...[C]olumnist Harriet Van Horne was obviously captivated by the "gentle-voiced Apache maiden...who appeared on the stage in tribal dress." Once the furor was over, suggested Van Horne, "people will still remember that lovely Littlefeather, in her shining braids, explaining as best she could why the most honored actor of the year was letting the chalice pass." The columnist's "heart went out to that Apache lass in her long braids." And that, she asserted, was "precisely what Marlon Brando had in mind.

Was that what Brando had in mind? If so, he had selected his propaganda device shrewdly, for it was, simply, that of the lovely and selfless Indian princess, possibly the most enduring image this land has known. Brando's braided messenger was Pocahontas and U-le-lah and Minnehaha and Redwing and Sacagawea and Sonseeahray and Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring and, some would say, the allegorical America. She was the female manifestation of the Noble Savage myth, changed little from the image created centuries earlier, and far more endearing and viable in the twentieth century than her male counterpart, the forest nobleman.

Through the nation's growing years Pocahontas the Nonpareil—intelligent, guileless, lovely, courageous—turned into Pocahontas the Imitated. Not a season went by that some author, or artist, or playwright, or trademark maker did not call upon her image.

As representations changed, the images of First Nations women as Indian princesses who embodied mystery and exoticism began to emerge. During the post World War I era, the Indian princess is repeatedly portrayed alone in the pristine wilderness, scantily clad in a buckskin or tunic dress, sporting a jaunty feather over two long braids. Most striking, however, is that all of the models are notably white-skinned women.

[T]he Shoshone (like other North American Indians) had no concept of royalty, as Lewis's journals make clear. The "Indian princess" stereotype turns up a lot in misleading history, and even more in third-rate television and movie westerns. The stock Indian princess saves the white hero from her less enlightened brethren, and is often depicted as being tall, beautiful, and freakishly light-skinned. Think of Sacagawea as portrayed in the 1955 film The Far Horizons by that great Native American actress, Donna Reed.

Sacajawea was not shy, but appealing soft of speech and manner. And she was gracefully feminine beyond any woman I had seen....Her head was not elongated, as so many of the Indians, but rather small and round, Caucasian in shape. So, too, were her features Caucasian.

Sacajawea was not only an uncommonly pretty young girl, she was a regal woman by any standard of any race. No man who ever knew her, was quite the same again.

Grace was hers, and good manners. Intelligence she had, and a quick and lively tongue. Dignity covered her every move. She could look like a queen while gutting an elk....She had no crown but her auburn hair....But Sacajawea was a ruler of men's hearts by God's will.

During my three years as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians it was a rare day when some white didn't visit my office and proudly proclaim that he or she was of Indian descent.

Cherokee was the most popular tribe of their choice and many people placed the Cherokees anywhere from Maine to Washington State. Mohawk, Sioux, and Chippewa were next in popularity. Occasionally, I would be told about some mythical tribe from lower Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Massachusetts which had spawned the white standing before me.

At times I became quite defensive about being a Sioux when these white people had a pedigree that was so much more respectable than mine. But eventually I came to understand their need to identify as partially Indian and did not resent them. I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves someday and leave us alone.

Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.

It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian grandmother complex that plagues certain whites. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer. And royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.

The early colonists, accustomed to life under benevolent despots, projected their understanding of the European political structure onto the Indian tribe in trying to explain its political and social structure. European royal houses were closed to ex-convicts and indentured servants, so the colonists made all Indian maidens princesses, then proceeded to climb a social ladder of their own creation. Within the next generation, if the trend continues, a large portion of the American population will eventually be related to Powhattan.

While a real Indian grandmother is probably the nicest thing that could happen to a child, why is a remote Indian princess grandmother so necessary for many whites? Is it because they are afraid of being classed as foreigners? Do they need some blood tie with the frontier and its dangers in order to experience what it means to be an American? Or is it an attempt to avoid facing the guilt they bear for the treatment of the Indian?