Abstract

This address reflects upon the ethical responsibility of ethnohistorians to consider the ongoing impact of historical depictions of indigenous peoples, in text and image, and our handling of those depictions. The essay draws in particular upon the historical mistreatment and misrepresentation of indigenous women, using Pocahontas and Malinche as examples of distorted icons, referencing the hidden history of the sixteenth-century trade in indigenous sex slaves in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, and arguing that the Armed Freedom statue atop the US Capitol Building is an allegorical icon of the highly problematic, deeply rooted, gendered, and ethnoracialized construction of “America.”

You do not currently have access to this content.