After reading the Truth about stories by Thomas King, his explanation of how Indigenous men were being represented through literature intrigued me. King stated that in the American Romantic Period, " The Romantics imagined their Indian as dying. But in that dying...there was also a sense of nobility" (p33). This ideology came from many individuals who falsely believed that very few Indigenous peoples existed. So many writers created the "dying Indian" an Indigenous man last of his kind, who was usually the sidekick to the white heroic protagonist.

Although many identities of the indigenous man have been formed by society since that period, there has always been this sense of the world trying to create a type of "shroud in which to wrap the Indian. And bury him."(p33). Ever since white colonists knew the existence of Indigenous people, for decades society has shared their opinions on how an indigenous person should behave, everyone believes they have " a right to use Indians as they see fit." (Hirschfelder, Molin, para 1).

https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/native/homepage.htm