The Correlation between Societal Attitudes and Those of American Authors in the Depiction of American Indians, 1607-1860

Abstract

The problem in this research is to identify the changing attitudes of American fictional authors toward the American Indian and the roles they attributed to the natives from early America to the Civil War, and to explore the relationship of these attitudes and prescribed roles to changing societal views about the native Americans. From Captain John Smith's dramatic rescue by Pocahontas in the early seventeenth century down to N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1969), the American Indian has furnished inspiration to a multitude of writers. Specifically, the westward movement of an aggressive Anglo-Saxon culture left its imprint in the records of those who by force or superior cunning succeeded in taking the country from its original inhabitants. This tragic, yet colorful, drama imbues a large part of the literature that reveals the way American Indians have been portrayed to the reading public. Thus it is with the Indian portraits painted by some of the major writers in American fictional literature, and more specifically as they reflect the attitudes of society toward these original natives, that this paper is chiefly concerned. The first American writers compared the background and the mode of living of the Indians with the European ways of life in the seventeenth century and consequently felt the Indians were an inferior race. This notion of race superiority has been one of the most persistent themes throughout the history of American literature. Although the American Indian has formed a dramatic nucleus