Native American Stereotypes Essay

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Native American stereotyping that classifies these collective groups of people as savages, unhumanlike, and uncivilized is important in order to maintain the images of these people as the “other,” and the white Europeans as the ideal and supreme race. Stereotyping that demeans and belittles these people also seems to justify the white idea of the “Manifest Destiny” that resulted in the genocide and racial removal of millions of Native people and their family, as well as the continued racism they receive, even today. The only times when Native Americans are posed in a positive light is in individualized cases, and separate from Native American groups as a whole because “the group had to be depicted as ‘bad’ in order to justify the existing …show more content…

It presents these people as natural savages, while the “good” ones are merely a small group of individualized cases. Also, the physical portrayals of the Native Americans in this film are also stereotypical because only some specific tribes wore feathers in their hair, however, this representation generalizes this aspect onto all Native Americans. The film also seems to assume that Natives had very little, and non-advanced languages, in which “the ‘pesky red-skins’ of the dime novels were almost completely silent, except for blood-curdling war whoops and occasional slaughter of the English language” (Kilpatrick, 1990, pg. 43-44). This even assumed that these Natives’presumed lack of language was merely primitive, and therefore, explains why the Natives in this film seem unable to learn English. They are also presented as childlike, even by those who advocated against their maltreatment, such as when Senator Frelinghuysen said that “we shall consider them as our children, and always hold them firmly by the hand” (Kilpatrick, 1990, pg. 35-36) because of their stereotyped inability to learn language, interact with the white people, and ultimately become white peoples’ idea

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