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The Savage Indian

 The Savage Indian
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The Native Americans are frequently portrayed in modern fiction as a tragic group of people subject to prejudice of the White Man and now are suffering in an age of darkness. Seems like it is standard fare for Native Americans to be like that?
Not quite.
Though not common today, in older works the default was the Savage Indian, a native of their land who is a bloodthirsty man or woman who only wishes to kill and hunt trophies for the sake of satiating their unquenchable thirst or desire for heads. They are brutal, uncompromising and are seen as "better you than me" type of people if one must work with them. They are most of the time exiled by their tribes for being too violent, but if a foreigner comes in, expect the Savage Indian to reject the outsider first with a weapon up their vital organs. Sometimes they will be the rival tribe/griyo that the Noble Indians want to see defeated or at least no longer hurting them and the people they are making peace with but couldn't due to unfortunate damage done by them.
This trope has ancient forerunners: practically every culture has identified a less technologically advanced neighbor as "savage", particularly when there existed a conflict of interests. It became especially common in the age of imperialism during which racist conceptions of human evolution and society were used to advance a policy of "enlightened" Europeans "civilizing" the rest of the world. In the United States, expanding settlers repeatedly came into conflict with the native tribes, sometimes voluntarily but sometimes simply through cross-cultural misinterpretation. These conflicts between various native groups against both European/American settlers and also between rival tribes led to the common perception in mainstream American culture that most, if not all, natives were brutal savages. Battles against savage Indians were commonplace in Western fiction up until the modern era, putting this on the edge of becoming a Dead Horse Trope. Modern "Revisionist Western" fiction typically attempts to provide a more diverse and historically accurate view of violence by and against Native Americans.
May get a touch of praise for courage, hardiness, or other stern virtues, but do not rely on it.
A subtrope of Hollywood Natives. Often overlaps with other stereotypes including Braids, Beads and Buckskins and Tonto Talk. Compare and Contrast Magical Native American and Noble Savage. It should be noted that in older works (even within anthropology) the term "savage" is used for all cultures that are less technologically sophisticated than the (usually Western) writers. It didn't necessarily mean brutal, though other negative connotations are implied, like inferior intelligence, morality etc. Nowadays the term has long been discredited, and the similar "primitive" seems to be going the same way.
noreallife

Examples
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 The Savage Indian / int_126de014
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The Savage Indian
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Zigzagged in Shotgun (1955). Delgadito's Apaches are ruthless killers who excel at inflicting cruel deaths on their enemies (they leave Bentley to be killed by a rattlesnake and shoot Reb through the chest with an arrow, leaving him nailed to tree, because it will be more painful and take him longer to die). However, they are also established as renegades, and so not typical of their tribe, and are shown to have their own code of honour and to respect courage, regardless of who is demonstrating it.
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 Shotgun (1955)
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The Savage Indian
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The Apaches are portrayed rather more favorably in Fort Apache (1948), in which only the arrogant Thursday views the Apaches as "breech-clouted savages."
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The Savage Indian
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Parodied in McLintock!. The town leaders treat the local Comanche tribe like neighbors for the most part. It's mostly outsiders — and inept Humphrey — who mistreat them and drive them to go on the warpath... something that doesn't even bother McLintock and his fellows one whit.
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Magua from The Last of the Mohicans.
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The Savage Indian
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The Oni, the indigenous people of the planet Tenra in Tenra Bansho Zero, are portrayed as this by the powers that be:
 The Savage Indian / int_2263afda
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 Tenra Bansho ZERO (Tabletop Game)
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The Savage Indian
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Zigzagged in Canyon Passage. Early on, there is some sympathy from the settlers to the Indians' plight, and some amiable - if guarded - interactions between the settlers and Indians. However, once the Indians are provoked into uprising, they are brutal: killing men, women and children indiscriminately. (And scalping Bragg, who was the one who triggered the war.)
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The Savage Indian
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Bone Tomahawk attempts to avoid the Unfortunate Implications of this trope by making the antagonists a group of inbred Contemporary Cavemen that actual Native Americans find savage and monstrous. Tall Trees, the main Native character, is a well-read professor respected even by white settlers and dismisses any kinship between his people and the troglodytes, calling them bastards who would rape their own mothers and it turns out, they actually do. They're based loosely on Southwestern (Paiute) Native American legends which tell of giant, ogre-like cannibal humanoids who lived in caves that the Paiute warred with in their distant history.
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The Savage Indian
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Sunset Riders has Chief Scalpem, a late boss and enforcer of Sir Richard Rose who resembles a stereotypical Native American war chief, crown of feathers and all. Native Americans also appear as enemies all over his stage, wielding both knives and bows. The Genesis version leaves most of this untouched but the SNES port removes all the Indian enemies and changes the boss' name to Chief Wigwam.
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In the Discworld continuum, the fictions Small Medium, Large Headache and Rincewind Among the Redskins expand on the throwaway joke from Reaper Man which gives spirit medium Mrs Cake a Red Indian spirit guide, the hapless drunk One-Man-Bucket. Terry Pratchett places the Discworld's Red Indians in Howondaland, his expy of Africa. In an attempt to resolve and expand on this, authorA.A. Pessimal wrote a tale of how the Indian peoples of Howondaland fight and defeat a certain General Ruster, in a plot owing much to the movie Little Big Man, with the wizard Rincewind cast in the Dustin Hoffman role. Another Pessimal fic homages medium Tracy Potts in Good Omens by giving her an Apache spirit guide, who has a fairly direct, Manitou-like resemblance to Graham Masterton's Misquamacus. Mayhem ensues as Mrs. Cake and One-Man-Bucket confront the dread spirit of the heap powerful medicine man in a plot owing something to Masterton's horror fiction. The normally retiring and elusive - but definitely not shy - Apache people, a tribe reputed to give lessons in being nasty to the Elves, are encountered in the tale Gap Year Adventures by a brave and intrepid traveller. who gets the Apache honorific of "Little Girl, Big Trouble."note Her best friend remains "Ginger With Freckles", however.
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The Savage Indian
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In Deadwood this is played surprisingly straight, due in equal parts to Protagonist-Centred Morality and Deliberate Values Dissonance. As the town is stuck right in the middle of Lakota territory, the Sioux and the local gold miners are in constant low-level conflict, so they're widely viewed by the townsfolk as savage heathen raiders. We actually see very few of them; they're credited with a couple of caravan raids, at least one of which may have been a cover-up for someone else's crimes, and at one point Seth is attacked unprovoked by a lone horseman.
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The Savage Indian
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Played with in Westworld, where the Ghost Nation hosts are depicted as bloodthirsty marauders for one narrative. However, since the hosts' individual personalities can be altered in whatever way the park's employees deem fit, this is arguably more to showcase the park management's racist tendencies. The second season reveals that the Ghost Nation was deliberately redesigned to be more violent and inhuman for Westworld's grand opening in order to create more conflict and to make sure the guests wouldn't feel bad about killing them.
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Game & Watch: Fire Attack makes no effort to hide that the enemies trying to burn down your fort are supposed to be Native Americans, with the opposing Mr. Game & Watches wearing comically huge feathered headbands and your player character wearing a cowboy hat. This has made the game a notable subject of controversy in the succeeding decades, with Nintendo of America opting to remove the feathers from the Native Americans for the game's re-release in Game & Watch Gallery 4 on the Game Boy Advance, the characters being rebranded as generic bandits to remove any racial connotations. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was another game notably affected by Fire Attack, as the animation for Mr. Game & Watch's forward smash was redesigned to more closely resemble it, following the theme of Mr. Game & Watch now transforming into the characters of the G&W games in each attack. Following public outcry, Nintendo opted to censor the animation identically to Game & Watch Gallery 4, once again removing the feather, and with it any indication of Native American stereotyping.
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The Savage Indian
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The protagonist of Utu is a combination of this trope, and the Noble Demon with a sense of honour and fair play. His brother and arch enemy is part noble savage, and part Sergeant Rock.
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The Savage Indian
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Hell on Wheels deconstructs this trope for the most part. The opening episode and series as a whole features numerous instances of native warriors raiding and killing civilians and unarmed men, and most characters in-universe see them as mindless savages, but it is made clear that they are no more villainous nor corrupt than the drunken laborers they have working on the train, that they are trying to defend their land and abide by a moral code that the settlers simply do not relate to.
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim puts a fantasy twist on this trope with the Forsworn: natives to the Reach, they are bloodthirsty tribal savages with a distinctly shamanic culture that borrows some elements from native american folklore.
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The Savage Indian
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Played with, if perhaps somewhat unintentionally, in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts. The antagonists of the story, the White Legs, play this to the hilt. As an Always Chaotic Evil tribe with no knowledge of production (lacking even basic hunting and cooking skills), they must continually raid to survive, and violently attack any outsiders on sight. However, they are ethnically white, along with the much more peaceful Sorrows and Dead Horses tribes the player is tasked with protecting. Word of God says that all three tribes were originally intended to be racially mixed with no clear real world analogue, but the developers had trouble getting the tattoos and tribal paints to work on darker skin tones. (The White Legs' name comes from their practice of covering their bodies with white chalk as a primitive camouflage for the rocky white surroundings of their native area of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, not from being Caucasian.)
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Cry Blood, Apache builds on the idea that the Apache were incredibly inventive when it comes to torture.
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: The Native Americans in "Near Algodones" and "The Gal Who Got Rattled" are presented as unsympathetic, often faceless aggressors, almost like a tidal wave of death and destruction that attacks for no reason or purpose. This is very much what one would expect from the pulp westerns that the film is inspired by. The one exception is a mentioned-only character, the former lover of the trapper, who was a Hunkpapa Lakota. They apparently got on well despite her not speaking English and the trapper not speaking Sioux.
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News of the World (2020): Zigzagged. Most settlers certainly believe the Native Americans to be this, and truth be told they are revealed to have done some pretty barbaric things, like murdering Johanna's parents and siblings (and subsequently kidnapping Johanna to raise her as a Kiowa). On the other hand, when Kidd and Johanna run into a group of Kiowa after losing their wagon and horses, the Kiowa give them a new horse despite clearly having little belongings left. And Kidd admits that, while the Natives can be brutal, it is mostly in retaliation for the settlers driving them from their land.
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The Savage Indian
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In Damn Yankees (1958), the Devil recalls "Indians draggin' an empty covered wagon when scalping the settlers was the latest craze," and the film shows an image of this.
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The Savage Indian
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Tall Tale America has these turn up whenever guys like Mike Fink or Davy Crockett get tired of shooting animals.
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While Jonah Hex does generally portray Indians in a sympathetic light, it also doesn't shy away from just how savage they could be if you got on their bad side, in particular, their penchant for torture. In Two Gun Mojo, Jonah cripples an especially nasty villain and leaves him for the approaching Apaches to find, knowing that they'll give him a long slow death.
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In Shaman King, in Hao's life 500 years ago, he went so far as to destroy cultures because they didn't want to join him in his quest to rid the world of muggles. One of the last survivors of that thinks that Silva and the rest are just like Hao. Which is... really weird in The '90s.
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In her last appearance in French sitcom Les Filles d'à côté, Magalie receives an unexpected bequest - tribal regalia and a tomahawk which apparently belonged to an ancestor who was an Apache Indian. Much mileage, or possibly kilometrage, is had by trotting out all the Savage Indian stereotypes.
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Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13!: While he's not actually an Indian, Android 14 has the appearance of a Native American and is a villain. A murderous robot bent on killing Goku, with no regard for innocent humans killed in the crossfire as collateral damage.
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Also Jared Diamond deconstructed the trope in The Third Chimpanzee and pointed out the classical image of the wars against Native Americans usually amounts to bare-chested, feathered strongmen on horses charging the US Army or the migrant cowboys. But this is limited to a few conflicts in the 1870s which involved a few thousand people all put together. For nearly 400 years, the hidden conflict between the races involved sneak attacks, back stabs, well poisonings, kidnapping of women and children and other nasty things which happen when two agricultural societies try to undermine each other in a quest for land and resources. It remained hidden as long as it happened on the fringes of the civilized world and among people who couldn't write.
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Subverted in the Tintin comics The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners Of The Sun. The Incas who target the Belgian archaeologists are arguably the smartest and most determined antagonists in the whole series, and only targeted the archaeologists to punish them for what they thought was the looting of an Incan ancestral tomb. When Tintin explains to the Incas that the Europeans were seeking knowledge rather than wealth, they immediately heal the archaeologists. That said, they still attempt to sacrifice Tintin and Haddock earlier, for their trespassing in sacred areas. Tintin foils this by realizing there's a solar eclipse for that day, which he used to take control over the sun, scaring the Inca into releasing them. Herge later admitted this was a dumb story turn beneath his writing standards, as Incans were sophisticated astronomers and knew all about eclipses. Tintin in America features somewhat unfortunate depictions of a plains tribe as rather primitive and hostile towards outsiders. Still, it is sympathetic in portraying them as simply wanting to protect their land. With good reason—in the end, when oil is discovered there, they are all forced out.
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Railroad Rampage, a Beat 'em Up set in the Wild West, has tomahawk-wielding Red Indians as a recurring enemy type.
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In The Charge at Feather River, the Indians are a hostile force out to destroy the westward progress of the railroad. They do unspeakable things to captive white women, and leave their old and sick to die alone. When the Guardhouse Brigade find an elderly Arapaho abandoned by his tribe because he was slowing them down, Grover comments "No wonder they call them savages!"
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Zig-Zagged in Black Robe. Chomina's band of Algonquins are generally portrayed as being noble and generous, and Chomina himself is extremely loyal to Father Laforgue to the point where he places himself and his entire family in jeopardy to see the priest to his ultimate destination. The Innu and Huron groups that Laforgue visits are also portrayed sympathetically, especially the latter whose violence against the French missionaries is stated to be only a desperate reaction to the sicknesses that said missionaries have brought to their village. However, the Mohawk who attack Chomina's band are unambiguously villainous, killing Chomina's wife in their assault, murdering Chomina's daughter in front of him, and subjecting Laforgue and Chomina to various tortures such as a collective beating from the entire village and cutting off Laforgue's finger with a sharpened shell. The Mohawk also intend to ultimately skin the priest and Algonquins alive the next day, though the group escape the village before that can occur.
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In The Faerie Queene, Meleger's arrows are said to look like the deadly and cruel arrows used by American Indians, negatively associating that race with this 1590 poem's vile villain.
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In The Searchers (1956) Comanches attack the family of Ethan Edwards' (John Wayne's) brother, killing everyone but a daughter who is kidnapped, leading to a rescue mission that lasts for years.
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Subverted in the silent Western The Iron Horse, in which the Cheyenne violently oppose the railroad, but are humanized in several scenes such as a dog mourning a dead warrior.
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 The Savage Indian / int_bcba8c33
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Played with in Silent Tongue. Although the ending implies that Eamon is about to suffer a very nasty fate at the hands of the Kiowa, he probably deserves everything he is going to get for what he did to one of their number. Notably, they allow Reeves—who has done nothing to harm them—to leave unhindered.
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The Savage Indian
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Queen: "White Man" comments on the stereotype. The narrator, a Native American, notes how "the red man knows war with his hands and his knives," but contrasts this with the European colonists who waged genocide against his people, describing this as true savagery.
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The Savage Indian
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In Calamity Jane (1953), Jane fights this kind, and brags of the number she has killed.
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The Savage Indian
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The Apaches in Stagecoach (1939).
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The Savage Indian
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The Book of Mormon portrays the Lamanites this way.
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The Savage Indian
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Super Fighter: The Big Bad and Final Boss Red Man is one of the rare cases of this trope being played straight in a post-1960s work without any hint of irony. Granted, while the game he is featured in is a Street Fighter II knockoff developed by the Taiwanese company C&E without any intention of it ever going outside of its home country, but even then it's pretty egregious regardless.
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The Savage Indian
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Genesis: In "Ballad of Big", the title character is killed in a Native American ambush while trying to drive cattle through their territory. Said Native Americans are only described as "a-whooping and a-hollering and flashing their knives."
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In The Manitou and its sequels, the protagonist is the undead spirit of the most powerful Indian medicine man ever to walk North America, Misquamacus. Misquamacus is an Indian who completely loathes and despises the white man—and for that matter, the black and yellow-skinned immigrants who have displaced the Indians from their heritage. His goal is to physically re-enter the world and to bring about the genocide of all the non-native American races who have supplanted the Indians, and he uses some very savage magic to thwart those who are seeking to prevent his return.
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Surrounded: A few Comanche men appear in the film, who attack Tommy and Mo for straying into their land. She kills them defending herself. With that said, Mo is sympathetic to them, having left the US Cavalry as she didn't want to fight Native people who aren't much lighter than her (as she's black).
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In Addams Family Values, Wednesday gleefully depicts Pocahontas and her tribe in this manner when she hijacks the summer camp Thanksgiving play, with a little Noble Savage thrown in. It's at least partially justified as a reaction against the much more offensively patronizing, twee, sanitized Manifest Destiny of the original script in which the natives (and the children playing them) are constantly insulted. Wednesday's version is an Exploitation-style preemptive-revenge fantasy in which Pocahontas is a Jeanne d'Archétype reacting to visions of the Bad Future the pilgrims represent. Whether that entirely serves as an excuse for the ensuing war whoops and scalpings and roasting people on spits...
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The Reavers in Firefly are uncomfortably close to Savage Indians IN SPACE!! A more optimistic reading—given that the Reavers are colonists who went mad on the fringes of society, and not some already-present race lurking in the depths of space—is that they're more of a bunch of astro-Wendigos.
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The Savage Indian
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Zig-Zagged in Blood Meridian: some natives encountered by The Kid and the various gangs he joins are this to a T, most notably the Comanche warband that completely obliterates (and in many instances mutilates and violates) Captain White's filibuster expedition and the Delaware trackers who ride with the gang and commit atrocities such as smashing infants to pieces on rocks. However, other native groups such as the Gilenos and the Tiguas that the Glanton Gang massacre are mostly peaceful. Still other native peoples are portrayed on a scale of savage to noble, such as Karakawas who are rumored to be cannibals but aren't actually shown doing anything untoward, and the Yuma band that ultimately end Glanton's group, who are shown as being respectful if wary of the gang at first but absolutely willing to resort to brutal violence for aims both political (controlling the ferry) and revenge-based (following their heavy losses in the ferry battle). Ultimately the Glanton gang is shown to be just as bad if not worse than any of the natives they encounter, as halfway through the story they begin slaughtering Mexican villages and scalping civilians while they're still alive so they can pass the remains off as natives' and get paid.
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The Apache are not shown in a positive light in The Deserter. They seem to have no motivation other than to attack and massacre white folk. Kaleb admires some of their characteristics—their hardiness, ferocity, and willingness to die silently so as to not betray their position—but otherwise holds the entire race in contempt.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 The Savage Indian
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Discredited Trope
 The Savage Indian
processingCategory2
Native Americans Tropes
 The Savage Indian
processingCategory2
Stereotype
 The Savage Indian
processingCategory2
Villains
 Jonah Hex (Comic Book) / int_75750b9a
type
The Savage Indian
 The Dutchman's Secret (Comic Book) / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Arizona (1940) / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Billy Two Hats / int_75750b9a
type
The Savage Indian
 Bone Tomahawk / int_75750b9a
type
The Savage Indian
 Calamity Jane / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Carry On Cowboy / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Creepshow 2 / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Fort Apache / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Hondo / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Jungle Cruise / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Northwest Passage / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Ravenous (1999) / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Ride Lonesome / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Shalako / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Stagecoach / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 The Great Race / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
 Valhalla Rising / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Westward the Women / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
 Around the World in Eighty Days / int_75750b9a
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian
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The Savage Indian