Native American stereotypes
Native American stereotypes refer to widely held but oversimplified and often inaccurate beliefs about Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These stereotypes have roots in both intra-tribal perceptions and European colonial narratives, which often portrayed Native Americans as either noble savages or barbaric heathens. The early interactions between Native tribes and European colonizers contributed to the misrepresentation of diverse cultures by lumping them into broad categories, leading to a lack of understanding of their unique identities and traditions.
Historically, these stereotypes have influenced policies and societal attitudes, often justifying mistreatment and marginalization of Indigenous populations. While some portrayals are romanticized, depicting Native Americans as noble figures untouched by civilization, others present them as savage and violent. These misconceptions have persisted into modern times, often reinforced by media representations, leading to the erroneous belief that Indigenous cultures are static and have vanished since European contact.
In recent decades, there has been a concerted effort from both American Indian communities and scholars to challenge these stereotypes and promote a more accurate understanding of Native American histories and contemporary realities. This movement aims to highlight the ongoing cultural vitality and diversity among Indigenous peoples, countering the narrative that reduces their identities to outdated caricatures.
Native American stereotypes
Significance: Outmoded stereotypes of American Indians have long dominated various media; these stereotypes may affect public policy as well as individual perceptions.
Stereotypes are generalizations concerning groups of people. They are frequently inaccurate because they are commonly based on false or incomplete information. Stereotypical assumptions concerning groups may lead to individuals being penalized (or occasionally rewarded) for traits that they as individuals may not in fact possess. Such behavior is manifestly unfair, and for this reason it is important to understand stereotypes concerning American Indians and to correct these misconceptions.
The first stereotyping of American Indians occurred among the various Indian tribes. Many Indian groups’ names for themselves simply mean “the people” in their native tongues, but tribes often gave one another derogatory labels, some of which have become the name by which a tribe is generally known, such as Eskimo, believed to mean “eaters of raw flesh,” or Atakapa, which means “eaters of people.” Traditionally, many Indian tribes considered those who did not speak their languages or share their cultural norms to be less than human. Such views are an example of ethnocentrism, or people’s tendency to esteem their own culture and denigrate those of others, describing others’ behavior as deviant or inappropriate.
Early European Stereotyping
With the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, additional stereotypes emerged and were soon recorded in various media. The earliest historic descriptions of New World cultures were written by the Spanish about peoples of the Caribbean and Central and South America. They did not describe the Aztec and Maya as possessing different but worthwhile cultural traits; rather, Spanish narratives characterized them as lacking Christianity and “civilization.” These distinctions allowed the Spanish to place native populations in a category apart from Europeans and to justify their own horrific treatment of native peoples.
The later colonization of North America by the English and French (among others) incorporated the Spanish preconceptions. The terms “Indian,” “savage,” “infidel,” “barbarian,” and “heathen” were widely used by the seventeenth-century English to identify a large number of different American Indian cultures and to treat them all as members of the same group. The French used the term sauvage for the same purpose. This collapsing of individual and cultural differences into broad generalizations was typical of the colonial period in North America. Such mental templates occasionally justified illogical policies such as plans to relocate different cultural groups onto the same tract of land. The planners did not seem to recognize—or did not care—that such policies often resulted in severe cultural conflicts.
It was common to describe Indians not simply as they were but in terms of their differences from Europeans, which were generally regarded as deficiencies. Europeans often evaluated American Indians according to their own Christian moral code, dismissing as immoral behavior that which was perfectly appropriate and sensible within the culture in which it occurred.
“Good” and “Bad” Indians
Not all European and European American stereotypes of Indians were negative. Colonialism gave rise to two general categories of American Indian stereotypes that, with variations and refinements, continued for centuries: the “good” Indian and the “bad” Indian. These categorizations had far more to do with intellectual currents among Europeans than with Indian cultures themselves. If Europeans wished to criticize their own society, they often turned to accounts of American Indians, supposedly unspoiled by the artificiality and constraints of civilization, to demonstrate the deplorable state of European culture. These conventions are most apparent in eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy, as in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his notion of the “noble savage.” Conversely, when Europeans wished to uphold the worth of their own social mores, they often called upon the stereotype of the Indian as dirty, wretched, and bloodthirsty to enhance, by comparison, the value of European society.
Among early English colonists, Puritan publications such as captivity narratives had didactic and social motives, namely to trumpet the virtues of Christianity, to support Christian conversion of American Indians, and to justify colonial settlements on Indian lands. The “good” Indian motif was not prevalent in America until independence from England. At that time, American literature with indigenous themes began to seem patriotic. American literary nationalism discovered the “proud and noble” Indian, and this theme was later incorporated into the works of painters and photographers. By the mid-1880s, authors had turned their frontier obsession to cowboys. Wild West shows became a popular form of public entertainment, combining stereotypical images of cowboys, soldiers (“Indian fighters”), and Indians.
Twentieth Century and Beyond
With the arrival of the twentieth century, radio, films, and television continued to popularize various outdated views of American Indians. A general misconception, still prevalent, is that Indian culture was timeless and unchanging until contact with the Europeans, at which time it was destroyed. This denial of both American Indian history and survival suggests that the only true Indians existed before European contact and that their descendants somehow do not exhibit real “Indian-ness.” This type of misconception underlies accounts of North American history that describe white settlement as progress advancing across a huge expanse of seemingly unoccupied vacant land and pushing the frontier west. Such accounts ignore native peoples as prime movers in their own right, and they deny the ethnicity and cultural diversity of a significant proportion of the North and Central American populations. Since the 1970s, American Indians themselves, in addition to non-Indian scholars, have confronted these and other stereotypes. Through publication and educational reform, they work to break the pattern of ongoing stereotyping.
Bibliography
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Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet, eds. The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1980. Print.
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