| During the late nineteenth century, Aboriginal people throughout North America confronted a contradictory thicket of tourism, anthropology, colonialism, and authenticity. Notions of authenticity that were related to the myth of the vanishing Indian simultaneously generated and delimited opportunities for Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people did not exercise much control over the terms of this discourse, but they often manipulated it to their benefit. The growth of anthropology and tourism provided economic opportunities that helped Aboriginal people make a living under the difficult economic and political conditions of late nineteenth-century colonialism. Aboriginal workers combined these sources of income with historically entrenched subsistence activities.;Aboriginal people could ill afford to forego the economic opportunities they derived from the growth of anthropology and tourism. Yet these opportunities hinged upon their self-representation in terms of static, "either-or" colonial categories. These categories revolved around the notion of an authentic core, a notion which ultimately undermined Aboriginal people's bids for political rights, economic equality, and cultural survival. According to the "one-drop" racial theory, which non-Aboriginal people transmuted into a theory of culture, the smallest sign of the "old," "tribal" way of life was grounds for denying Aboriginal people equal rights. Within the colonial discourse of authenticity all things Aboriginal were of the past. Non-Aboriginal people turned images of Indians playing authentic roles into glossy advertisements for Aboriginal disenfranchisement. In nineteenth century North America authenticity was a crucial tool of both colonial authority and Aboriginal self-expression.;This dissertation explores the implications of authenticity for Aboriginal people in three episodes which occurred between 1880 and 1906: the first looks at Kwakwaka'wakw performers from Vancouver Island who were "live exhibits" at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893; the second examines migrant Indian labourers who worked in the hop fields of Puget Sound in Washington State; and the third focuses on a Tlingit jeweler's legal battle to have his children admitted to the White public school in Sitka, Alaska. All three episodes rely upon on government reports, personal papers and diaries, court records, newspapers, ethnographies, and travel accounts as sources. |
