A few hundred years ago, the fitness of Native Americans for the world they inhabited excited admiration in some European observers: here were natural aristocrats, disdainful of labor, dedicated to war. Unlike European peasants stooped to the grind of agriculture, anxiously accumulating grain against future want, the Indian appeared free because confident of his ability to bear hardship; leisured because tough. Whatever projections this might have involved, whatever need of the European mind was being served by the image of the noble savage, there were real cultural differences here that
...more
