by John F. Moffitt
In 1492 when Christopher Columbus encountered native inhabitants of the Americas, he thought he was in the Far East - and so he mistakenly called them "Indians." The misnomer has persisted and with it a host of medieval and Renaissance beliefs and misconceptions about "Indians." Eastern or Western. Those anomalous "Indian" stereotypes generated by the Columbian encounter, both positive and negative, still determine many details of the present-day image of Native Americans. The authors reclaim the historical origins of still-evolving attitudes about the Indian myth in precolonial pictorial and literary sources. Essential for the initial European invention of the American Indian were both the scriptural precedent of the Edenic Earthly Paradise, itself often placed in India on medieval maps, and the equally ancient idea of the Noble Savage. The authors document the establishment of psychological boundaries between Europeans and their subject "New Peoples," and how the Europeans' New World
Roald Dahl
Zora Neale Hurston
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