THE TEMPEST IN THE WILDERNESS

THE TEMPEST IN THE WILDERNESS- The Racialization of Savagery

In this article, the author, Takaki Ronald illustrates how the performance of William Shakespeare’s Tempest can be approached as a fascinating tale that served as a masquerade for the creation of a new society in America. The article also shows how the English conquered the Irish and Indians by force and took over their land. In this process, many Indians were killed and those that survived were deprived of the opportunities that they initially possessed. “The English claimed they had a God given responsibility to inhabit and reform so barbarous a nation.” The English saw the Irish and Indians as savages whose savagery, they believed, could be improved if these people became civilized showing that the difference between the English and these people was a matter of culture. The Indians were seen as devils that lived in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and the worship of God.
In the view of bringing the true knowledge of God to the Indians and Irish, the English settlers ended up in a competition of resources with the Indians. Part of the competition was for arable land. Takaki concludes that “within this economic and cultural framework, a discovery occurred: the Indian “other” became a manifest devil. Thus savagery was racialized as the Indians were demonized… once the process of this cultural construction was under way; it set a course for the making of a nation identity in America for centuries to come.” Takaki concludes that “civilizing the Indians was a strategy designed to acquire land for white settlements. All Indians, regardless of whether they were farmers or hunters, were subject to removal, even extermination, if they continued in their “barbarism.” Thus Indians were only given one option and that was to adopt the white man’s culture in order for them to survive.
In his argument, Takaki states that the Indians were subject to extermination regardless of whether they attained the civilization that was to be brought upon them by the English settlers. I agree with his assumption here because throughout the article, we could see that the intentions of the English settlers were more than just bringing civilization to the Indians and Iris, but to actually possess their land. Actually the Indians themselves saw this leading their governor Pequots to protest: “we see plainly that their [the English] chiefest desire is to deprive us of the privilege of our land, and drive us off to our utter ruin.” This is one of the evidences showing that the English had other intentions of satisfying their own desires in the conquest of the Indians as Takaki argues.
While reading the article, I was so amazed at how these English settlers used the God as their sender to get that which they needed. Indeed you would wonder what type of God would find pleasure in the death of thousands of people without prior warning just so others can have possession of temporal things like land.