| Ever since Columbus Native Americans have critiqued how outsiders have defined them. Since the 1800s they have increasingly interrogated the apparently innocuous public institution of a museum, its constructions and perpetuation of problematic images, and its right to handle objects and human remains, culminating in recent museum repatriation legislation. Yet, in most recent critical academic research Native American analyses and experiences are absent. Starting with Simon Pokagon's Red Man's Greeting (1893), a Pottawattamie's response to the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, I juxtapose Native American analyses and alternatives with Field Museum American Indian displays. Following Foucault's genealogy of power relations, I use two usually 'subjugated knowledges': ignored erudite, historical data and delegitimized perspectives from society's margins.;This is the first critical history of the Field Museum and its world renown Native American collection. I view the museum as a site of unequal encounters and colonial meaning making (Pratt's 'contact zone') in three time periods and paradigms: (1) the Field's 'evolutionary' 1894 set-up covering all of natural history; (2) its famous 1933 'race' archive, The Hall of Races, (a project with close scientific, institutional, and personal connections to National Socialist and eugenics projects, for which Malvina Hoffman sculpted the figures under tight supervision, and which idealized the Nordic male); (3) and some of the 1996 Native American displays reflecting the environmental and geographical determinism of the 'culture area' paradigm. With each essay I narrow my focus to ever smaller dimensions within the museum: its evolutionary scope which included all of nature and mankind, its physical or race anthropology which circumscribed the range and type of humanity, and finally its anthropology of American Indians.;The Field Museum 'primitive', ahistoric, and decontextualized images of America's colonized peoples exclude 500 years of colonial encounters, as well as specific information about historical and contemporary Native Americans. Whereas the museum works within a discursive field in which Native American challenges to the colonial legacy (treaty disputes, tribal enrollment and blood count definitions of ethnicity, colonial histories, internalizing of negative stereotypes, etc.,) appear nonsensical, visitors escape uncomfortable questions about their conceptions of nationhood, social identity, and history. |
