PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY
Why was the Museum Extension Project in Kansas interested in educating non-Native school children about Native American cultures that once had a presence in what is now the state of Kansas? What is especially notable about these particular dioramas is that compared to many other representations of Native Americans from the time period, this series of dioramas seems to present a more sympathetic and nuanced view of Native American peoples. The text and visual stories recognize distinctions between tribes and acknowledge the negative pressures of European-American expansion, including the history of removals. However, the larger historical context of their creation tells a more complicated story.
Inspired by the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists like Franz Boas, American scholars and policymakers had begun to appreciate the diversity of Indigenous North American cultures by the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than imagine that all Native peoples belonged to a homogenous “Indian” culture, they recognized that each group had unique customs that reflected their particular circumstances.
Poster for the 1922 documentary film “Nanook of the North” (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief listening to a cylinder recording with Frances Densmore, Smithsonian anthropologist, 1916 (Source: Library of Congress)
Nevertheless, white thinkers still tended to view American Indians as “people without history” whose unique cultural practices had remained relatively unchanged since time immemorial. This was a dangerous interpretation since it denied the full complexity and creativity of Indigenous people and implied that American Indians could not adapt but only disappear in the face of modernity.
Indeed, many anthropologists of the period engaged in so-called “salvage ethnography” to observe and record Indigenous cultures before they and the people who created them seemingly vanished forever.
Such views made their way into WPA projects like the Museum Extension Program, which sought to educate the public about Indigenous peoples in the past but often failed to acknowledge their ongoing existence in the present.
The dioramas purport to depict timeless, pre-contact Indigenous cultures without fully exploring how these peoples adapted and survived over time.
Children with objects representing “Native American” cultures created by the Kansas Museum Extension Project, ca. 1940 (Source: Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library)
Beadwork artists from the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation working in a WPA workshop in Mayetta, Kansas, ca. 1937-1938 (Source: Kansas State Historical Society)
Indigenous people were no strangers to change. They had experienced profound cultural transformations across the centuries as they responded to new opportunities and challenges, particularly in the wake of European and Euro-American colonization.
The scenes depicted in the Museum Extension Program’s dioramas thus represented a mere snapshot of their rich and complex stories.
Despite decades of warfare, forced removal, hardship, and disease, Kansas’s Indigenous people had endured. Although they no longer engaged in all of the practices shown in the dioramas by the 1930s, they remained nonetheless Indigenous with strong kinship, cultural, and community ties.
Indeed, at the same time as the dioramas went on display, many tribes were taking advantage of new federal policies under the Indian New Deal to undergo a political and economic rebirth—one that would set the stage for the tribal self-determination movements of the later twentieth century.
Haskell Institute students on a parade float in Lawrence, Kansas, 1920 (Source: Kansas State Historical Society)
