Squaw, Mistress or Princess? – Stereotypical Representations of Native American

Women in Hollywood Narratives

Abstract

This paper investigates mainstream visual representations of Native American women in several films
belonging to different historical periods: John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Searchers (1956),
Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow (1950), Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005), Disney’s animation
Pocahontas (1995), as well as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). The narratives within the dominant discourse
have stereotypically delineated the American Indian women as the “squaw”, a household drudge and beast of
burden; the seductive (mixed-blood) mistress; or the Indian princess, a modest, but exotically beautiful maiden,
usually the chief’s daughter. My aim will be threefold: firstly, the analysis of the prevalence of these clichés in
films produced at certain points in time. Second, the paper will focus on gender construction, as well as on the
male-female/white-Indian dynamics and on the issue of miscegenation. Finally, the paper will analyze the
construction of gender and ethnicity in the contemporary American mainstream cinema.