"Native Americans arent NOBLE Savages! They had war, they are just Savages"

Like you know that the reason that the Noble Savage is bad (besides that its obviously inaccurate and racist for the reason im about to say) is because its definition describes Native Americans as being "one with nature" and "uncivilized" solely because we were essentially animals and not humans (unlike White Europeans, allegedly), you know that right? You know its because its because of the dehumanization and the Eurocentric thinking on what "civilized" means? You know that the Noble Savage isn't placing us on a pedestal for our eco-friendly practices and saying we were perfect & you realize that it was the opposite, and insulting us by calling us animals and that our eco-friendly practices were completely by accident and not conscious choices? And you know the solution to disprove the Noble Savage ideology isn't to say we essentially "deserved" our genocide because we occasionally engaged in warfare like literally every other place on earth?

You know that, right? RIGHT?

in addition to this, I think people miss some critical parts of the original Noble Savage concept which are: 1) it was primarily used as a mirror / foil for European society, and 2) it always had a tragic cast to it, where the tragedy is that these Indigenous people are “noble” in some way but the “nobility” is in spite of the fact that Native people ARE STILL “savages,” and therefore they are inferior and (in some versions) doomed to vanish.

There are some forms of the Noble Savage trope that are primarily about white people trying to defend Native people from literal genocide (Las Casas, some of the reformers of the 19th century US) who basically are like “Native people are the most uwu innocent beings ever” because the Vicious Savage trope was SO strong.

But the Enlightenment version, and imo much of the 20th century version, was about critiquing European society while also reassuring Europeans that their way of living was, despite some flaws, ultimately the best. This is how you get debates re: The Dawn of Everything about whether Lahontan’s accounts were actual descriptions of real Native societies and people, or if they were just him putting his criticisms of Europeans in Native mouths. Ditto 1970s environmentalists or whatever: the Crying Indian ad etc. wasn’t about real Native people, it was about saying “look, these primitive people have some good quality that us decadent moderns don’t! Maybe we can extract that and use it to improve our own lives.”

But critically, in these situations, there’s an addendum that’s like “maybe WE can learn from the Noble Savage, but ofc he’s still a savage, and our way of life is still better even if it’s flawed, so there’s nothing that can be done for him besides maybe extinction or becoming civilized like us.”

There are, in fact, still many people who draw on this trope today, mainly white woowoo people. It is, however, NOT what some people seem to think it is, which is basically “saying anything was good about Indigenous societies is Noble Savage bullshit.”