Beyond the Brink: Indigenous Women’s Agency and the Colonisation of Knowledge in the Maid of the Mist Myth

Robinder Kaur Sehdev

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i3.2348

Abstract

The myth of the Maid of the Mist of Niagara Falls is a settler story of an Indigenous woman who kills herself by piloting her canoe over the cataract. This is presented not as a tragedy, but as a cultural necessity. So compelling was this settler myth that until recently it was the focus of settler cultural production at Niagara. I argue that the creation and subsequent fixation upon the myth attempted to displace Indigenous stories, and the centrality of Indigenous women to Indigenous epistemologies and in decolonial action. The recent move to banish the myth from tourist audiences does further violence by moving colonial cultural production to the fringes of visibility and away from critical interrogation. The myth and the ways it is called upon and subsequently banished indicates the normalizing practices of settler colonialism and must be pulled from the brink of unnameability and unknowability into critical discourse.

Highlights

The story of the Maid of the Mist is central to Niagara Falls as a historical space of tourist exchange and settler colonialism
Attention to the story itself is all but drained away. Why was this myth rendered marginal and what does its marginality mean in a context of settler power and privilege? In this article I argue that the Maid of the Mist myth attempts to displace Indigenous knowledge systems and silence the agency of Indigenous women
The Maid of the Mist myth cannot be dismissed as a quirky flourish or romantic story solely designed to draw crowds to the waterfalls; it was central to the colonial imperative to displace Indigenous knowledge through the diminished representation of the ‘Indian maiden’

Summary

Introduction

The story of the Maid of the Mist is central to Niagara Falls as a historical space of tourist exchange and settler colonialism. Where in the past the story of the ‘Indian maiden’ poised at the brink of Niagara Falls adorned local popular culture, today it exists in the form of that more general moniker, ‘the Maid of the Mist’ which the steamboat corporation has appropriated.

Results

Conclusion