The image of the Noble Savage arises from the colonial drive to order and make sense within Western frames by labeling indigenous peoples as connected to the environment. This representation is dehumanizing and fails to acknowledge Native ontologies
Shepard Krech III, PhD and Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Brown University, 1999, “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History”, W. W. Norton & Company, New York: London, acc. 2/15/13, p. 15-27

Even though an invention of Madison Avenue, the Crying Indian is an effective image and advocate because its assumptions are not new. From the moment they encountered the native people of North America and represented them in texts, prints, paintings, sculptures, performances—in all conceivable media—Europeans classified them in order to make them sensible. They made unfamiliar American Indians familiar by using customary taxonomic categories, but in the process often reduced them simplistically to one of two stereotypes or images, one noble and the other not. For a long time, the first has been known as the Noble Savage and the second as the Ignoble Savage. The Noble Savage, the first of the two stereotypes or images, has drawn persistently on benign and increasingly romantic associations; the Ignoble Savage, the second, on a menacing malignancy The first has emphasized the rationality, vigor, and morality of the nature-dwelling native; the second, the cannibalistic, bloodthirsty, inhuman aspects of savage life. Often elements from the two stereotypes have been combined in a single portrait.2 The label savage, which English-speaking people used for North American Indians (and their imagery) for centuries, presents problems today. With its derivation from silvaticus (Latin), cognates sauvage (French), salvage (Spanish), selvaggio (Italian), and the related forms silva, selva, and sylvan—which have