Wanamaker expeditions

The Wanamaker expeditions were a series of three journeys led by Joseph K. Dixon to various tribes of Native peoples living in the US in the early 20th century.

Historian Alan Trachtenberg notes that such stores in the early twentieth century were locations where people learned what it meant to be an American.

[4] Also in 1909 Dixon returned to Crow Agency where he directed around 100 Native chiefs to film "The Last Great Indian Council" and a reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

[6] In June that year,[3] Dixon set out with his son, Rollin, another photographer, John Scott, James McLaughlin, and an employee of Eastman Kodak[7][8] on an "expedition of citizenship" that was sponsored by Wanamaker's and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which provided a rail-car that had a darkroom, known as Signet.

[9][10] Funding was in part provided by a "Committee of One Hundred", which included wealthy Americans such as John D. Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst.

Additionally, the expedition had a "Declaration of Allegiance" for Natives to sign and recordings of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the President of the United States speaking.

A contemporary article in the Society of American Indians's Quarterly Journal called Dixon's expeditions "the great advertising hoax".

[14] The 1913 expedition did lead to increased public support for Native American citizenship, and some tribes welcomed Dixon's visit.

[15] The historian Russel Lawrence Barsh deemed the expedition "an American Heart of Darkness" and compared the two works by noting how Dixon, "a single troubled and mysterious man, [... used his connections] to impose his romantic fantasies on every Indian tribe in the United States."

Barsh continues to argue that "[l]ike one of [Joseph] Conrad's protagonists, he was thrust deeper into his ambivalence by his own apparent triumph, as he slowly realized that he had become just one more deceiver and victimizer of the people he had intended to save.

To Trachtenberg, Dixon conceived and executed the expeditions as a "product", designed to provide a comfortable narrative to white people.