ABSTRACT
At the heart of any literary exploration of the American experience stands the image of the Native American. As he plays the role of Other to the American Self, he holds a mirror to an ever-emerging sense of identity. In his landmark study of Euroamerican images of Native Americans, The White Man’s Indian, Robert Berkhofer writes, “to understand the White image of the Indian is to understand White societies and intellectual premises over time more than the diversity of Native Americans” (1979: xvi). No single statement can be more fundamental to a study of the Indian in American literature, for the merging of various distinct peoples under the generalized term “Indian” was central first to European, and later to American thought and art, and was a vital concept in the dialectics of selfdefinition, political development, and literary independence. What follows is a survey of the literary uses of the Indian over centuries which attempts to synthesize the diverse intellectual and moral currents of AngloAmerican thought.
