Wendy Red Star’s Indigenous Gaze

One little-known fact about Indigenous people is that we excel at “counting coup” on our oppressors through the nonviolent resistance of satire. Why exert the energy to slay one’s enemies when one can laugh at them instead? The Crow multimedia artist Wendy Red Star understands the art of “Indi’n humor” as well as anyone, as evidenced by her cunning deployment of bigoted tropes in her 2014 series “White Squaw.”

Like many of Red Star’s projects, the series began when Red Star went down a Googling rabbit hole. She was interested in the etymology of the word “squaw,” an Algonquian term that had evolved into a derogatory label for Indigenous women. Last year, the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, launched an initiative to rename places on federal lands where the word appears. Red Star took a different approach. Her Web search led her to a pulp-fiction series dating from the eighties and nineties titled “White Squaw,” featuring campy cover illustrations and outrageous subtitles and taglines—“Buckskin Bombshell: In a hot Texas canyon—she finds herself in the hands of some iron-hard men”; “Virgin Territory: She’s more than a handful for any man!”—that played on centuries-old captivity narratives embedded within the colonial imagination. Red Star bought up all twenty-four paperbacks in the series on eBay, scanned their covers, and replaced the original illustrations with self-portraits of her doing her best “Indian princess” burlesque.

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