ABSTRACT
Transgressive iterations of Indianness, such as Praying Indians, Anglo-acculturated Indians, and even gender-bending “mixed-bloods” like Unca Eliza Winkfield, were, as I have argued in previous chapters, incredibly threatening to Anglo-European discourse and, therefore, very appealing to Anglo women writers seeking to establish their own authorial identities. Such figures with their binary-defying identities could be successfully deployed by female authors to rupture and destabilize colonial discourse, while simultaneously opening a space within the white, masculine New World hegemony where white womanhood and female authorship could emerge. When undergirded by the authenticating power of Indianness, Anglo women authors could rewrite the master narratives governing race, nationalism, and American identity through the appropriation and domestication of that same Indianness. They could posit the possibility of not only a differently raced nation, but also a differently gendered one where they now had a voice—even if their voice came through the appropriation of Indian identity and perpetuation of colonialist Indian fantasy.
