MUSEUMS, NATIVE AMERICAN REPRESENTATION, AND THE PUBLIC: THE ROLE OF MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC HISTORY, 1875-1925 By Nathan Sowry Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of American University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences July 12, 2020 Date 2020 American University Washington, D.C. 20016 © COPYRIGHT by Nathan Sowry 2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED For Leslie, who has patiently listened to me, aided me, and supported me throughout this entire process. And for my parents, David Sowry and Rebecca Lash, who have always encouraged the pursuit of learning. MUSEUMS, NATIVE AMERICAN REPRESENTATION, AND THE PUBLIC: THE ROLE OF MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC HISTORY, 1875-1925 BY Nathan Sowry ABSTRACT Surveying the most influential U.S. museums and World’s Fairs at the turn of the twentieth century, this study traces the rise and professionalization of museum anthropology during the period now referred to as the Golden Age of American Anthropology, 1875-1925. Specifically, this work examines the lives and contributions of the leading anthropologists and Native collaborators employed at these museums, and charts how these individuals explained, enriched, and complicated the public’s understanding of Native American cultures. Confronting the notion of anthropologists as either “good” or “bad,” this study shows that the reality on the ground was much messier and more nuanced. Further, by an in-depth examination of the lives of a host of Native collaborators who chose to work with anthropologists in documenting the tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials of Native American communities, this study complicates the idea that anthropologists were the sole creators of representations of American Indians prevalent in museum exhibitions, lectures, and publications. In this way, this work attempts to return some of the humanity and individuality to many of the forgotten players in American anthropology’s early years, while also revealing some of the power dynamics involved. Regardless of their sympathy for the hardships suffered by Native American communities, nearly all of the anthropologists portrayed herein ascribed to the common belief that American Indians were a vanishing people, doomed to assimilate to American society or disappear. At the same time, anthropologists also depicted American Indians as existing in an ethnographic present, frozen in time, and thus beyond the bounds of modern society. This study ii argues that due in part to such anthropological portrayals in museums and World’s Fairs, large numbers of the mainstream public chose to willfully ignore the suffering and marginalization of Native Americans as the federal government corralled them onto reservations, compelled them to attend Indian Boarding Schools, and forced them to abandon their cultures. iii PREFACE In the fifty-year period between approximately 1875 and 1925, mainstream America’s conception of Native Americans radically transformed from that of savage enemies posing a real and ever-present threat to American tranquility, to the view of a romanticized historical people not only no longer to be feared, but widely considered to no longer exist. Indeed, by the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century large segments of the American public believed Native Americans had essentially vanished. Such widely-accepted views were due in no small part to the work of anthropologists at World’s Fairs and in recently created natural history and anthropology museums across the country.1 In fact, one of the few places members of the public sought to find “real” or “authentic” American Indians was in these very museums, specifically as anthropologists represented them in exhibits, lectures, and publications produced for mass consumption on educational and entertainment levels.2 This study argues that the representation of Native Americans created and perpetuated in emerging sites of knowledge production such as museums and World’s Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered a willingness on the part of large numbers of the American public to ignore the suffering and marginalization of those Native Americans who very much continued to exist in their midst. The presentation of Native Americans as existing in a romanticized past, rather than a turbulent present, allowed the mainstream public to willfully 1 “Museum anthropology,” as many scholars now use the term, incorporates both the idea of anthropology performed in museums as well as the anthropology of museums. In this study, however, the term “museum anthropology” is restricted to those anthropologists employed by museums and other sites of knowledge production, like the BAE, around the turn of the twentieth century, when museums were by and large the only employers of anthropologists. 2 Although emerging contemporaneously with and to some extent influenced by the rise of professional and academic anthropology in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, this study restricts itself largely to American anthropology as it existed within the United States between the years 1875 and 1925. iv ignore and disregard contemporary American Indians as the federal government carried out deleterious actions that included the corralling of Native communities onto reservations, mandated compulsory attendance in Indian Boarding Schools, and approved the passage of the 1887 Dawes Act with its subsequent break-up of communally-owned Native lands. Labeled “a century of dispossession” by historian Frederick E. Hoxie, nineteenth-century America witnessed the creation of a host of federal laws and policies aimed at the eradication of distinctive Native American cultures, histories, and lifeways. Ostensibly promoting the twin goals of “civilizing” and assimilating Native peoples into Euro-American Christian society, the U.S. federal government systematically separated American Indian communities from their homelands via successive waves of warfare and legal maneuvering.3 In addition to forced removal, Native communities also faced a myriad of culturally-debilitating hardships and indignities once relocated onto federally-mandated reservation lands. These included unsanitary living conditions, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) usurpation of Native leadership roles, and the prohibition on many reservations against the performance of Native dances or religious ceremonies considered to represent “savage and barbarous practices.”4 While family members living on reservations suffered privation and deculturation in their new lands, many Native youth forced to attend distant Indian Boarding Schools far from their families suffered equally if not more so. As a result, much of the economic marginalization and inter-generational trauma still 3 Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), vii. 4 Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880- 1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 259. v rampant in American Indian communities today stem from federal policies enacted during this era.5 Directly related to the federal government’s policies of enforced deculturation of American Indian peoples at the turn of the twentieth century, natural history and anthropology museum professionals were part of a much larger onslaught of destructive forces entering, and perhaps unintentionally weakening, Native communities. Within the classificatory structure of late nineteenth-century museum anthropology, American anthropologists deemed Native Americans and other non-Western peoples “primitive” and incapable of producing history.6 While collectively these Indigenous groups were thus worthy of study as remnants of a shared human evolutionary past, anthropologists depicted Native peoples as frozen in an ethnographic present, outside the temporal bounds of the modern world, and fated to either disappear or assimilate into the larger Euro-American society.7 The perception of Native Americans as “savages,” occupying a twilight zone between nature and culture was not new, drawing as it did on previous generations’ beliefs in manifest destiny and the moral right of Euro-Americans to possess former American Indian lands.8 What was new in the final decades of the nineteenth century, though, was the scientific “fact” of Native Americans’ low evolutionary state, as broadcast in museums and World’s Fairs across the 5 Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976). 6 Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2004). Among the many scholars and their works which further elaborate this colonizer/colonized relationship of rejecting Indigenous history, a few of particular note include Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), and Steven Conn’s History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 7 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 93-94. 8 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 77. vi nation. Racial science,