INDIAN WOMEN AND GENDER ROLES WOMEN IN POPULAR CULTURE Two common misconceptions of Native American culture in the U.S. are our understandings of Native Women as a “Squaw” or a “Princess.” The “Squaw” according to some historians degrades Native American women to nothing more than a menial laborer, while her husband basks in the glory. “Squaw” did not always have such connotations, but hundreds of years of misplaced usage made it a derogatory term. Many might know of Pocahontas and the idea of the Native American Princess. Interpretation of Native American women as princesses romanticizes the image of Indian women. Depictions of Pocahontas exemplify this romanticization where she takes on European culture and notions of love, creating an idealized image of natives.
Native American women encompass more than just the “Squaw” and the “Princess” duality. Women helped rear their children, worked in small gardens and large fields, gathered water and firewood, created pottery and helped heal the sick. Ceramic material represents one of the instances in which a society sheds their nomadic origins; many tribes traded pottery so the existence of ceramic materials represents the associations between indigenous communities, where women had a shaping role.