Props and the performance of ethnographic realism in George Catlin's Indian Gallery: Fabrications in hide, paint, and text

Abstract

In the 1830s, George Catlin undertook several journeys to the American West to document, through painting, writing, and collecting, Native North American communities he perceived as vanishing. He later assembled the different media in his Indian Gallery, which he toured through the United States and Europe. In this article, I begin to redocument Catlin's Indian Gallery and his exhibitionary practice by paying attention to its largely overlooked material culture collection. Many items display signs of non-Native modification, like imitations of Plains pictorial tradition and detachment and reattachment of quillwork. Moving beyond questions of (in)authenticity, I focus on the objects' role in his exhibition, taking them seriously as one of Catlin's material museological practices. Through close-looking analysis, I identify patterns of alteration and fabrications: replacement, repurposing, creating similarity and types, and emphasis on visual appeal. Based on these patterns, I suggest understanding Catlin's own approach to this material as a collection of props fabricated and employed to authenticate and support claims of cultural realism for his representations of Indigenous life. By studying this collection, we gain a deeper understanding of predisciplinary exhibitionary practices and how later ethnographic display technologies also relying on props, like dioramas, developed.