American Indians

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas, particularly North America. The term appears in historical and scholarly contexts referring to Native American populations as subjects of European exploration, colonial punishment, Enlightenment-era social theory, and frontier narratives.

Claims that use this term

• Explorers punished American Indians as Muslims and called them devil-worshippers.
• American frontier monsters inhabited the same spaces as American Indians.
• Studies of American Indians anchored Enlightenment social science’s model of earliest social development
• American Indians were imagined and punished as Muslims.
• Scottish Enlightenment thinkers also pivoted social theory on American Indians
• British colonizers imagined American Indians as descendants of North African Muslims