The William and Mary Quarterly

Abstract:

Native communities across North America experienced disruptions when European and colonial collectors began seeking out their material objects for deposit into museums, scholarly repositories, and comparable institutions. Yet Native people and sovereign nations repeatedly exercised agency in shaping objects' transits and meanings in early America. This article revisits a "lost" museum once situated at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. Here Ezra Stiles and other eighteenth-century collegiate affiliates assembled a wide-ranging collection of objects, including Indigenous items from local and more distant communities. The museum sheds light on an early instance of using materiality for knowledge formation and history making in Anglo-American colonial settings, a project that departed in signal ways from the logic and goals of both European Wunderkammern and later American museums. Despite its significance, this early collection is scarcely known today, and the whereabouts of its contents—including sensitive Indigenous heritage objects—are uncertain. Using interdisciplinary, decolonizing historical methodologies, this article appraises how such sites can be used to convey multivocal histories of Indigenous entanglements with evolving forms of settler colonialism and to better recognize tribal communities' long-standing practices of material interpretation and caretaking.