 Racist ideologies about rape are also prominent in the history of colonialism and genocide against Native Americans. Ideas about Native men as savage rapists, Native women as downtrodden and raped squaws, and white men as heroic saviors of both white and Native women were essential to the “colonial imagination” that explained and justified the taking of Native lands (Smith 2005, 7–33). These ideas were conveyed in widely read captivity narratives, stories—usually apocryphal, and often written by white men—of the abduction and brutal treatment of a white woman by the “savages” (Smith 2005, 21–22; Faludi 2007, 200–279). The message was that white women desperately needed white men’s protection, not only in the usual form of restrictions on the women’s behavior and mobility, but also by the men’s efforts to control and kill off dangerous natives. As for supposedly downtrodden Native women, white men proposed to deliver them from their oppression by civilizing them, assimilating them to more enlightened European values and culture. In short, the ideology held that “Native women can only be free while under the dominion of white men, and both Native and white women have to be protected from Indian men, rather than from white men” (Smith, 23). In fact, the reality was quite the contrary. Smith argues that rape was a key method of forcibly instituting patriarchal values in what had been relatively egalitarian Native cultures: