Sacajawea and Her Sisters: Images and Native Women

Abstract

Historicized images of First Nations women and the cultural narratives they tell are deeply entrenched in North American popular culture. We construct iden­tities through our identification with narratives that we see, hear, and tell and the ideological messages they carry. These appropriated, commodified representations of Native women circulate in the politics of difference, confining the past and con­structing the future. But the identities of First Nations women are also built in the stories of grandmothers, mothers, and sisters. In narratives of Native traditionalism and Aboriginal experience, First Nations women situate, reap­propriate, and transform the past as they empower their own futures.