The Imaginary Indian and the Noble Savage Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

The Imaginary Indian and the Noble Savage - Essay Example..collecting and displaying Indian objects andIndians as objects or human specimens, constructing pseudo-Indians in literature...dominating or colonizing First Nations peoplesalvaging...material fragments of a supposedly dying native culture... (p. 267). She notes that umteen modern Native Americans wanted to be white or at least not different, horizontal as Native Americans are considered exotic. The imaginary Indian, then, is the mythological construct of the Native American (and, to an extent, primeval peoples in general) by people in the West who seek out what they want in this rendering Constructing the savage as violent and warlike if the goal is conquest, as shamanic and in touch with nature when westward anxieties over their own relationship to nature and God is being threatened or challenged. But the description itself requires reference to opposite concepts, like postmodernism, or a challenge to unrestrained na rratives of progress created by contemporaneity fine stratagems institution, itself an abstract concept based on cultural definitions of fine art dominated by social elites colonization, or the intellectual and physical process of domination of other societies and hegemony, or discursive dominance by established groups.