The Exotic Other: Early Ethnology aNd American Indian Women
Mi-neek-ee-sunk-te-ka
Shakoka
The first American anthropologists, whose discipline emerged in the early 19th century, were heavily influenced by the presence of Native American societies. George Catlin, an artist from Pennsylvania whose interest in Native Americans stemmed from early childhood, traveled throughout the interior of the country and interacted with various Native American groups. Catlin, who frequently painted portraits of the people he encountered, caught the eye of anthropologist James Cowles Prichard, who published nearly a dozen of Catlin’s pieces in the ethnographic work The Natural History of Man (London, 1843). Prichard, intending to showcase the diverse physical characteristics of mankind, selected those portraits whose sitters came from groups with seemingly unique physical features.