Celebrating our own savagery
When white Americans celebrate Indian "savagery" they celebrate their own
I have been reading Gorski's and Perry's brief and excellent book about white Christian nationalism, The Flag + The Cross. Their book begins with a statistical study of various religious denominations' views on race, religion and politics, quickly isolates “whiteness” as the key component of white Christian nationalism, and makes a strong case that the veneer of Christianity embraced by white nationalists has little to do with religion — indeed, runs counter to actual Christian teachings — but has everything to do with white freedom, white power, and white violence.
Worse, the book (which was written after January 6th) shows that the white supremacists who besieged the Capitol were just the tip of the iceberg. A large number of white Christian nationalists — constituting over 80% of the Republican party — may not themselves be carrying AR-15's or preparing for another coup, but they share the same values as the insurrectionists. And they share all the same myths.
It is common to date the birth of American white supremacy to the Civil War, but Gorski and Perry show the roots go back even further, to the religious fanatics who first established the Plymouth Colony, evolving into a form of white nationalism that developed through conflicts predating the Civil War— notably the French and Indian Wars and the War of 1812.
There is much more to this book, but as a resident of an ostensibly "liberal" town that just "affirmed" a racist mascot, the following excerpt from the book jumped out at me — and it explained the persistent cultural misappropriation of Native American identity:
The French and Indian Wars generated a British and Protestant version of white Christian nationalism in the colonies; the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 helped to "Americanize" it. Until the Revolution, most colonists identified as "British" or "English"; the term "American" usually referred to the native peoples. After the Revolution, the former colonists struggled to articulate what was "American" about the United States. They often answered the question by appropriating native culture. What supposedly made white American men different from their former British countrymen was that they also had a tinge of "red" and a bit of the "savage" in them. The first symbol of this white American masculinity was not the "cowboy" but the "scout," the frontiersman who ventured into the wild, learned the ways of the "Indian," and absorbed a bit of "savagery" in the process. The figure of the scout, in other words, was the first heroic embodiment of the individualistic ethos that is at the heart of white Christian nationalism and its holy trinity of freedom, order, and violence.
The great takeaway from this is that when Dartmouth's white residents celebrate the "savage" Indian warrior, they are not celebrating Native people; they are celebrating themselves.