Native tongues : colonialism and race from encounter to the reservation Native Tongues explores the morally entangled territory of language and race as it relates the intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its manifest destiny of westward expansion Provided by publisher