Research Project

The Indian Cowgirls Research Project

Dr. Marilyn Burgess is heading a research project sponsored by the Multiculturalism Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her Research Assistant, Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, is a Mohawk visual artist.

Pop culture pictures of Native women outside of the stereotypical portrayals of "Princess" or "Squaw" are rare and hard to find. Public libraries and catalogues do not have categories like "Rodeo Women of the First Nations" or "Gender Benders of the Southwestern Plains." Yet Aboriginal women have been "cowgirls" - rebels, renegades and fierce survivors for as long as the west has existed as a popular fiction.

We know that some women, like Princess Red Bird and Linda (aka "Linder") One Spot rode in wild west shows and rodeos, riding bucking broncs and brandishing guns.

Who were the others? We are trying to find them and we need your help.

The project aims to account for two related phenomena:

1) the marginalization and exoticization of Native women in popular frontier folklore - wild west shows, pulp fiction, rodeos and early westerns - in the service of a dominant code of femininity applicable to and reserved for White women.

2) the reversals of this race/gender code occasioned by Native women's appropriation of the cowgirl image: Native women's participation in rodeo and wild west shows, photographs of Native women posing as scouts and huntresses and modern-day American Indian and Native Canadian cowgirls and rodeo queens.