Colonists reused European monster legends to dehumanize American Indians

Evidence

Stories of water monsters in the Ohio and other rivers were often described as “demonic” due to their proximity to American Indians or otherwise related to an indigenous narrative, often implicating American Indians with some kind of maleficence. The language of savagism employed in such narratives excluded American Indians from the human family. Savagism is a language situated in notions of monstrosity: “Images of the Indian as a beast drew on legends of monsters, wild men, and quasi-human creatures that had long been part of the European tradition.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 589

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence that the Muslim-monster template was a portable scaffold re-applied to other colonized peoples - the projection mechanism working on new targets.
• SEED: An essay angle: the same savagism/monstrosity language cycles onto each new colonized group in turn — the reusable dehumanization grammar from Saracens to Indians to Africans.