O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian

Abstract

O Brave People: The European Invention of the American Indian. John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastian. Albuquerque: U of Mexico P, 1996. xiv + 399 pages. $55.00 cloth. Although Moffitt and Sebastian remark that they did not intend to employ postmodern theory in this analysis of the European `invention' of American Indians from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, they admit that [i]n retrospect ... [this book] ... now seem[s] a textbook example of deconstruction because it dismantles the stereotypical imagery that continues to inform Western conceptualizations of these indigenous peoples. In their interrogation of these stereotypes, the authors not only examine cartographic and artistic iconography, but devote a great deal of their time to debunking Western literary traditions that constructed Native Americans as spiritually inferior, exotic savages who were lazy, shiftless, and highly libidinous. Because this study attempts to expose medieval and Renaissance ideologies that underlie these gross misrepresentations, O Brave People should be particularly useful for scholars and students interested in Historicism and/or Postcolonial Studies. Ultimately, the authors hope that this book will demystify the prevalent dehumanizing stereotypes produced by specific religious, political and economic systems so that successor images [of American Indians] might begin to improve considerably in both accuracy and in fundamental intention. Chapter one, `India' and `The Earthly Paradise': The Contribution of the European Middle Ages to the American Legend, predominantly charts how centuries of literary and cartographic images prior to the voyages of Columbus were responsible for the idea of a Biblical Paradise on Earth, el Paraiso terrestre. According to Moffitt and Sebastian, the myth of an Asian `Eden' was due in no small part to St. Jerome. This exegete's misinterpretation of the eastern dawn of Creation in the Book of Genesis led him to place Eden in India, which at that time was the establishment point on medieval mappaemundi, or world maps--a topos subsequently elaborated upon not only by St. Augustine, but also by St. Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae, an encyclopedic masterwork of geography that was explicitly cited by Columbus in the Diario of his first voyage. According to the authors, the mappaemundi that influenced Columbus began to include pictures of both Christ and Adam and Eve on top of their representations of India. Hence, as is widely known, although Columbus actually landed in the present-day Caribbean islands, he named the inhabitants Indians. In Chapter Two, Medieval Literary Conventions in the First European Encounters with the American Indians, the authors highlight how predigested literary formulas of Eden were projected onto the New World and its inhabitants by both Columbus and subsequent conquistadores who were driven by both economic and religious factors. Indeed, according to the authors, Columbus's 1492 entry in his Diario that the natives `will be made into proper Christians' epitomizes the explorer's patronizing paternalism and Christian opportunism that were manifested in his invention of these Indians. In the third chapter, Early Pictures of the in Renaissance Art, Moffitt and Sebastian reveal that most artists who `represented' American natives never actually saw them. Informed by people such as Michel Montaigne, illustrators constructed American Indians as monstrous cannibals who filled both the explorers and the European public with dread. Particularly egregious was the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a fourteenth century French monk whose fabricated accounts of global exploration was not only more popular than Marco Polo's account of his travels to the Orient, but, according to Moffitt and Sebastian, was avidly consumed by Columbus. Mandeville not only perpetuated the idea of an Asian Eden, but he also detailed the cannibalistic and savage exploits of an Indian people he never laid eyes on. …