Thread by @Hiranyareta

"Most Americans simply assumed that the uncivilized Native American was doomed for extinction in the face of civilization—similar to the idea that traditions such as Hinduism are doomed to succumb eventually to what is called ‘progress’."

"The theoretical frame work created by Christian theology and Enlightenment notions of progress and history became the received wisdom about the Natives’ inevitable fate."

Richard Slotkin on the Frontier Myth.

"The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography,and polemics produced over a period of three centuries.1/

According to this mythic-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy,2/

and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization. "
3/3

"This Myth is played out in the Eden-Frontier dichotomy. Eden is ‘our’ space and the Frontier is the ‘satanic’ wilderness inhabited by uncivilized, unknown ‘others’. "

"The mission entrusted to Americans—purportedly by Providence—is to constantly expand Eden,or Civilization (its secular equivalent), by conquering and colonizing the wild Frontier. "

"The Frontier Myth helped to generate cohesiveness among the settlers by evoking varying degrees of ‘otherness’ towards the Native Americans (and later the Blacks and the Mexicans)—ranging from exoticization to suspicion, tension, and outright hostility."

"The Natives were otherwise invisible—seen as part and parcel of an uninhabited wilderness—thus providing untrammeled rights to the Whites to reshape the wilderness as they saw fit."

"A similar situation can be seen as prevailing in academic studies of Hinduism—the intellectual space is seen as an uninhabited wilderness, thus granting full rights to scholars to recast Hindu religious thought as they see fit."

#AudreyTruschke explained.

"The landscape of the Frontier Myth is partitioned by a moral demarcation separating civilization from the wilderness. The civilization-wilderness dichotomy is a device to distinguish civilized Whites from uncivilized non-Whites."

"The Frontier has been both a geographical place and a mythic space populated by various imagined casts/castes: Native American Indians as savages, Blacks as inferior, Whites as heroes,white women as needing rescue from savages, and so on."

"The underlying motivation for such imaginations of the other was, of course, lust for land and the need for hegemony, but such materialistic aspirations had to be justified in order to quiet the rumblings of the collective white conscience. "

The quest to blame the Natives for their own suffering gave rise to an abundant flowering of popular narratives and media images of the ‘primitive savagery’ of the Natives that warranted their subjugation—

not dissimilar to some of today’s ethnographies and reports about various kinds of Third World peoples.

This bestselling‘Indian atrocity literature’ chronicled the kidnapping, capture and torture of Whites, especially women and children, at the hands of Native Americans on the Frontier.

In today’s language, one might say that the Natives were portrayed as egregious violators of human rights,their religion and culture blamed as the cause of their inhumanity.

"These sensationalized stories included one-sided exaggerations of some actual incidents and outright lies about others. Their main application,however, was not to provide insight or accurate accounts, but to offer an excuse for the usurping of Indian lands."

"The whites achieved this by devastating the image of Native American culture and questioning whether natives who clung to such ‘evil’ culture deserved the same human rights as the civilized (white) people."

Compare abv 2 tweets to the NYT or WaPo on #Hathras

"The early development of an independent America was fueled by a seeming paradox: on the one hand, a systemic genocide of the Natives was being carried out across America, while, on the other hand, the nation was celebrating the beginning of a liberal democracy with1+

participatory voices from many sides.

The dissonance between a liberal society and a wholesale decimation of a people gave rise to an ‘Enlightenment’ view that sought to romanticize the Natives while justifying their destruction. "

"This Enlightenment view of the Natives sought to revise the fundamentalist Christian view of them as subhuman ‘beasts’ by positing the Natives as innately equal humans beings who,given proper training, could become civilized."

"This romantic image of the Native American as a ‘Noble Savage’ influenced important American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper, who continued to portray the Native as a noble albeit tragic figure."

"These writings had a sense of tragedy built on fatalistic inevitability—that nature had predestined the Indian for destruction in the face of progress."

"They presented a more humane portrayal than the ‘beastly savage’ image. However, this did not prevent the Natives’ extermination."

"The intellectuals of the time also failed to identify Christian intolerance or Enlightenment-based European supremacy as problematic ingredients in the process of genocide."

"In fact, the Enlightenment model of the Natives served less as a challenge to the prevailing ‘beastly savage’ model than it served as a reinforcement of both models’ underlying perception of the Natives asan ‘uncivilized’ and inferior people. "

"The main difference between the two models was that the Enlightenment view sought to civilize the Natives while the fundamentalist view sought to conquer them. Both aimed at denigrating and exterminating native cultures and religions."

"For example, Jeffersonian Democracy, though a product of the Enlightenment, had an ambivalent position on the Indians and a worse one on the Blacks."

"The liberal impulse, fostered by the democratic leanings of the American people, contributed in a curious way to the development of the Frontier Myth, as the introduction of a liberal voice (the ‘good cop’) played counterpoint to the1+

frontiersman (the ‘bad cop’) and yet came to the inevitable conclusion that the Natives were an unchanging threat to white ‘victims’ that had to be removed."

"The historian, Richard Drinnon, graphically illustrates how the literature produced during the process of the white takeover of North America provided justification for ignoring the rights of the Natives who lived there."

"The literature often acknowledged as a starting point that the Natives had a favorable case for the ownership of the land and the practice of their culture.

The American Frontier and its perpetual expansion were justified through a kind of ‘soft’ debate that was managed through these stories. Drinnon shows that the debate was never allowed to get serious, but was simply used to assuage the American conscience."

"Indeed, the health of the American Myth has depended to a great extent, as Slotkin and others have shown, on blocking out genuine debate while claiming to champion intellectual freedom."

"In many of the atrocity stories, a token white person would try to make a sympathetic case for the Indians.

This is a historical version of the modern urban, liberal white ‘good cop’ who feels pity and objects to the unfair demonology and the killings of Natives by a courageous but unsophisticated frontiersman—the ‘bad cop’."

"By the time of Jackson’s Presidency, the debate between the Enlightenment and fundamentalist Christian views of the Native was dying down: even those who considered Natives to be innately equal humans had largely internalized the atrocity literature1+

(which in addition to portraying the Natives in debasing and cruel ways showed Christianity and Civilization as the solution)."

" Jacksonian Democracy fully embraced the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that vowed to remove and relocate Native peoples so that white Americans could occupy the land.

Andrew Jackson is infamous for causing the Trail of Tears—the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their sacred home lands in the southeast to Oklahoma—a tragic ethnic cleansing of an enormous number of people."

"Andrew Jackson provided ready justifications by graphically depicting the depravity and cruelty of the Natives. Images of women and other helpless victims were especially useful."

"Andrew Jackson’s excesses as the bad cop were met with public criticism by the presidential cabinet playing the good cop.

But, ultimately, as Drinnon points out, such violence was protected and justified by powerful cabinet members such as John Quincy Adams (who later became President).

When Adams was asked to investigate Jackson’s actions, he produced a White Paper that adroitly avoided dealing with substantive issues such as the unprovoked atrocities of white militias, the white lust for Native lands."

"Thomas Jefferson, for one, felt that Adam’s White Paper linking the US usurpation of Native lands to the Natives’ inherent savagery was a triumph of logic."

"Further, Jefferson noted that this would help “maintain in Europe a correct opinion of our political morality”."

"Once the Europeans accepted the status of Whites as victims and the status of the Native Americans as savages, they were less likely to doubt the success of the American experiment in democracy and its claims to Manifest Destiny."

"Once the savagery of the Native is expertly ‘proven’, the story and discussion ends.

The Natives’ inherent human right to defend their sacred sites and families in the face of white greed and aggression, and the huge discrepancy between White and Native atrocities, are never discussed."

"Hindus are the latest in a long list of ‘savage’ minorities to be pitted against the ‘civilizing’ force of the America’s Manifest Destiny."

"Unlike the frontier struggles of the past, this is not a physical battle with literal bloodshed, but a battle of ideas, where indigenous traditions and ways of knowledge are sought to be decimated by Western tropes and ontologies1+

(brought forth by academic ‘pilgrims’ venturing into foreign and exotic intellectual and cultural territory), where the ‘dead Indian’ is not a physical body, but a deity (Ganesha, Shiva, the Goddess—victimized by the psychoanalytical weapons of the academic battalion)2+

or a saint (Sri Ramakrishna, defamed as a pedophile) or spiritual practices (Tantra, denuded of spiritual value by being recast as an appropriation by sexually repressed upper castes of lower-caste sexual practices)."

Abv tweets were from here. The write-up by Rajiv Malhotra on the Frontier Myth. One of the most fascinating reads of my life. (page 272/564).

rajivmalhotra.com/wp-content/upl…