Indians in a School Textbook Research

Textbook Archive

In this activity, we looked up the definitions of savage and savagery and we looked at a textbook archive. In this archive we read pages 18-19 about Indians and then we searched "savages" in the whole textbook. After those results came up we read the excerpts from which they were from. The definitions I found according to google for savagery is, "the quality of being fierce or cruel" and "the condition of being primitive or uncivilized." Savage is defined as, "fierce, violent, and uncontrolled" and "a member of a people regarded as primitive and uncivilized."

"If you were an American student reading this text as part of your schoolwork, how would that shape the way you viewed Native Americans?"

If I was an American student reading this I would think that Indians basically lived in the wilderness and that they could hold themselves up. The author in the textbook says, "For their food they depended, for the most part, upon the wild beasts they killed and the fish they caught." In other words Indians were good at finding resources for themselves and sharing them with their tribe members. I would also think that Indians, according to this, are not necessarily "bad," they are just not up to date with the white civilization. Indians are also defined as looking a specific way. The author says, "They had long, black, coarse hair, a scant beard, and high cheek-bones." This shows how white people saw Indians only in one way and how it was difficult to tell the difference between them. Overall, I would think that Indians are basically described as savages.