University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Spring 2005 "Vanishing" Indians? Cultural Persistence On Display At The Omaha World's Fair Of 1898 Josh Clough University of Oklahoma Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Clough, Josh, ""Vanishing" Indians? Cultural Persistence On Display At The Omaha World's Fair Of 1898" (2005). Great Plains Quarterly. 2472. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2472 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. "VANISHING" INDIANS? CULTURAL PERSISTENCE ON DISPLAY AT THE OMAHA WORLD'S FAIR OF 1898 JOSH CLOUGH Nebraska's Indian population exploded in to be known} to show the public how educa­ the summer of 1898, but it was not due to tion was "civilizing" Native Americans. In­ natural increase. More than 500 Indians rep­ stead, the Bureau sponsored an enormous resenting twenty-three tribes came to Omaha intertribal powwow and Wild West show that as part of the United States Indian Bureau's directly contradicted its own policies. Three exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. factors-bureaucratic error, Indian resistance, During their three-month stay at the world's and Indian agent accommodation-combined fair, Indians engaged in dancing, feasting, vis­ to produce an exhibit at Omaha that left the iting, and earned money performing sham Indian Bureau red-faced and Christian reform­ battles. In doing so they demonstrated not only ers seething. the vibrancy and resilience of Native Ameri­ In this essay I want to demonstrate that can cultures, but also the ineffectiveness of Indians not only negotiated the terms on which the government's assimilation policy. The In­ they came to Omaha but also played a major dian Bureau spent $40,000 for the Indian Con­ role.in determining what activities they would gress (as this gathering of Native peoples came participate in once they arrived.! Rather than view the Indian Congress as an example of the imperialist and racist tendencies of the United Key Words: Grass dance, Omaha, Trans-Mississippi States at the turn of the century as have some Exposition, U.S. Indian Bureau, Wild West Shows. scholars, I have chosen to adopt a less pessi­ Josh Clough is a PhD student at the University of mistic view of the encampment.2 Certainly Oklahoma and is a supervisor at the Western History exhibit organizers had their own colonialist CoHections in Norman, Oklahoma. He would like to ideas about how Native peoples should be thank Dr. David W. Levy and Dr. William W. portrayed to the American public at Omaha. Savage, Jr. for their editorial assistance with this essay However, Indians who attended the exposi­ and the Reverend Nick Birdshead for introducing him to the world of powwows and 49s. tion created their own program of events that defied the notion that they were either sub­ [OPQ 25 (Spring 2005): 67-86) servient or assimilated. 67 68 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2005 The intertribal Grass dances that took place Exhibition to the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana on the grounds throughout the summer, for Purchase Exposition, featured some sort of instance, demonstrated that Indians were will­ Indian display. Most of these exhibits were ing to compromise on decisions regarding organized either by anthropologists (many of where dances were held and who could par­ whom worked for the Smithsonian's Bureau of ticipate in them in order to ensure their sur­ American Ethnology) who sought to preserve vival. Such concessions support historian vestiges of Native cultures before they disap­ Clyde Ellis's observation that the Grass dance, peared, or by the U.S. Indian Bureau, which or Omaha dance, became more secular in form sought to destroy them. Such differences may and meaning in the late nineteenth century as have placed the two groups at loggerheads but warrior societies waned in importance.3 And did not prevent them from working together as Paige Raibmon suggests in her study of on fair exhibits. Reasons for this cooperation Kwakwaka'wakw Indian dances at the Chi­ lay in the message each group wished to con­ cago Columbian Exposition of 1893, such com­ vey to the fairgoing public. Anthropologists, promises represented not the "commercialized convinced that Native Americans were a van­ corruption of traditional practices" but rather ishing race, hoped to give white Americans cultural resilience in the face of the colonial one final glimpse of Native culture through policies of the federal government.4 displays of Indian artifacts and actual Indians. Save for the size and scope of its Indian The Indian Bureau, too, believed Native exhibit, the Omaha world's fair typified those peoples were disappearing, not so much nu­ that preceded it and those that would follow it merically as culturally. It hoped to convince in the twentieth century. The purposes of the fairgoers, with displays of Native children's exposition, to boost the local economy and schoolwork and examples of "civilized" Indi­ establish the city as a regional power, were not ans, that its educational system was respon­ new concepts, and the fair's structures, while sible for erasing Native cultures. Thus, as imposing, were by no means innovative. It counterpoints, anthropological and Indian featured magnificent buildings filled with ex­ Bureau exhibits could not have been more hibits from national, state, and local govern­ complementary to one another. 6 ments and businesses; beautifully landscaped The best example of complementary Indian grounds with a central lagoon; and an enter­ Bureau and anthropological displays prior to tainment-filled Midway section consisting of the Omaha world's fair appeared at the 1893 refreshment stands, wild animal exhibits, eth­ Chicago Columbian Exposition. There, the nic villages, and peep shows. The exposition government erected a two-story model Indian attracted more than 2 million people during school in which Native pupils recited lessons its five-month duration, which compared fa­ and demonstrated domestic and industrial vorably with attendance figures at the smaller skills to the public. Bureau head Thomas J. world's fairs of the 1890s.5 As is true of most Morgan hoped the model school would offer fairs, all the buildings on the grounds were fairgoers "a graphic and impressive showing of demolished shortly after the exposition con­ what the Government is trying to do in the way cluded. Although the structures appeared per­ of education and civilization."? As a dramatic manent, they were in fact made of staff, a contrast to the school, the Indian Bureau material similar to plaster of paris. planned to establish an encampment of tradi­ Monuments to progress and Anglo-Saxon tional Indians near the schoolhouse to live as achievement, Gilded Age expositions seem an they did on their reservations. The distinc­ unlikely place to find exhibits related to tion between primitive and progressive Na­ American Indians, much less American Indi­ tives would therefore be made clear to visitors. ans themselves. However, every U.S. world's Morgan's hopes for an ethnological village fair, from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial dimmed when Congress slashed the Bureau's "VANISHING" INDIANS? 69 exhibit appropriation, but he found a way Although Rosewater's plan met with im­ around the problem by enlisting the help of mediate approval from exposition officials, Frederick Ward Putnam, an anthropologist at who saw the exhibit's potential to lure visitors Harvard's Peabody Museum. Putnam, acting to the fair, it proved financially unfeasible and as director of the fair's Department of Ethnol­ had to be scaled back. Rosewater revamped ogy and Archaeology, eagerly agreed to as­ the exhibit, working closely with James semble an encampment oflndians for Morgan. Mooney, an anthropologist for the Bureau of His efforts to attract representatives of vari­ American Ethnology who happened to be in ous tribes to the exposition proved highly suc­ town preparing his own exhibit for the fair. cessful as more than one hundred Navajo, The newspaperman scrapped the Civilized Cree, Penobscot, and Iroquois Indians agreed Congress, the artifact display, and the grand to set up camp in the village just south of the wigwam portions of the display but kept the model school building. The ethnological vil­ core Indian village component, albeit with­ lage and the model school proved popular with out Indians from Canada or South America.ll visitors, and both the Indian Bureau and an­ The leaner, more focused exhibit had the en­ thropologists came away from Chicago feeling dorsement of one of the most famous anthro­ good about themselves.s pologists of the era, but would it meet with the approval of the Indian Bureau and the U.S. ORGANIZING THE OMAHA INDIAN Congress? After all, without the sanction of CONGRESS the former there would be no Indians, and without the sanction of the latter there would As originally conceived, the Omaha be no money. exposition's government Indian exhibit bore some semblance, at least ideologically, to that THE FIGHT FOR FUNDING at Chicago. Edward Rosewater, editor and publisher of the Omaha Bee and chairman of Fair managers chose to tackle the congres­ the exposition's Bureau of Publicity and Pro­ sional appropriation problem first and solved motion, first proposed the idea of a grand the Bureau problem in the process. Sometime Indian encampment in August 1897.9 He between October 1897, when Rosewater and envisioned bringing representatives of every Mooney finalized plans for the exhibit, and tribe in North and South America to the fair­ December 6, 1897, when the U.S.