Ursula Johnson

In mainstream culture, the Indigenous female body has been regarded as a place of exoticization and romanticization, which has led to the unfair treatment of Indigenous women by society.


For decades, mainstream fashion has repeatedly adopted trends of incorporating imitation hide, beads and feathers, dream catchers, medicine wheels, war bonnets and headdresses.

Appropriated Indigenous symbols and imagery continue to be used in women’s mainstream fashion. Quite often the integration of this iconography perpetuates the image of the indigenous female body as a sexually charged space.

Advertisements that portray a scantily clad woman dressed with beads and feathers reinforce the age-old stereotype of the Indigenous Woman as the ‘Indian Princess Damsel in Distress’, a stereotype perpetuated for decades by the film and television industry. Indigenous female artists, musicians, writers and scholars have been working just as long to engage the public in dialogue around the inappropriateness of this portrayal.

– Ursula Johnson