Introduction: Native Americans in Europe in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Roy Harvey Pearce’s classic 1965 study of the ‘savage’ in American culture traces savagist origins to a European philosophical tradition in which the social theorist attempts to imagine society in its earliest formations, comparing the imagined forebear with contemporary reality. The collision between this Rousseauian abstraction and frontier reality, argues Pearce, where ‘a primitivistic mode of social criticism came to America fully developed and virtually innocent of actual study of actual primitives’ (1965: 136), birthed a remarkably stable set of signifiers of savagism as the polar opposite of civilization. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr, in The White Man’s Indian (1979) extends both our understanding of the bon sauvage tradition and its revaluation under Romanticism in the early Republic to explain how even as tribes were being herded from their lands under armed guard, New York and Washington audiences came to weep for the plight of King Philip in Metamora, Or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829). The do med Indian, noble or ignoble, came to symbolize the inevitability of American progress.