The 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to America. The event drew over 27 million visitors during its six month run. The Exposition covered 690 acres and was a symbol to the emerging idea of American Exceptionalism. While the dedication ceremonies were held on October 21, 1892, it wasn’t open to the public until May 1, 1893.
In his chapter in The Changing Presentation of the American Indian: Museums and Native Cultures, Evan Maurer reports:
“A visitor could learn about American Indian life through displays of American Indian arts and crafts, and exhibitions of traditional and contemporary Indian life that could be seen in more than a dozen locations, including the anthropology building, the Department of the Interior building, the Canadian and Mexican pavilions, various South American exhibitions, and the Smithsonian Institution’s display in the Woman’s Building.”
The ceremonies began with an American Indian chief stepping forward and tolling a replica of the Liberty Bell. The Indian chosen to play the chief was Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon. In his essay in Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, historian Frederick Hoxie writes of Simon Pokagon:
“Born before the founding of the vast city that formed the backdrop of his address, he had personally witnessed—and suffered from—most of the technological ‘progress’ displayed and praised in the exposition’s massive exhibit halls: the coming of the railroad, the clearing of the Midwest’s forests, and the advent of mechanized agriculture, and the spread of large-scale industrial manufacturing.”
In his speech, reprinted in Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, Simon Pokagon told the people:
“On behalf of my people, the American Indians, I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being built in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world.”
In his book Indians in Unexpected Places, Philip Deloria describes the Exposition this way:
“On the Midway, ethnological exhibits explained social evolution and the New World order by displaying and ranking indigenous people from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.”
According to the thinking of the time, these people could be ranked from savagery (foraging), barbarism (farming land in common), civilization (individualized farming), and enlightenment (industrialization). Thus, the Bureau of American Ethnology exhibit, according to Robert Tydell, John Findling, and Kimberly Pelle, in their book Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States:
“…dealt with language and race and emphasized the cultural distinctiveness of Indians, making clear to visitors that racial typologies were legitimate categories for understanding human evolution and that racial types could be arranged in categories of savage and civilized.”
Publications put out during the Exposition described American Indians as racially inferior.
The Fair appointed Frederic Ward Putnam (1839-1915), the curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, to organize exhibits on archaeology, ethnology, history, and natural history. Many amateur collectors provided artifacts for the archaeological displays.
Hundreds of Native American men, women, and children worked at the exposition as guides and in the popular Indian villages and expositions. In her book Sins of the Shovel: Looting, Murder & the Evolution of American Archaeology, Rachel Morgan reports:
“During the fair, some Indigenous people earned financial compensation for their participation; others earned nothing; and wage disputes remained a source of conflict.”
Rachel Morgan also reports:
“Although much of the archaeological, anthropological, and ethnographic work presented at the fair revolved around Indigenous communities, Indigenous Americans were not offered seats at the professional table. At best, professionals used Indigenous Americans as informants.”
Many Indian artists demonstrated traditional arts and crafts. The exposition included a group of Kwakiutls (a Northwest Coast tribe) as a part of its “living Indian” displays. After one ceremony, described as “Sun Dance-like,” missionaries, who had learned of the ceremony from newspaper accounts, insisted that the Exposition officials not allow the Kwakiutls to repeat the ceremony.
Regarding “living Indian” displays, Rachel Morgan reports:
“The Inuit set up a replica village along a pond. For twenty-five cents, visitors could see reindeer and dogs in harnesses and a skin tent that housed Inuit people wearing traditional clothing.”
During the Fair, four Inuit were born.
Other “living Indian” displays included Penobscot (a tribe from Maine) birch bark wigwams and a working model of an Indian school which housed delegations of American Indian students and their teachers.
Among the Navajos in the Southwest, ceremonial leaders are called “singers”, and the ceremonies are “sings” or “chants.” To illustrate the songs used in the ceremonies, the Navajos use sandpaintings or drypaintings. These are created by dribbling colors (made from charcoal and pulverized minerals) on the ground using the first and second fingers of the right hand. A Navajo singer at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago demonstrated sandpainting.
The World Columbian Exposition also included a display of artifacts from an archaeological site on the farm of Mordecai Hopewell, just west of Chillicothe, Ohio. While many people believed that the mounds in Ohio had been built by a mysterious lost race, the display clearly showed that the Mound Builders never disappeared, because they were not a mysterious race, but rather, they were American Indians.
Also on display were artifacts collected by the Wetherill family from the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. The Wetherill collection had been sold to the H. Jay Smith Exploring Company and C. D. Hazzard in 1892. Rachel Morgan reports:
“They crafted a replica of Battle Rock Mountain, a cliff dwelling in southwestern Colorado. They used timber and iron to create the basic shape of the mountain, and then painted the cliff a shade of reddish brown and covered the exterior in grasses. For twenty-five cents, visitors could step inside the exhibit, where some two thousand artifacts from the cliff dwellings lay on display.” Included in the display are mummified bodies which had been excavated from the cliff dwellings.”
Rachel Morgan also writes:
“American archaeology in 1893 was not a field focused on inclusion, much less the accumulation and interpretation of data. Archaeologists collected things. Lots of things. Then they speculated on the appearance of things and little more.”
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which had not been invited to the Exposition, performed just outside of the Exposition. The Indian Office (now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs) ordered John Shangreau, a Lakota Sioux of mixed heritage who acted as an interpreter, to cut his hair because he would be representing “advanced Indians.”
One sideshow on the midway was a 500-piece collection of Indian relics taken from Lakota Sioux Ghost Dancers who had been ambushed near the Lakota Stronghold in South Dakota. One of the main features of this exhibit was a dried body of an Indian baby. Historian Renée Sanson Flood, in her book Lost Bird of Wounded Knee: Spirit of the Lakota, writes:
“The grisly relic attracted hordes of people, who filed past the unfortunate child, nestled in a glass box.”
After the Exposition
Many of the Indian objects displayed at the Exposition were later donated to museums. Thousands of the Indian arts and crafts items displayed at the Columbian Exposition led to the creation of the Field Museum of National History in Chicago. Many professionals—archaeologists and ethnologists—were concerned about the fate of the items and had hoped that they could be kept together and displayed to the general public. Rachel Morgan writes:
“The professional community had anticipated this issue during the fair and had high hopes for the creation of a museum. Marshal Field wrote a seven-figure check, and the Field Columbian Museum was born.”
More American Indian histories
Indians 201: The Navajo Long Walk
Indians 101: Hanging Indians, slaughtering horses
Indians 201: The murder of Walla Walla chief Peopeo Moxmox
Indians 101: American Indians and the creation of Washington State in 1889
Indians 101: Chief Leschi's trial
Indians 201: The 1827 Winnebago Uprising
Indians 101: Montana gold and the Indians
Indians 101: The 1855 Treaty Council at Wasco, Oregon