American Literature
of Indians by whites involves an appropriation, even an expropriation, parallel to the economic expropriation which is its context." They believed that
it would lead to a greater knowledge of the natives by the colonists, which in turn would lead to a greater ability to exploit the natives and eventually
to a complete appropriation of them. It is widely documented that Cooper admitted his support for what the white settlers did in their westward
expansionhe actually acknowledges in The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking Tales to be written but the next to last in the sequence of
events, that "the Europeans, or, to use a more significant term, the Christians, dispossessed the original owners of the soil" and justified it by
saying that it was part of the noble mission of Christianity and therefore "part of a universal moral progress which it was the special destiny of
American to manifest
annaabi.ee 
