Bob Berkhofer's White Man's Indian is still such an important work, even decades after it was published. This groundbreaking book established the ways in which a dominant culture invented, shaped, and used the image of the Indian in order to define White values and civilization in contrast to Indian "savagery."
"the essence of the White image of the Indian has been the definition of Native Americans in fact and fancy as a separate and single other. Whether evaluated as noble or ignoble, whether seen as exotic or downgraded, the Indian as an image was always alien to the White."
