American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In recent years, substantial critical attention has focused on the vogue of "the Indian" in American literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. Scholars have found this literature interesting, not primarily for its literary merits (outside of Cooper and a few others), nor as a source of information on Native American life and character, but rather for what it reveals about white American culture of the time and the underlying values and ideas which gave rise to and supported white attitudes toward the Indian. Thus, one finds studies with titles like The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind; Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier; Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790-1890; and Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. All of these works draw upon literature about the Indian in important ways to help support an analysis of white American culture and national character. An accurate and convincing analysis depends at least partly upon a complete survey and a balanced interpretation of the literature; one that is sensitive to the literary and cultural contexts in which it was produced. But most current studies of the period, as one might deduce from the titles listed here, lay undue stress on literature hostile to the Indian. They suggest that the small and harshly negative body of "Indian hater" fiction is representative of the whole, and that the "metaphysics of Indian hating" which this fiction embodies is an accurate reflection of nineteenth-century white ideas, values, and beliefs. Indian hater fiction, however, is far from representative. It is a minority and extreme genre of literature that arose and flourished in large part to counter the sentimental and Romantic views which prevailed at the time. In fact, a close examination of Indian hater fiction reveals that there was not a broad negative consensus of views about the Indian, as recent scholars have claimed, but rather a wide divergence and a persistent debate.