| From 1879 to World War I, the Smithsonian Institution played a leading rule in developing American anthropology, serving as the principal government-supported organization responsible for the administration of ethnographic research and collection of material culture of this nation's native inhabitants. The Smithsonian sponsored a series of collecting expeditions during this period, directed by the newly created Bureau of Ethnology, that secured extensive material culture from southwestern American Indians. These expeditions constituted a new dimension in the already complex relationship between the federal government and American Indians. The resulting ethnographic collections continue to bind together---and divide---museum administrators, anthropologists, and American Indians.; The present study combines both historical and anthropological perspectives to examine the complex transformation of native goods into natural history museum specimens. Focusing on the "collecting process" as a field activity initiated by Washington between government scientist and American Indian, this ethnohistorical approach incorporates both Euro-American and Pueblo viewpoints. Drawing upon new historical research has made possible a broad examination of various historical factors that played a role in the origins of the resulting ethnographic collections. These factors include: (1) the U.S. Army, other government agents, federally regulated traders, and academic collecting expeditions; (2) local economic conditions; and (3) Pueblo responses.; The period from 1879 to 1885, when most of the Pueblo ethnographic collections of the Smithsonian Institution took shape, receives the greatest attention here, as well as benefits from new historical documentation afforded by the Bureau's fiscal records. These records, previously believed to have been lost, account for yearly congressional appropriations for the Bureau through 1892, as audited by the U.S. Treasury and archived in the National Archives, Washington, D.C. This analysis furnishes a greater appreciation of the complex bilateral process of gift exchange, trade, purchase, persuasion, and deceit that contributed to the formation of the Smithsonian Institution's Southwestern Ethnographic collections, while simultaneously forever altering Pueblo life ways. |
