Between the 1870s and 1950s collectors vigorously pursued the artifacts of Native American groups. Setting out to preserve what they thought was a vanishing culture, they amassed ethnographic and archaeological collections amounting to well over one million objects and founded museums throughout North America that were meant to educate the public about American Indian skills, practices, and beliefs. In Collecting Native America contributors examine the motivations, intentions, and actions of eleven collectors who devoted substantial parts of their lives and fortunes to acquiring American Indian objects and founding museums. They describe obsessive hobbyists such as George Heye, who, beginning with the purchase of a lice-ridden shirt, built a collection that—still unsurpassed in richness, diversity, and size—today forms the core of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary in Alaska, collected and displayed artifacts as a means of converting Native peoples to Christianity. Clara Endicott Sears used sometimes invented displays and ceremonies at her Indian Museum near Boston to emphasize Native American spirituality. The contributors chart the collectors' diverse attitudes towards Native peoples, showing how their limited contact with American Indian groups resulted in museums that revealed more about assumptions of the wider society than about the cultures being described.

This collection of essays deals with the development of Native American art history as a discipline rather than with particular art works or artists. It focuses on the early anthropologists, museum curators, dealers, and collectors, and on the multiple levels of understanding and misunderstanding, a

Over the past three decades, Ralph T. Coe has traveled extensively throughout the United States and Canada to assemble this collection of Native American art, one of the finest in private hands today. Immersed in the cultures of Native America, he has come to know artists and artisans, traders, dealers, and shop proprietors, selecting the very best they have to offer. The Ralph T. Coe Collection includes representative pieces from most Native American geographic regions and historical periods, beginning with objects dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. Many examples{u2014}men's shirts with ermine fringe, weapons, and button blankets{u2014}evoke the heroic lifestyle of the past, while small objects, such as tipi and kayak models, dolls, and tiny moccasins, speak to a more intimate significance. Ritual objects imbued with spiritual meaning{u2014}masks and katsinas, tablitas and medicine bundles{u2014}as well as utilitarian objects, such as pottery and baskets, also have a strong presence. This catalogue tells the stories of nearly two hundred of these objects, combining art history with personal reminiscence, and reveals the role Coe has played in bringing about awareness of the artistic heritage of Native America.-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

This landmark publication reevaluates historical Native American art as a crucial but under-examined component of American art history. The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection, a transformative promised gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes masterworks from more than fifty cultures across North America. The works highlighted in this volume span centuries, from before contact with European settlers to the early twentieth century. In this beautifully illustrated volume, featuring all new photography, the innovative visions of known and unknown makers are presented in a wide variety of forms, from painting, sculpture, and drawing to regalia, ceramics, and baskets. The book provides key insights into the art, culture, and daily life of culturally distinct Indigenous peoples along with critical and popular perceptions over time, revealing that to engage Native art is to reconsider the very meaning of America. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

This text is a comprehensive examination of Native American art, containing introductions for each of the eight culture areas as well as 34 regional sections. The majority of works covered in the book are from the historic period - some as early as 500 BC - but contemporary pieces are also covered.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery on their epic journey across the American West, they were acting not only as territorial explorers but as diplomatic emissaries from the young United States to the Native American peoples they encountered. Castle McLaughlin's fresh examination of the Native American objects related to Lewis and Clark's expedition brilliantly challenges the conventional wisdom about these men and their mission as scientists, collectors, and explorers and places their journey in the context of a complex process of mutual discovery between representatives of very different cultures. In Arts of Diplomacy, Native Americans are revealed as active participants in the outcome of the expedition, selecting objects of significance to bestow as gifts or use in trade, and skillfully negotiating their own strategic interests in their dealings with the exploring party. McLaughlin makes it clear that Lewis and Clark were not acting as "collectors" of exotic material culture, but rather were dealing on a much more even playing field with cultural representatives whose goodwill--and goods--were critical to the success of their enterprise. The vehicle for this innovative and illuminating analysis is the collection of late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Native American objects from the Prairie, Plains, and Pacific Northwest at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. The magnificent objects in the Peabody Museum's collection, presented in lavish color photography, are analyzed in detail and traced through documentation to their probable sources--both tribal makers and users and likely collectors. Long thought to be the only remaining ethnographic items collected by Lewis and Clark, the objects are here exposed to intense scrutiny by a team of anthropologists, art historians, and material culture specialists. McLaughlin's interpretation is a model for how, through informed contextual analysis, objects can be used to tell stories. Her text gives voice to the calumets, buffalo robes, and basketry pieces that served as items of gifting and exchange in cross-cultural encounters. Contemporary Native American voices are heard here as well, in essays by and about Wasco fiber artist Pat Courtney Gold, Mandan-Hidatsa flute player Keith Bear, Hunkpapa Lakota painter Butch Thunder Hawk, Lakota quillwork artist Jo Esther Parshall, Mandan-Hidatsa community activist Mike Cross, and others. Far from being participants in a "First Encounter," as the Lewis and Clark expedition is so often portrayed, the objects tell a story of Native peoples already deeply engaged in a far-reaching exchange of goods and materials--sophisticated traders and cultural brokers with networks of exchange that spanned the globe from eastern Europe to the South Pacific decades before the arrival of Lewis and Clark. As historian James P. Ronda writes in his Foreword, "Built on the best historical and anthropological sources, and informed by current critical theory, Arts of Diplomacy gives voice to seemingly mute objects and lets readers hear Native voices in the expedition conversation." Castle McLaughlin is a social anthropologist who writes frequently on the American West, past and present, and Native American art and visual culture. She is associate curator of Native American ethnography at the Peabody Museum.