SOURCE: Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. “French and English Terms and Images.” In The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, pp. 12-22. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

In the following excerpt, Berkhofer discusses terminology the French and English used to categorize Native Americans—most notably the English tendency to label natives as “savages”—and how such categorization reflected European conceptions of Christianity and civilization.

To what extent … conceptions bequeathed by the Spanish to other Europeans became the preconceptions of the French and English in their subsequent contact with Native Americans is difficult to tell. Even without such advance information, the French and the English would have approached the New World's inhabitants with the same basic values and orientations as had the Spanish. Thus, whether they were or were not influenced by Spanish reports, French and English explorers saw Native Americans in light...