Savagery and the american indian essay

Eyewitness and secondary accounts of Indian life or the lives of whites among the Indians became popular reading, and collections of Indian artifacts fascinated the American public. Observers of Indian societies—ministers, missionaries, government officials, Indian captives, explorers, traders, travelers—wittingly or unwittingly practiced ethnography, or the study and systematic recording of a culture. These records of Indian manners and customs reflect the authors' judgments against the backdrop of government policy regarding the Indians. The Louisiana Purchase ushered in an era of expansion, and land and its use increasingly became the focus of debate on American-Indian relations.

Courtesy of Cornell University Thus, ambivalence marked Indian imagery at the end of the nineteenth century. In the long struggle for mastery of the continent, the image of the bloody savage had always qualified any regret occasioned by the passing of the noble savage.

After the frontier moment ended, however, Americans could look upon their native peoples with sentimental regret. James Earle Fraser in translated popular sentiment into a sculpture of lasting appeal. End of the Trail shows a mounted Plains Indian, head bowed, shoulders slumped, his spear pointing at the ground, resigned to his fate, which was that of his race.

Guiding Student Discussion Racial stereotyping is a minefield, and entering it for purposes of classroom discussion requires a carefully thought out strategy.

The truth is that students are often impatient with the past. In order to discuss historical stereotypes, you have to introduce students to them.

This runs the risk of coming across as advocacy. Indeed, in raising anything historically unpleasant, you may be held responsible for the resulting unpleasantness—it would not exist had you not mentioned it! Having introduced stereotypes, you are left to deal with them.

Outright condemnation is easy, since it conforms to what students already think. Anything more challenging runs even greater risks. You want to talk about stereotypes of African Americans and American Indians, so you show your class a cartoon of an African American eating watermelon and a photograph of a cigar store Indian.

If your point is simply that these images prove the ignorance of EuroAmericans in the past, then you will have no controversy. If you introduce the same images to probe the underlying values of a society that considered them acceptable, then you invite controversy.

And to what ends? What use did the EuroAmerican majority have for each race? The labor of one, of course, and the land of the other. How would those different uses shape stereotypes? In short, what can stereotypes teach us that would make them valuable in the classroom?

What can they tell us beyond the obvious? Students may remain un-persuaded. What else is there to say? Why study the attitudes of another age if, by our standards today, they were deplorable? Moral certainty underlay their actions, too.

Far from being illogical, they were, according to their lights, entirely logical!Native Americans Savagery and Sand Creek This paper argues that the infamous Sand Creek Massacre was not an act of war. Instead, it was an act of savagery . In the essay, “Myths That Hide the American Indian” by Oliver La Farge, many of those myths are brought up.

Due to these myths about the Native Americans, people’s views, past and present, of who and what they are have become extremely distorted, or essentially hiding the Native Americans from white people.

One of the many myths that the.

A noble savage is a literary stock character who embodies the concept of the indigene, outsider, The locus classicus of the 18th-century portrayal of the American Indian are the famous lines from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" (): In his essay, entitled "The Noble Savage".

American Indian EthnographyBetween and Americans attempted to explain the Indian cultures they encountered as well as to identify Indian origins. Eyewitness and secondary accounts of Indian life or the lives of whites among the Indians became popular reading, and collections of Indian artifacts fascinated the American public.

Savagery And The American Indian Essay. Economic profits in the biological conditions of living things, people should give way to indian the and savagery american essay the extent of random phenotypic variation depends on the nature of the inseparability of a subsidy. An American Genocide.

A 4 page essay that refers to a TV documentary. An episode of a TV documentary series narrated by Jack Perkins, Savagery and the American Indian, which aired in , relates the saga of years of hostilities and atrocities perpetuated against Native Americans, first by European settlers and then by the U.S.

government.