I actually wrote about this awhile back, so I'll repost it here:

"Cultural appropriation" is something of a buzzword these days as white society, as a collective, becomes more aware of how we have in the past used, and more importantly misused, imagery with strong cultural meaning to marginalized groups, but it is hardly a new phenomenon, and the use of Native American imagery by white Americans its a pretty "time-honored" tradition that dates back centuries, through the 20th century, and continues today. Across that timeline remains generally quite divorced from the reality of relations with the indigenous peoples of the country, and these coins are a great example of that tradition, and how the reality of indigenous peoples of the United States so often is entirely divorced from the idea of "The Indian".

Although hardly the first example of this if we travel back in time, I think it is one of the first prominent examples, and certainly a well known one, namely the Boston Tea Party, where several participants chose to disguise themselves to look like Mohawks. Not everyone disguised themselves in the group who participated, but the choice of native garb (or more properly, often a very rough approximation) was a very pointed one. Although on one level, it can be said that in doing so, the participants provided a convenient target for the blame, it was not one that authorities could be expected to take seriously, least of all since the Mohawk settlements were several hundred miles from Boston. More deeply though it was an appropriation of Native American imagery by American nativists, at best a detached respect for the convoluted idea of "The Indian" held by white persons which didn't necessarily translate into real respect. Writing on their choice of disguise, Benjamin Carp sums up this dichotomy:

Even as Americans used the supposed savagery and barbarity of the Indian as justification for targeting real Indians for conversion or extermination, they also admired and applauded a different set of stereotypes when they thought of Indians in the abstract. The pure, primitive image of the Indian provided a basis for criticizing decadent, tyrannical Europe: according to this view, Americans of all colors were natural natives with natural rights. These were the very rights that the tea destroyers, as they boarded the ships, were defending.

It was a double-think that didn't particularly trouble the Sons of Liberty, and again, hardly a new one, as similar use of the image of the indigenous population as a symbol of the white population dated back in numerous examples to the very founding of the colony, the 1629 seal featuring a Native American rather than an Englishman. Over the ensuing century, as the Tea Party ably illustrates, the native symbolism came to be more and more associated with the ideas of freedom and liberty that were brewing in the colonies, and set up as a direct counter to imagery of England, and Europe generally. In choosing their disguise, the participants in the Tea Party were declaring themselves to be American, but using the symbols of the real Americans they had displaced as their own.

This is hardly limited to the Tea Party though. This tradition of "playing Indian" during protests remained an active tradition for decades, especially in the rural areas where any signs of government encroachment were seen as a stamping upon their rights, the disguises not only hearkening back to the famed Boston party-goers, but also intended as a signal to government officials "a willingness to engage in savage violence", as their characterization of the real indigenous peoples went hand-in-hand with.

The example that most immediately comes to mind from the mid-19th century though is the Know-Nothing Party, certainly the most (in)famous nativist movement of the 19th century, and one which was thoroughly steeped in this appropriation of native imagery for their own nativist purposes. A mix of political party, populist movement, and secret society, the latter part especially comes into play here with much of the pomp and ritual that they created for their meetings being indigenous ceremonies - or more properly of course, white peoples' ideas of what such ceremonies were. Leadership of the Know-Nothings included "Grand Chiefs" and "Grand Sachems" and subgroups called themselves names like "Choctaws". Built out of earlier groups of similar bent, one such antecedent of the Know-Nothings was even called "The Improved Order of Red Men".

Long after the end of Know-Nothingism, some less overtly political fraternal groups continued to use such imagery and names, remaining exclusive to white men, despite choosing the name "to perpetuate the name and fame", as Albert Stevens describes the late 19th century "Order of the Iroquois", a fraternal group founded in 1896 Buffalo, in his Cyclopædia of Fraternities; or for that matter the Improved Order of Red Men which went through several reoganizations over the 19th century, and which Stevens describes without irony as "[p]reserving the manners and customs of the American Indians", despite actual American Indians being prohibited from membership.