The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present [Paperback]

Robert Berkhofer's "The White Man's Indian" is an invaluable text that compliments the ongoing ethnic studies/post-colonial studies canon excellently. Berkhofer enters the archival images that we as Americans have of The Indian (in its dualistic Good/Bad Native model), to deconstruct it, and to ultimately reveal the historical opportunities and reasons why there was a national production of such images in the first place. In many ways, Berkhoker's "The White Man's Indian" is a perfect companion to Edward Said's seminal text "Orientalism" in that what each aims to do is not to rest on simply recognizing stereotypes ("The Native", "The Oriental"), but to situate The Image in its historical socio-economic context, and to have critiques of The Image lead us deeper into the complexities of national hegemonic (re)productions of power.
Berkhofer does not just repeat ad nauseum, "This is a stereotype", "That is a stereotype", etc. Instead, he looks at how the polarization of peoples into Old World and New World affected whole schools of thought and culture, like Evolutionism, Anthropology, and Christian theories of human genealogy.
I would say that this text is alligned with the growing body of literature and scholarship that comes out of post-colonial critiques of the first-world's narcissistic (and violent) stranglehold on the production of self-aggrandizing myth making. And so, for contributing sorely needed scholarship that counter-pushes against our internalized presuppositions of "The Native" - deriving somewhere between Disney's Pochahontas and Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade - "The White Man's Indian" should be read by anyone who has a stake in resisting neocolonialism - which is to say, everyone.

Very informative and shocking to those that are unaware of the American Indians' oppression by the government.

If, as the author suggests, history is a series of questions put to the past by the present, then the question history puts to us today (through this book) about Native Americans is this: While it may have been reasonable for whites of Columbus' era, in the absence of better knowledge, to have created caricatures and used stereotypes to classify and give designations to Native Americans, why is it that later, (including today) after acquiring full knowledge (of the high civilizations of the Aztec and Incas for instance) that proved the stereotypes to be both wrong and demeaning, have Whites continued to use them? In this book, the author gives us the answer. It is a metaphysical answer, one that has to do with the generalize white hang-up over race.

The essence of the white image of Native Americans is the same as that conceived by whites of other minorities, like Blacks for instance. Native Americans were preconceived of as caricatures of (Sartre's) proverbial "other." And as such they played an important psychological role as the dialectic (and metaphysical) opposite of the way whites wanted to see themselves? It was the old familiar xenophobic paradigm and racist trope of "we" versus "them," with a heavy does of Freudian Projectionism thrown in for good measure.

To understand why whites saw all Native Americans as a single "lumped together group," when for three centuries they were keenly aware of tribal and cultural differences; and when they would never have lumped all whites together as a single tribe, is to understand the psychology driving (and that still drives) whites to make and place such a high value on race-based distinctions.

This book makes clear that the erroneous idea of an "Indian" (after all Columbus thought he had landed in India?) was a psychologically necessary white creation. The "Indian" was an image carved out along the contours of white fears, both about the Native Americans - about whom initially they had absolutely nothing to fear since Native Americans accepted whites innocently and with open arms -- and about whites' own doubts about their own hidden intents and thus about the morality of their own "civilized" culture.

Once the Settlers discovered that the "Natives" were in awe of them, respected their advance weaponry, but failed to see them as a threat, the table was set to execute the hidden white agenda of Western expansion (which was a euphemism for imperial domination, enslavement, economic exploitation and genocide). Negative images of "Indians" as savages, cannibals, heathens, barbarians, sexually promiscuous and pagans, long after whites knew this applied to at most only a handful of tribes if to any at all, was turned into a symbol that represented all Indians, and thus was a calculated form of dehumanization prerequisite to executing the evil hidden white agenda. In short, creating a negative cultural symbol of Native Americans cleared the way, gave permission to, and justified use of the Settlers enormous advantage in military power to take away Indian lands, enslave, starve, isolate and kill them.

The idea ostensibly was to "civilize these heathens" by either bringing them to Christ, killing them or assimilating them. However, once Indian lands were taken over, these civilizing projects were simply abandoned. Today, except for the few Native Americans still living on reservations, no one knows or cares about what happened to the rest of them or to Native American culture? But like African Americans, they do have a museum in Washington, D.C. In most of the U.S., however, Native Americans have blended into becoming indistinguishable from Latinos. Five Stars

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