SOURCE: Ramsey, Colin. “Cannibalism and Infant Killing: A System of ‘Demonizing’ Motifs in Indian Captivity Narratives.” Clio 24, no. 1 (fall 1994): 55-68.

In the essay below, Ramsey links captivity narratives with the demonizing of Native Americans during the Puritan era.

The Puritan phase of the Indian captivity narrative, both in its binary “good vs. evil” oppositions and in its imagery, established the paradigm for much of the subsequent development of the Indian captivity narrative form—helping to fix particular (and ethnocentric) views of the Indian in the American imagination, and thereby making those same images and motifs readily available for political and ideological manipulation. This paper will examine two such captivity narrative motifs, ubiquitous in Puritan captivities but by no means limited to them, namely, the motifs of Indian cannibalism and infanticide. I will discuss these motifs within Indian captivity narratives as a “demonology,” defined by Phillips Stevens, Jr., as...