"salvage anthropology."3 Detailed field accounts of Native American lifeways were

produced according to region by this federal office. Past theories of cultural evolution

led the American public to believe that American Indian Tribes would be fully

assimilated into mainstream Anglo-American culture; therefore, Native ways of life

would eventually cease to exist.4 Household items, clothing, religious objects, tools, and

artworks were feverishly collected, documented, and deposited into what would become

the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History.

Comprehensive Native American collections were amassed in public and university

anthropology museums such as Harvard's Peabody Museum and the Denver Museum

of Anthropology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even trickery and theft

were used by some of the scientists to gain certain artifacts related to burial or esoteric

activities. Ethnographers did not inform American Indian participants on how the

information and collected cultural objects would be reappropriated into the academic

and public spheres without further Native consultation.

Problems

       Museum collecting practices for ethnographic collections removed significant

Native objects from Native communities, and over generations this resulted in the

deterioration of Native traditions. The prolific collection of Native American cultural

objects corresponded with the active attempt by the U.S. government to assimilate



3 Salvage Anthropology is a term used in anthropology to critique early anthropological practices of the 1800s.
These practices documented the language, music, arts, and cultural practices of populations that had been colonized
by or assimilated into mainstream Western society (Gruber 1970).
4 Cultural evolution, also associated with Social Darwinism, was a theory popular in the early 1900s that defined
Western society as the most evolved human society on a linear scale ranging from "primitive" to "civilized." Under
the tenets of cultural evolution, it was assumed all "primitive peoples" were destined to "evolve" into the "more
advanced" Western form of civilization.