American Indians: The Image of the Indian | National Humanities Center

TeacherServe Essays

American Indians: The Image of the Indian

Author: Dippie, Brian W.

It is a given today that the idea of the American Indian has been historically significant. It shaped the attitudes of those in the nineteenth century who shaped Indian policy. Indian policy—be it removal of the Eastern tribes in the 1830s, reservation isolationism beginning in the 1850s, or allotment of reservation lands and assimilation in the 1880s—cannot be understood without an awareness of the ideas behind it. Literature and the visual arts provide revealing guides to nineteenth-century assumptions about the Indian.

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Subjects

History / Education Studies / Indigenous Peoples of the Americas / Indigenous Americans / American History / Stereotypes / Racial Discrimination /