How Indians Got to Be Red

Abstract

SCHOLARS WORKING ON THE HISTORY OF RACE AS AN IDEA assume that Europeans were the sole inventors of it. 1 Undeniably, race (the belief that people can be categorized by observable physical differences such as skin color) flourished with the early modern European slave trade. Sometime in the eighteenth century, race outpaced the older categories of Christian and pagan to become the primary justification for expropriating the land and labor of others. As a system of categorizing people, race fulfilled Europe's ideological needs by creating the illusion that human difference was biologically ordained.2 But, as Europeans spun their web of racial hierarchies, what were non-Europeans thinking about race? Historians have yet to tackle this question in depth, instead focusing on how whites constructed images of others.3 This approach to the historical emergence of race as a system for categorizing people replicates what it purports to critique, since the emphasis on European image-making consigns American Indians and other non-white peoples to a passive role in the construction of knowledge. They exist only as the objects of white observation, and the power to label or name resides with Europeans. One example of this tendency is the standard explanation for how Indians got to be red: European explorers saw that Indians wore red paint and so called them