<i>Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago</i> by David R. M. Beck

Visitors arriving to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago entered a ceremonial landscape designed to celebrate the unstoppable march of progress in the United States and around the world. Within the glittering neoclassical “White City,” as the fairgrounds were known, attendees could see examples of the best local, national, and international industry and the arts. Life-size replicas of Columbus’s vessels, a reconstructed Viking ship, the first English steam engine, and an enormous Krupp coastal gun impressed those interested in history and industrial productivity. Modern-facing fairgoers marveled at exhibits of inventions like a moving sidewalk and an entirely electric kitchen that included a dishwasher. New foods and beverages like Shredded Wheat, brownies, Juicy Fruit gum, and Pabst beer debuted there and further enhanced the experience. For the price of their tickets, the visiting throngs had front-row seats to a four-hundred-year panoply of history.To underscore the distance between the Columbian “discovery,” its colonial antecedents, and America’s emergence as a global leader in 1893, fair impresarios looked beyond Beaux Arts buildings and innovative snack foods for recognizable historical symbols that could serve, in effect, as “before” pictures. Who better for this task than representatives from the Western Hemisphere’s surviving Indigenous nations? These vestigial relics of the original Native populations could remind fair visitors, in a more immediate way than any prototype dishwasher ever could, of the irresistible power inherent in Western civilization and embodied in American white supremacy. If American Indians began the story, the dazzling displays at the exposition were indicators of how far the march of progress had carried the country.While the performative aspects of Native American participation in exhibitions, fairs, and Wild West shows is a subject that has received much scholarly attention, historian David R. M. Beck takes a different approach in Unfair Labor: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Beck offers an in-depth assessment of the economic implications of “playing Indian” at the 1893 extravaganza. Fair organizers wanted Indigenous authenticity and were willing to pay for it. American Indians recognized their commercial value as American Indians and acted on that knowledge. Through their involvement, whether behind the scenes or appearing before fairgoers, they translated ethnocentric curiosity into financial opportunity.Beck’s examination of the economic impact of the World’s Columbian Exposition on Native participants starts with Indian Country’s omnipresent and abject poverty at the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning his discussion in 1891, he reveals that many American Indians first learned about the exposition when they encountered collectors, men and women armed with cash and sent by fair impresarios and collaborating anthropologists to gather ethnographic materials for use in Chicago. As the author acknowledges, the collectors relied on their own cultural and familial connections as well as destitution among Native Americans to acquire a wide range of artifacts. He also, though, notes that Indigenous sellers bargained hard to bring badly needed cash into their communities. Beck obliquely reminds us that the sale of cultural patrimony, however regrettable, must be understood within the context of near-moribund tribal economies.Describing the fair itself, the author provides a remarkable portrait of the American Indians who populated the various ethnological villages scattered throughout the exposition grounds. Nowhere was the contrast between the Indigenous past and the American future drawn more clearly than in these areas where Ho-Chunk, Haudenosaunee, Inuit, Penobscot, Lakota, and Navajo men and women functioned as living history actors for attendees. Beck’s exhaustive research has facilitated the development of detailed participant and salary rosters that offer important and sometimes poignant insights into their lives. Indigenous self-determination lies at the center of the author’s work, and he highlights it whenever possible. From the silversmiths and weavers to the dog sled drivers to the Indian School student passing through Chicago and working his way home, the Native fair employees were all far removed from their respective communities and all working for a living. However tiresome it was to appear as a “real” Indian before crowds of curious onlookers, these men and women recognized that their labor was key to improving life for themselves and their families.The examples of economic agency that Beck’s history convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous workers understood their market value and were ready to defend themselves against abusive and unethical employers. His discussion of labor activism among Native fair workers offers an especially compelling case study of this Native resistance. While in Chicago, members of the Inuit contingent from Labrador found themselves confronting an unscrupulous promoter who assumed he could shortchange their wages and living expenses because they were “just Indians.” One man fled the village and then sued his former manager, using Illinois state labor laws to argue in support of Native allegations of mistreatment and fraud. By the fair’s end, the Inuit had won their case in the courts and in the court of public opinion. That “uncivilized” Indigenous men and women could navigate the dominant culture’s inherently racist and antilabor legal system with such ease must have been quite a shock to the exposition’s managers.When the World’s Columbian Exposition closed its gates in October 1893, more than 27 million fairgoers had seen the White City and its exhibits. While it’s likely that most spent time at a Native American ethnological village or display, it’s hard to know what they thought of the men and women working in them. David Beck’s Unfair Labor offers three conclusions about what Indigenous workers learned from their experiences. First, continued Native economic survival would necessitate hard choices about which elements of Indigeneity to relinquish and which to keep. Second, those in the bottom ranks of the working class should expect that they would have to defend themselves against the abuses of the interlocking American and international financial systems. And finally, however imbalanced the terms of labor might be, “playing Indian” could be lucrative.

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