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People often use the term \u201csavage\u201d as a racial slur to diminish and belittle Indigenous peoples. I wanted to deliberately invert that stereotype. In my book, I follow Indigenous Americans who travelled to Europe after 1492 \u2013 from their perspective, Europe was a much more savage place than the Americas.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a good question. It\u2019s not that historians have never written about this; I\u2019m standing on the shoulders of other scholars in my work. But for some reason the presence of Indigenous peoples in Europe doesn\u2019t seem to have made an impression on popular understanding of the past. I think that might be because, in our imagination, 15th and 16th-century Europe is a white, ruffed and codpieced \u201cGolden Age\u201d. The stories we\u2019re told are about kings, lords and royal dramas. But how many people know that there was a Brazilian king at the court of Henry VIII<\/a>, or that there were tens of thousands of enslaved Indigenous people in Spain?<\/p>\n