Summary Of 'Construction Of The Imaginary Indian'

In "Construction of the Imaginary Indian," Marcia Crosby shows that throughout history, there has been an imagined image of a savage, yet illusory indigenous person constructed by the West to justify European colonization, known as the "Imaginary Indian." Until present literature, this Eurocentric approach marginalized Indians as human specimens or peripheral objects. However, Native people have been an imperative component of European history throughout North America. As Crosby states, the indigenous population have always been placed opposite to the West to stress the importance of colonizing and civilizing these peoples by assimilation in an effort to "rescue" them. According to her past judgment, in a binary system where only white people
and Indians existed, most Indians were stereotyped as being “drunken, lazy, dirty, or promiscuous” (489, Crosby). Throughout her university career and interactions with her professors, Crosby finds that this view of the Indian was changing in postmodern society. Alongside being considered an uncivilized savage, an Indian was "the negative space of the 'positive' force of colonialist hegemony," documenting a fictive, yet historical whole (490, Crosby). When looking into the works of Gyatri Spivak, Crosby finds that throughout time, there has been an increasing positive association of the indigenous person as one that had been exploited, but one that is ready to be recovered and explored. Despite this embracement for "difference," this view is still largely based on assimilation as Western people still hold a philanthropic concern for these people.