Deloria asserts in her book Playing Indian (1999): "[T]he self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests on the ability to wield power against Indians... while simultaneously drawing power from them." This is also the basic idea of Shari M. Huhndorf's Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. "As white Americans became disenchanted with how American society was developing, they began to reference Indian people and culture as an answer to such problems of a modernizing America as capitalistic greed; alienating, sedentary life-style of the office worker; imperialistic aggressiveness; and racial and gender challenges to white male hegemony" (Barak, 2005).
The Indians progress was challenged by the so-called American School of ethnology. Therein Christianity became a tool in the American colonial project. The development of an ideology based in religion was made the reason to carry out genocide against the Native Americans. Judeo-Christian tradition was set off by a group people who denied the unity and preached the multiplicity of races. These men rejected the monogenesis of old Judeo-Christian tradition and chose polygenesis, which implies separate creation of the races. Most of the recorded evidence was provided by Samuel G. Morton. In his book Crania Americana, published in Philadelphia in 1839, he wrote disparagingly about Indian capabilities.
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