Thus conflict with stereotyped Indians could--indeed had to--become central to the American story, but flesh-and-blood Indian people and the histories they made for themselves could not. So, as White Americans wrote their nation's past, their greatest erasure of all was of memories of Indians who neither uncompromisingly resisted like the King Philip of their imagination nor wholeheartedly assimilated like the Pocahontas of the their fantasies. (252-53) Facing East from Indian Country (2001) |