Representations of Native Americans in the Pennsylvania Gazette (1780-1800): Discourse Practices of Exclusion

The discursive construction of national identities always runs hand in hand with the construction of difference and distinctiveness (De Cillia et al. 1999). In the years of the early American Republic, when the conflict over land between Native Americans and whites intensified, the press promptly exacerbated the cultural polarization between “hostile Indians”/ “savages” and “whites” in order to justify practices of exclusion, dispossession and extermination. Drawing upon Reisigl and Wodak’s discourse strategies for constructing in-group and out-group identities (2001), I shall analyse nomination and predication strategies used for the representation of “Indians” vs “whites” in Pennsylvania newspapers from 1780 to 1800. The newspapers selected for analysis are available in the Newspapers.com online archive. The quantitative and qualitative investigation of the recurrent collocates for “Indians” will reveal an ambivalent attitude towards Native Americans. While the dominant view encodes them as unspecified “Indians”, “savage”, “hostile”, “alien”, “allies of Britons” and nomadic hunters entitled to the concession of “hunting grounds” rather than “land”, an alternative perception is traceable in news articles which adopt a more empathetic approach to the condition of the Indians, as documented by the collocation “poor Natives” and “poor Indian”. Within these two poles, newspapers represented Indians in a variety of ways but almost always as people different from Euro-Americans and outside the blessing of Western civilization and rights. The fact that the first naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to free white persons excluding both Native Americans and black people from receiving American citizenship is indicative of the crucial role of whiteness in accessing national in-group membership for most of US history (Trautsch 2016).