SOURCE: Jennings, Francis. “Savage Form for Peasant Function.” In The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, pp. 58-84. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

In the following essay, originally presented in 1971, Jennings argues that the English conception of the natives of North America continually changed to better fit the purposes of the colonists, whewther as trading allies or military enemies.

In his book on the Canadian fur trade, Harold A. Innis has conceived of the contact between Europe and the Americas, not as a collision of civilization and savagery, but as a meeting of two civilizations, one relatively more complex than the other, but both extremely responsive to each other.¹ Innis's comment referred particularly to economic relations, which will be discussed at length hereafter, but it is also applicable in other contexts. If the two societies were comparable as civilizations, then their...