Daniel Morley Johnson, ‘From the Tomahawk Chop to the Road Block: Discourses of Savagism in Whitestream Media’, American Indian Quarterly 35, 1 (2011)

Typically, the news media have tended to portray Natives as a conquered people, a poor minority in a rich country, militant activists, remnants of an ancient North American past, and so on. As Canada’s Royal Commission pointed out, media outlets continue to perpetuate stereotypes and inaccurate generalizations about Indigenous peoples, and aside from a few independent and Indigenous-owned media sources, the misinformation continues mostly unchallenged and unabated. This essay will explore the use, perpetuation, and legitimization of anti-Indigenous rhetoric (discourses of Savagism) in media with regard to two major flashpoints of misrepresentation: racist sports imagery and anticolonial Indigenous protest.