‘This stuff speaks to me’: Settler materiality, identity and nationalism among collectors of Native American material culture

ABSTRACT

This article examines the collection activities of Paul Dyck (1917–2016), a collector of Native North American Plains objects. Paul Dyck’s extensive archive is employed to explore networks of collectors and their practices, spanning the entirety of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Weaving ethnographic material conducted with private collectors and heirs alongside Dyck’s correspondence, Dyck’s activities are situated within the history of anthropological thought, a discourse on the nature of settler colonial practices of collection, and U.S. settler identity formation. The article draws on these insights to introduce settler materiality, a new theoretical term and definition with relevance for anthropologists, Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars, historians, and settlercolonial theorists interested in the way material culture functions in settler colonial societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Collection practices
• settler materiality
• settler colonialism
• Paul Dyck
• Native American
• material culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a further biographical history and a description of individual objects in Dyck’s collection, see Hansen (2018).

2 See Napolitano (2015) for a discussion of traces as a theoretical and methodological tool in anthropology.

3 Archival data was not anonymized in the transcription process and is presented in the article to include full names and dates of correspondence. Ethnographic data in this article is anonymized.

4 On Federal Indian Policies and change in material culture in the Plains, see Hansen (2007, 203–245) and Amiotte (2007, 246–251).

5 In reference to Daniel Miller’s definition of materiality as a ‘large compass … that indluces the ephemeral, the imaginary, the biological, and the theoretical (2005, 4)’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Buffalo Bill Center of the West.