O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian

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 was interpreted in light of Christian prophecy. They also reveal that long before Columbus's discovery, Europeans had attached the same conventional imagery to a host of non-European "Primitive Others." The authors examine the explorers' chronicles to show just how they wrote about, and sometimes pictured, a strange new world unfolding its wonders after 1492.This original, provocative, and sometimes unsettling book will be important to scholars of history, anthropology, literature, medieval and Renaissance European culture, cartography, and the pictorial imagery of early colonial America.

History

MOFFITT, John F.

Sebastián, Santiago

Americas

Univ of New Mexico Pr

<p>O Brave New People explores the myths and preconceptions early European explorers brought with them to the New World and the ways in which such ideas have shaped misperceptions about American Indians to the present. Thinking he was in the Far East, Christopher Columbus labeled native inhabitants "Indians" in 1492, and so fixed a misnomer that carries with it a whole host of medieval and Renaissance European beliefs and legends. </p>
<p>The authors find in both graphic and literary sources evidence of evolving attitudes about the legends of paradise on earth and the invention of the notion of the noble savage. They reveal that long before Columbus's discovery, Europeans used the same imagery to convey subcultural traits belonging to a non-European "Primitive Other."</p>

University of New Mexico Press

Colonial Art from Columbia & Ecuador

Kennedy, Alexandra

De Rueda, Marta F.

Americas Society

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Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Ediciones Tuero

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