Bits and Pieces of Eranos


The Shadow of the Noble Savage
Headhunting and Ritual Cannibalism in
Seventeenth Century New England

by Jay Livernois
(From The Eranos Yearbook number 61)

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth century French Swiss philosopher, is the originator of not only the cult of nature and individual freedom but is also the inventor of the modern art of autobiography and political science as autobiography. In addition, through his scandalously personal Confessions, Rousseau was the first to claim a sexual identity and is, as a result, a much under recognized precursor of Freud and Freudian psychology. And through his proto-Romantic praise of the Alps, he started the fashion of visiting and touring Switzerland, and therefore it can be reasonably argued that Rousseau has been somewhat responsible for much of Switzerland’s economic vitality over the last two centuries. But today, what Rousseau is best known for, particularly in North America, is his idea of the noble savage. In 1750 at the age of 38, he began to develop it in the following way.

Rousseau, while on his way to visit the French philosopher and encyclopedist Diderot (who was locked up in the notorious Vincennes prison), came across a notice of an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Dijon. The proposed subject by this Academy was: “Has the restoration of the arts and sciences had a purifying effect upon morals?” Initially Rousseau thought to argue that the revival of arts and sciences in European civilization had, yes indeed, improved morality. But he was not sure if he wanted to take up this rather common argument praising the wholesome effect of his contemporary culture and technology. Instead Rousseau thought he might argue something quite different and daring, namely, that no, morality had not improved with the development of civilization, and in fact morality was on a decline from the original “free” state in which savage humanity had begun in the primeval past. In Rousseau’s alternative argument, the reason for this decline was that humanity was no longer free as it was in its savage original state, and due to the necessity in civilization of a binding social contract, “the arts, literature and the sciences . . . [just] fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them [citizens] down.”1

Still Rousseau was not sure which argument to use. He wrote both arguments down on paper and compared one against the other. Unable to make up his mind, he decided to ask Diderot for his advice while visiting him in prison. Diderot, much more intrigued by Rousseau's argument critical of civilization, persuaded Rousseau to take up this less conventional argument as he thought its unusualness had a better chance of winning the contest. Diderot was right, and with A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau won the first prize from the Academy of Dijon. Almost overnight Rousseau became famous not only in Dijon, but throughout France and Europe, along with the new ideas in his essay.

There are several peculiar, almost synchronistic twists and quirks in this story. One is how Rousseau was not sure which argument he wanted to use to compete for the Academy of Dijon's prize. Another is how Diderot’s was the overriding voice that persuaded Rousseau to argue his unconventional and original ideas. Yet then another is that if Rousseau had not taken the argument he did, he might not have become famous and might have been at best just a minor figure in eighteenth century musicology, and therefore Rousseau's idea of the noble savage might easily have never come into existence.

But these oddities lead to more specific questions. First, did Rousseau have any particular “primitive” peoples in mind on which he based his ideas when he imagined his noble savage? Second, is Rousseau's idea of the noble savage totally original with him? And third, just what is Rousseau's idea of the noble savage?

In answer to the first question, the so-called “primitive” peoples Rousseau had in mind as his prototypes of the noble savage and to whom he refers in his work seem to have been the “Indians” in Brazil, the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Amerindians of French Canada and the Hotentots of South Africa. Rousseau knew about these savages from reading popular reports of travelers to the Americas and Africa. He first invokes the image of what he fantasized as these “free” savages in his attack on the commercial products of the arts and sciences in his prize winning essay, Has the Restoration of the Arts and Sciences had a Purifying Effect upon Morals? Rousseau sees the products of civilization as binding and enslaving, arguing that “They [Sovereigns] very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.”2 Rousseau's noble savage now makes its first appearance in his argument against the fruits of the newly restored arts and sciences, and he says: “The American savages, who go naked, and live entirely on the products of the chase, have been always impossible to subdue. What yoke, indeed, can be imposed on men who stand in need of nothing?”3

Secondly, the idea of the noble savage was not entirely original with Rousseau. It seems he derived it from a misreading of Montaigne's essay Des cannibales. Rousseau writes in a footnote in his prize winning essay:

I dare not speak of those happy nations, who did not even know the name of many vices, which we find it difficult to suppress; the savages of America, whose simple and natural mode of government Montaigne preferred, without hesitation, not only to the laws of Plato, but to the most perfect visions of government philosophy can ever suggest. He cites many examples, striking for those who are capable of appreciating them. But, what of all that, says he, they can't run to a pair of breeches!4

I say that this is a misreading of Montaigne's Des cannibales as the new historicist David Quint has argued decisively that Montaigne's essay is not about praising the cannibals of Brazil5 but is a veiled criticism of 16th century France's Wars of Religion in general and the stoic Huguenots in particular (let us remember that Montaigne was a royalist Catholic).6 And in fact it seems that Montaigne's claim that he received his anthropological knowledge about the cannibals of Brazil from a servant, on which he based his essay, is a fraud, and also his claim that he did not consult cosmographers for his information is a lie.7 Out of this mix of fictions, Rousseau drew his inspiration for his idea of the utterly “free” savage.

But Rousseau only really developed his idea of the noble savage in A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind, which was his next submission to the Academy of Dijon after having won first prize in 1750. In this second discourse written five years later, which did not win a prize or even an honorable mention from the Academy, Rousseau more fully developed his fantasy of the “free” and noble savage. This more complete picture is where Rousseau's myth of the noble savage comes together and is really fleshed out.

Rousseau first mentions “the savages” in this essay as an exemplum of natural health in his scathing criticisms of medicine as it was practiced in his day. He claims that most diseases are caused by civilization and its resulting medicine, “and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform, and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed.”8 Rousseau imagines that his own tendency to be a recluse is an a priori condition of nature and the first principle of existence in the primeval state, and that isolation from society means health. Rousseau says:

When we think of the good constitution of the savages, at least of those whom we have not ruined with our spirituous liquors, and reflect that they are troubled with hardly any disorders, save wounds and old age, we are tempted to believe that, in following the history of civil society, we shall be telling also that of human sickness.9

Rousseau, a Swiss, thinks that primitive people are never ill, so he concludes they must not have any medicines. He says: “Being subject therefore to so few causes of sickness, man, in the state of nature, can have no need of remedies, and still less of physicians:”.10 Therefore the first component of Rousseau’s noble savage is a human who is never ill and who has no need of medicine because they live in a perfect, natural state; an Ur-Eden.

Physically Rousseau imagines the noble savage as having highly developed senses like wild animals, because for Rousseau, people in nature are “solitary, indolent, and perpetually accompanied by danger,...”11 As a result Rousseau thinks that primitive people have highly developed and, when compared to degenerate, civilized people, almost supernatural senses. Rousseau points out that:

It is therefore no matter for surprise that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope distinguish ships at sea, with the naked eye, at as great a distance as the Dutch can do with their telescopes; or that the savages of America should trace the Spaniards, by their smell, as well as the best dogs could have done; or that these barbarous peoples feel no pain in going naked, or that they use large quantities of pimento with their food, and drink the strongest European liquors like water.12

In fact Rousseau’s noble savage is seen as being basically animal and blissfully unconscious. He says of his savage:

The only goods he recognizes in the universe are food, a female, and sleep: the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, and not death: for no animal can know what it is to die; the knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions made by man in departing from an animal state.13

And when it comes to reflection, Rousseau says,

It would be melancholy, were we forced to admit that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all human misfortunes; that it is this which, in time, draws man out of his original state, in which he would have spent his days insensibly in peace and innocence;14

And Rousseau’s primitive is also the naive existentialist. He says that:

His soul, which nothing disturbs, is wholly wrapped up in the feeling of its present existence, without any idea of the future, however near at hand; while his projects, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the close of day. Such, even at present, is the extent of the native Caribbean’s foresight: he will improvidently sell you his cottonbed in the morning, and come crying in the evening to buy it again, not having foreseen he would want it again the next night.15

Another aspect of Rousseau’s noble primitives is that they are not suicidal. Rousseau juxtaposes his fantasy of primeval existence with life in eighteenth century Europe where, according to him, people are miserable, suffer from despair and lean towards suicide. Rousseau says,

We hardly see anyone around us except people who are complaining of their existence; many even deprive themselves of it if they can and all divine and human laws put together can hardly put a stop to this disorder. I would like to know if anyone has heard of a savage who took it into his head, when he was free, to complain of life and to kill himself. Let us be less arrogant, then, when we judge on which side real misery is found. Nothing, on the other hand, could be more miserable than a savage exposed to the dazzling light of our 'civilization', tormented by our passions and reasoning about a state different from his own.16

Of course imbedded in this fantasy is Rousseau, the recluse who “hates the dazzling light of our ‘civilization’” and desperately wants to be “free” of it. He projects this desire for freedom onto his fantasy image of the savage. But one of the most surprising elements of Rousseau’s noble savage is the incredible assertion that the primitive is not violent. Rousseau comes to this conclusion because he believes that primitive people do not have any possessions to fight over so “Their quarrels therefore would seldom have very bloody consequences; for the subject of them would be merely the question of subsistence.” He also thinks that primitive people are not very passionate as “The imagination, which causes such ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of savages, who quietly await the impulses of nature, yield to them involuntarily, with more pleasure than ardour, and, their wants once satisfied, lose the desire.”17 He then reasons:

And it is the more absurd to represent savages as continually cutting one another's throats to indulge their brutality, because this opinion is directly contrary to experience; the Caribbeans, who have as yet least of all deviated from the state of nature, being in fact the most peaceable of people in their amours, and the least subject to jealousy, though they live in a hot climate which seems always to inflame the passions.18

Rousseau reaffirms this non-violent portrait of the noble savage by saying,

Let us conclude then that man in a state of nature, wandering up and down the forests, without industry, without speech, and without home, an equal stranger to war and to all ties, neither standing in need of his fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and perhaps even not distinguishing them one from another19

This image of the primitive is based almost totally on Rousseau's fantasy. He provides no real examples or proofs for imagining Neolithic people as non-violent; he simply makes it up.

The problem with this wonderful fantasy of primitive humanity is that not only is it false, but since the debut of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century, this fiction has dominated how both past and present Neolithic cultures are seen by us. This paradigm has influenced our culture’s sense of ourselves, as it has obscured our past, and it has blocked our understanding and appreciation of the primitive other. This fiction, this reclusive and solitary fantasy of the primitive, through movies, books, anthropology, art, New Age psychologies and therapies, and politics, has skewed the way we understand ourselves today. Our culture, Neolithic culture and even our savage dreams as they often stalk us at night are still at stake. So let us now look at the shadow of this noble, passionless, non-violent, solitary primitive, something that Rousseau never considered. After all, if you were trying to create the noble savage, why would you want to say anything ignoble about him?

2. Headhunting and Canibalism in 17th Century New England
Roger Williams, the dissident Puritan minister who was the first great American advocate for the idea of the separation of Church and State, and who also was the founder of Providence, Rhode Island, put together while sailing from the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (what is now New York) to England, A Key into the Language of America. Written in 1643, this is one of the earliest works on America and is not only a rudimentary dictionary of a Native American language, the Narragansett’s, but is also an extensive commentary on New England’s indigenous culture. New England was inhabited at this time of European contact and colonization by the Algonquin or Eastern Woodland tribes, of whom the Narragansett were a large and important group located in southern New England around what is still called Narragansett Bay.

A Key into the Language of America is not organized in a lexicographic format but is structured chapter by chapter as a history of the Narragansetts “from their Birth to their Burialls.”1 This results in Williams presenting, along with the Narragansett vocabulary, a descriptive critique of their culture and lifestyle. In the body of the text, Williams contrasts this “American” life and culture to the life led by English colonists of New England and the so-called “degenerated”2 culture of England which the Puritans had left.

On reading through A Key, in Chapter VII, titled “Of their Persons and parts of body,” I came upon the following gloss which stunned me. “The Mauquauogs, or Men-eaters, that live two or three [hundred] miles West from us, make a delicious monstrous dish of the head and brains of their enemies;”3 The tribe that this passage refers to is the Mohawk of the Iroquois confederation who were located in what is now the state of New York. The Mohawks had a fierce warrior reputation, and in the seventeenth century they often raided well into southern New England. They would scream and boast when attacking their enemies, “We are the Mohawks, we will eat your hearts and drink your blood.” I had never read or heard that they had literally carried out these rather bloody acts of cannibalism and terror. I had always thought the Mohawk warriors yelled this to throw panic into their enemies. On first reading this information I dismissed it. It simply seemed that the Narragansetts were disparaging their foes by attributing to them monstrous deeds and habits.

Yet reading on in A Key, I was further surprised to find the following:

Timeqúassin To cut off, or behead, which they are most skilful to doe in fight: for, when ever they wound, and their arrow sticks in the body of their enemie, they (if they be valourous, and possibly may) they follow their arrow, and falling upon the person wounded, and tearing his head a little aside by his Locke, they in the twinkling of an eye fetch off his head though but with a sorry knife.4

This was another thing I had never heard of before. Nowhere is it written in the histories of New England that the indigenous people deliberately cut off the heads of their enemies in battle which would mean that they were headhunters. The practice of Indians scalping is well-known, but even that has been attributed to the brutal influence of Europeans paying a bounty to so-called “friendly Indians” for the deaths of “unfriendly Indians,” with the scalps being the proof for payment. From this point on, I began to read A Key more closely for any other glosses on the Narragansetts' headhunting practices. In it I found the following:

Ob. They are much delighted after batell to hang up the hands and heads of their enemies:5

... and yet having no Swords, nor Guns, all that are slaine are commonly slain with Great Valour and courage: for the conquerour ventures into the thickest, and brings away the Head of his Enemy.6

though sometimes the Sachim sends a secret Executioner, one of his chiefest Warriours to fetch of a head, by some sudden unexpected blow of a Hatchet, when they have feared Mutiny by publike execution.7

Fascinated by these further proofs, I began to scour all the contemporary works on New England's Native American culture, history and their warrior customs. There was almost no mention of headhunting except for a sentence on the results of a battle that occurred in northern New England between the Algonquin tribes of the Micmac and Abenaki in 1607. “And the victors celebrated their triumph in traditional fashion, returning with the heads of their dead enemies plus live prisoners for torture.”8 The Native American custom of the ritual torture of prisoners is well known if now somewhat lost in a kind of amnesia brought on by the revisionist politics of correctness and multiculturalism, but again here is a clear reference to the cutting off the heads of enemies and bringing them back as trophies, and it is clearly stated that this was “traditional custom.”

I next examined nineteenth century and earlier accounts of New England’s Native American history to find if there was any more proof of headhuntinghabits. I was able to find a verbatim account of a conflict between rival tribes in a coastal area just south of Narragansett territory in 1654.

A number of Pequots . . . set out one day in search of Ninigret’s camp, with the intention of obtaining an interview with their kindred there and persuading them to desert the Nehantics. They were met in the forests by three of Ninigret’s Pequots, who demanded of them what they were doing there. “O! we have some things to do,” was the answer. “How many are there of you?” “Thirty.” “Then there are thirty heads for us,” fiercely responded the three boasters. “but we are in the employ of the English: we carry burdens or letters where they wish to send them.” “We will have those thirty heads before to-morrow afternoon in spite of the English,” replied the strangers; 9

Here, again, and word for word, the Indians are looking to take heads.

I found another account supporting a headhunting thesis in a description of the Mohegan sachem Uncas (the Mohegans were a neighboring tribe of the Narragansetts), triumphing in a fight and his subsequent actions. “Uncas shot the chief with an arrow, cut off his head, and stuck it up in the crotch of a large oak, where the ghastly trophy remained withering and bleaching for many years.”10 This is certainly headhunting at its finest.

But in searching for more evidence that New England's seventeenth century Neolithic warriors were engaged in headhunting, I also came upon accounts of Native Americans involved in what seems to have been ritual, and definitely not subsistence, cannibalism. The following is a relation of how the Mohegans in their customary fashion dealt with a traitor captured during the Pequot War.

Uncas claimed the right to execute this Indian after the custom of his tribe. Never was justice meted out to a wretch with a more lavish hand. He was torn limb from limb, and roasted in a fire kindled for that purpose, and then passed around the council-ring, and eaten by Uncas and his Mohegans with a relish equaled only by the demonstrations of joy with which they threw the bones into the fire when they had completed their meal.11

Next is the gruesome account of the notorious execution of the captured Narragansett sachem, Miantinomo, by Uncas and his brother.

Uncas repaired to Hartford, took the captive into his custody, and, accompanied by a file of English soldiers, who were sent to protect him from the vengeance of the Narragansetts, proceeded to execute the warrant. Two other Englishmen were also sent to remain by the prisoner, and see that no barbarities were practiced at the execution. Uncas took Miantinomoh, and led him to the place where he had been taken. When they had reached the fatal spot, the brother of Uncas, who was marching behind Miantinomoh, split his head with a hatchet and killed him at a blow. Notwithstanding the presence of the two Englishmen, Uncas cut a piece from the shoulder of his fallen enemy, and ate it in savage exultation. “It was the sweetest meat he ever ate,” he said, and added complacently, that “it made his heart strong.”12

There is even mention of cannibalism among Indians found in the reports from a Vatican official traveling through New England late in this period. Niccolo’ Forteguerri, secretary of Propaganda for the Holy Roman Catholic Church, wrote in 1709 that the Indians of New England had reverted back to their traditional role of being “fond of eating human flesh,”13 and again I want to emphasize the word traditional.

From these accounts it seems that New England's seventeenth century Native Americans were customary and traditional headhunters and cannibals. But slowly through the post-contact period, as they assimulated more and more into English colonial culture and as Eurpoean technology changed their lifestyle, New England’s Indians gave up the practices of headhunting and cannibalism along with their polytheistic religion. Yet several questions come up if these accounts are reliable. For example, why has so little note been taken of these practices? Why was no attention paid to them among the English writers of that time? And what perhaps did the actions and rituals of war religiously mean to the Neolithic people practicing them?

3. Headhunting and the Algonquin Soul
It seems that seventeenth century English writers were not shocked or horrified by the headhunting of New England’s aborigines because, it should be remembered, the English themselves were accustomed to decapitation. The seventeenth century New England Puritans especially were not about to be offended by the practice of detaching heads from bodies, after all their co-religionists in England cut off the head of King Charles I. In fact when administering capital punishment to Native Americans, the English colonists routinely cut off Indian heads and put them on display in public places rather than hanging the individuals. Here is one example of an Indian encounter with English capital punishment.

. . . the townsmen were enabled to recognize in him a fellow named Busheag. With a great deal of difficulty the Indians were persuaded to surrender him; he was carried to New Haven, tried for his crime, convicted and sentenced to decapitation. Busheag sat erect and motionless, while the unskillful executioner mangled him with eight blows upon the neck, before he could detach the head from the body. This execution seems to have satisfied both parties; the Indians became tranquil, and the English do not appear to have made any further demands for the murderer of the servant.1

Capital punishment was used on Indians in all the colonies especially in Pilgrim Plymouth and Puritan Boston. Besides, the English, like the Algonquins, also demanded or took heads as signs of victory in war.

The whites responded:

“this excuse will not serve. We know well that it is not true. You must give us the heads of those who have slain our people, or we will fight with you.”2

He [Canonchet, chief of the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War] was carried to Stonington, and there executed in such a manner as would give each tribe of warriors who were with Denison [an English officer] a share in the deed. . . . Cassainamon’s men shot the devoted sachem; the Mohegans beheaded and quartered him; the warriors of Catapazet kindled the fire on which his body was burned. His head was preserved by Denison as a trophy, and was sent to the magistrates of the colony.3

Another reason that not much is made of the headhunting practices of New England’s Neolithic people is that most of the contemporary accounts about them were written by missionaries who wanted to portray Indians in the best light possible. This was done so that people in England would continue to send money to convert the native pagans to the English God. John Eliot, the famous “Apostle to the Indians,” in all his many books on his years of missionary experience with New England’s Native Americans, never once remarks about headhunting or cannibalism. It was not in his financial interest to do so. It seems the English were much more horrified and fascinated by the Indian warrior custom of torturing prisoners to death and the delight Indian women and children took in this “sport.”

Another reason these indigenous customs were not widely remarked on or written about was that the Puritans had an aversion to learning anything about their pagan neighbors. The Puritans were deathly afraid that they might become contaminated by the local heathens and, with what seemed to them, their lazy and sinful life. In fact this did indeed happen as many traders and friends of the Indians, like Thomas Underhill, Major Fitch and James Perrin, were so deeply influenced by Native Americans and their sense of freedom, that they permanently moved out of the controlling environment of Puritan culture. Still the question remains, why were the New England Indians headhunters? The answer seems to lie in Williams’ A Key. Williams writes:

Wuttìp. The braine. Ob. In the braine their opinion is, that the soule (of which we shall speake in the Chapter on Religion) keeps her chiefe seat and residence:4

The belief that the soul of a person is located in the brain is common among Neolithic cultures. For example the Asmat people of Irian Jaya, which is the western half of New Guinea and part of Indonesia, believe that a newborn does not have a soul until a head is cut off in a raid and given to the child. The head is stripped of flesh, dried, carved and decorated. It is then used as a pillow for the rest of the person’s life and acts as a dream vehicle for the soul.

The Native Americans of New England seem to have had a variation of this belief but split in two. This soul dualism is in Williams’ A Key under the Chapter on religion. He writes:

Cowwéwonck. The Soule, Derived from Cowwene to sleep, because say they, it workes and operaates when the body sleepes. Mìchachunck the soule, in a higher notion, which is of affinity, with a word signifying a looking glasse, or cleere resemblance, so that it hath its name from a cleere sight or discerning, which indeed seemes very well to suit with the nature of it.5

One of the souls here is associated with sleep and is a ghost soul, while the other is connected with intelligence. Both of these souls were located in the brain for native New Englanders, but they could become split off especially after a violent death.6 Then the dream soul would wander and cause all kinds of sickness and create all kinds of misfortunes.

This belief in a wandering, evil ghost is found throughout the world and is probably a remnant of Neolithic shamanic religion. It seems to be referred to even in the sophisticated, Chinese oracle I Ching in the definition of one of its aspects for “Adversity, LI: poisonous, sinister, cruel, contrary. It indicates a spirit or ghost that seeks revenge by inflicting suffering upon the living. Pacifying or exorcizing such a spirit can have a healing effect.”7

It is my belief that the New England Algonquins of the seventeenth century took enemy heads in order to not only insure the death of their victims but also to capture the two souls of the dead and most particularly the ghost or dream soul. The Indians, having a special fear of the ghosts of the dead, by cutting off an enemy’s head and hanging it in lodge, insured power over a potentially vindictive ghost/soul. Oddly enough for us, they slept better with human heads hanging around them.

It is also my belief that New England’s Native Americans occasionally ate individuals to ingest the power of their victims. It seems that to be eaten by them meant having special qualities, possessing or being possessed by manitou, a god. That’s why Uncas relished eating part of his great Narragansett rival, Miantinomo, after executing him, and “it made his heart strong.”

Still it does not make sense that the headhunting and ritual cannibalism of New England’s indigenous tribes in the seventeenth century is not better known. Not only is it not known, but it is also never discussed or written on. I believe the reason for this is the glowing image of the noble savage we get from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This romantic image of the natural, non-violent, solitary human has almost no (what we would call today) darkness or shadow as Rousseau invented this creature in the eighteenth century out of his “perfect” imagination. When we imagine Native Americans, and now probably all indigenous peoples throughout the world, we do not, we cannot see this darkness, this other, unsavory aspect of the noble savage. What we do see is an almost shadowless Romantic fiction. This fiction has distorted what I believe is a truer image of the Native American in seventeenth century New England—a splendid Neolithic headhunter and cannibal but with a polytheistic sensibility and soul.

Notes

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (Vermont: Charles Tuttle, 1993), 4-5. It was this idea of European civilization predicated on a “social contract,” unhappily limiting individual freedom, that occupied Rousseau's thinking almost to the end of his life, and from the beginning this line of thought devolved from his fantasy of a prior “free” savage state of humanity.
2. Ibid., p. 5.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. Ibid., fn 5.
5. David Quint, “A Reconsideration of Montaigne’s Des cannibales,” America in European Consciousness: 1493-1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1985), fn 188.
6. Ibid., pp. 166-191.
7. Ibid., p. 168.
8. Rousseau, p. 56.
9. Ibid., p. 56.
10. Ibid., p. 57.
11. Ibid., p. 58.
12. Ibid., p. 59.
13. Ibid., p. 61.
14. Ibid., p. 60.
15. Ibid., p. 62. Clearly, Rousseau, and the traveler who relates this information, did not understand the complex nature of the exchange system practised among Native Americans. Hence the origin of the pejorative label of “Indian giver” for someone who gives gifts and then takes them back.
16. Ibid., pp. 70-71.
17. Ibid., p. 78.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 79
20. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 36.
21. Ibid., p. 130.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 131.
24. Ibid., p. 132.
25. Ibid., p. 237.
26. Ibid., p. 203.
27. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 71.
28. John W. DeForest, History of the Indians of Connecticut (Hartford: Hamersley, 1851), 245.
29. De Forest, p. 145.
30. G.H. Hollister, The History of Connecticut, vol. I (Hartford: L. Stebbin & Co., 1858), 55.
31. Ibid., pp. 123-24.
32. In Italian Forteguerri writes: “vaghi di mangiare carne umana, . . . dotati di gran froza ed altissimi di statura; di religione idolatri”. Luca Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians,” America in European Consciousness, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1995), 214, (fn) 238.
33. De Forest, p. 210.
34. De Forest, p. 97.
35. Ibid., p. 283.
36. A Key, p. 130.
37. Ibid., pp. 193-94.
38. Åke Hultkrantz, Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians (Stockholm: The Ethnographical Museum of Sweden, 1953), 73-114.
39. I Ching, trans. Rudolf Ritsema and Stephen Karcher (Ascona, Switz.: Eranos Foundation, 1995), 663-64.

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