Creativity Quote by George Catlin

Catlin is doing something quietly radical here: he treats “savage” less as a description than as a weapon. The line turns on a sly grammatical pivot. He doesn’t just call the term inaccurate; he calls its “use” an “abuse” - not only of language, but of the people it’s pinned to. That shift matters because it frames naming as an act with consequences, a cultural technology that authorizes conquest while pretending to be neutral observation.

The phrasing is careful, almost courtroom careful: “inclined to believe,” “general sense.” Catlin isn’t thundering; he’s sidestepping the era’s booby traps. As a white American artist working in the 19th century, he’s speaking from inside the machinery that produced the stereotype. His credibility in the marketplace depended on depicting Indigenous life as exotic and vanishing, yet his on-the-ground experience also made the slur harder to sustain without self-disgust. The sentence reads like a man trying to keep his access, his patrons, and his conscience in the same frame.

The subtext is an indictment of the “civilized” audience. If “savage” is an abuse, the abuser is the speaker - the society that needs a dehumanizing category to make removal, violence, and broken treaties feel like destiny instead of policy. Catlin’s critique lands because it attacks the moral laziness embedded in a single word: the way it collapses nations and individuals into a convenient fog, then calls that fog truth.