savagize

English

Etymology

savage +‎ -ize

Verb

savagize (third-person singular simple present savagizes, present participle savagizing, simple past and past participle savagized)

1. (transitive) To make savage; to reduce to a state of savagery.
   • 1817, The Analectic Magazine, volume 9, page 153:

     […] the chiefs came to a determination, that Jewitt should be married (they knew better than to think of savagizing Thompson) […]

   • 1884, Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of the Northwest Coast: 1543–1800:

     But there are many tribes of Indians and islanders more expert with their canoes — as for example the Alaskans and the Kanakas — than any European, however savagized by forest life.

   • 2004, John McWilliams, New England's Crises and Cultural Memory, page 108:

     This conceptual change allowed the Indian as tractable heathen to be rather rapidly replaced by the Indian as uncivilizable savage. When, therefore, nineteenth-century white historical writers wished to elegize or savagize the Indian, it was comparatively easy for them and their audience to assume that Mohicans, Pequots, and even Wampanoags no longer existed.