Even without foreign monsters, America was a landscape filled with imaginary characters. Frontier monsters in rivers, forests, deserts, and caves populated the American imagination. It is not accidental that these monsters inhabited the same spaces as American Indians. Stories of water monsters in the Ohio and other rivers were often described as “demonic” due to their proximity to American Indians or otherwise related to an indigenous narrative, often implicating American Indians with some kind of maleficence. The language of savagism employed in such narratives excluded American Indians from the human family. Savagism is a language situated in notions of monstrosity: “Images of the Indian as a beast drew on legends of monsters, wild men, and quasi-human creatures that had long been part of the European tradition.”

XREF: Connects to broader settler colonial rhetoric that dehumanized indigenous peoples through monstrous imagery, echoing similar dynamics in other colonial contexts.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 589