From the Tomahawk Chop to the Road Block: Discourses of Savagism in Whitestream Media

Since early colonial times, Indigenous peoples on Anowarakowa Kawennote--"Great Turtle Island" in Kanienkeha (the Mohawk language)--have been represented via the imaginations of the invading European settler-colonists. Not surprisingly, such typically distorted representations have long been a part of the popular press and news media in the United States and Canada. Typically, the news media have tended to portray Natives as a conquered people, a poor minority in a rich country, militant activists, remnants of an ancient North American past, and so on. Media outlets continue to perpetuate stereotypes and inaccurate generalizations about Indigenous peoples, and aside from a few independent and Indigenous-owned media sources, the misinformation continues mostly unchallenged and unabated. This essay explores the use, perpetuation, and legitimization of anti-Indigenous rhetoric (discourses of Savagism) in media with regard to two major flashpoints of misrepresentation: (1) racist sports imagery; and (2) anticolonial Indigenous protest. (Contains 83 notes.)