Little (Dead) Indians

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Ed Ayers is away this week. We’re going to begin today with a woman named Veronica Pasfield. She’s a member of the Ojibwe Bay Mills Indian community in Michigan.

VERONICA PASFIELD: And I’m a mom. And the mom of Tyler [? Baron. ?]

PETER: When Tyler was in second grade, his class did a unit on the Patowatomi, a tribe with roots in the Ann Arbor area, and close connections to the Ojibwe.

VERONICA PASFIELD: And so we had a whole month of these great activities, learning about, you know, our traditional ways, and our language. And I came into the class every week and supplemented the curriculum with things like, you know, teaching about the drum and teaching about harvesting wild rice, things like that.

PETER: The class ended with a field trip to the local natural history museum to see dioramas of the traditional native life.

VERONICA PASFIELD: And there, lined up amongst the dinosaurs and the geodes, and the taxidermied animals, was this tableau of approximately three to four dozen little glass terrariums that were populated with these little sort of happy meal figures of tribes across North America.

BRIAN: You’ve probably seen these sorts of dioramas of native life. They’re all over natural history museums. Sometimes they’re life-sized. Sometimes they’re miniaturized. But they always feature scenes of traditional tribal life, people drying meat in front of a pueblo, people gathering for war near their tee-pees, that kind of stuff.

VERONICA PASFIELD: So the kids are just absolutely transfixed by this scene before them and my son seemed kind of confused by this. You know, being a tribal child, being a child who’s active in his community, he’s looking at these little people and seems a little bit more confused, less enthusiastic than his classmates.

BRIAN: Tyler’s class headed back to school with one last assignment, to draw a picture of what they learned about the Potawatomi.

VERONICA PASFIELD: So the drawing that my son made was of two skeletons at the bottom of very deep graves with two RIP headstones at the top. This overriding message that he got from these dioramas was that Indians were dead. And I knew at that moment that I couldn’t stand by and watch this happen.

PETER: Veronica approached the museum’s director. And together they tried to come up with ways to update the dioramas. But after several experiments, they agreed that there was a fundamental problem with the very idea of these dioramas.

BRIAN: The form had become popular at the end of the 19th century. That was a time when museums were frantically gathering artifacts from what they saw as the last remains of a dying culture. And Pasfield believes that the dioramas are a perfect encapsulation of what was happening to actual Indians at that very time.

Tribes were being contained on reservations. And Indian culture was being actively stamped out on the grounds that it was a thing of the past. In the end, the small natural history museum in Michigan decided to remove the dioramas. And that raised a whole new range of questions.

VERONICA PASFIELD: I remember a really great conversation I had with the director about, well gosh. What are we going to do now if native people aren’t in this exhibit? Where are we going to see them? And I said to her, you know, why is it the job of a natural history museum to talk about indigenous people?

Take your students to powwow. Take your students to an urban Indian center. There are countless online resources, countless movies. Bring in speakers. There just so many ways that you can learn about a culture from the people who created the culture that the dioramas really were unnecessary.

PETER: American Indians are hardly the only people whose culture has been twisted and turned in any number of grotesque fashions over the course of our nation’s history. But what’s unique about representations of Indians is that at their core, they’ve relied on the notion that Indian culture no longer exists. And non-Indians in America have been telling that story for well over 100 years.

BRIAN: And so today on the show, as school children don feather headdresses and act out the supposed first Thanksgiving meal, we’re taking on the long and often ugly history of depictions of American Indians. When did the narrative of their culture’s extinction take shape? How did non-Indians depict natives before they were relegated to a thing of past? And how have American Indians countered those popular depictions of them?