Native American scholars parsing it later could not help but focus on the emasculating resonance of those words, the stereotype of the poor Indian who was to be glorified and pitied at the same time, an instinctive creature who could not be held responsible for his ignorance. But this was not Jim’s concession of Indian inferiority. It was Warner talking, not Thorpe, drawing on a way of thinking about Indians that was deeply ingrained in the white American culture of the early twentieth century.
