![]() ![]() Indigenous Removal in the Nineteenth Century According to historian Paul Jentz, white Americans felt the deaths of Indigenous individuals “could be mourned” while simultaneously believing that “Indians must die away into the ‘untrodden West’ as white civilization took its racially superior place on the continent.” 5 In reality, Native Americans were not “vanishing.” They were being displaced by war and coercion and dispossessed of their ancestral lands through illegal seizures and illegitimate treaty negotiations. 4 This trope posited that Native Americans were doomed to extinction. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, Americans embraced a larger theme in artwork, literature, and political rhetoric which historians call the Myth of the Vanishing Indian. While the Frenchman included Indigenous people in his depiction of the United States, American artists from the same period consciously and subconsciously excluded Native Americans from their portrayals of the national landscape, which is evident in many fine and decorative arts pieces found in the White House Collection today. Deltil was correct his representation of Native Americans was very different from American counterparts of the same period. ![]()
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