Columbian World's Exposition: Article Analysis

While I was working on campus at SBPrinter.com I put together many readers and I looked through countless articles. I mention this because while I was working on these readers, I noticed that each article professors included in their readers had a purpose for being included. The article, Classifications of the Columbian World’s Exposition has been included in our reader because it displays how religion was perceived in America through a historical perspective and what America’s behavior was towards Native American religion and traditions.
In Classification of the World’s Columbian Exposition, we see the organizer, William F. Barrow and his bias in the “department” section. We see the first mention of Native Americans in Department M: Ethnology,

Archeology, Progress of Labor and Inventio (Reader 11). Yet, the Native Americans are only truly discussed in the last sections of Department M. We already begin to see the kind of priority the World’s Fair placed on learning about the people that were their neighbors. It was a prime example of a frontier of exclusion. Although the Native Americans seemed to be “included”, they were still represented in the “other” manner that Americans saw them. The Exposition wanted to display how wonderful and friendly America was at the time. Including the Native Americans was more for America’s benefit than the Native Americans. It was America’s way of congratulating itself for being so considerate and including “the others”. Shows were put on to highlight what Native American life consisted of. However, many of the Native American actors that participated were not even affiliated with the said tribe and its respective clothing, traditions, and religion.
Even in modern times, we continue to see these attempts of “inclusion” that exclude the very people they are attempting to include. In the article, The Passing of Indians Behind Glass by Francie Diep, we see another prime example of how frontiers of inclusion can really be frontiers of exclusion in disguise. A Native American third-grade boy goes on a field trip and sees the Great Lakes Indians dioramas. Yet, instead of having a sense of pride in his culture, he perceived the dioramas as a tribute to his ancestors because he believed they were dead. On the contrary, his ancestors were alive, through their descendants like himself. The boy is not uncultured according to his mother, “he has been a participant in ceremony his entire life” (Diep 2). Rather, the museum misinformed the boy, thanks to their wrongful grouping up Native Americans with ancient fossils, artifacts, and precious gems. This kind of placement museums have, can lead to misinterpretations and not just by a third-grade boy.
Plenty of people who have felt the same emotion that third-grader did, can be found in the article, “Indigenous Rights Activists Demand ‘De-Colonization’ of Natural History Museum” by Joshel Melgarejo. User “FleursDuMal” describes a visit to the museum as such, “… found these displays bizarrely anachronistic and unnecessary… I just don’t know why content on human creatures would be in a natural museum in the first place.” (Melgarejo 2). Although these events are occurring in the present day, connections can still be drawn to the World’s fair. Through FleursDuMal’s comment, we are shown that Americans preserved their behavior towards American Indians’ culture.