Wengrow / Graeber 38: "The idea of the 'noble savage' [...] didn't refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen"
on 69 they refer to "the 'myth of the myth of the noble savage'"
70: "The phrase 'noble savage' was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists" (see the British Ethnological Society, which at one point "called for the extermination of inferior peoples")