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Rebecca Kay Jager. Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. 320 pp. Cloth, $29.95.
From murals to Disney films to currency, Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea are well-known, and fraught, figures in Mexico and the United States. Rebecca Kay Jager's work, Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea: Indian Women as Cultural Intermediaries and National Symbols takes on these three famous Native Americans and proposes to analyze not only their actual lives but also their afterlives as symbols in the United States and Mexico. Her project is to rescue these three Native women from their status as betrayers of their race and symbols of Native acceptance of European colonization by casting them as intermediaries, arguing for their agency and their importance within Native and European societies.
In order to cover such a sprawling topic, Jager splits her book into two parts. Part 1 covers these Indigenous women's lives, while part 2 investigates their afterlives. In the first part, Jager argues that Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea need to be understood within their Native contexts, in which women performed important roles as cultural intermediaries. Rejecting the idea perpetuated by European sources that these women were attracted to European "civilized" culture, Jager claims that Native groups exchanged Malinche, Pocahontas, and Sacagawea in order to cultivate goodwill and facilitate cooperation. These women would have expected to perform this role, according to Jager, as it was entirely within Native ideas of gender...