consisted of static representations in miniature and life-sized dioramas of pre-Contact

camp life amidst flora and fauna. This exhibition in a natural history setting failed to

place Native American culture in an active role in human history (Cooper 2008).

Curators sometimes projected a social evolutionary perspective onto these

representations of Native history and culture. The American Indian voice was excluded

and replaced with that of the scientist speaking about a research subject, or the voice of

the heroic frontiersman claiming his land victory. Human remains and other sacred or

sensitive Native objects were displayed without considering Native sensibilities.

American Indian communities were not consulted about exhibiting their heritage and

contemporary American Indian life was not mentioned.

       Over four million Americans identify as Native American; however, many of these

people believe they were widely misinterpreted in museums, because their historical

objects were reappropriated to project images of primitive humans, or "noble savages,"5

(Lawlor 2006). Native Americans expressed opposition to these representations during

the era of major museum growth throughout the 1920s-1950s (Cooper, 2008). Native

groups presented museums with corrections to misinterpreted events, and gave insights

on how to improve upon representation of their people; nonetheless, Native American

communities felt that a number of museum curators identified themselves and other

scientists as experts on the subject of Native cultures and that their pleas were often

ignored. Frustrations over the exclusion of Native American input continued to build up


5 The concept of "noble savage" was applied by Anglos to artistic imagery of American Indians beginning in the late
18t century. This societal fear and exoticism toward Native Americans "became fixed as an element in a set of
structurally opposed categories of nature and culture, heathen and Christian, hunter and farmer, and-in larger
terms-of savagery and civilization" (Phillips, 1998:120).