The "Squaw Drudge"

The "Squaw Drudge" looks at the stereotypes placed on Native societies at the time of colonization based on the Euro-American ethnocentric view that Native people were savages. Based on this view Euro-Americans were able to justify their harsh ideas that Native women were basically work horses pushed by lazy Native men. This idea led Euro-Americans to conclude "that Indians personified savagism" which "served as the grand rationale for imperialism" (Smits, 2007, p. 29). Consequently, Europeans could justify their maltreatment and harsh criticisms of how native people lived their lives. Europeans believed that as the more advanced and more evolved civilization it was their job to civilize and Christianize Native people in order to elevate them from their savage status. Specifically Europeans saw the roles Native women took on as particular signs of savagism because Native women played roles that in European society were played by men. In European society women were suppose to be submissive, weak, quiet, "ladies". According to Wright Native societies were savage because "the weaker sex" was the one that did the physical labor. "Where we find the weaker sex burdened with hard labour, we may ascribe to the stronger something of the savage" (Smits, 2007, p. 36). The reason Europeans saw for insinuating Native people were savages was that it furthered their agenda in gaining land, in my opinion. If Native people were savages, they must be less deserving of land and resources than the more civilized individual.

In regards to the land found in The New World, Europeans believed that they were more deserving of the land and should have ownership of the land because Native people were not working the land and did not own the land in the European sense. "By disregarding Indian agriculture, Euro-Americans could defend their territorial dispossession of the Native Americans" (Smits, 2007, p. 37). In fact, according to European thought "...the frontiersmen could not be accused of trespassing, for "the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not..." or Europeans believed that "the world would come to a standstill" because taking this land was God's destiny for Euro-Americans (Smits, 2007, p. 38). However, what Europeans did not know or acknowledge was that for several thousand years Native people had not only been living but thriving in the New World enjoying sexually defined roles that were "complementary, equitable, and harmoniously integrated" into their way of life (Smits, 2007, p. 40).