Imaging and Imagining Encounter between Europeans and Native Americans
Europeans imagined the inhabitants of the New World before they encountered them in the flesh, shaped by the few stock images that print makers generated of the New World and circulated throughout Europe. “Encounter” encourages students to look critically at the ways in which Europeans imagined and represented, both visually and in text, Native Americans and their interactions with them. By looking at historical engravings and reading accounts of the Lenni Lenape by William Penn and others, students draw conclusions about some of the European assumptions that structured Native American-European encounters and interactions.