OBJECTS, PERFORMANCE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC SPECTACLE

Abstract

In the 1830s, US artist and traveller George Catlin (1796–1872) amassed what he called an ‘Indian Gallery’, which he then toured in Europe as a means of publicizing the ‘American Indian plight’ as a so-called disappearing ‘race’. The gallery included his own paintings, material objects he had collected and, eventually, live performers, some of them from indigenous North American communities who took part in performing themselves in one of the first instances of what would morph later into very popular Wild West shows like those run by Buffalo Bill Cody. Whereas previous scholarship of Catlin's spectacles has focused on the participation of native performers, I will interrogate the visual displays in conjunction with the live performances to try to unlock the British and European nineteenth-century sensibilities and curiosities that would enable such shows to become popular. The essay also investigates ways in which Catlin's displays were loosely aligned with a ‘science’ of ethnography that entailed examination of both peoples and their objects.

Keywords:

• agency
• American Indians
• Catlin, George
• nineteenth-century exhibitions
• Ojibwe
• Wild West shows

Notes

¹ Catlin's Indian Gallery: In the Old Theatre (1838) printed broadside, April, Broadside Collection Port. 198–10A, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

²‘The Exhibitions’, Morning Post, 20 April 1840.

³Surprisingly, despite Catlin's repeated assertions of his abhorrence at the disinterring of Indian graves for plunder and his disgust that the skeleton of one of ‘his’ Ojibwe had been preserved for scientific study (1848: ii, 301), his collection included ‘Skulls from different tribes, of very great interest; and particularly several from the Flat-heads, showing perfectly the character of this unaccountable custom, and also the Flat-head cradles, illustrating the process by which these artificial distortions are produced’ (1848: i, 296).

⁴ The Times, 3 February 1840, p. 5.

⁵See Hampshire Advertiser and Salisbury Guardian, 4 May 1844, p. 3.

⁶Writing in 1848, Catlin refers to him retrospectively as ‘M. Franconi, of the Hippodrome’, but Franconi did not inaugurate that establishment, at the Barrière de l’Étoile, until 1846. In 1845 Franconi was based at Le Cirque Olympique, Boulevard du Temple.