Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by David R. M. Beck

Reviewed by: Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by David R. M. Beck Paige Raibmon (bio) Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago by David R. M. Beck University of Nebraska Press, 2019 UNFAIR LABOR? IS A CAREFULLY ORGANIZED, argued, and focused contribution to Indigenous labor history. Beck takes good advantage of the vast archival resources related to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to generate a wide-angle snapshot of Indigenous people's efforts to navigate the ethnographic and performative income opportunities that arose under late nineteenth-century colonialism's sustained assimilationist assault. The World's Columbian Exposition was a massive advertisement for colonialism's supposed successes. Colonialism's ideology of authenticity—with its idealizations of "pre-contact" Indian life—created the earning opportunities that Beck describes. Indigenous people who took up what we might call this "culture work" were frequently snared in authenticity's contradictions. Some who sought work at the fair, for example, were deemed inadequately "traditional" and thus ineligible. Beck organizes his narrative by the logic of the archive upon which he draws. The logic creates an easy-to-follow flow as he presents detailed descriptions of the income and working conditions of Indigenous individuals who worked as collectors, sellers of cultural belongings, and live performers. Part 1 (chapters 1 and 2) provides context for the representation and involvement of Indigenous peoples and people at the World's Columbian Exposition. Part 2 considers opportunities to earn in advance of the fair: chapter 3 looks at the limited number of documented Indigenous collectors; chapter 4 at collectors employed by the Department of Ethnology; and chapter 5 at government collecting efforts, particularly by the Smithsonian and the Canadian federal government. Part 3 examines Indigenous labor at the fair itself: chapter 6 considers employees of the fair's anthropological and education displays; chapter 7 the experiences of workers in commercial displays including Buffalo Bill's Wild West and the "Esquimaux village"; and chapter 8 groups and individuals who sought but failed to find work at the fair. Beck strives to locate Indigenous perspectives in the official university and government records upon which he relies, although the book's structure sometimes works against this. It is not clear, for example, that performers [End Page 150] drew distinctions among themselves based upon whether their employer was public or private, but the distinction signifies for Beck because of his materialist approach. Beck underscores that this culture work should be situated among the myriad other colonial labor opportunities of the day. His primary thesis is that income opportunities from the sale of cultural belongings or the performance of ceremonial or everyday Indigenous life were economically significant for individuals, families, and communities. This income mattered, he argues, not so much because it was sizable or sustained but because of the extent to which settler colonial governments had imposed conditions of poverty and dispossession upon Indigenous nations. By 1893, any source of income, however paltry, uneven, or unfair, was something many Indigenous people could not afford to dismiss. Beck's demonstration of this income's significance draws out and upon some of the material conditions in workers' home communities. His argument, in turn, raised interesting questions for me about the cultural, social, and political impacts of these income flows back home. Certainly, these other impacts were sometimes significant and perhaps more enduring even than the economic ones. More than once, employment at the fair provided public opportunities for Indigenous people to flaunt their refusal of colonial efforts to remake and control them. Beck's other main point is that the diverse stories he tells constitute impressive evidence of Indigenous agency and modernity in the face of upheaval caused by the twinned extension of settler colonialism and global capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century. He rightly argues that Indigenous people were both willing and able to engage modern capitalist markets in dynamic ways. This was true both before and after 1893, of course. Indigenous people were already savvy traders and vendors, in some cases with centuries of experience in colonial markets, and they sought maximum value in exchange for their labor

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