The last decade of the nineteenth century was a low point for Indigenous people in terms of land loss, economic devastation, population decline, and overall prospects for survival as autonomous tribal communities. From the non-Indigenous perspective, Native Americans were soon to disappear as independent entities. White Americans wanted to record and observe Indigenous cultures, compelled by the notion that they would soon be gone. Meanwhile, anthropologists, linguists, and collectors attempted to recreate a pre-Columbian, aboriginal world, collecting and negotiating around changes in economies, dress, education, and language that had occurred since contact with Europeans. All the while, Native Americans themselves sought to carve out their own role in the market economy and to represent their own cultures on their own terms.

In Unfair Labor?, David R. M. Beck explains how the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago reflected this dichotomy. He argues that the exposition “provides a lens through which we can view the ways in which American Indians were continuing to adapt to the changes and challenges they faced as the nineteenth century drew to a close” (xv). The book is divided into three parts: “Overview: American Indians and Ethnology at the Fair,” “Before the Fair: Making Money at Home,” and “During the Fair: Working in Chicago.”

The book builds on previous studies of Native Americans and the fair by emphasizing the “economic and labor aspects of their experience,” but Beck notes that “their representation and experiences also provide valuable insights into the American and Native American psyche of the late nineteenth century” (4). Beck distances himself from the common practice of characterizing Native Americans as either “traditional” or “progressive” and posits five types of representation of Native Americans at the expo: “Indians as they wanted themselves to be known and understood, Indians as objects of science, Indians as assimilating into American society, Indians as romantic images and actors reflecting a bygone era, and Indians as savage or wild representations of America’s past” (5). The top-down power structure that influenced Native American participation was based on an agreement between Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan and Harvard Ethnologist Fredric Ward Putnam, who ran the fair’s Department of Ethnology. The federal government would run a boarding school exhibition and Putnam would run the ethnology exhibit. The Smithsonian Institution had some of their own exhibits, some of which they claimed were “pre-Columbian” but that often contained post-contact technology and animals. Putnam was the central figure in organizing the collection of objects from Indigenous societies in the years leading up to the exposition. Beck emphasizes that both the federal government and Putnam excluded American Indian self-determination in controlling their stories. Putnam hired prominent anthropologist Franz Boas to “oversee collecting in 1891” (36). Putnam also hired George Dorsey in South America, encouraging him to engage in grave robbing, taking skulls, and even entire skeletons. Dorsey went beyond disturbing graves and even stole objects from living people, a violation of even Putnam’s limited ethics.

Part Two looks at Native American participation in the collecting process in the years before the expo. Four Native Americans (or presumed Native Americans) were hired by Putnam and his people to engage in collecting: Cornelius C. Cusick (Tuscarora), George Hunt (Kwakwaka’wakw), Odille Morison (Tsimshian), and Antonio (who self-identified as Apache but was very likely not). These individuals benefitted by being employed recruiting American Indian participants, taking measurements of skulls and other body parts, and collecting artifacts. Beyond these direct hires, other Native Americans in their communities saw participation in these activities or sale of objects as a means to make some money at a time when traditional economies teetered and participation in the market economy was only just taking hold.

Beck mines a wide array of primary sources, including Putnam’s letters in the Harvard University Archives and the Peabody Museum at Harvard, along with materials related to the expo in Chicago and letters from the various organizers. Beck creatively extracts American Indian participation in the fair from the letters of Putnam and other ethnologists to paint a picture of the market economy on the reservations and Canadian reserves. Craftspeople with traditional knowledge could produce materials that collectors would pay for. More refined work fetched more money and savvy Indigenous producers sought higher prices for quality work. Furthermore, people who sold older materials knew they were of higher value. Sometimes tribal communities controlled points of entry and shipping and collected additional fees. Beck provides maps indicating locations “visited by collectors,” including Blackfoot, Blackfeet, Crow, Ojibwe, Pine Ridge, Menominee, Haida, Zia Pueblo, Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency, Maliseet, Micmac, Haudenosaunee, Pamunkey, Maya, and Inca communities (72). Of course, not everyone benefitted equally. Communities used to the tourist trade or the market economy did better than neophytes. Beck asserts (with financial numbers to back it up) that the non-Native ethnologists and collectors received the lion’s share of the monetary benefits.

Part Three discusses the hundreds of Native Americans who attended the fair as workers. First, a government exhibit portrayed boarding school life as reflecting faith in the progressive success of the educational institutions, though none of the children were paid. Second was the “Ethnographical Village” that portrayed “traditional” cultures. New York, Maine, and Colorado helped sponsor exhibits from the tribes from their states that purported to display traditional dances, dress, and habitations. Attendees came from Hawaiian, Kwakwaka’wakw, Ho-Chunk, Pine Ridge, Navajo, Inuit, Penobscot, Haudenosaunee, and Arawak communities. Beck presents an impressive chart of payments to individuals derived from Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Field Museum of Natural History documents, and letters of the participants (125-128). The final chapter, “Those Left Out,” reveals the mechanisms of exclusion and thereby the biases of the organizers about what it meant to be “Indian” in the late nineteenth century.

In sum, Unfair Labor? uses the Columbian Exposition as a way of understanding the clash between non-Native’s assumptions about Indigenous peoples’ pasts and trajectories for the future and Native people’s own adaptations and plans for their communities. As with so many similar stories, Native Americans’ relationship to the United States, non-Native Americans, and the market economy was far more complicated than many late-nineteenth century European Americans could ever hope to understand.