Native American Ontologies at the World’s Columbian Exposition
by Emily C. Burns, Director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West
March 25th, 2025
3 PM EST / 2 PM CDT / 12 PM PDT / 12 PM MST / 7 PM GMT
This event is free, open to the public, and will be held online via Zoom.
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Interior view, Smithsonian Institution and United States National Museum exhibits in the United States Government Building, featuring life group of Indian women of the plains dressing hides presented by the Department of Ethnology and Bureau of American Ethnology. Cyanotype. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 61, Folder 11A, Image No. SIA_000095_B61_F11A_017
About the Lecture
Throughout the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Native American “artifacts” were on evident display in the Smithsonian Bureau of American Ethnology pavilion, the Indian boarding school exhibition, and even the metalwork company Tiffany & Co.’s display. While these exhibitionary contexts impose narratives of Native American decline and assimilation and the fluid appropriation of Native American material culture by settler society, re-thinking material forms through the lens of Native American and Indigenous studies as animate and relational Belongings invites new interpretations about how Indigenous epistemologies inhere and communicate even within restrictive contexts such as the Bureau of American Ethnology and the boarding school building.
Emily C. Burns is Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West and an Associate Professor of Art History at University of Oklahoma. Burns is a scholar of the transnational nineteenth century, with an interdisciplinary research practice that analyzes artists and works of art moving through space and between cultures, with a focus on relationships between U.S. and Native American artists, as well as dialogues between French, U.S., and Native American artists. She is author of Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) and co-editor of Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (with Alice M. Rudy Price, Routledge, 2021); Routledge Companion to Art and the Formation of Empire (with Alice M. Rudy Price, forthcoming 2025); and Routledge Companion to Art and Challenges to Empire (with Alice M. Rudy Price, forthcoming 2025).