In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnographers working for the newly created Bureau of American Ethnography sought to preserve Native American culture before it disappeared. A laudable aim, but their studies perpetuated the myth of the “vanishing Indian” and were colored by their essentialist notions of cultural authenticity and tainted by romantic representations of their subjects. Salvage ethnography told more about the worldview of the ethnographers themselves than it did about actual Native peoples.
In Staging Indigeneity, Katrina M. Phillips tells us that a parallel phenomenon was underway at the same time, this one pushed forward by town boosters in rural America seeking to “salvage” their regional economies by deploying nostalgic conceptions of Indian history and Indianness for non-Indian tourists. The growth of railroad and automobile tourism and the emergence of an affluent, urban middle class drenched in rural nostalgia and frontier envy created the preconditions for...
