Overview

Between the 1870s and the 1950s, collectors vigorously pursued the artifacts of Native American groups. Setting out in part to preserve what they thought was a vanishing culture, they amassed ethnographic and archaeological colelctions amounting to well over 1,000,000 objects. Many founded museums throughout North America that were meant to educate the public about American Indian skills, practices, and beliefs. The contributors to this text examine the motivations, intentions, and actions of 11 collectors who devoted substantial parts of their lives and fortunes to acquiring American Indian objects and founding museums. They describe obsessive hobbyists such as George Heye, who, beginning with the purchase of a lice-ridden shirt, built a collection that - still unsurpassed in richness, diversity and size - today forms the core of the Smithsonian's National Museum of teh American Indian. The contributors assert that despite biases and questionable tactics, collectors of American Indian objects have left a valuable legacy that goes beyond the founding of public and private institutions. Their collections today have the potential to help Native Americans to not only unlock their past but also revitalize their traditions.

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9781560988151

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"Shepard Krech III is professor of anthropology and the director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. His most recent book is ""The Ecological Indian: Myth and History"" (1999). Barbara A. Hail is the deputy director and curator of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. She is the author of ""Hau, Kola! The Plains Indian Collection of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology"" (1983) and, with Kate Duncan, ""Out of the North: The Subarctic Collection of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology"" (1989). ""From the Trade Paperback edition."""

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