It’s all about property

From Women in Kentucky (Univ Press of Kentucky, 1979) by Helen Deiss Irvin

During the relatively brief period when Indians and newly arrived settlers lived in proximity in Kentucky, an almost mythic fear of miscegenation haunted the frontier. Like the similar fear that would be directed in the next certury toward blacks, this attitude did not apply to white men and Indian women, as it would not extend to white slaveholders and their black women slaves. The mixing of races in itself was not the issue: what was forbidden was the white woman’s part in doing so.

. . .

This prohibition may have stemmed in part from the view that women were property, not to be shared, involuntarily or voluntarily. And possibly Indians, like blacks, were perceived as close to nature, possessing a primitive power, a superior vitality that threatened white males.

Whatever the cause, there is evidence that white women captives who retruned home were devalued, objects of gossip and a kind of ostracism or unspoken disapproval, as if suspected of cohabiting with the enemy. Some experienced melancholy, perhaps because they had survived and others, often their own children, had not. Perhaps, too, their neighbors were uneasy around them. The end of their captivity was not the end of their ordeal. [p.20-21]

Proving, I guess, that where women are concerned, blaming the victim is not a new thing at all.

Possibly related posts:

Samuel Shepard #2

The strong need for companionship

Braddock’s Field, thirty years on

A glimpse of the European perspective

Indigenous again

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