Saskatoon's Mendel Gallery has certainly got a great summer season underway. Last month we reviewed the Joni Mitchell exhibit and now I'm going to look at another show the Mendel is currently curating: Indian Princesses and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier. The exhibition, which features more than 200 antique prints such as postcards, calendars, sheet music, and black and white photographs from Canada's earliest rodeos, aims to deconstruct these images and reveal another facet of femininity in the pioneer past.

"All nations have their own creation tales; those fanciful stories of an invented origin which serve to replace one version of people and place with a newer, culturally-improved rendition. Such imaginary designs are particularly acute within the nationalist histories of the United States and Canada. For both of these countries, the manufacture of nation involved aggressive-indeed often genocidal-acts of appropriation; particularly directed towards Native peoples. And yet there was also the fundamental need to guise these acts of appropriation as appreciation.

"Appropriation, after all, involves the strategy of occupation, of re-tailoring both real and imagined spaces in order to make them appropriate to the needs and the fantasies of the occupier. And in the history of colonization it is most often women who are re-possessed; made amenable to occupation while re-figured and re-drawn in an appreciative light. Thus it was that the debased squaw-serving as the repository for all that was considered prohibited and polluted-was accompanied by a figure of desire in the form of her lighter twin: the beautiful and heroic Indian princess. Along parallel lines, the cowgirl was drawn towards an opposite direction: from the feminine abider of white masculinist norms, to a 'white savage' who transgressed boundaries both sexual and spatial."

If the curators are right, why did the patriarchy do this? Was it for titillation? Were the men excited by gorgeous, (supposedly wild), native women astride bucking broncos? Was the image of the devil-may-care cowgirl a metaphor for taming the wild frontier? Or is it all about masculine nationalism personified by a female figure? Interesting ideas. Have you got anything to offer on this artistic debate?

P.S. While you're visiting the Mendel, be sure to catch the Paul Fenniak show. Known as one of Canada's most interesting figurative painters, Fenniak's work borrows from the Medieval and Renaissance figurative tradition, all the way until today. Both shows close this Sunday.