Savage Anxieties

This review of Western history’s disdain for “savage” tribes across three millennia is “a provocative contribution to multicultural studies” (Publishers Weekly).

From one of the world’s leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples’ human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society.

Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have been justified by citing civilization’s opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization’s war on tribalism as a way of life. Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.

“A tidy academic survey of the savage, from the ancient centaurs to today’s indigenous tribal peoples. . . . A straightforward scholarly study that concludes with a compelling look at the pervasive harm in stereotypical attitudes and language.” —Kirkus Reviews