On a more local or micro level, distilled frustration also wells up and overflows whenever this writer sees the terms “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” used to describe someone’s remote ancestor of indigenous American ethnicity.
Such terminology is intended to disguise certain truths, in order to place a romantic gloss on older, darker aspects of American history.
Using the words “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” suggests some bygone age of intercultural amity, in which a woman of equal social standing was “courted” by a “white” outsider to her community – see the various incarnations of the Captain Smith and Pocahontas myth.
These words are meant to imply a 1950s-style of courtship, in which a love-besotted man approaches the family or tribe of said “maiden”, seeking her hand in marriage from her father, who is of course always a “Chief”.
The words “maiden” or “princess” are also intended to elevate the woman in question – a way to skate over the fact that, for most of American history, indigenous peoples were in fact treated much the same way as African-Americans.
Indigenous peoples were enslaved. They were sold. They were rounded-up in concentration camps and marched at gunpoint to dry and dusty places hundreds of miles from their rightful homelands.
And of course, they were killed in wars and slaughtered during massacres.
Their children were removed and placed into industrial schools, where they were abused physically and sexually, or beaten for speaking their native tongues.
And in a patriarchal society, no one was farther down the social ladder than indigenous women/women of color.
In the violent rough and tumble of Manifest Destiny, “non-white” women were often seen as little more than a labor resource, or a sexual commodity.
Almost everyone accepts that the disease, warfare, and land grabbing of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s saw the deaths of innumerable indigenous men.
What almost no one ever mentions is the countless number of indigenous women and children left to fend for themselves in the wake of these communal disasters, or the sheer number of children removed from their families and communities and put up for adoption, or sent to Indian boarding schools to be “assimilated” by force into “white” culture.
Not all indigenous women ended-up on reservations – perhaps not even the majority. Many were forced into a life of back-breaking manual labor or menial drudgery as farm hands or washerwomen.
Some were forced into prostitution.
The “luckier” ones might become wife or “consort” to a frontier trapper, miner, or settler, enduring a hard life of endless childbearing, cooking, sewing, washing, spinning, weaving, cleaning, etc.
This writer has in fact read first-hand accounts in which men were quite open about bringing their Indian consorts (yes, that’s plural) west, making them walk alongside an ox-wagon for days, their feet tied with rope to the woman ahead or behind them…
This is not ancient history, lost in the mists of time. Much of the foregoing (such as the Indian Boarding Schools) was still occurring in my own lifetime, and very much during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents.
*****
Everything was not horror. Some inter-ethnic pairings and marriages were based on mutually agreed trade-offs, even affection.
Many indigenous women came to be held in high regard by their wider communities, often because of their expertise and skills in pottery-making, basketry, herbal medicine and midwifery.
Anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America has one of these women in their family tree somewhere.
Modern DNA testing will rarely show it, because the DNA of one or two indigenous women during the late 1700s or early 1800s will usually have been “shuffled-out” by now.
But these woman WERE there, they were real, and they were almost never an “Indian princess”.
Such obvious distain in his voice when he says "another American will come into the world" if he hates Americans so much and what they do to the environment he should go all the way and just kill himself.
