CHAPTER ONE
From White Man to Redskin:
Changing Anglo-American
Perceptions of the
American Indian

    The use of color terminology for major social groups, especially "whites" and
    "blacks," is nowadays virtually universal, even though those labels are chro-
    matically inaccurate and encourage a dangerous homogenization of human cat-
    egories. Yet as shorthand labels for what most people probably perceive as signif-
    icant divisions of the human species, chromatic labeling seems as deeply
    entrenched as is the concept of "race" on which it rests. It has not always been
    so: "black" and "white" were rarely applied to humans (in print, at least) until
    the sixteenth century; "red" and "yellow" came into frequent use two centuries
    later. In colonial British America and subsequently in the United States, the late
    emergence of "red" as a descriptive term for Native Americans is fraught with
    significance because, in conjunction with other trends in Indian-white relations,
    it tells much about changing ethnic/racial perceptions.

    This essay's roots are in my immersion over the years in the documentary ev-
    idence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European contact with American na-
    tives. Time and again I was struck by the contrast between the virulence of the
    Europeans' cultural animosity toward Indians and their overwhelmingly fa-
    vorable assessments of the Indians' physical characteristics. With few exceptions,
    the documents suggested a widely shared British and Continental Perception of
    American natives as biologically admirable but socially abhorrent; nature had
    blessed them, nurture had cursed them. To ethnocentric Westerners, the obvious
    solution was to save the Indians from themselves by converting them to European
    notions--Spanish, French, English, or other, depending on the observers' own
    affiliation--of how to behave, to dress, to worship, to think. As the following
    pages relate, British Americans' perceptions and the resulting policies changed
    slowly but profoundly between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth.

    The ideas presented in this essay were first aired in 1978 at a Washington, D. C.,
    area seminar, held on the University of Maryland campus, and later, in trun-
    cated form, at other scholarly gatherings. It was published in the American His-torical Review




Reference List

Vaughan, Alden T. 1982. "From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian." American Historical Review 87, no. 4: 917. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed September 28, 2009).