Indigenous history

North American anthropology as a discipline emerged from the “salvage paradigm” of the late-19th century, a paradigmthat asserted the inevitable cultural and physical disappearance of Indigenous people. In the eyes of a new generation of buding government funded social scientists, the perceived demographic and cutlrual decline of Native Peoples justifed the unsolicited collection, and in many cases theft, of their stories, objects, and bodies as well as concurrent federal policies of land acquisition. The discipline's initial approach to Indigenous people is captured in the following statements made by the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, J.W. Powell, in aForum article published in 1893, “We may properly conclude that the Indian tribes are not to be extinguished by war and degradation, and that we have already reached the point where we may hope to save the remnant to be absorbed into modern civilization.” ⁴ As Powell’s comment suggests, a desire to preserve what fragments of Indigenous culture “remained” in the wake of Euro-American colonization informed much of the early anthropological recording and collecting efforts. ⁵ Over the course of the 19th century, some of the most formidable anthropological collections in the United States were established, including the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, the Harvard Peabody Museum in 1856, the American Museum of Natural History in 1869, and the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879. ⁶ Within the halls of these grand museums, ethnographic objects, archaeological artifacts, and human skeletons were displayed side by side in order to demonstrate the evolution of human societies while confirming the superiority of Western civilization. ⁷ By adding scientific weight to the popular rhetoric of Indigenous inferiority and extinction, anthropologists reinforced the veracity of these ideas. le.