“See The Natives”: Indigenous Visual Culture at the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition

ABSTRACT“SEE THE NATIVES”: INDIGENOUS VISUAL CULTURE AT THE 1894 CALIFORNIA MIDWINTER INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION\nChristina Hellmich \nThough the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition (or CMIE) in San Francisco is often considered a minor regional exposition and is typically omitted from scholarly consideration of world’s fairs, it was significant for raising the profile of the city as Western expansion came to a close, serving to promote the colonialist interests of settlers in the West. This study investigates the exhibition of Indigenous culture at CMIE, as configured through villages complete with “Natives” (Indigenous people from inside and outside US borders), putatively depicting their ways of life. The villages shaped and reinforced understandings of race and national identity and made a case for regional and global imperialism.\nThrough the legacy of the Expo’s photographic and textual archive, we can explore some of the strategies and counterstrategies deployed at the CMIE and their resulting meanings. Like theatrical sets, the villages were conceived by their organizers as performance spaces to represent cultures—merging the authentic, the adapted, and the fabricated—to create an encounter for visitors with the desired message and financial remuneration. Examples drawn from the Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Fon, and Native American villages illustrate how the imaging and spectacle of Indigenous participants were powerful tools demarcating difference and enabling the United States and European nations to define their national identities against the racial and cultural stereotypes that they created of Indigenous people. These, in turn, played a larger role in national debates about US expansion and economic imperialism. \nWhile it can be shown that performances at the CMIE were staged in hopes of cementing ideas about settler colonialism and White supremacy put forward by village managers and organizers, the displays were nonetheless subject to unanticipated mutability and expansion of viewpoints promulgated by the Indigenous participants. Through their biographies, it is possible to move beyond the generalizations and stereotypes applied to Midwinter Fair participants to reveal how they were responding to financial and political instability in their homelands and larger cultural debates to assert power over their bodies, identities, and representation at the fair. \n

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