White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

by Ruby Hamad

Indeed, although Native women often held positions of prestige and influence within their traditional communities, the hallmark of their depiction on-screen is an abject lack of complexity. When they weren’t Princess Pocahontas, they were the Dumpy Squ*w. Usually nameless and unimportant—in 1980, Lakota/Dakota actress Lois Red Elk revealed that she’d never played a role that actually had a name—the squ*w was a drudge: a sexless, unattractive workhorse who was relegated to the kind of manual work that white women were considered too highly prized for. Native Americans regard the term as a slur and have been lobbying for years to have place names that include it renamed. The word “squ*w,” explained Mohawk woman and Native rights activist Suzan Harjo on The Oprah Winfrey Show back in 1992, comes from the Algonquin word for “vagina,” and “that’ll give you an idea of what the French and British fur trappers were calling all Indian women.”