I’m in a class with Carmen Bernier-Grand, and as we are workshopping our novels-in-progress, she raised a valid question.
“Do you have to refer to the nineteenth-century Indians as ‘wild’ and ‘brown'”?
The terms bother me, too. But I’m basing my novel on real letters from the mid-nineteenth century, and this is the language Jakob Handrich used. Here is a quote from his letter, which accompanied a package that contained vests and moccasins, written in 1849:
“The shoes, that is the work which the wild people or the brown Indians make.”
It seems it was a common reference — I’ve also come across the term in the book Pfälzer in Amerika. ‘Brown’ and ‘wild people’ are politically incorrect terms, and for that matter, just plain inaccurate, yet they seem gentle when compared with language used by the Yanks. Here’s one example I found in a speech by Ohio’s Governor Arthur St. Clair to the Ohio State Legislature in 1812:
“The government of the United States has ever with an unceasing philanthropy, and great expense, labored to civilize the Savages on her borders–to diminish the ferociousness of their natures–to cultivate among them the arts of peace–to estrange them from the cruel rites of Molock–and to inspire them with a true knowledge of a beneficent Deity.”
Hmmm. He goes on to say that, thank goodness, the U.S. has passed laws to extinguish the territorial entitlements of these “heathen remnants.” Ye gads! A glimpse of the white, barbaric mindset of the nineteenth century. It’s like we Ohioans were savages or something.