The Museum as West and West as MuseumThe Micro-Politics of Museum Display in George Catlin's Vanishing American Indians

Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, George Catlin trained as a lawyer and found himself drawn to painting. Having been inspired by the artistic scene in Philadelphia and by the public curiosity surrounding Native Americans, he decided that his future lay in making public efforts to highlight the plight of Native Americans in the Jacksonian era. Catlin saw Native American cultures as pure and static and their disappearance under the constant and continuing interventions of the federal government as a fait accompli and chose to register any signs of gradual change in culture not as a part of a process contingent on colonization but as a cataclysmic disappearance. Taking his cue from the popular Cooperian images of the vanishing American Indian, Catlin's visual rhetoric in both his artwork and his travel accounts in "Indian" territory was similar to the formulaic prescriptions of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales.¹ This romanticized version of Native American cultures and ways of life was expressed in the Gallery Unique, Catlin's version of a touring museum that he took with him to cities in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Belgium.

By 1830 Catlin had managed to procure the necessary papers to travel on the steamer Yellow Stone. The journey, conducted in 1832, is recorded not only in his travel accounts but also represented in his artwork in the form of scenic sketches. Many of these were later worked into oils and washes in a New York studio for display during Catlin's later tours to East Coast cities in the United States and in select cities in Europe or converted into engravings for the purpose of illustrating his travel publications. In accounting for his life and work Catlin "performed himself self-reflexively as the only authentic witness of American Plains Indian culture" (Pratt 273). This article argues that Catlin's representation of Native American ways of life, particularly through his Gallery Unique, is touristic in nature because the display strategies that Catlin used made the Great Plains into an open-air museum for Anglo American and European audiences. Using insights from Dean MacCannell's theory of tourism in his classic account, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (published 1976; reprinted 1999), this article argues that Catlin was able to showcase Plains Indian culture by creating an effect of strangeness; audiences were made to see Catlin's exhibition as an authentic starting point for understanding the alien nature of the Great Plains Native heritage. This article also borrows insights from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (1998) to assess how Catlin used the "quotidian" (everyday objects in use) to make his collection of Native American artifacts seem worthy of contemplation. I use her notion of cultural distancing via the quotidian to show how Catlin's use of the quotidian opens up the tourist's view of Native American cultures as an imagined world of process that doubles back on itself and reifies the world-picture of Native American peoples as a rarefied dense "object" of curiosity. I use these arguments to show that Catlin's accomplishments are better understood through his specific positioning of the Gallery Unique as the authentic West and, by the use of select display techniques, the overall positioning of the "West" as an open-air museum unrestricted by four walls.

Catlin's tacit acceptance of expansionist ideology has been emphasized in authoritative accounts of his life. For instance, Haberly, Ewers, and McCracken emphasize how Catlin's romanticized vision of Native peoples can be seen in the way he painted idyllic scenes, his own attitude as the savior of the primitive, and his continuing zeal for over forty years in this mission. Truettner and Dippie (George Catlin) focus on how Catlin, in order to make his work more profitable, repeatedly advertised his collection and tried to sell it to the federal government, hindered as he was by the lack of federal funding. Berkhofer and Dippie (The Vanishing) show that despite the idealism implicit...