| Summary: | Following the U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867, government officials, tourists, missionaries, and ethnographers all contributed to an imperial discourse that racialized Alaska Native peoples as “Orientals.” Chapter 1 examines this phenomenon of settler orientalism, a racial distinction for Alaska Natives that exoticized conquest and rationalized land dispossession. Tourists spread this racialization to a popular audience, and women tourists in particular located the success of the territory on the promise of gendered domestication for Alaska Natives through orientalist tropes. In contrast to government documents and travelogues of the late nineteenth century, Tlingit author Ernestine Hayes’s memoir Blonde Indian provides a twentieth-century Indigenous feminist account of working in the tourist industry beyond settler orientalist configurations.
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