Indians, North American

The history of the aboriginal indigenous population of the Americas has been that of progressive dispossession, most notably of their land, their lives, even of their name. Those of North America called themselves simply “the people” or the Anasazi , “the Ancient Ones,” as the Navajo termed their ancestors. The first recorded use of Indian in relation to America is “Indian tobacco” (1618), deriving from the misnaming of the people and their territories by Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, and others, who erroneously believed they
had circumnavigated the globe and reached the Indies. The misnomer remained in general use for centuries up to about 1970 when activists began calling themselves Native Americans as a form of historical reclamation of their aboriginal status. This process of renaming, as in Afro-American , endorses the bitter observation of Toni Morrison: “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate” ( The Guardian , January 29, 1992).

The earliest records stereotypically describe the native population as savages beneath consideration. Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582) refers to three men “clothed in beasts skins, [who] ate raw flesh, and spake such speech that no man could understand them and in their demeanour were like to brute beasts” (A 3). Although Captain John Smith had a high opinion of the local government of Virginia and the authority of Powhatan, he nevertheless wrote in his Generall historie of Virginia (1624) that “The Warres in Europe, Asia and Africa , taught me how to subdue the wild Salvages [sic] in Virginia” (Utley and Washburn 1977, 15). William Bradford wrote in his History Of Plimouth Plantation (ca. 1630, ten years after the Plymouth settlement) of “those vast and unpeopled countries of America … where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little different from wild beasts” (Miller 1956, 12). John Winthrop’s Journal entry for September 22, 1642, similarly records “having come into a wilderness where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men” (Miller 1956, 42). In King James I’s famous Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), he attributed the origin of smoking to “the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians.”

The phrase Indian country is recorded in The Dictionary of American English (1715) in the sense of “enemy or hostile territory,” thus reflecting the essentially adversarial relationship between the colonists and the indigenous population. In the period of the great western expansion of the United States, the stereotype of the savage, scalping, and treacherous Indian developed as the people resisted, most spectacularly at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, or “Custer’s Last Stand,” in 1876. Especially revealing is the aggressive, virtually genocidal slogan, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” (attributed to Philip Henry Sheridan at Fort Cobb, Oklahoma, January 1869). The abbreviated form injun is recorded from 1825, but has since largely passed out of use, being unrecorded in the major recent dictionaries of American slang.

A curious but revealing footnote to the English perception of the American Indian occurred in eighteenth-century London in references to a notorious gang of aristocratic ruffians who styled themselves the Mohocks, after the Mohawks. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) carried the following entry: “The name of a cruel nation of America given to ruffians who infested, or rather who were imagined to infest, the streets of London.”

The phrase or characterization “Indian giver” derives from the Colonial period. In Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (1764), “An Indian gift is a proverbial expression, signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” However, in his Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), John R. Bartlett noted that the phrase was being used by New York schoolchildren in its modern sense, that is, for one who gives a present and then takes it back.

The subsequent policy of separation whereby the Indians were confined to reservations (a term that dates from 1790) obviously had the effect of reducing their social impact on the broader American society. Interestingly and ironically, the phrase Indian country resurfaced, not in relation to the people themselves but in the contexts of World War II, recorded from 1945–1948, and the Vietnam War from 1967, referring to the territory outside the Saigon government’s control.

Allen (1983) and others have argued that the number of hostile nicknames for a people reflects their perceived threat to the “host” speech community. On this basis it is an ironic reflection of the reduced status of the American Indian that on this basis they rank seventh, behind African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and Germans. The harshest terms are the oldest, namely savage and barbarian , being generic and part of common colonialist discourse that is now unacceptable. Most of the specific terms were first descriptive, then ironic adoptions from native culture and hierarchy, as in chief, brave, squaw , and papoose . However, some of these, like brave , first used by James Fenimore Cooper in 1837, are positive, emphasizing the idea of the “noble savage.” Cooper seems also to have introduced paleface . The contrasting color red supplies a range of terms, such as red-skin (1699), red-man (1725), and red-devil (1834), finally generating the most common formation, red-indian only in 1878. In comparison with terms for other groups, these have generally less impact. However, as Allen points out, many nicknames for American Indians were used locally (1983, 51). With the increasing sensitivities of political correctness, virtually all the native terminology is viewed critically in some circles.