This paper explores how 18th and early 19th century explorers of the North American environment relied heavily on taxonomy to describe the fauna and flora they were encountering. Efforts to classify knowledge, culminating in the publication of his taxonomy by Linnaeus in 1735, enabled them to organize what seemed to be the chaos of wild nature by resorting to categories. The descriptions of Natives these traveler-explorers wrote are not immune to this will to categorize and label and they often resort to broad characteristics that transcend tribe affiliation in order to depict the Natives they encounter as a global population sharing specific features or attitudes. Even if they often –but not always– seem to respect otherness, I argue that these accounts contributed to categorize and codify Natives, thus opening the door to the creation of stereotypes like the Noble Warrior or his alter ego, the Ignoble Indian. Contemporary Native filmmakers can be seen to reappropriate and subvert such stereotypical views of Native Americans that find their roots in accounts by 18th and 19th century white explorers. I show how these stereotypes, present in accounts by William Bartram, Thomas Nuttall, Bernard Romans, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, are challenged, subverted and distorted in Chris Eyre’s 1998 film Smoke Signals and, more recently, in Sterlin Harjo and Taiko Waititi’s Hulu tv series, Reservation Dogs.