“Merciless Indian Savages”: Deconstructing Anti-Indigenous Framing

The obsessive white framing of Native peoples as savages legitimates oppression and moral erasure of Indigenous communities long seen as a threat to Christian religion and national/international legitimacy of colonizing societies (Echo-Hawk 2013; Stannard 1993). From the beginning, Native Americans were framed as savage threats, often with demonic origins, stalking the “frontier” and innocent white communities—a gauntlet for invading Europeans to overcome in a God-given land while ensuring that Europeans can be portrayed as victims of alleged savage violence. Meanwhile, white violence against them is framed as virtuous Christian self-defense (Stannard 1993). Today, as in the past, Native communities are a threatening reminder of the moral and legal illegitimacy of colonial nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil (Echo-Hawk 2013).

In his pathbreaking book The American Holocaust, historian David E. Stannard (1993) highlights the white self-victimizing reality and virtuizing pageantry of widespread anti-Indigenous genocide. A white European “settler group” (i.e., invader group) takes on the public role of victim of Native people so that they can portray themselves as “valiant seekers of justice and freedom” fighting virtuous wars with Native Americans for white family and community survival (Stannard 1993:16).

In addition, as Christians, these whites have long viewed themselves as blessing heathen lands—believed to be theirs by Divine right—with Christian civilization. “Real” civilization, alleged the European invaders, did not encompass the impressively advanced Native societies already in the Americas, civilizations European invaders directly encountered. These advanced civilizations, throughout the Americas, were viewed as unvirtuous, irreligious, barbarous, and worthy only of Christian conversion, slavery, or extermination (Pope Alexander VI 1493; Purchas [1625] 1907; Stannard 1993; Townsend 2019; Whitaker 1613). Much of this white-framed, anti-Indigenous narrative persists in contemporary popular and academic descriptions of everyday Native practices, customs, and life (Dippie 2008). Fully authentic civilization was, and still is, considered to be Western, Christian, and individualistic.

Combining savagery language and concepts with a white self-victimizing narrative became essential to the anti-Indigenous subframe. It provided the dominant white framers with an exculpating framing whereby anti-Indigenous actions are justified as virtuous pursuits of white safety. Obsessive self-victimizing contributes to a Western predatory ethic demonizing racialized “others” while absolving white perpetrators of most responsibility for anti-Indigenous land/resource theft and violence. Religio-militaristic colonial expansions in the nineteenth century were intent on wiping out Indigenous resistance; white “frontier” violence was explicitly rationalized as a virtuous response to unvirtuous resistance.

Just as early colonial invasions were morally accounted for by white-virtuizing and white-victimizing dimensions of the anti-Indigenous subframe, so too is continuing white colonization under hoary myths such as Manifest Destiny, a renewed Doctrine of Discovery, and landed democracy (Drinnon 1997; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Stannard 1993:243). Today, this “virtuous” white violence against Native America is rationalized as freedom itself—that is, as not being U.S. colonialism and imperialism. For example, in a 2009 interview, then President Barack Obama declares, “We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But . . . America was not born as a colonial power” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014:115).

Professing the virtuousness of European invaders, their Christian proselytizing, and democratic ideals has long provided moral legitimacy to white anti-Indigenous violence and its accompanying racist framing (Drinnon 1997; Feagin 2020). Today, the values of European-origin Christianity are still frequently invoked to frame Native peoples as anti-Christian savages and reinforce white virtuousness, other aspects of the anti-Indigenous subframe, and the broader white racial frame. Adamant and emotional framing of white virtuousness connected to an anti-Indigenous subframe over centuries has made it difficult to counter that racist subframe (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

Racialized framing of Native Americans as savage, uncivilized, and anti-Christian is evident from the beginning of the European invasions. This anti-Christian framing encompassed white Christians’ savagizing of Native peoples, self-victimizing themselves, and virtuizing their often-violent white pursuits. Native Americans were framed as animal-like and uncivilized; their weak grasp of, or resistance to, so-called civilized languages and concepts (i.e., European languages and Christianity) was the ultimate indicator of their alleged sub-humanity and savagery (Greenblatt 1990; Veronelli 2015:108–34). This sub-humanity was solidified by whites co-naturalizing new anti-Indigenous language with an inferior “red race” category. Native peoples, their languages, and their cultures are framed in new racist language (Rosa and Flores 2017).

Christianity was central to the entire history of European colonialism. Shortly after Columbus landed on Quisqueya (Hispaniola), Catholic Pope Alexander VI issued the edict Inter Caetera (1493). This colonizing document permitted Europeans to claim and exploit all lands not inhabited by Christians and established the Doctrine of Discovery whereby “. . . the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself . . . ” (Pope Alexander VI 1493). In subsequent centuries, religious (and secular) colonizers from various European countries framed Native peoples as un-Christian and barbarous nations to be subordinated. Continuous framing of Native people through Christian concepts of virtuousness and “holy right” established white moral authority over them and their lands while excusing anti-Indigenous atrocities.

Indeed, this fiercely asserted Doctrine of Discovery was not ephemeral, but pervaded much of early Protestant American colonial culture, and then later became a U.S. legal precedent valid to the present day. Consider, for a major example, that in the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Supreme Court used this Doctrine to affirm the legitimacy of white land theft and other oppression targeting Native Americans and to justify again the European-imagined Christian right to the “New World.” In the major Supreme Court decision, Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 8 Wheat. 543 (1823), which was decided unanimously by an all-white Court, the famous Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that the (Christian) Doctrine of Discovery principle gave European nations a right to Indian lands, and explicitly insisted too that “Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages . . . .” By this date in the U.S. history, the Doctrine had been firmly imbedded in the dominant white racial frame and its anti-Indigenous subframe.

Early in the North America colonies, Protestant Christian religious ideas, printed media, and religious actors—especially prominent white clergy and leading theologians—were central to the development of anti-Indigenous framing and its implementation. Reviewing major online documents, we discovered much early religious usage of heathen savages language and conceptualization in sermons and other commentaries of leading colonial clergy.

The English (later British) colonizers strongly emphasized the term and concept of Native “savages.” A typical May 1607 entry in Jamestown colonist Gabriel Archer’s diary (Archer 1607:107) describes colonists setting up a cross to honor Christian King James but deceiving local “savages” about what that symbol actually meant. A few years later, the prominent Protestant minister Alexander Whitaker (1613), called the “apostle of Virginia” who allegedly converted Amonute (“Pocahontas”), said that Native people are “. . . naked slaves of the divell . . ..” And Samuel Purchas ([1625] 1907), an influential English cleric who published popular travel literature, warned white readers that Native Americans had “. . . little of humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion; moree brutish than the beasts they hunt . . . captivated also to Satan tyrallny . . . .”

Another major example of anti-Indigenous framing by Protestant clergy is that of the prominent American, Samuel Davies, well-educated and later president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) where he played a major role in educating Protestant youth. He preached numerous sermons that reportedly influenced white Christians across the colonies and in Britain (Morales 2021). Trained in New Light Presbyterianism, he proclaimed the Calvinist idea of salvation coming only from God’s Grace (Publishing Committee 1832). He was critical of what he saw as a sinful lack of patriotism among white colonists and regularly decried this in sermons. His most developed anti-Indigenous framing appears in The Curse of Cowardice (1758), where he argues that English colonists’ failure to enlist in the French and Indian War demonstrated sinful cowardice:

Such a [cowardly] Conduct in such a Conjuncture, is a moral Evil, a gross Wickedness; and exposes the Wretch to the heavy Curse of God both in this and the eternal World . . . You that love your Religion, enlist; for your Religion is in Danger. Can Protestant Christianity expect Quarters from Heathen Savages and French Papists? Sure in such an Alliance, the Powers of Hell make a third Party. Ye that love your Friends and Relations, enlist; lest ye see them enslaved or butchered before your Eyes.

Davies racially frames Native Americans as savage and unholy, as an existential threat to Protestant Christian colonists. Native Americans are the antithesis to virtuous Christian colonists living in their God-given land. He constructs an explicitly anti-Indigenous narrative and incites his Protestant audience toward violent actions against “heathen savages” to preserve Christian colonists and colonial Christianity. He tries to emotionally inspire fear and a bloodlust in his white audience, justifying violent action as virtuous. The influential Davies maintained this anti-Indigenous framing for years as he went on to inspire fellow white revolutionaries, such as the famous Patrick Henry who credited studying Davies’ sermons in developing his oratory skills (Pilcher 1971:82). Davies was eventually central in early American higher education, becoming president of what is now Princeton University (Morales 2021).

In an earlier sermon to volunteer forces fighting in the French and Indian War, Samuel Davies (1755b:3–5) railed against demonic Native Americans to inspire Christian action, saying,

. . . our frontiers ravaged by merciless savages, and our fellow-subjects there murdered with all the horrid arts of Indian and Popish torture . . . Can human Nature bear the Horror of the Sight! See yonder! the hairy Scalps, clotted with Gore! the mangled Limbs! the ript-up Women! the Heart and Bowels, still palpitating with Life, smoking on the Ground! See the Savages swilling their Blood . . . Sure these are not Men; they are not Beasts of Prey; they are something worse; they must be infernal Furies in human Shape.

Like other white Christian leaders, Davies develops an anti-Indigenous framing with specific co-naturalized racist language to frame Native people as devilish merciless savages. He uses this framing of extreme savagery to instill terrifying images of inhuman creatures ravaging colonists and to excite white soldiers into a furor for doing what God required of them—that is, exterminate Native Americans. His framing includes racialized emotions of existential dread. Through frequent sermonizing on patriotism and Christian duties, Davies demands violent action against Native people. In addition, his constant savagizing accents white self-victimizing and white virtuousness. He encourages a mythologized racial reality where white soldiers can view themselves as virtuous victims of torture and death, not as the invading enemy. He promotes the idea that this is a virtuous religious war against unholy demons taking human form.

In another 1755 sermon, Samuel Davies ([1755a] 1811:115, 1756:7) obsessively advances white racial framing and oppressive anti-Indigenous actions, recycling this religious narrative in a two-sermon Discourse a year later: “Methinks I also hear the sound of the trumpet, and see garments rolled in blood—thy frontiers ravaged by revengeful savages.” Davies again reveals his strong anti-Indigenous subframe that seeks to activate racist stereotypes, narratives, images, and emotions in his white audience—including accentuating the subframe’s savagery, white self-victimizing, and white virtuousness dimensions. In yet another section, Davies ([1755a] 1811:117) uses his racist narrative to infantilize Indigenous people who were currently working with the English in the French and Indian War: “and the Indians will now probably break off their alliance with the English, and join the victorious party; and what barbarities we may expect from these treacherous and revengeful savages, I cannot think of without horror.” In these long sermons, Davies, like Jefferson in the Declaration decades later, frames Natives as child-like, manipulated, and lacking in morality.

Some decades later, in an early nineteenth-century example of this anti-Indigenous framing, the Reverend William Brown (1814), son of an influential Scottish minister, wrote The History of the Propagation of Christianity Among the Heathen Since the Reformation. A popular three-volume work, viewed as significant by nineteenth-century historians and theologians, focuses on bringing Christianity to Native peoples, who he regularly frames in a savage light. In one fanciful novelistic story, Brown (1814:545) highlights the alleged inhumanity of Natives by recounting a scene, asserted as rare, of Native humanity: “On this occasion, a scene was exhibited so tender and melting, that even the merciless savages seemed struck with astonishment, remorse, and sorrow.” In his books, Brown mostly maintains the white-obsessive framing of Native Americans as merciless savages usually incapable of the virtuous Christian emotions of astonishment, remorse, and sorrow, and he creates an image of them as being unusual in showing humanity. Noting this as a recurring dimension of anti-Indigenous framing, scholars Stannard (1993) and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014:49–77) highlight the ever-present framing of Native people as emotionless and inhumane as yet another white rationalization for anti-Indigenous violence. Framing them as emotionless in their savagery thereby privileges “real” white emotions of anti-Indigenous fear, anger, and hatred. Moreover, fear-motivated violence against alleged merciless savages protected the “victimized” white communities, virtuous violence no matter how horrific and antithetical to Christian values (Townsend 2019:95, 102, 120).

Occasional debates among whites over anti-Indigenous framing came early to European colonists. In the mid-1600s, well before the Declaration of Independence, prominent New England lawyer and reformer Thomas Morton aggressively countered the framing of Native Americans as savages. Against the Protestant authorities, Thomas Morton ([1637] 1883:274) boldly argued Native Americans are not, “Salvages [and are] more full of humanity than the Christians.” Persecuted by white Plymouth leaders for accenting Native American morality and civilization, he was accused of being irreligious and engaging in “licentious” acts with Native women, and he was attacked for having Native friends (Drinnon 1980:382–410). Morton’s stance countering anti-Indigenous framing was unacceptable because it threatened white colonists’ ability to unanimously savagize Native people, portray whites as victims, and rationalize anti-Indigenous violence (Drinnon 1980:382–410, 1997:9–20). According to major Puritan leaders like William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, the “country could not bear the injury he did” (Drinnon 1980:392).

Historian Richard Drinnon (1980:392) drives home the long-lasting reality of the anti-Indigenous subframe these early white Protestant leaders had crafted:

. . . from 1628 to 1883 and after, the unwritten code assumed Indians not to be persons . . . but “savages,” who would inevitably use any available weapon to strike at the lives of newcomers, those bearers of “civilization.”

For disagreeing with these religious leaders openly, Morton was exiled twice, had his home burned, and was imprisoned in brutal conditions before being released to die.

Utilizing political framing and distributional media, secular European-American leaders joined Christian clergy in demanding anti-Indigenous framing, oppression, and removal or extermination. Probably the most widely circulated secular example of this intense anti-Indigenous framing is the primary U.S. founding document, the Declaration of Independence. There the bitingly racist phrase, merciless Indian savages, is featured by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s principal architect, to describe the “problem” of Native Americans. The anti-Indigenous subframe and broader white frame around it were already deeply engrained in colonial whites’ minds like that of Jefferson. He frequently espoused major elements of the anti-Indigenous subframe, as well as of other white racist framing such as that of African Americans. He was clearly influenced by leading English philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who spread anti-Indigenous framing across the English-speaking world during the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.

Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 1904:84), who influenced Thomas Jefferson, emotionally described lives of “savage people in many places of America. . . [as] poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To this day, this last phase is widely featured in the English-speaking world, often disconnected from its original anti-Indigenous language.

John Locke, investor in English slave trade and supporter of American slavery, was a favorite philosopher of Jefferson, influencing his and other founders’ ideas—especially in the Declaration of Independence (Constitutional Rights Foundation 2001). For instance, the influential John Locke ([1689] 1884:211) expounds negatively on Native Americans:

There cannot be a clearer demonstration of anything, than several Nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of Plenty, i.e., a fruitful Soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, raiment, and delight; yet, for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the Conveniences we enjoy: And a king of a large fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England.

Locke frames Indigenous peoples racially as unintelligent, impoverished, and lazy. Lacking a work ethic, they have no desire to utilize the environment for profit and are devoid of “real” civilization. Civilized whites versus uncivilized savages again are a key element in anti-Indigenous framing. Since Native Americans do not conform to his English version of civilization, their lives and culture are antithetical to civilization, and by implication, Christianity. Christian leaders, like Locke, had long framed Native Americans as worthy of domination due to their less-than-human status in the eyes of the Christian God (Stannard 1993:64–66; Williams 2012:121–78). This influential narrative of Native Americans as uncivilized savagesby a leading Western philosopher and capitalist investor reinforced the already extensive anti-Indigenous framing.

Several decades later, in the Declaration of Independence influenced by Locke, Jefferson included highly racist language about actions of the British king:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

The leading founder Jefferson reveals his broad white racial frame and anti-Indigenous subframe in this famous passage. Centuries-old images of Native peoples as merciless Indian savages advance a narrative of brutal beings intent on destroying European-Americans. This passage reflects, and potentially generates, white emotions of fear and anger toward Native people: Fear of their animal-like ferocity and anger at their supposedly immoral warfare. The Declaration racially frames Native Americans as savages lacking in human values and willing to blindly destroy white Americans. White self-victimizing in the Declaration allows elite and ordinary whites to rationalize their anti-Indigenous violence as virtuous and necessary actions to secure their safety and right to lands they invaded.

Revealingly, Jefferson, and other white founders, chose to remove a strongly worded racialized passage in the draft Declaration blaming the African slave trade and slave insurrections on British King George, even as they chose to keep the anti-Indigenous passage (Feagin 2020:39). Elite whites here solidified an aggressive anti-Indigenous frame in the new nation’s founding document. By the time of the Declaration’s writing, the newly coalescing nation had many decades of anti-Indigenous stereotypes and narratives engrained into its dominant white framing. In contrast, removing anti-slavery statements from the Declaration, even those indicting the British king, effectively protected that horrific institution as a critical white economic enterprise. Meanwhile, the often-genocidal destruction of Native Americans, rationalized and virtuized due to alleged Indigenous savagery, cleared the landscape for more white exploitation of Native America. Native clearance and extermination were essential for white land-grabs, but the slave trade and slavery were integral to exploitation of those and other lands by powerful whites. Both are enshrined in the Declaration.

After writing the Declaration, as a leading slaveholder and government official, Jefferson continued to advance the anti-Indigenous subframe and broader white racist framing. He reflects Locke’s racist sentiments in his only major book, Notes on the State of Virginia ([1781] 1787:96–97), the first such book by an American intellectual. “Savage” Native Americans have

never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government. Their only controuls are their manners . . . whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans . . . It will be said, that great societies cannot exist without government. The savages therefore break them into small ones.

Like Locke a century earlier, Jefferson reinforces cognitive and image stereotypes of savages who live by natural “manners” (customs) rather than formal laws that govern “civilized” whites. He advances narratives that they lacked real government or laws and that European civilization, with formal laws, is superior—thereby explicitly framing civilization as formal law and order. This too creates a sense of white virtuousness and superiority over Native Americans. Again, these dimensions of anti-Indigenous framing seem underlain with strong emotions of racial superiority that rationalize many anti-Indigenous actions he supported.

Thomas Jefferson ([1781] 1787) offers some “positive” framing in his Notes book (Query VI) of a Native American as one who “meets death with more deliberation, and endures tortures with a firmness unknown . . . with us” (p. 63), and he further expounds on the oratory skills and family dynamics of Native peoples, he is mainly establishing there the racialized concept of the “noble savage.” This still popular white framing of Native Americans as noble warriors portrays them as operating nobly but from a baser instinct, from a so-called Golden Age of humanity before they became corrupted (Williams 2012). Moreover, Jefferson’s ([1781] 1787:68) Query VI also contains a passage where he asserts his race perspective: “I do not mean to deny, that there are varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and mind. I believe there are . . .” While Jefferson does make some seemingly positive comments about Native Americans, he makes clear in this book that he operates fully out of a white racial frame accenting white superiority, including his buttressing of the patronizing white narrative of the “noble savage.”

Jefferson further made evident his strong anti-Indigenous framing during and after his presidency (1801–1809). As president, he described Native Americans as uncivilized in contrast to civilized whites. Later President Andrew Jackson (1833) argued that “savages” did not have “the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits. . . . essential to any favorable change in their condition” and engaged in brutal Indigenous removal policies. Yet, decades before, President Jefferson had set the foundation for such racial removal. In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Governor of Indiana Territory and later the U.S. president, Jefferson said he wanted kept secret his advocacy of violent anti-Indigenous government action:

As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation

He racially frames white society as virtuously humanitarian, but this “virtuousness” is oppressively paternalistic and threatening violence. Later, in an 1807 letter to his Secretary of War, Jefferson (Ostler 2015) said,

if we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated or driven beyond the Mississippi . . . In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.

Again, his anti-Indigenous framing victimizes whites as their “necessary” violence would be due to Native Americans defending their lands. His use of the word “extermination,” and the destruction it references, indicates a genocidal inclination that even then was not a new concept to other white officials or Native Americans (Ostler 2015).

Even earlier, Tsalagi (Cherokee) War Chief Tsi’yu-gunsini (1775) recognized this common white genocidal intent:

They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers . . . Not being able to point out any further retreat for the miserable Tsalagi, the extinction of the whole race will be proclaimed.

A few years later, the U.S. Secretary of War Henry Knox ([1790] 1832:97) insisted in a letter to General Josiah Harmar: “efficient protection . . . against solitary, or small parties of enterprising savages, seems altogether impossible. No other remedy remains, but to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said banditti.” Native Americans are explicitly constructed as white-harming savages and criminals. Again, Knox’s claim of white victimization virtuizes extinction-focused violence.

We now consider other major white “founders” of the United States to further show the institutional extent, bedrock depth, and founding significance of anti-Indigenous framing and its very specific language. Consider these highly racist and expansionist words about Indigenous societies by the first and most famous U.S. president:

We are attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape.

This major letter to the Continental Congress by General George Washington (1783) reveals the anti-Indigenous subframe as firmly entrenched in official thinking and policy of the new country (Utter 2002:387–88). Often referencing graphic images like “wild beasts” and “savages” in their linguistic phrasing, powerful whites like the brutal slaveholder Washington proclaimed and reinforced anti-Indigenous framing that helped to generate violent anti-Indigenous actions.

The framing of Native peoples with animalizing “wild beasts” language reinforces the narrative that they are subhuman, and therefore lacking the rights of white Christians and necessarily subjugated. Washington’s (1783) framing of Native people as bestial and brutal creatures who will “return as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there” seems to seek an emotional response from elite and ordinary whites. Emotions are likely powerful motivators in the anti-Indigenous subframe that justify inclinations toward anti-Indigenous violence. Washington, the top military leader, does not portray the aggressive colonialism as what it really is—a white invasion of Native homelands, but portrays invaders as victims attacked by subhuman savages.

In all eras, anti-Indigenous framing reinforces the view that whites’ genocidal actions can be rationalized as virtuous and necessary for survival. Whites can obsess over Native savagery as an evil victimizing them, evil that had to be dealt with aggressively and then by virtuizing whites’ expropriating actions. Creation and support of an anti-Indigenous subframe by revered officials like Washington reinforce viewing, even today, these pursuits as necessary and moral.

President James Madison (1812), the “father of the U.S. Constitution,” made similar arguments in his annual address to Congress in the War of 1812 era:

A distinguishing feature in the operations . . . is the use made by the enemy [the British] of the merciless savages under their influence. Whilst the benevolent policy of the United States invariably recommended peace and promoted civilization among that wretched portion of the human race . . . the enemy has not scrupled to call to his aid their ruthless ferocity, armed with the horrors of those instruments of carnage and torture which are known to spare neither age nor sex.

Into the nineteenth century, the influential Madison promotes racist framing of Native people as infantile and manipulated by the British, like Jefferson, while continuing white fixation on Indigenous people as merciless, uncivilized, unworthy inhabitants of the new United States. Madison’s emotive language likely invokes in his white audience racialized emotions rationalizing government anti-Indigenous violence. Madison reiterates the official framing of the new United States as having benevolent policies aimed at bringing civilization to inferior savages, while framing whites simultaneously as their innocent victims and saviors. This white-victimizing perspective again accents the perceived virtuousness of white Americans, their civilizing mission, and, implicitly, their legitimating Doctrine of Discovery.

Significantly, this rationalized white genocide targeting Native Americans has had a long and contemporary international legacy. For example, Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders in Germany studied these U.S. anti-Indigenous policies before they developed their horrific policies of large-scale genocide (Miller 2019).

We noted the importance of the Doctrine of Discovery in a consequential 1823 Supreme Court case legally justifying Native oppression. This legal precedent had earlier incarnations. Official European colonial policies long imbedded much anti-Indigenous framing (Townsend 2019). These policies were enforced by invasion forces, colonial militias, and federal militaries. Leading white politicians used armed forces and the broader fiscal-military state to oppress Native communities (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021) and regularly advocated violence in communication with military leaders, who held similar attitudes (Drinnon 1997:65, 331–32; Stannard 1993:119–33).

Consider the prominent deputy governor of colonial Pennsylvania and Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, Robert Hunter Morris. In 1756, he organized, and rewarded, volunteer white scalping parties to murder Native Americans there (Silver 2009). At one point, his Provincial Commissioners (1756), including influential founder Benjamin Franklin, conveyed disappointment in a letter at how few Native scalps had been collected. A year earlier, in a letter to revolutionary war veteran and influential Pennsylvania politician, Captain William Parsons, Robert H. Morris (1755b) argued, “. . . it gives me great concern to see that a few merciless savages can by reason of the defenceless state of the province, perpetuate such horrid cruelties and indecencies on poor innocent people living peacefully. . .” Through racist images of “merciless savages,” he too proclaims and reinforces an official narrative of Native Americans as waging an immoral war. Morris, like almost all leading colonizers we have studied, transforms Indigenous peoples from human to inhuman while self-victimizing Euro-American invaders as not at fault because of their imagined right to the provincial lands. White framing of the innocence of invading white colonizers regularly rationalizes the often-genocidal violence of colonialism.

Other correspondence between leading whites is equally revealing of the anti-Indigenous subframe’s recurring savagery themes and language. In a letter to General William Johnson ([1755a] 1851), Deputy Governor Morris argued, “You cannot conceive what a vast Tract of Country has been depopulated by these merciless Savages . . . with all its horrid Circumstances . . . without the least Provocation from us . . ..” In his vigorous, white-framed language, Morris again perpetuates the racist narrative of uncivilized savages. His anti-Indigenous subframe includes not only savagizing but also white victimization, and this doubtless encouraged his military officers’ oppressive actions toward Native peoples.

This legacy of asserted white innocence in “Indian wars” has persisted over centuries. Even today, this framing of white virtuousness in many books and articles continues to advance racist narratives that Native “aggression” (i.e., resistance) against colonizing white “settlers” far outweighed white anti-Indigenous violence and, thus, that large-scale white genocide does not meet the official qualifications for “true genocide” (e.g., see Ostler 2015). Revealingly, whites were violently displacing the real settlers there.

Rationalization is an essential part of anti-Indigenous framing, and this is true for leading white scholars and intellectuals who have influenced generations of ordinary whites. Consider the anti-Indigenous framing of the still influential sociopolitical observer, Alexis de Tocqueville. Describing Native Americans in his seminal Democracy in America (1839), he argues vigorously for such contentions as “Indians will never conform to civilization . . .”; “the savage is isolated in the midst of a hostile people . . . without whose assistance he cannot live . . .”; and “The [white] Americans . . . are aware that these tribes have not yet lost the traditions of savage life . . . it is intended . . . to [reduce] them to despair.”

Touring 1830s America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1839) adopts the dominant white racial frame, including its anti-Indigenous subframe. He too unreflectively frames Native Americans as savages devoid of civilization. He also self-victimizes white Americans, suggesting their oppressive anti-Indian actions are necessary. Victimized whites have no choice but to exterminate savage communities and ensure civilized whites’ safety. Though he terms whites as “hostile,” and admits the U.S. government is reducing Native communities “to despair,” these are not sympathetic words. This widely read scholar in the United States reinforced, and still reinforces, the narrative of Native savagery while also victimizing whites and virtuizing violent white oppression.

White virtuousness for Tocqueville, as for many of his time and since, includes the larger civilizing project by whites of Native Americans as a necessary pursuit, even if futile. de Tocqueville (1839) insists on stereotyped framing: “Far from desiring to conform his habits to ours, he loves his savage life . . . he repels every advance to civilization.” Tocqueville constantly frames Native Americans as unwilling to throw off “primitive” habits for the “civilized” white lifestyle. Tocqueville thereby maintains the narrative of whites as virtuous bringers of civilization, with only cursory recognition of violent white colonial and nineteenth-century atrocities, which he frames as virtuous survival tactics by victimized whites.

Tocqueville’s prominence as a European intellectual and the recognized importance of his U.S. travels’ book have long contributed legitimacy to the white racist framing of Indigenous Americans in the United States and overseas. Utilizing well-established, co-naturalized white race thinking and specific racist language to categorize Native Americans as subhuman, Tocqueville furthers the narrative that they cannot achieve a social status equal to whites, and thus cannot match white civilization. The constant citing of Tocqueville’s “democracy” writings by modern scholars and politicians—usually without recognition of his racist framing of Native peoples—helps to legitimate anti-Indigenous framing in the twenty-first century.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, influential white commentators again demonstrated conformity to old savagery framing of Native America. In a blockbuster 1920s book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Harvard-educated historian Lothrop Stoddard (1920:262) insisted,

The immigrants of colonial times were largely exiles for conscience’s sake, while the very process of migration was so difficult and hazardous that only persons of courage, initiative, and strong will-power would voluntarily face the long voyage overseas to a life of struggle in an untamed wilderness haunted by ferocious savages.

As noted previously, in early European accounts of the Americas, the colonizers mythologized an “uncivilized wildness” of lands they “discovered.” Centuries later, Stoddard perpetuates this same white framing of North America as wilderness and relatively uninhabited, a God-given resource for superior white colonists. Read by U.S. presidents and ordinary Americans alike, the learned Stoddard’s racist framing reinforced for the early- and mid-twentieth century the widespread narrative that these “untamed” lands were ripe for white taking, but dangerous for virtuous white invaders. Operating from the anti-Indigenous subframe, he savagized the land and Native Americans while self-victimizing European invaders as courageous people trying to survive in lands dominated by ferocious savages. By the 1920s, this framing is a multi-century white obsession with Native savagery, white victimization, and virtuousness. The “courage” of the early Europeans, the so-called exiles that Stoddard and other white supremacist writers of this era (e.g., Madison Grant, in The Passing of the Great Race) emphasize, virtuizes those invaders and implies that their future anti-Indigenous violence and displacements were necessary means of white survival in a hostile land.

Today, the anti-Indigenous subframe has certainly not disappeared. One obvious example is modern reverence for the eighteenth-century Declaration of Independence, which still broadcasts its slaveholding authors’ strong pronouncement that Native Americans are merciless Indian savages—a section that gets almost no national critique for its still vicious racism. As noted previously, it took Facebook’s non-human AI system to forcefully call out publicly the Declaration’s highly racist language as contemporary hate speech (Coble 2018).

Today, many mainstream books, movies, and television shows accept or actively utilize major dimensions of old anti-Indigenous framing. Popular media episodes, movie segments, and novel sections feature racist stereotypes, images, narratives, and emotions directed toward Native communities, past and present. Their lands are still coveted, stolen, and polluted by whites, while their protests are largely ignored. Old racist representations continue in media and savagize Native people as wandering primitives, often with poor language skills and many superstitions, while simultaneously portraying frontier whites as their victims and virtuizing the violent actions implemented by white-run governments or frontier communities. Old and new Wild West/New World books, radio shows, and films demonstrate this—the 1933–1956’s Lone Ranger radio show, Disney’s 1995 Pocahontas, Disney’s 2013 The Lone Ranger remake, Universal’s 2011 film adaption of the 2006 graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens, among many others. This negative racial framing reinforces centuries-old white framing of white racial superiority.

In addition, many U.S. geographical features—mountain ranges, lakes, rivers, trails, parks, neighborhoods, roads, schools, and sports teams—still unreflectively feature racist Indigenous mascots, names, epithets, and stereotypes (Fenelon 2016). Whites continue to use Native American names, mascots, and representations as they please. If questions are raised as to whites’ ethical use of this often-racist framing, the response is typically one where whites announce themselves as the victims of “political correctness” while professing their virtuousness in use of racial depictions “honoring” Native Americans (Hill 2009). Native American researcher Williams (2012:222) has shown how whites continue with a savage framing of Native Americans, including in entertainment media: “The ubiquity and deep penetration of the idea of the savage can be confirmed by turning on your TV set and watching a football game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Washington Redskins.” White obsession with Native peoples and their cultures, whites’ appropriating them, and whites’ using racist language remain commonplace and entrenched, and hard for most whites to view critically.

Contemporary white narratives often accent Native “disappearance.” In Monuments to Absence, Andrew Denson (2017) critiques this faulty narrative, including its “noble savage” counterpart. It facilitates colonial-invader society in appropriating Native histories—for example, whites erecting monuments to the infamous Trail of Tears without authentic Native involvement. Ignoring living Native communities contributes to a narrative that Native Americans are largely extinct, that the virtuous extermination of “savages” succeeded. Historical white atrocities are largely ignored, or hollowly apologized for, while monuments are erected without Native American involvement.