The Exhibited Body: The Nineteenth-Century Human Zoo

The display of living human beings for the entertainment or putative edification of others was not an exclusively Victorian phenomenon, but the practice reached a crescendo in the latter half of the nineteenth century, driven by a combination of factors including the rise of ethnography and scientific racism as well as a growing popular fascination with the cultural others who were encountered during the process of colonial expansion. In Britain and elsewhere in Europe, a vibrant market for visual and print culture depicting "savages" from around the world led to a popular desire for staged encounters with living subjects from non-European cultures—and many impresarios were happy to provide this experience to paying customers. What is now known as the phenomenon of "the human zoo" included several different venues and genres, including the circus, the freak show, the ethnographic village, the museum, and the zoo. In all these performance spaces, non-Europeans were displayed as examples of primitive or backward cultures, often being compared to animals or the vanished peoples of antiquity.

Today, there is some disagreement about the level of agency that these performers may have had. Some of them were abducted and kept virtually imprisoned in their performance enclosures, while others had a greater degree of autonomy and even chose to become what Roslyn Poignant has called "professional savages" in her book of that title. Many others worked in a murky realm of partial consent, trusting their livelihoods and their lives to the promises of showmen. Certainly, most of these performers would not have understood the broad meaning of their roles within the European imagination. Though it may have seemed to them that they were being asked to demonstrate their cultural practices, many of their audience members would have seen them as performing the spectacle of their own extinction—either as an inevitable future or as an immediate reality.

This essay focuses on the Indigenous peoples of North America, who were among the most common performers in European human zoos and were also the objects of a powerful rhetoric of impending extinction. The trope of the "dying Indian" was already well established by the Victorian period, and it would only grow in popularity as the nineteenth century progressed. But the idea of the dying Indian was more than a cliché; it was also an alibi that enabled colonial culture to avoid responsibility for the genocidal actions that were perpetrated against Indigenous people during the nineteenth century and beyond. If these "savages" could be constructed as passively fading away in response to the natural superiority of Europeans, then no blame could be assigned for the violence of colonization.

This idea was prevalent in the colony of Newfoundland when the last Indigenous person of the island, Shawnawdithit, lived out her final months in a makeshift St. John's museum dedicated to the culture of her people, the Beothuk. At her death—which occurred in 1829, three years after the publication of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans—she became an embodiment of the dying Indian stereotype. But, as I have written elsewhere, the reality of the Beothuk people's extinction was very different from the romantic notion of inevitable and pathos-infused decline; in fact, it had all the hallmarks of genocide, with British settlers hunting the Beothuk for sport and denying them access to their traditional food sources.¹ These violent actions were decried by a number of settlers, including the members of the Beothick Institution [sic], which created the museum in which Shawnawdithit lived. However, even this apparently enlightened and empathetic approach to preserving Beothuk culture was compromised by the carceral aspects of her residence there. Shawnawdithit was a virtual prisoner in the museum, where she spent her last days documenting and practising her culture for a European and colonial audience. Her final activities, and even her death itself, can be understood as unwilling performances, orchestrated by the Beothick Institution and staged within the proto-ethnographic space of the museum. The context of her death, and later representations of it as a tragically inevitable event, set the stage for...