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MUSKOGEE'S INDIAN INTERNATIONAL FAIRS:
TRIBAL AUTONOMY AND THE INDIAN IMAGE IN
THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
ANDREW DENSON
Although most of its organizers were white businessmen, the Indian International Fair provided some Native American leaders with opportunities to broadcast their own political positions regarding Indian Territory and tribal autonomy. This essay describes and explains the fair, while drawing connections with the literature on Indian exhibits in American expositions.
"I would be glad to see the people in the States take a greater interest in the [f]airs of these people than they have heretofore. They deserve it. If you don't believe it, go and see for yourselves. Go amongst them and don't be afraid to take your wives down with you. See and enjoy the beautiful country and the delightful climate. See for yourselves the intelligence they have, and the wonderful advancement they have made and test their hospitality. My word for it you will find ladies and gentlemen among the Indians, and you will form acquaintances among them, as I have done, whose acquaintance you may be proud to claim in any country."
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J. W. ARCHER, A RESIDENT OF INDIANA, was writing of the Indian International Fair, a multi-tribal gathering held annually at Muskogee, Creek Nation, during much of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Archer had attended the fair while traveling through Indian Territory in the autumn of 1881, and upon returning home he wrote an account of the experience for an Indiana newspaper. He described an event that, in most respects, resembled the county agricultural fairs that took place each year across his own state. There were exhibits of corn and wheat grown in the Indian nations, livestock, and "some very good cotton." There was a "ladies' department" containing needlework and canned goods. Merchants had placed farm machinery on display for inspection. The fact that this was an Indian fair, however, set the gathering apart in Archer's mind. When performed by the territory's Native American residents, the typical fairground activities took on new meaning as signs of Indian progress. Archer had not expected to meet "ladies and gentlemen" in the territory, and he suggested that the truly remarkable aspect of the fair was the extent to which those in attendance did not match the popular images of western tribes. "The man who goes to the Indian Territory to find the dime-novel Indian," Archer concluded, "will be badly fooled."1 |
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I too find the Indian International Fair remarkable, but for a somewhat different reason. In the late nineteenth century, Americans maintained a variety of cultural forms concerned with producing images of Indians, from the dime novels Archer mentioned to the early wild west show. Among these mediae were America's own international expositions, the world fairs, which almost always included exhibits of Indian objects and Indian people. These expositions displayed Indians in ways that reinforced white ethnocentrism and justified American conquest. Indians appeared as colorful primitives and relics of the past. Or else they were the dutiful wards of enlightened white authorities, children receiving much-needed instruction. Native Americans themselves appear to have exercised very little influence over how their images were employed.2 Placed in that context, the Muskogee fair seems noteworthy. Although most of its original organizers were white merchants interested primarily in bettering their town's commerce, Native Americans participated in ways that allowed them to shape the fair's depiction of Indian people and Indian Territory. In particular, leaders of several of the Five Tribes (or Five Civilized Tribes) labored to make the fair serve their paramount political goal, the maintenance of the territory as a collection of independent Indian nations.3 As Archer's letter suggests, they did this by crafting images of Indian progress. They used the fair to amplify one of their most common political arguments: that Indian advancement proved the wisdom of preserving tribal autonomy. |
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