American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Who can control the savage in his fury! Then he is like the tiger who ha s drank Of human blood - nought else can satisfy (N. Deering, Carabasset, 1830). Savages, beasts, Amerindians, Indians; these are some of the appellations by which the aboriginal inhabitants of what has been designated the New World have come to be known. By right of conquest, Europeans have empirically determined the nomenclature pertaining to the land they claim to have discovered, and two of the main characters in this drama, Yespucci and Columbus, have had a direct influence on the naming of the new-found land and its human dwellers. However, words and names are more than just symbols. They are also expressions of attitude. And the Europeans came to America with pre-conceived notions of the nature of the people they were about to encounter. Naturally, the experience of what they actually saw qualified these notions, but did they see more than they wanted to or could see? After all, their frame of reference did not include many of the things they were exposed to in the ''New Land." They were consequently forced to incorporate the American experience into their own conceptual universe in an attempt to come to existential terms with it. Being alien to the Europeans' experience, the objects exhibited by America had to be named in order to be controlled. And the names had to be of European extraction to satisfy this goal. Furthermore, since the Europeans came to conquer, the conceptual domination had to include an inherent moral justification for the physical domination. While there can be no doubt about the fact that the newcomers were extremely influenced by what they saw, it appears equally as obvious that this influence was reflected only very little in the conceptual treatment of the experience. Or in other words, the Europeans, who voyaged across the Atlantic, have refused to acknowledge their huge debt to America, though it is there for everyone to see.