Native American Manhood

Of all the historical images of the Native American man, perhaps none has endured as well as that of the lone warrior. Whether recalling the Sioux war-chief Sitting Bull or the horse-mounted militants of 1950s Westerns, Americans tend to imagine Indian men either fighting valiantly on the frontier or stoically accepting inevitable military defeat. This one-dimensional representation masks the complexity of both historical and contemporary Indian manhood. For more than four hundred years, Native American men have played a host of other roles that have shaped American history in concrete ways and that offer important insights into the construction of masculine identities and the social structures that support them.