Collecting Native America 1870-1960 [SOLD]

Collecting Native America 1870-1960

Edited by Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail

Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press

Hardback with slipcover, first edition 1999, 298 pages

From the Slipcover

"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 collections amounting to well over one million objects and founded museums throughout North America that were meant to educate the public about American Indian skills, practices, and beliefs.

"In Collecting Native America contributors examine the motivations, intentions, and actions of eleven 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 the American Indian.

"Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary in Alaska, collected and displayed artifacts as a means of converting Native peoples to Christianity. Clara Endicott Sears used sometimes invented displays and ceremonies at her Indian Museum near Boston to emphasize Native American spirituality. The contributors chart the collectors' diverse attitudes toward Native peoples, showing how their limited contact with American Indian groups resulted in museums that revealed more about assumptions of the wider society than about the cultures being described."

The Collectors included are:
Sheldon Jackson and his Alaska Native art
David Ross McCord's ethnographic collection
Charles Fletcher Lummis and the origins of the Southwest Museum
Rudolf F. Haffenrefer and the King Philip Museum
Phoebe Hearst's Collections from the American Southwest
Clara Endicott Sears and the Fruitlands Museum
Ernest Tompson Seton collecting to educate
Mary Cabot Wheelwright and the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (now the Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe)
George Gustave Heye whose collection is now in the Smithsonian
Mary W. A. and Francis V. Crane American Indian collection