Crèvecœur's memoir appeared in 1782, although it was completed by the start of American Revolution. In it, a fictionalized narrator writes letters to England describing life in the Hudson Valley area of New York state. The Native Americans he describes, however, range across New England, and he describes a situation in which ancestral tribes have already been displaced and often merged with other tribes as a result of white conquest/settlement.
Crèvecœur's narrator has many positive things to say about the Indians, noting their sense of humor and their close relationship with nature. In many ways, he uses the "noble savage" paradigm to understand them as more innocent and natural than the Europeans.
In one of the most interesting passages about Native Americans, he discusses his fears of his own children being assimilated into their tribes. He speaks of the many thousands of children who, captured by the Indians, and later discovered by their parents, simply refused to return to European civilization. This included older children, who had been well socialized into English cultural norms and knew their parents well. This phenomenon leads him to ruminate that:
There must be something more congenial to our native dispositions, than the fictitious society in which we live; or else why should children, and even grown persons, become in a short time so invincibly attached to it?
This leads him to dwell on the superiority of Native American culture, described in terms of the noble savage paradigm:
Without temples, without priests, without kings, and without laws, they are in many instances superior to us; and the proofs of what I advance, are, that they live without care, sleep without inquietude, take life as it comes, bearing all its asperities with unparalleled patience, and die without any kind of apprehension for what they have done, or for what they expect to meet with hereafter. What system of philosophy can give us so many necessary qualifications for happiness?
However, Crèvecœur is quite morally concerned with issues of industry and sloth (or what we would call being hard-working or lazy). He condemns Europeans, such as hunters, who fall into lives of sloth but also criticizes the Indians for this fault as well as for degeneracy, though he also understands the degeneracy to stem from whites displacing the natives from their close association with their ancestral land.
Over the course of Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecœur's portrayal of Native Americans is somewhat ambiguous. At times, he stresses the negative impact of the environment on what he describes as nature's "undefiled offspring." For Crèvecœur, as with so many of his contemporaries, man is very much a creature of his environment. That being the case, a wild environment can only beget wild people.
Later on, however, Crèvecœur appears to change his mind. Now he regards the Native Americans as superior to the white settlers of the West by virtue of their closeness to nature. In Crèvecœur's eyes, it is the white settlers' remoteness from nature that makes them so degenerate.
Initially, Crèvecœur regarded the environment as the primary cause of man's degeneration. But in his decision to go and live among Native Americans, he effectively reverses his initial opinion. Now he asserts that it's the separation from nature that leads to degeneration, the kind of degeneration that has led to the war from which Crèvecœur has fled.
J. Hector St, John Crevecoeur speaks of Native Americans in Letters from an American Farmer. Crevecoeur tells of the men in the land "near the great woods, near the last Inhabited districts" who "seem to be placed still farther beyond the reach of government." According to Crevecoeur, these men have "been driven there by misfortunes." He claims that the Natives do "not afford a very pleasing spectacle."
According to him, the men are drunk, idle, and "often in a perfect state of war." He goes on the state that they are "no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank." He continues stating that, although respectable, their wives and children live lives of sloth, with no "proper pursuits." He continues stating that they are a "mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage."
Although his account is riddled with negative statements and stereotypes about Native Americans, Crevecoeur does offer a few positive attributes for the reader. First, he states that the Native Americans are "excellent judges of land." They know exactly where to plant, and they boast great harvests. Second, he states that the Native Americans possess successful methods of "curing simple diseases." Lastly, he admits that the Indian corn is "looked upon as a good crop."
Overall, much of what Crevecoeur states about the Native Americans is negative. The few offerings on the positive characteristics of the Native Americans seem superficial and generic.
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