Bullseye! Uh... bison's eye?

Anyway, eyes are the windows into the soul — or at least the head, where nineteenth-century Euro-Americans kept some very harmful ideas about Indian and buffalo. America in the 1800s was going through a change. As Andrew Isenberg explains, white Americans were finally starting to let go of the long-standing trope of Indians as noble savages. This would be a great step forward if the new idea taking its place wasn't one that presented Indigenous people as weak and destined to die out.

But the increasingly popular idea was that Indians were uncivilized and inferior and they couldn't keep up with Western civilization. Therefore, the narrative goes, Indians would eventually and inevitably die out like a failing competitor in the survival of the fittest. Darwinian concepts of natural selection also contributed to this, and when buffalo became involved, it only reinforced these ideas of scientific racism.

The buffalo was on its way out and if Indians followed, many Americans believed, that was only further proof that they were too weak to survive anyway. Ideologies of white superiority of course tied into all of this and only encouraged bison hunters as well as everyday civilians even more. In my essay, I'm tying this aspect of the buffalo decline into the overarching colonialist mindset that drove the rest of the phenomenon.