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ETHNOGRAPHIC CHARISMA AND SCIENTIFIC ROUTINE Cushing and Fewkes in the American Southwest, 1879-1893 CURTIS HINSLEY In one of the swift closing scenes of The Last of the Mohicans, Uncas stands before his Huron captors, anticipating death yet stolidly disdaining their taunts and tortures. As James Fenimore Cooper presents the picture, "in the very center of the lodge, immediately under an opening that admitted the twinkling light of one or two stars, stood Uncas, calm, elevated, and collected .... Marble could not be colder, calmer, or steadier than [his] countenance ...." (1826:288, 293). Uncas would soon die at the hands of the treacherous Magua, and thus the noble Red race of America would be symbolically extinguished, not by White civilization but by its own dark side of undisciplined bloodlust. As Cooper's phrases indicate, for White Americans the marbling and bronzing of the American Indian began at an early date; the transformation of the aborigine from historical actor to aesthetic object, as unfeeling as stone, was a significant cultural exercise that lasted well into the twentieth century. From the cigar store to the United States Mint, from statuary to small change, the artistic abstraction of the Native American served to deflect a painful history of violence and injustice. Given public preference for sentiment and stereotype, it is hardly surprisCurtis M. Hinsley teaches American history and history of science at Colgate University . He is currently writing a book on the history of anthropology in Boston, 1860-1920, centering on the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. With Lea S. McChesney he is also co-authoring a narrative history of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition under Frank Hamilton Cushing (1886-1889). He is the author of Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910. 53 54 CURTIS HINSLEY ing that anthropological fieldwork emphasizing attention to the historical and ethnographic integrity of specific peoples did not find fertile conditions for growth in nineteenth-century America. Some serious efforts occurred: the observations of Lewis Cass and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the upper Michigan peninsula of the 1830s; Albert Gallatin's promotion, through the first American Ethnological Society, of historical and linguistic inquiries; the early work of Lewis Henry Morgan; the paintings of George Catlin and Charles Bird King; and the less-heralded labors of missionaries such as Stephen Riggs and Cyrus Byington. Still, not until the last quarter of the previous century did individuals begin to undertake fieldwork in North America in a conscious , sustained effort to record, study, and understand the remaining Native American peoples. The organizational center of this development was the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), the most important regional focus became the Southwest, and the leading though certainly not sole figure was Frank Hamilton Cushing. It was among the anthropologists working in the Southwest, led by Cushing in the 1880s, that the patterns and styles ofNorth American fieldwork first began clearly to emerge. "Their history is, to some extent, our history," Schoolcraft wrote of the Iroquois in 1846 as he urged study of Native American peoples. For its handful of nineteenth-century enthusiasts, anthropology in the United States always possessed psychological and political bearing on the national purpose. In defending their enthusiasm, they commonly cited two goals, one practical and the other scientific: more efficient and humane government policy, and better knowledge of civilization through study of its antecedent forms. John Wesley Powell used precisely this dual argument in his successful lobbying to establish the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879; variations on the theme were common. Beneath the practical and scientific justifications, though, lay a deeper stratum of purpose, best expressed by Schoolcraft, that lent a unique style to American fieldwork in these years. The distinguishing element was a sense of identity based on shared historical mission and common stewardship of the continent. "It has been given to us, to carry out scenes of improvement , and of morals and intellectual progress, which providence in its profound workings, has deemed it best for the prosperity of man, that we, not they, should be entrusted with. We have succeeded to their inheritance" (Schoolcraft 1846:28-29). Understanding our predecessors in this teleological history became an integral part of the burden of American progress. This conviction placed Native Americans within the national experience by definition, and it determined that, however ignorant or cruel popular attitudes or public policy toward the Indian might become, the dominant culture could never achieve complete separation of identity. By the same token, early...

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