Civilization, American Indians, and the
Noble Savage Myth in French Colonial
and American Discourses
Ashley Wiersma
Michigan State University
American Studies Association Conference
November 16, 2012
Panel: Imaginary Indians: Representations of Native American People in Comparative Imperial Perspective
“Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization
scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and
cherished him.” – Francis Parkman
European “Civilization” Encounters the Sauvage
“The Discovery of America.” Jan van der Straet (Stradanus), pen and bistre, ca. 1575. In
Robert Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to
the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), image in insert between pages 138-139.
French
Discourse
 The Valois Victory in the
Hundred Years’ War created
a need for a unified French
identity
 Painting of the last battle of
the Hundred Years’ War:
Battle of Castillon (1453), by
the French painter CharlesPhilippe Larivière (1798–
1876).
Development of an Idea:
Civilisation
 By 1771, this word referred to a group of people who were:
 Sociable
 Civil (polite)
 Tractable (compliant & governable)
 Able to live in community with one another because they
recognized their religious and moral obligations to God and
others
 Who lived in an ordered society that was governed by laws
and sovereign authority.
Etymology of Civilisation
and related concepts
Civilisation Concept Map
“Sauvage” (1771)
“people who live by
roaming the woods, without
fixed homes, without police,
and almost without religion;
wild people. [This meaning]
is employed extensively.
The wild people or the
sauvages of America are
mostly cannibals. They live
by hunting and fishing and
from the bounty of the
Earth.”
Theodor de Bry Engraving
Measures of Civilization
Hygiene & Social Norms
“They seldom cut their nails. They
rarely wash meat before putting it
in the pot. Their cabins are
ordinarily very dirty. They eat lice.
The women make water before any
one and in a full gathering. … In
[sum], they put no restraint on their
actions, and follow simply the
animals.” (Louis Hennepin, 1683)
Measures of Civilization
Politeness
“The Indians trouble themselves
very little with our civilities, on the
contrary, they ridicule us when we
practice them. … Their
conversation whether among men
or women is generally only
indecency and ribaldry.”
-- (Louis Hennepin, 1683)
“Civilized” Indians
“The first day after our departure we found the cabin of
Rouensas, the most considerable of the Illinois chiefs. He
is a very good Christian and received us politely, not like a
barbarian, but like a well bred Frenchman; he took us to
his cabin and forced us to spend the night there. He made
us a present of three deer, one of which he gave to the
Father, the other to Mr. de Tonty, and the third to us.”
-- Father Buisson de St. Cosme
Enlightenment Definition of
Civilisation
Expanded to include:
 Advancements in comfort
 Increased material possessions and
personal luxuries
 Improved and expanded education
 Cultivation of the arts and
sciences
 Expansion of commerce and
industry
[add images from NAISA
conference – luxury,
writing, etc.]
Shaping American Discourses
 Influenced by William Robertson’s History of America
(1777)
 “The inhabitants of the New World were in a state of
society so extremely rude, as to be unacquainted with
those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity in
its advance towards improvement. Even the most
cultivated nations of America were strangers to many of
those simple inventions, which were almost coeval with
society in other parts of the world, and were known in the
earliest periods of civil life.”
-- Robertson, vol 1, p. 270.
American Discourses
 William Robertson employed the French concepts of
civilization and the progression of mankind through stages of
development.
 Robertson’s work and these ideas shaped Thomas Jefferson and
other Americans’ discourses in the early American republic.
 To be civilized was to be socially unified, exhibit social norms
perceived to be necessary for civil life, exchange complete liberty
for life in community with others and therefore to subject
oneself to the rule of law.
Early 19th Century American
Representations of Indians
George Catlin’s Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon’s
Egg Head (The Light) Going To and
Returning From Washington (1837-9)
Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans
(1826)
Noble Savage Myth
 Began in French
discourse
 Analogy of human
potential and the
possibility to reform
society and politics
 In the United States, the
image became popular
during and after the
American Revolution
 It could only be adopted in
regions of the United
States in Americans
perceived Indians to have
disappeared
Competing Tropes
 English colonial and
American captivity
narratives and tales of brutal
Indian warfare.
 American settlers’ portrayals
of “savage,” degenerate
Indians unfit to occupy
“American” territory
 French “noble savages” who
exemplified the positive
characteristics of “natural
man” and revealed flaws in
French society
 American “noble savages” –
heroic but doomed and/or
the unwitting accomplices to
American colonization
In each case, American Indians served to demonstrate the distance between white
Euro-American culture and that of “primitive” peoples either to critique or praise
and advance contemporary Euro-American civilization.