Staging empire: The display and erasure of indigenous peoples in Japanese and American nation building projects (1860--1904)

This dissertation asserts that when Japan "opened" to the West in 1854, one of the ways that country managed to level the Imperial playing field –or rather, adjust it to include Japan as it had not included most of Asia–was by mirroring the emergent world power, the U.S. –by claiming its own "Indian problem," frontier, and nation-building project. Arguing that that the phenomenon of an "Indigenous problem" was not simply a practical problem of governance for the modern settler nations of Japan and the United States, this dissertation places it at the center of nationalist discourses in both countries, helping to frame nationalist self assertions and reflexive international relationships.;The role of the United States as colonial mentor to Japan is explored using archival written records and visual media, the history of American Indian Policy, visual media and the records of the 1904 World's Fair. This analysis both reconsiders standard narratives of Japanese colonial expansion, and examines the usage of Native bodies and images in processes of imperial growth, carefully considering how Native peoples experienced these rapid changes. This dissertation also analyzes the role that Native peoples played in Japanese and American nation-building projects between 1860 and 1904, both as actors on the global stage and as manifestations of "nativeness" that have entered the colonial imagination. In the latter case, I am looking specifically at the exporting of images of "imagined" Indians, as well as of colonial technologies (including Indian policy) to Japan in the 1870s. The dissertation also uses the film The Last Samurai to highlight efforts to hide the colonial violence of the 1870s in contemporary times. This dissertation concludes with a final examination of the use of Native bodies –both Japanese and U.S. among others–at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri as part of the centennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to advance scholarship in the overlapping fields of Native Studies, American Studies and Japanese Studies towards a recognition that the roots of a contemporary Indigenous consciousness run far deeper Indigenous rights movements of the 1970s. This dissertation employs what it terms a Global Indigenous Studies framework, to ensure that nation-state boundaries do not limit the scope of analysis when seeking to understand Native experiences that were, themselves, not limited by the borders of colonial settler states.