In spite of Irving's seventeen years in Europe, his search for native themes led him to contribute importantly to portraiture of the American Indian. Although his firsthand observation of Indians was limited, he was liberated om the pioneer's need to justify Indian displacement. He was able to view Indians sympathetically, bringing the perspective of a worldly man to questions of civilization and savagery. In his first book, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Dietrich Knickerbocker ( 1809), he satirizes pretentious historians and wittily deflates some shibboleths of American history. In Chapter Five Dietrich Knickerbocker pretends to justify the rights of European colonists to the land they "discovered." He succeeds, of course, in revealing the falsity and injustice of their claims. At the end of the chapter, Irving offers a Swiftian summary of colonization; this passage is reprinted below. In a more straightforward way, but not more devastatingly, Irving takes up the topic of displaced Indians again in two sketches added to The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., in 1820. In "Traits of Indian Character," Irving expresses succinctly that sympathy for wronged Indians implied in Knickerbocker's History: It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. In this essay, Irving praises the Indians for courage and magnanimity, and explains their deep resentment of white injuries; he calls it "the dark story of their wrongs and wretchedness." In the next sketch, "Philip of Pokanoket,,, he brings together materials for the many nineteenth century treatments of Philip (most notably, Cooper's and Stone's). Irving's recognition of the heroism of this "true-born prince" in trying to save his people is in sharp contrast to earlier views of Philip as devilish. In these comic and serious meditations on history, Irving helped to establish the idealized Indian; he worked from secondary sources, the northeastern Indians having been conquered and displaced by the 1820s. But Irving's treatment of the Indian does not end with these books. In 1832 he traveled across Indian territory, and recorded his glimpses of western tribes in A Tour on the Prairies ( 1835). His most intimate contact with Indians was gathered through his acquaintance with a half-breed guide on this trip.
In the document “Doomed to Perish”: George Catlin’s Depictions of the Mandan by Katheryn S. Hight, she analyzes the work of George Catlin while he traveled to the Mandan colony west of the Missouri River. Hight identifies that Catlin created a false and imaginative depiction of the Mandan Indians based on his social and political ideas which ended up creating an entertainment enterprise rather than reporting history. Catlin’s extravagant depictions of the Indians, which did have an impact on the Indian Policy in America, seemingly motivates Hight to write on this subject.
In The White Man’s Indian, Robert Berkhoffer analyzes how Native Americans have maintained a negative stereotype because of Whites. As a matter of fact, this book examines the evolution of Native Americans throughout American history by explaining the origin of the Indian stereotype, the change from religious justification to scientific racism to a modern anthropological viewpoint of Native Americans, the White portrayal of Native Americans through art, and the policies enacted to keep Native Americans as Whites perceive them to be. In the hope that Native Americans will be able to overcome how Whites have portrayed them, Berkhoffer is presenting
In this book, Kupperman is telling a well-known event in remarkable detail. She intentionally uses last three chapters of the nine to tell the Jamestown’s history. The first six are in relation to how Jamestown came to be. The first chapter deals with political, national and religious conflicts during this period and how it motivated the English to venture West. The second is titled,” Adventurers, Opportunities, and Improvisation.” The highlight of this chapter is the story of John Smith, and how his precious experience enabled him to save ”the Jamestown colony from certain ruin.” (51) He is just an example of the “many whose first experiences along these lines were Africa or the eastern Mediterranean later turned their acquired skills to American ventures.” (43) Chapter three discusses the European and Native American interaction before and during this period. “North America’s people had had extensive and intimate experience of Europeans long before colonies was thought of, and through this experience they had come to understand much about the different kind of people across the sea.” (73) This exchange of information happened because a lot of Europeans lived among the Natives (not as colonist or settlers), and Natives were brought back to Europe. The people in Europe were very fascinated with these new people and their culture. Chapter four analyzes this fascination. It starts off talking about Thomas Trevilian, an author of “an elaborate commonplace book,” that showed “the English public was keenly interested in the world and in understanding how to categorize the knowledge about all the new things, people, and cultures of which specimens and descriptions were now available to them.
Washington Irving, Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Company,)
In the book Bad Indians, Miranda talks about the many issues Indigenous People go through. Miranda talks about the struggles Indigenous people go through; however, she talks about them in the perspective of Native Americans. Many people learn about Indigenous People through classrooms and textbooks, in the perspective of White people. In Bad Indians, Miranda uses different literary devices to show her perspective of the way Indigenous People were treated, the issues that arose from missionization, as well as the violence that followed through such issues. Bad Indians is an excellent example that shows how different history is told in different perspectives.
Though the stereotyping and alienation is strong in Dougy and Gracey’s community they manage to break away from it. The whites feel that the Aborigines get everything free from the government and never do any work of their own, and according to the book, most of them do just this.
In Thomas King’s novel, The Inconvenient Indian, the story of North America’s history is discussed from his original viewpoint and perspective. In his first chapter, “Forgetting Columbus,” he voices his opinion about how he feel towards the way white people have told America’s history and portraying it as an adventurous tale of triumph, strength and freedom. King hunts down the evidence needed to reveal more facts on the controversial relationship between the whites and natives and how it has affected the culture of Americans. Mainly untangling the confusion between the idea of Native Americans being savages and whites constantly reigning in glory. He exposes the truth about how Native Americans were treated and how their actual stories were
The stress of this caused their once coveted friendship to wither and morph into an ill hatred. The English began a campaign of the demonization of Native Americans. The image of Native Americans was described in Red, White, & Black as friendly traders who shared a mutually beneficial relationship with one another. Evidently, a very different image started to appear when land disputes arose. The new illustration the English painted was that Native American people were “comparable to beasts” and “wild and savage people, that live like heards of deare in a forrest”. It was sudden change of heart between the two societies that supports Waterhouse’s claims of the changing relationship of the English and Native
Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.
In his novel, Thomas King plays on stereotypes and expectations that occur in our society on the portrayal of Native Americans. He show us the bias image that we have of them by describing what is an indian from a colonizers point of view, how the genre of western movies has an effect on our perception in society. In the novel, Nasty Bumppo, who represents modern society, explains that :
...744,” in The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America, ed. Colin G. Calloway (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994), 101
Debo, Angie. A History of the Indians of the United States. 6th ed. Norman: aaaaaUniversity of Oklahoma Press, 1979.
Cooper's romanticizing of the Old West, created an inaccurate picture of Native Americans, but he was not the only one. Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century literature shows us many incorrect representations of Native Americans. With passages like the one above, captivity narratives, and the descriptions of Indian wars, is it any wonder that people were afraid of the Indians they would encounter out west? When people moved out into the frontier all the biased opinions they had been fed went with them. They took the mental pictures that the media of the day proposed and made them real in their minds eye. But the fear they took with them was almos...
All in all, the treatment of the American Indian during the expansion westward was cruel and harsh. Thus, A Century of Dishonor conveys the truth about the frontier more so than the frontier thesis. Additionally, the common beliefs about the old west are founded in lies and deception. The despair that comes with knowing that people will continue to believe in these false ideas is epitomized by Terrell’s statement, “Perhaps nothing will ever penetrate the haze of puerile romance with which writers unfaithful to their profession and to themselves have surrounded the westerner who made a living in the saddle” (Terrell 182).
Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.