"With hue and cry, with hatchet red,
They danced amongst our noble dead!
But when our soldiers took the field,
The savage hordes could only yield!"The Native Americans are frequently portrayed in modern fiction as a tragic group of people subject to prejudice of the White Man and now are suffering in an age of darkness. Seems like it is standard fare for Native Americans to be like that? Not quite. Though not common today, in older works the default was the Savage Indian, a native of their land who is a bloodthirsty man or woman who only wishes to kill and hunt trophies for the sake of satiating their unquenchable thirst or desire for heads. They are brutal, uncompromising and are seen as "Better you than me" type of people if one must work with them. They are most of the time exiled by their tribes for being too violent, but if a foreigner comes in, expect the Savage Indian to reject the outsider first with a weapon up their vital organs. Sometimes they will be the rival tribe/griyo that the Noble Indians want to see defeated or at least no longer hurting them and the people they are making peace with but couldn't due to unfortunate damage done by them. This trope has ancient forerunners as practically every culture has identified a more primitive neighbor as 'savages', particularly when there existed a conflict of interests. It became especially common in the age of imperialism during which blatantly racist ideas were used to advance a policy of European nations "civilizing" the rest of the world. In the United States, expanding settlers repeatedly came into conflict with the native tribes. Infrequent abhorrent acts of violence perpetrated by the natives against the intruders led to the perception that all natives were brutal savages, especially considering that the settlers were all saints. Battles against savage Indians were commonplace in Western fiction up until the modern era, putting this on the edge of becoming a Dead Horse Trope. In the era of the "Revisionist Western," (the era in which we find ourselves) fiction often attempts to provide a more diverse and historically accurate view of violence by and against Native Americans. May get a touch of praise for courage, hardiness, or other stern virtues, but do not rely on it. A subtrope of Hollywood Natives. Often overlaps with other stereotypes including Braids, Beads and Buckskins and Tonto Talk. Compare and Contrast Magical Native American and Noble Savage.
ExamplesAnime and Manga
- In Shaman King, in Hao's life 500 years ago, he went so far as to destroy cultures because they didn't want to join him in his quest to rid the world of muggles. One of the last survivors of that thinks that Silva and the rest are just like Hao. Which is...really weird in The '90s.
- Subverted in the Tintin comics The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners Of The Sun. The Incas who target the Belgian archaeologists are arguably the smartest and most determined antagonists in the whole series, and only targeted the archaeologists to punish them for what they thought was the looting of an Incan ancestral tomb. When Tintin explains to the Incas that the Europeans were seeking knowledge rather than wealth, they immediately heal the archaeologists. That said, they still attempt to sacrifice Tintin and Haddock earlier, for their trespassing in sacred areas. Tintin foils this by realizing there's a solar eclipse for that day, which he used to fake control over the sun, scaring the Inca into releasing them.
- Herge later admitted this was a dumb story turn beneath his writing standards, as Incans were sophisticated astronomers and knew all about eclipses.
- Averted in many Franco-Belgian Comics (to the point of Magical Native American), where the Indians are almost always manipulated into attacking by whites (almost every Lucky Luke featuring Indians ends on a peace treaty). Their biggest flaw is often being hotheaded and temperamental, not unlike many white heads. There are also friendly and nice tribes.
- In the Discworld continuum, the fictions Small Medium, Large Headache and Rincewind Among the Redskins expand on the throwaway joke from Reaper Man which gives spirit medium Mrs Cake a Red Indian spirit guide, the hapless drunk One-Man-Bucket. Terry Pratchett places the Discworld's Red Indians in Howondaland, his expy of Africa. In an attempt to resolve and expand on this, authorA.A. Pessimal wrote a tale of how the Indian peoples of Howondaland fight and defeat a certain General Ruster, in a plot owing much to the movie Little Big Man, with the wizzard Rincewind cast in the Dustin Hoffman role. Another Pessimal fic homages medium Tracy Potts in Good Omens by giving her an Apache spirit guide, who has a fairly direct, Manitou-like resemblance to Graham Masterton's Misquamacus. Mayhem ensues as Mrs Cake and One-Man-Bucket confront the dread spirit of the heap powerful medicine man in a plot owing something to Masterton's horror fiction.
- The Apaches in Stagecoach (1939).
- John Ford somewhat made amends for that portrayal, by depicting the Apaches rather more favorably in Fort Apache (1948), in which only the arrogant Thursday views the Apaches as "breech-clouted savages."
- Subverted in Ford's silent Western The Iron Horse, in which the Cheyenne violently oppose the railroad, but are humanized in several scenes such as a dog mourning a dead warrior.
- In Calamity Jane (1953), Jane fights this kind, and brags of the number she has killed.
- In Damn Yankees (1958), the Devil recalls "Indians draggin' an empty covered wagon when scalping the settlers was the latest craze," and the film shows an image of this.
- Averted in Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (1936), meaning that American media were worse than the Nazis.
- More recent films using this trope make sure to invent some fictional tribe. For example, the Hovitos from Raiders of the Lost Ark (although they were manipulated by the Big Bad rather than evil on their own), the Ugha from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Aborigines in VanDiemensLand and the Pelegostos from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Note that all of these take place in Latin America or Oceania. Savage Indians in US territory is much harder to excuse.
- The protagonist of Utu is a combination of this trope, and the Noble Demon with a sense of honour and fair play. His brother and arch enemy is part noble savage, and part Sergeant Rock.
- In Westerns where the hero is an Indian or similar Noble Savage, the savage tropes are given to a rival tribe. Examples include the Pawnee in Dances with Wolves or Wirepa's tribe in Dead Lands.
- Parodied in McLintock!. The town leaders treat the local Comanche tribe like neighbors for the most part. It's mostly outsiders -— and inept Humphrey -— who mistreat them and drive them to go on the warpath... something that doesn't even bother McLintock and his fellows one whit.
- Curiously deconstructed and mirrored in El Conquistador. The Aztec, although depicted as a Proud Warrior Race akin to human sacrifice, are actually shown to be a complex society, as their sacrifices are questioned by some of the elite classes, but even they aren't particularly painful or long and always are preceded by a life of excesses and privileges (they also believed them were necessary to save the universe). The Spanish Inquisition's tortures and killings, conversely, seem to the Aztecs overly brutal and barbaric, and the religious wars and crusades are seen as hypocritical, dumb or overly evil. So the Savage Indians are mirrored in the Europeans, and some of the Middle East.
- Magua from The Last of the Mohicans.
- Injun Joe, the Ax-Crazy villain of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, fits this trope and represents Mark Twain's early prejudice against indigenous Americans.
- Tall Tale America has these turn up whenever guys like Mike Fink or Davy Crockett get tired of shooting animals.
- A non-US example are the cannibal natives in Robinson Crusoe, which takes place off the coast of South America. Although often Race Lifted in the novel's many adaptations, the cannibals are identified as Carib Indians in the original text. This makes sense, since the Caribs had a notorious (though highly exaggerated) reputation as ferocious man-eating savages for hundreds of years — in fact, the very word "cannibal" comes from these guys (as does the name of the Caribbean Sea).
- In The Manitou and its sequels, the protaganist is the undead spirit of the most powerful Indian medicine man ever to walk North America, Misquamacus. Misquamacus is an Indian who completely loathes and despises the white man—and for that matter, the black and yellow-skinned immigrants who have displaced the Indians from their heritage. His goal is to physically re-enter the world and to bring about the genocide of all the non-native American races who have supplanted the Indians, and he uses some very savage magics to thwart those who are seeking to prevent his return.
- The Apaches in the Man with No Name spinoff novel A Dollar to Die For are a painfully stereotypical example. They kidnap Sgt. Tuco Ramirez, mistaking him for a high-ranking officer (and it didn't help when Tuco promoted himself to General after killing Lt. Sanchez), and inflict this strange torture device on the Man with No Name by having him be bitten by killer ants. There may be some Truth in Television here, since the Apache did indeed torture prisoners.
- In Deadwood this is played surprisingly straight, due in equal parts to Protagonist Centred Morality and Deliberate Values Dissonance. As the town is stuck right in the middle of Lakota territory, the Sioux and the local gold miners are in constant low-level conflict, so they're widely viewed by the townsfolk as savage heathen raiders. We actually see very few of them; they're credited with a couple of caravan raids, at least one of which may have been a cover story for someone else's guilt, and at one point Seth is attacked unprovoked by a lone horseman.
- Hell on Wheels deconstructs this trope for the most part. The opening episode and series has a whole features numerous instances of native warriors raiding and killing civilians and unarmed men, and most characters in-universe see them as mindless savages, but it is made clear that they are no more villainous nor corrupt than the drunken laborers they have working on the train, that they are trying to defend their land and abide by a moral code that the settlers simply do not relate to.
- The Reavers in Firefly are uncomfortably close to Savage Indians IN SPACE!! A more optimistic reading—given that the Reavers are colonists who went mad on the fringes of society, and not some already-present race lurking in the depths of space—is that they're more of a bunch of astro-wendigos.
- Apache Bull Ramos, the bookers wanted him to be a face because he could wrestle well but had very little charisma. He refused though and became one of the greatest heels ever, when it came to drawing crowd heat. He mainly suffered the Worf Effect to establish the new champion's credibility.
- The Native Beast Nyla Rose managed to draw on the savage imagery and behavior while remaining baby face, getting chants of "break his neck" while mauling whatever hapless heel happened to be in her way.
- The Aztecs are almost always portrayed as bloodthirsty and war-loving, even in modern works. Of course, there are reasons for this bad reputation.
- In North America, the Pawnee are the only ones who practiced Human Sacrifice, of virgins from neighboring groups, but since they were allies of the U.S., they were typically portrayed more sympathetically. They underwent a meta-Face–Heel Turn in the movies around the time the Sioux underwent a meta-Heel–Face Turn. This was brought Up to Eleven in Dances with Wolves, when Pawnee warriors attack even their white allies, which would have been suicidally stupid.
- This used to be a major draw at Disneyland, back when Westerns were popular. Aside from the Indian Village, Tom Sawyer's Island included an eternally burning shack with arrows in the side of it. As attitudes changed, it was given several different backstories before it became just a shack.
- The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who ventured into the Venezuelan jungle in the 1960s to study the Yąnomamö tribe, released accounts of a perpetually violent society beset by wars and constant strife. Chagnon believed he found a society in which homicide and warfare were common and most violent men wound up with the most wives and children. Whether or not his views were really founded on actual fact or visualizing the Yąnomamö through his rough childhood (as was claimed in the book Darkness in El Dorado, that also accused him of deliberating infecting them with measles) created a huge controversy in the anthropological world. The allegations were investigated and refuted by the American Anthropological Association, but his work was taken to justify Christian missionaries' subversion of the native culture and escalated clashes between them and nearby miners. Ironically, the local Catholic Silesian missionaries were actually the sole source of the allegations, whose ire Chagnon had earned for criticizing them over supplying the Yąnomamö with shotguns, which he said escalated their violence (for a further irony, he was then accused of giving them weapons himself to secure their cooperation). Accounts of Yąnomamö violence predated Chagnon's work, or even his life, and seem to confirm his findings.
- As late as February 2011, Bryan Fischer, Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, argued that Indians were "morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil" by their "superstition, savagery and sexual immorality". How wrong is this statement? Let us count the ways:
- He also stated that "the Europeans proved superior in battle, taking possession of contested lands through right of conquest. So in all respects, Europeans gained rightful and legal sovereign control of American soil." So might clearly equals legal right in his worldview (shared by many European nations in those days).
- The Europeans didn't always prove superior in battle, and that the United States acquired much of its land not by force, but by making treaties and business deals whose terms the US never intended to keep. Several Indian tribes had their lands taken over despite never being officially beaten on the battlefield.
- Enormous numbers of Native Americans throughout the entire New World were also wiped out by Eurasian diseases. That's probably the single biggest factor that led to their conquest.
- "When we arrived in the New World God pleased to show us the vanity of managing our arms in the European mode. Now we are pleased to learn the skulking way of war." One of the reasons a bunch of untrained farmers were able to beat back the British at Lexington was the years they had spent fighting the Native Americans.
- Pick a US military helicopter. The Iroquois (better known as the Huey). The Black Hawk. The Apache. The Chinook. There's a reason for those names.
- Some native Americans were essentially this trope (most prominently, and successfully, the Comanches). So were many other nations at various times in their history (just read the Iliad, "the greatest epic of Western civilization"). The racism is in assuming that this was somehow inherent to native Americans, rather than particular to certain cultures at certain times.
- Mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, in a passage rarely quoted today:
"[King George III] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
- Supposedly inverted if Christopher Columbus's account of the Taino being a generous peaceful people who loved their neighbors before the Spanish got done with them is true. Not that Christopher Columbus thought the Spanish were wrong or anything, but the initial Spanish stereotype made them sound like a Christian community right out of the New Testament. The island that came to be known as Puerto Rico was even called "The Land Of The Noble Lord". The post Spanish Taino stereotype became people who stab.
- The Book of Mormon portrays the Lamanites this way.
- The Oni, the indigenous people of the planet Tenra in Tenra Bansho Zero, are portrayed as this by the powers that be:
To the humans, the Oni are a brutal, savage monstrous race of horned humanoids. Hunting them to extinction is a natural reaction towards those who would kill indiscriminately, kidnapping, torturing, and eating people alive.
However, this is a misconception, as the Oni do none of those things. These tales are nothing but rumors and folklore, spread to make people feel justified in the slaughter of the native people of Tenra.
- Played with in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts. The White Legs tribe play this one to the hilt, but as their name suggests, they're actually the descendants of a bunch of gormless white tourists who were visiting Injun Country when the bombs fell and decided to form a "tribe" whose cultural identity was based around ridiculous Indian stereotypes. The actual Native Americans are considerably friendlier.
- None of the tribes met in Fallout are really Native Americans, but descendants of different groups of survivors of the Apocalypse. 200 years of living under conditions similar to the nations residing in the western United States have made them adopt several costumes we would consider "Indian".
- Game & Watch: Fire Attack makes no effort to hide that the enemies trying to burn down your fort are supposed to be Native Americans, with the opposing Mr. Game & Watches wearing comically huge feathered headbands and your player character wearing a cowboy hat.