The Indian princess is a serene, noble savage. These stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in our popular culture that we scarcely give them a second thought. In the struggle for national identity, Canada and the United States began constructing their own creation myths and fanciful stories. For both of these countries, manufacturing a national identity involved an aggressive, if not genocidal, form of cultural appropriation of First Nations peoples and culture.
Appropriation involves strategies for occupation.
This entails a reworking of both real and imagined spaces appropriate to the needs and fantasies of the occupier, as well as a fundamental need to cloak the acts of appropriation in appreciation. Unfortunately, throughout the history of colonization it has primarily been women who have been made amenable to occupation by refiguring and redrawing them in an appreciated, though stereotyped, image. This double strategy not only masks Native peoples with European appearances, but is also used to represent the untamed nature which resides in both the frontier and white cowgirl. The imaginary constructs found in European notions of femininity and wild savagery are grafted onto First Nations and frontier women, bringing civilization to the wild and the wild to civilization in a more palatable form. Like the cultural narratives of the western frontier which sustained them, textual representations of real First Nations peoples reveal stories of conquest and its legacies.