The best Western thinking on Native Americans (Indians) from 1500 to 2000:
1500s, 1600s
Indians seen in terms of the Bible. They are the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. They have the same human nature, they have souls, they can be brought to Christ. The idea that they got to the Americas by a land bridge goes back to the Spanish in 1590.
The Golden Age model of history: the West had degenerated since Greek and Roman times. Indians had degenerated too, even more so, having sunk into savagery. Maybe because of differences in climate and environment. Maybe because they were the Devil’s own.
This deficiency model of Indians lasts till the 1900s. They are clearly human yet lacking something.
1700s
Indians seen as part of the human species. God created the species, each with certain fixed characteristics. So Indians could be different from whites but not too different. French scientist Buffon notes that species in the Americas are smaller and fewer, says Indians lack strong feelings about sex, family and society, that whites in the Americas will become the same way in time. Thomas Jefferson disagrees, forcing him to argue that Indians are equal to whites at birth.
The progress model of history: The West has now clearly passed the ancient Greeks in science – Newton, the microscope, the discovery of Uranus, etc. History is now seen in terms of progress, unfolding in stages:
- savagery
- barbarism
- civilization
So Indians are like how white people used to be thousands of years ago.
New words: civilization (1772), as a stage of history; race (1774) as the main division of mankind, using physical features.
1800s
Scientific racism. Measuring skulls – craniometry – becomes big, especially in White America. Whites find that they have the largest skulls, Indians next, blacks last. Slavery and genocide get support from the latest science! Naked scientific racism becomes common among Western thinkers from the 1860s to the 1930s, from Darwin to Hitler.
The unilinear, evolutionary model of history: all human societies, past and present, are studied and ranked from least advanced to most advanced – as judged by Westerners! Native Americans are backward due to their smaller brains.
New word: culture (1867), in the anthropological sense, though not yet clearly separated from race.
1900s
The rise of cultural anthropology: Franz Boas and his students take over anthropology and study Indians to death. But not as “Indians” but as separate, independent cultures. They find no relationship between race, culture, language or archaeology. Cultural features spread by diffusion – culture is not a matter of race. They find that the longer a Jewish mother lives in America, the more her child’s skull is like a White American’s – skull size is not a matter of race.
Boas’s Indians were “timeless”, without history. That changed by the 1970s.
End of the Indian deficiency model: There is nothing “backward” or screwed up about Indians – they just belong to different cultures.
New word: ethnocentric (1900): judging another culture by one’s own.
Source: Mainly: Robert F. Berkhofer, “The White Man’s Indian” (1979).
See also:
- Natives through the National Geographic lens – still doing that unilinear, evolutionary model of history thing in the 1980s. Natives are still pretty much “timeless” in the 2010s.
- Indian
- Franz Boas
- Thomas Jefferson
- The word “race”
- “Europe is a continent”
Fairly good review. When I was in US +20 years ago what surprised me was the uneasiness that almost all the other groups had with the natives. If any of native guys walked into a store with braids, not to mention with a feather, the whole place fell silent. I mean dead silent. Somehow it was funny but also very sobering experience for a foreigner.
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Reblogged this on oogenhand and commented:
Not coincidentally, Franz Boas was good friends with Edward Sapir, a comparative linguist who studied Native American languages. Sapir is known also for the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis.
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One thing to keep in mind is the distinction between American intellectuals who came into contact with large numbers of American Indians on the frontier (e.g., Mark Twain) and American intellectuals who studied them as relics back east (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper or Lewis Henry Morgan). The latter tended to be much more appreciative of Indians, while the former were not. Twain, for example, absolutely hated Indians — compare his sympathetic portrait of Jim the slave in “Huckleberry Finn” to Injun Joe the bad guy in “Tom Sawyer.”
This common process by which aversion and loathing turns into romanticized appreciation was noted by Thomas Babington Macaulay regarding English/Lowland Scot/Saxon hatred of his Highland Celtic Scot ancestors when they were a barbaric threat, invading central England as late as 1745. After the English permanently crushed the Highland threat, the English felt in love (via Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels) with the romance of the now gone clan culture.
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@ Steve Sailer
I agree, it is easy to romanticize an out-group when it is no longer a physical threat. Though even in that case it can still be demonized, like in the cowboy and Indian films in the 1950s.
For the purposes of this post Cooper and Twain do not count as intellectuals, not any more than Buffalo Bill or Kevin Costner. All four men shaped the popular image of Indians, but unlike Morgan or Boas they did not contribute to Western thought, they did not advance the West’s understanding of what Indians are.
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“his common process by which aversion and loathing turns into romanticized appreciation was noted by Thomas Babington Macaulay…”
So at what point did Twain’s aversion to Indian turn into appreciation?
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