SOURCE: Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Virtues of Nature: The Image in Drama and Poetry.” In Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, pp. 169-95. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Pearce examines how the colonists of America viewed the Native American, beginning with the romantic idea of the Noble Savage, but later viewing the Native American as simply savage.

The indian over whom Americans finally triumphed was he whom they put in their plays, poems, and stories. New-rich in their discovery of the possibility of a national culture, they were certain that they could find the Indian's place in the literature into which that culture was to flower.¹ He was part of their past, they knew; and in his nature and his fate lay a clue to the meaning of their future. Yet if they would treat him imaginatively, they...