“Merciless Indian Savages”: Deconstructing Anti-Indigenous Framing

Abstract

In this article, we identify and develop the specific anti-Indigenous subframe of the long dominant larger white racial frame. Using sociological concepts of systemic racial oppression, we show how the anti-Indigenous subframe co-naturalizes race concepts and specific racist language, embedding a deep and lasting negative framing of Native Americans in the U.S. society. We utilize the Google Ngram Viewer for digitized document identification and retrieval, an important social science tool for finding major historical documents for analysis. Using important documents, we identify a very specific language of Indigenous oppression and examine its central role in anti-Indigenous racial framing, past and present. We demonstrate how powerful and influential political, religious, and scholarly figures and major institutions have developed this racist framing over centuries of systemic Indigenous oppression in the United States. Our analysis adds to the body of social science knowledge by explicating how Indigenous oppression on a systemic level has been perpetuated, rationalized, and legitimated by means of a broad white racial frame and its powerful anti-Indigenous subframe.

An Indigenous critique: Expanding sociology and recognizing unique Indigenous knowledge

“…Individual contributions in service to the larger community is a core aspect of the Global South tradition of comunalidad (Barkin, 2022). This paper recognizes, and refutes, the long-held elevation of Euro-Western knowledge and frameworks above that of Indigenous peoples and knowledge, which has occurred through an explicitly racialized lens and denunciation of Indigenous knowledge as "savage" (Williams, 2012;Mignolo and Walsh, 2018;Feagin, 2020;Mackay and Feagin, 2022;Sánchez-Antonio, 2022).…”

“…Prior to encountering Indigenous pragmatism, the colonial tradition saw the world as literally rising from the stories of the Bible. This strict interpretation of biblical events by colonial scholars and power-players was based on a long history of savagizing Indigenous peoples and viewing them as servants of the devil worthy of domination and oppression (Williams, 2012 ; Mackay and Feagin, 2022 ). Biblical stories were further interpreted by colonial scholars to justify the genocide occurring in the Americas as one which was ordained and demanded by the Christian God (Pratt, 2002 :37–55) while simultaneously establishing an idea of hierarchical and chronological importance.…”

“…This Indigenous attitude/millennia-knowledge was subsequently communicated to colonial-invaders like Roger Williams and Thomas Morton by Indigenous leaders across the hemisphere. Williams and Morton would later incorporate these ideas into their own Western works and lives to the point that they were actively vilified and aggressively persecuted by other Euro-American colonists for being “race traitors” (Pratt, 2002 ; Mackay and Feagin, 2022 ).…”

“…Indigenous oppression has a long and complex history (Stannard, 1993 ; Williams, 2012 ; Mackay and Feagin, 2022 ). It conceptually began with the ancient Greeks (Williams, 2012 ) and physically began with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and continues today.…”

“…Recognizing Indigenous knowledge isn't simply about recognizing the knowledge as valid, it is about fully integrating that knowledge and investigating sociological, biological, theological and other processes from a specifically Indigenous point of view using Indigenous frameworks. This is important for the liberation of Indigenous peoples, if Indigenous knowledge and philosophies are always relegated to a secondary status or only used by a few specialists, then Indigenous people will continue to be assumed to be savage, primitive, and without valuable contribution to the scholarly community thereby perpetuating the deeply entrenched white racial framing of Indigenous people and culture (Mackay and Feagin, 2022 ).…”