Stephen Lewis: The continuing evolution of ‘savage’ | News – Traverse City Record Eagle

My last column on the changing meaning of savage from the 17th century to now invites further development. The word took on a central place in the late 18th on into the 19th century when Romanticism emerged in Europe and here.

The first step in that transformation can be found in the words of the ever-sensible Benjamin Franklin. Writing out of his direct experience dealing with the Indigenous population during the French and Indian War, Franklin declared, Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.

Romanticism pushed savage from Franklins balanced assessment to a preferred status by positing that human nature is essentially good. Therefore, all the clearly morally reprehensible acts we see daily result from societys corruption of that goodness. Tracking back to the words root as meaning uncivilized, savage individuals were deemed to be noble, because they had not been corrupted by society. The exact origin of this phrase is often ascribed to the French philosopher Jean-Jacque Rosseau, a contemporary of Franklin, who without using the term itself did praise the virtue of the uncorrupted savage. Later usage elevated uncorrupted to noble.

English Romantic poet William Wordsworth opens a famous sonnet by declaring, The world is too much with us late and soon/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers and in the process lose contact with the essential goodness of nature. The more civilized we become, that is, the more removed we are from this essential goodness, the more corrupted we are.

All of the above is essentially a European concept. American Romantics, such as Emerson and Thoreau generally subscribed to the view of nature as essentially good, the motivation for Thoreau to retreat into the woods surrounding Walden Pond, but real-life exposure to the ongoing conflicts with the Indigenous population as settlers moved across the continent provided a different perspective. One form of this perspective was to respect the pre-contact Indigenous population as an evolutionary step toward a superior white civilization. Such a view is expressed in Henry Wadsworth Longfellows The Song of Hiawatha, which offers a noble savage existence that gives way to the reality of the presence of a superior culture carried here from Europe. Ralph Waldo Emerson protested the removal of the Cherokees but argued that the tribe could raise itself up by becoming more civilized, that is, whiter.

James Fennimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales, novels set in the then-frontier of western upstate New York, describes his main character Natty Bumppo as a being removed from the every-day inducements to err which abound in civilized life, who sees God in the forest a being who finds the impress of the Deity in all the works of nature without the blots produced by the expedients, and passions, and mistakes of man. In short, a man of nature.

Coopers view of the tribes is an interesting attempt at balance. Some of his critics chastised him for presenting the tribes in a too-positive light. That criticism seems to be an indicator of the move toward seeing the tribes as savage Indians, a view that soon dominated their representation in the American imagination. Cooper invented the term of gifts, attributes he associated with each culture, that is, white gifts and red man gifts.

For Cooper, his Natty Bumppo represented the best resolution, one who retained his superior white gifts while acknowledging, and learning from, the red mans gifts. That resolution, of course, did not take hold, giving way to the perceived necessity of cleansing the tribes gifts and replacing them with those of the whites settlers moving across the continent.

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Stephen Lewis: The continuing evolution of 'savage' | News - Traverse City Record Eagle