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In the 19th century, America had established itself as country with a violent, though brief, past. It was in the midst of developing for itself a sort of Euro-centric national identity that justified the exploitation of any other groups. One way of doing this was through art. Native Americans on their “home base” and large in number were seen as threatening to the colonists who marginalized them with art that portrayed them as dying “noble savages” on the verge of extinction. African Americans, necessary to American economic culture before the Civil War were depicted as part of the family, childlike and lovable, primitive and intellectually inferior, and therefore in need of domestication. On this basis, slavery was excused as necessary and helpful. These stereotypical distortions played an integral part in defining American culture, but these gross ineq