief," ca. 1J80 (Courtesy of the Newberry Library) /t,'71'17

THERE' s A METHOD IN THEIR IMAGININGS Aside from any erotic imaginings42 aroused by captivity. narr~tives ~r pas- sions kindled by opportunities for ethnosexual adventures m I~dian-whit~ end counters questions arise: To what uses were put.these centuries.of sexua ~e depktio~s of Indians? What were the ·social, politicat econormc, and pohcy

Sex and Conquest 75

consequences of these many uncomplimentary sexual descriptions of Indians as wanton savages and brutal rapists? How important were depictions of the sexuality of native men and women in defining the boundary between non- Indians and Indians, savage and civilized, noncitizen and citizen?

Certainly the portrayal of Indians as sexually dangerous was a conven- ient justification for warfare against native societies and for "removing" In- dians from areas chosen by whites for settlement. Sherry Smith notes that although no army officer's wife ever was captured by Indians many of those women wrote about the terrors of captivity:

Woe to the hapless party that fell into the devilish hands of a band of Indi- ans! . . . Babies had their brains dashed out before the eyes of father and mother, powerless to help them. Lucky would the latter have been, had they been treated in the same way; but what she was to endure would have wrung tears from anything but an Indian.43

Smith reports, for instance, that Elizabeth Custer, the wife of George Arm- strong Custer, /1 seemed particularly fascinated by the topic" of the fate of white women taken by Indians, and she quotes Mrs. Custer's conclusion that "death would be merciful in comparison."44 The images and messages con- tained in comments like these about Indian sexual threats were powerful jus- tifications for eliminating the "Indian problem" by any means necessary. 45

The sexual observations about native people made by explorers, mis- sionaries, soldiers, traders, settlers, and reformers were not simply prurient preoccupations or voyeuristic reports, though no doubt they served those masters as well. Sexualized depictions of and beliefs about native peoples be- came part of the imagining of the U.S. West. Real or putative sexual differ- ences between whites and Indians provided a rationale for seizing native re- sources to "better" manage and use them, and allowed U.S. political and economic interests to paper over their exploitations by launching programs to "improve" Indian individuals and cultures by civilizing and assimilating American Indians.

Reports of Indian depredations and savagery also became a means of jus- tifying white misbehavior and atrocities and provided ample opportunities for white self-aggrandizement. Smith reports that frontier soldiers often de- scribed Indian men as skilled warriors, in part to explain a defeat or because 11 a successful campaign against a formidable foe rather than a weak one could enhance a soldier's reputation back home."46 The defeat of a strong native opponent also would guarantee continued support for a frontier military pres- ence, a military that sometimes kept itself busy in less than glorious pur- suits. Military massacres of Indian women and children were defended by demonizing native women, thus these women whom soldiers sometimes sought as sex partners could be refashioned into suitable adversaries by re-

76 RACE, ETHNICITY. AND SEXUALITY

sexing them as men: "[n]ot a gleam of pity entered her feminine breast. She was a cold-blooded, thirsty vulture, only intent upon her prey, as good as

the warrior himself." 47

Another due to the usefulness of sexualized images of Indians can be found in the labels and meanings assigned to the whites who openly con- sorted with Indians. From the earliest days of European colonialism well into the nineteenth century, whites who crossed ethnosexual boundaries into In- dian country too often or who lingered too long ran the risk of being morally and ethnically redefined. White men who were thought to have too much intimate association with native cultures, and especially with native women, were suspected of disloyalty in native-white conflicts. For instance, one William Baker, a white man who was reported to "Speake much Indian" and to have "turned Indian in nakednes and cutting of haire, and after many whoredomes, is there maried," was believed to have fought alongside the Pequots during the colonial-Pequot war of 1636. The ~ext ye~r. auth~rities used Baker's sexual liaisons against him, and Connecucut officials tried to arrest him /1 for uncleanness with an Indian squaw, who is now with child by him."48 Ann Marie Plane describes intimacies between natives and English settlers in colonial New England and catalogs a number of intermarriages and long-term extramarital unions between Christianized Indians and colonists. She notes, however, the tenuous nature of these arrangements, and concludes that native-white conflicts "may have made the official sanction-

ing of interracial unions virtually unthinkable." 49

. . After U.S. independence, white men who consorted with Indian women

were seen less as threats to white security than as risks to white morality. Smith comments that JJmany nineteenth-century men maintained, at least in public statements, that sexual relations with Indian women deg~aded white men."50 This was despite widespread sexual contact between native women and male officers and soldiers stationed out west. A good deal of such eth- nosexual adventuring no doubt was overlooked, but John D'Emilio and Es- telle Freedman report that more enduring Indian-white sexual liaisons1 in- cluding marriage, were viewed by some whites as a "sha1:1e and d~sg~ace to our country."51 This view was consistent with the neganve descriptions of so-called squaw men, white men (often French traders) who lived with In- dian women or took Indian wives, and who were sometimes accused by ob- servers of exploiting their relationship with these women's tribes for their own economic gain. For instance, in his 1883 book, Our Wild Indians, fron- tier veteran Colonel Richard Irving Dodge distinguished between pioneering white trappers or traders who married Indian women and the "squaw-men" who "went native," living with their wives' tribes and sending "their squaws to draw rations, buying and selling the same and, even worse, engaging in

Sex and Conquest 77

the clandestine sale of guns and liquor to their native hosts ... and [having] no compunction whatever about abandoning their families. 1152 The denigra- tion of whites residing on the native side of the Indian-white ethnic bound- ary reinforced stereotypes of indigenous sexual and social disreputability and made their mistreatment easier to overlook.

While whites may have been seen to lose moral and reputational ground by ethnosexual settling or sojourning with Indians, there were some nineteenth-century reformers and "Friends of the Indian" who believed In- dians benefited from sustained intimate association with whites, and who ad- vocated racial mixing as a way to improve the Indian race. The mixed off- spring of Indian-white marriages were applauded by some reformers as superior to "full-blooded" Indians (if not an improvement over "pure" whites). Herbert Welsh, a well-known member of the Indian Rights Associ- ation, a reform organization with mainly white membership, advocated the marriage of white men to native women. In 1892 he met a white school- master and his native wife and was impressed by their relationship and the potential of such unions: ,

Welsh cited an [IndianJ agency physician who maintained that compared to the full-bloods, the mixed-breeds were 11 healthier1 more intelligent, enjoy life better, are physically stronger, have larger cleaner houses, and approach the domestic condition of the white man."53

Some reformers viewed intermarriage as a way to improve and civilize not only native individuals and the race, but native communities and cultures as well. Speaking at an Indian reform conference at Lake Mohonk, New York, in 1897, the Reverend J. A. Lippincott commented, "There is one way to solve ~he Indian problem: it is the absorption and assimilation of these aborigines mto the body of our people."54 This happy vision of miscegenation fit well U.S. plans to acquire Indian land and resources under the umbrella of policy ref?rm desig_ned to improve the lot of Indians. As it turned out, the offspring of mtennarnage and mixed sexual unions sometimes served the economic in- terests of non-Indians. The /1 management" of Indian resources was aided by the fact that many of the mixed-blood descendants of these sexual crossings "walked in both worlds"-the native and the white. Such hybrid individuals constituted a potential pool of "middlemen" or cultural brokers between na- tive communities and whites. Mixed bloods could broker deals that served in- digenous interests, but their dealings could serve their own personal and fam- ily interests as welt and sometimes mixed bloods acted as "servants of power," making deals with whites to the detriment of their tribal relations. 55

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Indians had been confined to reservations, their economies destroyed, and their lands allotted; native

78 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

children were undergoing forced acculturation in ~o~rdi~g schools ~th English-only policies, Christian indoctrination, and trammg m proper {wh~te]

ral gender and sexual behavior.56 As the decades progressed, reservat10n m~unities ~ere colonized by the creation of federally linked tribal gov- ~~nments, and programs were designed to eliminate reservati~ns altogether by relocating native people into the. cities. The g?al of late-mnete:nth an~

·1 -twentieth-century Indian policy was to dismantle the Indian/non eat y . " · " Indian ethnic boundary and absorb natives into the Am~nca~ mams~ream. Real Indians were to be relegated to history, and the imagined Indian was transformed in whites' minds, if not in native realities, from a ~yperse~ual­ ized savage into a tamed domestic put in service to the Amen can. national project. America could now use this new, imp:oved, sa~ely resexuahzed, and thus truly noble savage to refashion its own image of itself.

WHITE SKIN, RED MASKS

Gender and sexuality played roles not only in whites' imaginings of.Indians, but, in a strange twist of cultural history, Indian sexuality and native.mas- culinity also played a role in whites' imaginings o~ themselves. T~ere is an- other side to sex and conquest that involves not white men and native. wome~ or white women and native men; it involves only men-red and white. This installment in the American chronicle of sex and conquest centers t~e con- struction of U.S. nationalism and American manhood out of the rums and

stolen remnants of native nations and masculinities. . White men's attraction to native masculine virility has a long .history

stretching back to the early days of the ~merica~. Republi~ and reachmg for- ward into the present. In Playing Indian, Ph1hp Deloria documents that throughout U.S. history Americans, mainly whit~ men, h~ve dressed up and acted in ways they imagined to be Indian. He cites, for instance, the 1773 Boston Tea Party, when white colonists donned costum~s a~d ma~e~p to simulate Mohawks;57 their "Indian" antics were ~artly. to disguise t~eir iden- tities and partly fo intimidate their opponen~s with fe~gned Iro~u01~ co~fed­ eracy fierceness. Whites used native symbolism and simulated Ind1~n :er- emonies to create solidarity and community in men's fraternal organizations and private dubs such as the nineteenth-century Improved Order of Red Men or the League of the Iroquois, 58 and "the Indian"

59 had a ce~~ral pl~ce

in youth organizations designed to build American character and cltlzens~ip, such as the Boy Scouts and the Woodcraft Indians.

6° Conten:porary Indian play can be witnessed by even the most casual observer today m football sta- diums and baseball parks where fans wear "war pain;:" do "war dance;,~: chant "war songs," and make "Indian" gestures such as tomahawk chops.

Sex and Conquest 79

The large-scale appropriation of Indianness, in particular the consump- tion of Indian virility and potency by mainly white men, began at the turn of the twentieth century when two social trends converged in the United States: the defeat of native nations followed by their internment on reser- vations and a crisis of confidence in American masculinity as the country moved from an agricultural, rural economy to an urban, industrial society. According to historians, in the late nineteenth century American manhood had .lost its moorings. 62 Southern men, despite their tradition of military service and honor, had lost the Civil War to a North whose men they per- ceived as feminized and weak.63 Northern white men faced a variety of chal- lenges in the increasingly urban landscapes where they worked and lived: ~m~igrants with their cheap labor and political machines, monopolistic cap- italist trusts that controlled wages and prices, boom and bust cycles associ- ated with the unregulated U.S. economy, and women with their demands for political rights and economic opportunities. 64

Scholars argue that these social, economic, and political changes desta- bilized American men's sense of independence and efficacy and challenged the historical vision of American strength, adventurousness, and virility. 65 This vision and the challenges it confronted were articulated in 1883 when Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed the dosing of the U.S. frontier and the end of the American frontier spirit. Turner's diagnosis of what was troubling America and his gloomy prognosis about the poor national health of post- frontier America set in motion a search for a tonic to restore American na- tional vision and virility.66 One place Americans looked, especially Ameri- can men, for a source of renewal was to the symbol of the frontier- " the Indian," who was now conveniently imprisoned and emasculated on reservations-the better to pose no real threat to the weakened Americans.

Although Indians were thus out of sight (and their total disappearance constantly predicted), they were not out of the minds of Americans. Then as now, the Indian appeared in stories told to a mass public, not only in dime novels and captivity narratives, but also in Wild West shows and early film 5.67 Through these endeavors, Americans reinvented and sanitized the Indian to ~p~eal to ~opular audi.ences and to serve nostalgic reconstructions of A~ IJJ11lfl' ica s fronner days. Whites also used the Indian to reimagine and rebuil&<m.er- ican masculinity into an iconic form that has survived into the present.

The contemporary metal of U.S. national. manhood was forged out of ~he collision of native and nonnative masculinities in the country's first ma- JOr nationalist imperialist project: Manifest Destiny-a vision and set of poli- cies that designed and justified westward expansion as an inalienable right of America and Americans. The westward expansion of the boundaries of the United States at the expense of indigenous individuals and nations is inscribed

80 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

in American popular culture and popular histories as a :~ries of military events.68 Colonial images of the Indian warrior in these military encounters were presented first in newspaper accounts, periodicals, and ~ectures, and lat:r in books, theater, film, and television.69 Countless scenes m ~opular media h d br

ave U.S. frontier soldiers confronting and conquering dangerous s owe b i· · · but endangered Indian men. The Indians were seen to e c mgmg t~ an ar- chaic way of life, making their last desperate, but doomed sta~d. agamst the superior and inevitable march of civilization across a moder~1zmg western American landscape. The only good Indian was not a dead Indian, but rather a subjugated and sanitized Indian-an Indian that could be conquered re-

peatedly in white men's Indian play. . . Imaginings of the Indian as a formidable, but ult1mat~ly fe:kle~s foe ha~e

remained largely undisturbed in the American popular 1magmat1on des:1te the nearly complete eradication of native resistance by 1~90-1891. ma1 ked by the massacre at Wounded Knee and the murder o.f Sitting Bull ~n ~outh Dakota.70 In his 1894 triumphant rendition of U.S. history, '!he Winmn~ of the West, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt scathingly dep1cte.d the Indian not only as brutal, lazy, and incapable of self-motivate~ productive labor, but also as cruel to men and dangerous to women and children; he argue~ that white settlers' atrocities against native pe~ple were understanda~;{. 1f not justifiable in light of "the terrible provocations they had endured ·

The frontiersman 1 was not taking part in a war against a civilized foe; he [ f' ht. m· a contest where women and children suffered the fate of the was ig mg 1 . ·1 · . h: l g s His friends had been treacherous y s am w i eon messa e strong men ... · . . . ff h. h t of peace; his house had been burned, l1lS cattle driven o · · · is sweet eard

O r wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment the slave an

b 1 di . 72

concubine of some dirty and ruta In an warrior.

Roosevelt' 5

Americans drew power from the strength and savagery of their

Indian adversaries: Their red foes were strong and terrible, cunning in council, dre~dful in bat- tle merciless beyond belief in victory. The men of the border did not ~ver­ co~e and dispossess cowards and weaklings, they marched forth to sp~l ;f e stout-hearted and to take for prey the possessions of the men of m1g t.

Roosevelt was not alone in his simultaneous vilification. an~ glorifica- tion of native toughness. White soldiers often expressed admiration for na- tive warriors.74 Francis Paul Prucha recounts the assessment of Gener~! George Crook who was in the army. at the time of George Armstrong Custer s

defeat by Cheyennes and Lakotas m 1876: I wish to say most emphatically that the American Indian is ~h~ intellectual peer of most, if not all, the various nationalities we have assimilated to our

Sex and Conquest 81

laws, customs, and language. He is fully able to protect himself, if the bal- lot be given and the courts of law not closed against him. 75

Crook described an admirable adversary, someone worthy of respect, even emulation, someone who had something a white man might want.

There is a contradiction and a bitter irony imbedded in the juxtaposition of these opposite realities and images of Indians. On the one hand, there is the destruction of actual native peoples and their societies in the nineteenth- century West. On the other hand, and at the same moment, nonnatives were using imaginary native cultures and people to reinvent themselves as Amer- icans. The reservation system-abject physical and psychological spaces where actual Indians were imprisoned--opened the "West" as a secure space for victorious Americans to settle.

Added to the injuries inflicted on Indians by policies designed to destroy actual native cultures were insults in the form of whites' imitation of what they imagined to be "Indian ways." This supposedly sincerest form of flat- tery led to an bizarre situation where non-Indians were busy civilizing Indi- ans in an effort to turn Indians into whites, while at the same time non- Indian men were busy emulating, more accurately simulating Indian men in an effort to turn themselves into Indians ... and thereby into true Americans.76

Popular media played an important role in spreading the word about the reinvigoration of American manhood. In the modern western novel begin- ning with The Virginian in 1902, for instance, strong, silent men performed heroic acts in the face of overwhelming odds and bloodthirsty foes. In the words of Amy Kaplan, The Virginian marked

the return to an original virile past ... reopen[edJ the closed frontier and reinvent[edJ the West as a space for fictional representation .... There the homeless and nameless Virginian embodie[d] the national essence in his muscular beauty and animal prowess. He defeats a [native] rebellion in a staged theatrical performance before an Eastern audience of travelers, and his physical vigor is composed in the narrator's feminized gaze.77

Representations of the Indian as a mirror in which hegemonic mas- culinity could gaze at itself also were reflected in western landscapes seen off the written page, in theatrical reenactments of the winning of the West. L. G. Moses notes that before the late 1800s /1 most people who dreamed about the West and longed after excitement and diversion from mundaneness had few places to look except to the printed page--until, that is, the appearance of the Wild West shows."78 In these touring melodramas and outdoor pag- eants, men with little patience or ability for reading could find visual images of tough American men overpowering and defeating savage native threats to frontier homes, hearths, and womenfolk: On a May afternoon in 1883,

82 RACE. ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

Colonel William Frederick Cody, better known as "Buffalo Bill," led a group of Pawnees and locally recruited "cowboys" into the arena at the Omaha, Nebraska, fairgrounds. The show began, in the words of a Hartford Courant journalist,

with a pony bare-back riding race between Indians and went on to a climax with a grand realistic battle scene depicting the capture, torture, and death of a scout by savagesi [followed by] the revenge/ recapture of the dead body and a victory of the government scouts. 79

Thus~ the pageantry of American triumphalism was restaged as a road show, a traveling circus of Americana playing to different crowds in differ- ent venues at different times around the country. And the shows go on. The Indian wars have continued to provide the props, costumes, and scripts for whites to play Indians and thus be and become Americans, not only in re- vivals of the old Wild West shows, but in a variety of settings, past and pres- ent: in children's informal play as /1 cowboys and Indians, It on athletic fields in wars involving teams such as the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Redskins or the William and Mary Indian Tribe and the Southeastern Ok- lahoma State University Savages, in films such as John Ford's The Searchers or Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, and in children's and youth organ- izations such as the Boy Scouts and the Young Men's and Women's Chris- tian Associations 1 (YMCA and YWCA) /flndian Guides" and "Indian Princesses. 11 In these spectacles of nationalism audiences can relive America's past and dream about the next American century.

The Indian wars are not over. Nor has the boundary disappeared be- tween the Indians and non-Indians who populate the Americas of past and present. Romanticized, sexualized. natives still inhabit the imaginations of Americans and continue to haunt Americans' images of themselves. Indians can be found in the same social texts ancl contexts in which they were cap- tured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only on athletic fields or in romantic and adventure fiction, but in anthropology and history . . . and sociology, in photography, television, and film, in national parks and monuments, in the contemporary men's movement, in countless commer- cial and cultural spaces such as coffeetable picture books, print and visual ad- vertisements, coins, art, music, holiday pageants and celebrations, and in clubs, websites, societies, and organizations symbolically and institutionally designed to constitute and enact America and Americanness.

I invite readers to take a walk down the book aisle in any American dis- count store1 supermarket, or bookstore and to look at the covers of romance novels. There you will find ''the Indian" memorialized in depictions of long- haired, bare-chested muscular dark and handsome men with lovely, lithe-

Sex and Conquest 83

som~ white ':omen swooning in their arms. Plate 3 of the color insert shows one mcarnat10n of this enduring image that appeared on the front cover of Royal Savage by Selwyn Anne Grames. 80 A further stroll down the aisle lea~s to the ''true story1' adventure novels with their powerful, Indianized white (or uhalf-b~eed") men confronting the feminized forces of repression a~d threats to their rugged individualism, manly autonomy, and inalienable nght to freedom: the Rambos and Billy Jacks of contemporary American ad- ~enture fiction and film. In both women's romance and men's adventure fic- tion, the prominence of sexualized, gendered native images embracing the bodies ?f whit~ women and worn on the faces of white men, show us that ~he Indian-white ~thnosexual frontier remains an open chapter in the ongo- mg saga of American culture and identity.

CONCLUSION

This c~ap~er has examined the links between sex and conquest, the role of sexuality m the ~onstruction of an enduring ethnic boundary between Indi- ans and no~-Ind1ans, an~ how the sexualization of indigenous peoples has ~haped the VIews of Americans and served the interests of colonial and Amer- 1c~n governm~n.ts. The. ~m~rican settling of the U.S. West was not only an epic of competinve ~os1t10mng by colonial powers, conflicts with indigenous peoples, and spreading settler populations across the continent. The "con- quest of the West'' involved a series of sexualized encounters between Eu- ropeans and Indians that reflected a confrontation of sexualities and sexual systems .. This d~sh of sexualities was an important feature in the develop- ment of ideologies that defined each group and the construction of ethnic ~?~~ari:; that divided them. Definitions of sexual morality distinguished civilized Europeans and Americans on the one hand from "savage" Indi-

ans on the other.

Eur~pea~ coloniz~rs and settlers of the New World had both a practical and prurient mterest m the native population-as slaves, guides, emissaries, and sexual partners. Euro-American exploitation of the New World's land and inhabitants was a hallmark of the conquest of the Americas. The settlers who followed in the wake of the early adventurers saw the new land and its peoples through the same set of lenses, and they were driven to satisfy the sa~e ki~ds of desires. The New World was an exotic and erotic landscape, an imaginary land of milk and honey that lingered in the minds of Euro- pe~ns throughout the period of colonial settlement and into the era of sov- ereign state formation on both American continents.

In the United States the vision of America as a place to be colonized and conquered became a central theme in national self-imagining and nation build-

84 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

ing. The early European explorers' image of themselves as morally superior, benevolent, and called upon to civilize as well as consume the New World was inscribed on the American national identity and institutionalized in the Amer- ican national state. America's expansionist moral mission grew from the seeds planted at the point of European contact, blossomed into l~te-nineteenth .and early-twentieth-century U.S. imperial control of both continents and reg1ons of the Pacific, and matured into an established perennial American power that has thrived in and dominated the global environment. As the United States has matured from a commercial and political upstart into a mature mercan- tile and military power, the image of "the llldian" endures as a signifier both of American conquest and the indomitable Ametican spirit.

In the next chapter we will explore the intersection of ethnicity and sex- uality in another episode in American history, one that parallels in time the story of sex and conquest chronicled here, but it is a story that is retold as shameful rather than triumphant. Chapter 4 focuses on the sexual dimen- sions of the black-white color line in America. In that chapter we will reex- amine through a sexual lens the enslavement of millions of Africans in the United States from colonial times until the end of slavery in 1865; we will document the role of sexuality in definitions of blackness and whitenessi and we will see how sexuality has contributed to the maintenance of the most durable, violent, and enforced ethnic boundary in America.

NOTES 1. Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage

to America, 1492-1493, abstracted [and reconstructed] by Fray Bartolome de las Casas1 transcribed and translated into English, with notes and a concordance of the Spanish by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 67-69.

2. Ibid., 137. 3. Ibid., 255. 4. Ibid., 219. 5. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American

Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1978), 8-9; see also Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus, Letter to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici, trans- lated by George T. Northrup (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1916). .

6. For a detailed interpretation and contextualization of this image and the artists who were involved in its production, see Jose Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Okla- homa Press, 1993), especially chapter 1.

7. Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 225, 233.

Sex and Conquest 85

8. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 9. 9. Ibid.

10. Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, 255-57.

11. Ibid. 12. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 9-10. 13. See Stodola Derounian-Stodola., Kathryn Zabelle, and James A Levernier,

The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550-1900 (New York: Twayne, 1993)i Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: Pub- lished for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and "Brave New Worlds: Women's and Gender His- tory," William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993): 311-28.

14. Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Com Mothers Went Away: Mar- riage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 1991); the existence and nature of mainly male, cross-dressing 11 berdaches" is reported in a number of American Indian communities from earliest contact to the twentieth century; see Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (eds.), Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Ur- bana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991); Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender; this is a controversial topic among schol- ars, and it is difficult to judge the quality and veracity of the research separate from the agendas and sexual identity politics of various supporters and criticsi Gutierrez's work, in particular, has generated a great deal of debate; see the special section of American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 {1993): J4lff devoted to critiquing When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away.

15. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away, 72-73. 16. Ibid., 125.

17. Numbers of Americans of mixed Indian/non-Indian ancestry continue to in- crease today, partly due to high rates of native/nonnative intermarriage in the United States; for a discussion of American Indian patterns of intermarriage and population trends; see U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, Indian Health Care (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1986); Gary D. Sandefur and Trudy McKinneJl, 11

American Indian Intermarriage," Social Science Research 15 {1986): 347-71; Snipp, American Indians; Karl Eschbach, "The Enduring and Vanishing American Indian: American Indian Population Growth and Intermarriage in 1990," Ethnic and Racial Studies 18 (1995): 89-108.

18. Frank Bergon, The Journals of Lewis and Clark (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 324.

19. Ibid, 334.

20. James Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 64; see also Henry M Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, To- gether with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811 (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Speer and Eichbaum, 1814).

86 RACE. ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

d . d Clark among the Indians, 64. 21. Ron a, Lewis an . p· h Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resis-22 Ib.d 63· see also Kirsten 1sc er, · 11

•

1

., /

• I h . c 11 University Press, 2002), especia Y tance in Colonial North Carolina ( t aca. orne

chapter 2. h S Met· Sex and Gender on Three Frontiers," 23. Albert Hurtado, "W en trangers · . the Women's West ed. Elizabeth

in Writing the Range: Race, Class, andUC~ltur~ m f Oklahoma Press l997), 122--42; · (N rman · ruvers1ty o '

Jameson and Susan Armitage o I f. N . Women in the Creation of Fur Trade l . V Ki k "The Ro e o atlve · .

see also Sy via an r , "·n The Women's West, ed. Susan Armitage Society in Western Canada, 1670-1U83_0, i_ f Oklahoma Press 1987), 53-62; Pa~

. b h J (Norman· mvers1ty o / . W and Ehza et ameson . . Th Unbroken Past of the American est tricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest.198~) 50ff- Anne M. Butler, Daughters of (New York: W.W. Norton & Companhy, A '. n West 1865-90 (Urbana: Univer- Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in t e menca ' sity of Illinois Press, 1987), 9ff. h I d' 256

d L . d Clark among t e n zans, . . 24. Ron a, ewt~ an C hies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex m 25. Rebecca Blevms Faery, artograp U . ·ty of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

, . Nation (Noi·man: mvers1 the Shaping of an Amderic.an N t Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 67. 26. Brown, Goo Wives, as Y

27. Ibid. . . from Officers' Row: Army Perceptions of West- 28. Sherry L. Smith~ Th~ View£ A . . p ess 1990)· Butler, Daughters of Joy, ern Indians (Tucson: Umvers1ty o nzona r ' ,

Sisters of Misery· 11 • W . the Early Republic: Old World Percep- 29. Theda Perdue, .. N~,t~:e Na~:e~:ericans and the Early Republic, :d. Fred-

tions, New World Realltles, i d p J Albert (Charlottesville: University Press erick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, an ete.r . of Virginia, 1999), 96-97. M ,,

135 H d "When Strangers et, · G 30. urta o, l f I dian captivity narratives, see ar-f the most comp ete sets o n (N 31. For one o . f N h A . an Indian Captivities, vols. 1-111 ew land Library of Narratives o ort meric

York: Garl~nd Publications, 1977). Held Ca tive by Indians: Selected Nar:atives, 32. Richard van der Bee~s, f T . p Pres" 1974)· Richard Slotkin, Re-ill . u · verstty o ennessee .,, '

0 1642-1~36 (Knoxv e: ru . Th Mi tholo y of the American Frontier, 1600-186 generation through Violence. . e ¥ g 73 (Middletown, CT: Wesleya~ Unf1v;;s1~y P~~:sR!~ J~rvey Pearce, "The Significance

33. Faery, Cartographzes o . esireL,. ' t 19 (1947)· 1-20. . . N · " American itera ure ·

of the Capt1v1ty arrat1ve, tly available on videotape and DVD; 34. Especially since film versions arelcu.rrenh. betwe""n white women and na-

. h · aoined re at10ns ips '" Renee Berland examines t e rm O"'f h M h. and Lydia Marie Child's Hobomok; . 1 The Last o t e o zcans tive rnen m two nove s, . . d, romantic encounter between a young h Child / tale of an erotic1ze . she argues t at s s an ""'ttler depicts white women d M Conant a young worn """ / . Wampanoag man an ary ' Ali d Cora Munro are more passive

h C oper' s women, ce an ' d as active agents, w ereas

0 . lly involved with and are assaulte d . tl'miz' _ .J when they become romantica an more vie eu

by native men: . C . actuall dead and described as By the end of the book [Th: La;,t of the Mohzcan1o a or~~: where ~he w~uld find congen- the ghostly bride of an Indian, ;i:Af~pl~nt.ed: ".ble bJr-ne away within a litter "when low ial spirits, and be forever happy. ice is tnVlSl '

Sex a.nd Conquest 87

and stifled sobs alone announced {herJ presence." Hobomok, on the other hand, allows Mary Conant to transcend her spectrality, and leave behind her angelic purity. She mar- ries Hobomok and gives birth to a son. Later, she divorces him, keeping custody of their child and retaining her own wealth. He.r own possession of her body is affirmed when she goes on to marry again.

In both novels, native men simultaneously are sources of white fear and objects of white desire, and in both novels the women pay with their lives (at least once) for acting on their ethnosexual desires; Renee L. Berland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 2000), 65. Christopher Castiglia contrasts "typical" popular captivity narratives marked by "savage Indian tormentors and women captives who rely for rescue on [white] masculine financial or military agency,

/1

with more nontraditional fonns in which

narrative patterns question the structures the stories elsewhere support, signaling discur- sive conflicts within white culture ... fwhereJ the captive either fights the Indians in or- der to avoid captme, or, once captured, uses her own strengths to escape ... for where captives] either refuse to return to Anglo-American culture or inake dear that their lives among the Indians were no worse than among whites. (Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from MLlry Rowland- son to Patty Hearst (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1996], 25).

35. Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 66. 36. Ibid.

37. See James F. Brooks, "'This Evil Extends Especially to the Feminine Sex': Captivity and Identity in New Mexico, 1700-1846," in Writing the Range, 107; June Namias, White Captives.: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993)i Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, The In- dian Captivity Narrative, 73-85.

38. Frances Roe Kestler, The Indian Captivity Narrative: A Woman's View (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1990), 423.

39. Faery, Cartographies of Desire. 40. Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian, 28.

41. Namias, White Captives, 109; see also Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).

42. The next two sections of this chapter are based on collaborative work with David Anthony Tyeeme Clark; I wish to thank Tony for introducing me to recent feminist scholarship on the U.S. West and for sharing with me his creative and ad- venturous work recovering native voices and challenging conventional views of ''the Indian" in scholarship and in the American imagination; see David Anthony Tyeeme Clark and Joane Nagel, "White Men, Red Masks: Appropriations of 'Indian' Man- hood in Imagined Wests," in Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West, ed. Matthew L. Basso, Dee Garceau, and Laura McCall (New York: Routledge, 2000), 109-30.

43. Smith, The View from Officers' Row, 18.

44. Ibid., see also Shirley A Leckie, Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

45. See Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Ptess, 1987).

46. Smith, The View from qfficers' Row, 148.

88 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

47. Ibid., 68. 48. Ibid. 49. Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New Eng-

land (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 37. 50. Ibid., 70. 51. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sex-

uality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 88. 52. Quoted by David D. Smits, 111Squaw Men,' 'Half-Breeds,' and Amalgama-

tors: Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes toward Indian-White Race- Mixing/' American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15 (1991): 29-61, 39; see Richard Irving Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-three Years Personal Experience among the Red Men of the Great West (New York: Archer House, Inc., [1883] 1959).

53. Smits, " 1Squaw Men,' 'Half-Breeds,' and Amalgamators," 45. 54. Ibid., 43. 55. James Coser, "The Alien as a Servant of Power/' American Sociological Re-

view 37 (1972): 574-81; for a discussion of the role of mixed ancestry individuals in Indian-white relations, see William E. Unrau, Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution: Charles Curtis and the Quest for Indian Identity (Lawrence: University Press of

Kansas, 1989). 56. For a discussion of religious schools' efforts to inculcate "proper" sexual and

gender demeanor, see Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

57. Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian. (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1999). 58. See Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 59. The notion of "the Indian" is borrowed from the work of Gerald Vizenor,

in particular, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Pres- ence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

60. See Jeffrey P. Hantover, "The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculin- ity," in Men's Lives, 74-81.

61. For a discussion of Indian sports mascots, see C. Richard King and Charles f. Springwood, Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and 11 Fighting Spirits: The Racial Politics of Sports Mascots," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 24 (2000): 282-304.

62. This concern over declining masculinity was shared by Europeans. Lieutenant- General Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement in England and au- thor of Scouting for Boys, published in 1908, saw scouting as a way to bolster weak- ening English manhood; see Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 18i see also Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Guilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America (New York: The Free Press, 1996)i Joe L. Dubbert, "Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis," in The American Man, ed. Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modem America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 69-93; E. An-

Sex and Conquest 89

thony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Rev- olution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 185-93.

63. Nina Silber, The Romance of .Reunion: Northerners and tlze South, 1986-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993}.

64. For instance, Jeffrey Hantover argues that in the growing white middle class,

the profossionalization and sanctification of motherhood, the smaller family size, the de- cline in the number of servants who could serve as buffers between mother and son, and the absence of busy fathers from the ho.me made the mother-son relationship appear threat- ening to proper masculine socialization. ("The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Mas- culinity," 75)

65. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gen- der and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); John Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s/' in his Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 78-102; James R. McGovern, "David Graham Phillips and the Virility Impulse of the Progressives," New England Quarterly 39 (1966): 334-55.

66. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American His- tory," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894}.

67. See Sara J. Blackstone, Buclcskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buf- falo Bill's Wild West (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Raymond William Sted- man, Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture (Norman: Universitv of Oklahoma Press, 1982); Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian. ,

68. For an account of the so-called Indian wars as a defensive struggle, see Ward Church.ill, "The 'Trial' of Leonard Peltier," preface to Jim Messerscmidr, The Trial of Leonard Peltier {Boston: South End Press, 1983).

69. Such images have been seen in Hollywood productions since the earliest days of cinema; for discussions of depictions of the Indian in American popular filrn, see Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, eds., Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Don- ald L. Kaufman, "The Indian as Media Hand-Me-Down," in The Pretend Indians: Im- ages of Native Americans in the Movies, ed. Gretchen M. Bataille and Charles L.P. Silet (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980), 22-34; Alison Griffiths, "Science and Spectacle: Native American Representation in Early Cinema," in Dressing in Feath- ers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 79-95.

70. For an account of the massacre of approximately two-hundred native peo- ple, mainly women and children, by the U.S. Seventh Calvary on the Pine Ridge reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890, see Robert Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); Renee Samp- son Flood, Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota (New York: Scribner's, 1995); for an account the murder of Sitting Bull by Indian police and agency per- sonnel on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1891, see the letter writ- ten by James McLaughlin, Indian Agent at Standing Rock Reservation written on January 19, 1891, to the Indian Rights Association (http:/ /www.pbs.org/weta/ thewest/ resources/ archives/ eight/ sbarrest.htm ).

90 RACE, ETHNICITY, AND SEXUALITY

71. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: From the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, 1769-1.776, volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1894] 1995), 94.

72. Ibid., 95. As Gail Bederrnan notes, in his writings and speeches Roosevelt "repeatedly conttasts the virile manliness of the Americans to the brutal unmanli- ness of the Indians ... the virile white man is both like the Indians and superior to them"; see Manliness and Civilization, 181-82.

73. Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 110. 74. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers; Richard Godbeer "Erotidzing the Middle Ground:

Anglo-Indian Sexual Relations along the Eighteenth-Century Frontier," in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 91-111; Jennifer M, Spear, "'They Need Wives'; Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699-1730," in Sex, Love, Race, 25-59; Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Werit Away.

75. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father, volume l (Lincoln: University of Ne- braska Press, 1984), 548; another positive assessment of native men is more telling about the usefulness of the Indian, not as a weak, but as a strong adversary; it was a statement about Indian men made by Crook's contemporary, General Nelson A Miles:

The art of war am()ng the white race is called or tactiCSi when it is practised by the Indians, it is called treachery. They employed art of deceiving, misleading, decoy- ing, and surprising the enemy with great deverness. The celerity and secrecy of their move- ments were never excelled by the warriors of any country. They had courage, skill, sagac- ity, endurance, fortitude, and self-sacrifice of a high order. (ibid)

See also Nelson A Miles, Serving the Republic: Memoirs of the Civil and Mil- itary Life of Nelson A. Miles (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911).

76. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); in their self-reconstruction endeavors, Americans could find needed "facts" about Indians and Indian manhood in dime novels and in accounts written by army officers, captives, and other "experts"; for a discussion of white "In- dian" organizations such as the Improved Order of Red Men, see Carnes, Secret Rit- ual and Manhood in Victorian America.

77. Arny Kaplan, "Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Mas- culinity in the Popular Historical Novels of the 1890s," American Literary History 2 (1990): 659-90, 683.

78. L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 4.

79. Hartford Courcmt journalist was quoted in Henry Blackman Sell and Vic- tor Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Basin, WY: Big Horn Books, 1979), 135i see also Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1; Buf- falo Bill Cody used actual native people (sometimes "on loan" from the U.S. De- partment of the Interior) in his Wild West shows; see Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 26, 33.

80. The text on back cover of the book speaks even louder than the image on the cover: "To his own people, he was a traitor with a red man's body and a white man's soul. To the British aristocrats, he was a noble savage who dared to live-and love-as one of their own. To society's beauties, he was an exotic experience, a prize to be won"; Selwyn Anne Grames, Royal Savage (New York: Delt 1980).

CHAPTER 4

SEX AND RACE The Color of Sex in America

THE HEART AND DARKNESS: SEX AND RACE IN THE PORNO-TROPICS

The opinions and judgments voiced by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci about the sexuality and savagery of the indigenous peoples of the Americas were not utterances out of context. Europeans transported with them beliefs about native and tribal peoples as they voyaged from the Old World to the New. Old World "primitives" included groups in the Euro- peans' own backyard such as the Irish, the Sicilians, and the Samis.1 Noter- ritory, however, was more likely to be seen as barren of civilization and empty of civilized peoples than the "Dark Continent" of Africa. 2 Europeans1 casual musings about exploiting and enslaving indigenous Americans were nor new notions for the New World. When Columbus boarded the Santa Maria and set sail west, the Europeans he left behind had been exploiting and enslav- ing Africans for at least a century, and much longer if the Greeks and Ro- mans are taken into account, since both of these European-based empires were built on the backs of slave labor and stolen land. 3

In Europeans' images of Africa and America, both sex and race mat- tered.4 Anne McClintock argues that European explorations and colonial ex- ploitations were supported by an ideological apparatus that linked gender, race, and sexuality. Europeans viewed the new peoples they met as racial- ized, sexually exotic Others:

For centuries, the uncertain continents-Africa, the Americas, Asia-were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized. Travelers' tales abounded with versions of the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes, femiw nized men's breasts flowed with milk, and militarized women lopped