ABSTRACT
Travelers who continually represented Indians as excellent potential subjects for the artist rarely represented Indians themselves as either interested in or productive of anything that travelers were prepared to call art. Freezing the Indian into art was popular among travel writers, but the tactic emerges as no more than an expression of culture-bound attitudes that illuminate nothing of Indian life. White travelers who never spoke of other white bodies paid close attention not only to the clothes but also to the bodies of Indians. They dwelled on the physical composure of the Indians they saw, but rather than contrasting that composure to the rocking, whittling, jiggling, twitching whites of the interior, they instead employed the Indians' claimed immobility to push them out of humanity and into nature. Many travelers first acquired on the East Coast their view of Indians as marketers of handmade souvenirs; in the East, however, travelers' shopping opportunities among Indians were organized and convenient.
