Status Updates From Playing Indian (Yale Histor...

The powerful and creative identity embodied and performed at the Tea Party made it clear that Americans were, in fact, something new.

It remained far easier, however, to say what Americans were not or what they might become than to articulate what they actually were.

There was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Indians. At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained.

The exterior, savage Other assured Americans of their own civilized nature, and , more important, justified the dispossession of real Indians. The presence of actual Indians, persistently struggling to maintain land and sovereignty, necessitated the continued reconstruction of the savage, exterior Other throughout the 19th century.