Opinion: Making money off Indian imagery is old business in US

Americans (the non-native kind) haven’t always tried to profit from images of Native Americans. In fact, it was only after they had been almost exterminated by military force and disease, had their lands confiscated, and their tribes dispersed that Indians found themselves resurrected in commercial hell, as adornments for the packaging of a host of products in 19th-century America.

Patent medicine was the first business to seize on this branding. Bogus remedies that promised to cure everything from hemorrhoids to baldness to impotence (often all at once) were marketed with the image of a “noble savage” who allegedly had access to arcane medical lore desperately needed by city dwellers eager for a cure.

In the 1870s and 1880s, the brazen appropriation of Indians in advertising hit new highs. The Kickapoo Medicine Co., for example, built a national brand on the backs of the Kickapoo people of the Midwest. Concocting tinctures and potions -- Kickapoo Indian Oil, Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer, and Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, a “blood, liver, and stomach renovator” -- two fast-talking white entrepreneurs traded off the tribe’s name to hawk bogus cures.

The company’s proprietors marketed their wares during elaborate “medicine shows” featuring performers, some drawn from nearby reservations, who would give “authentic” portrayals of native life (one of the more popular consisted of dramatic scenes of Indians slaughtering white settlers.) According to historian Kevin Armitage, almost 80 of these sales troupes would tour the U.S. at any given time, extolling the restorative powers of Kickapoo Sagwa, which was nothing more than a powerful laxative.