Archiving Indians/<span class='italic'>Indios</span> and Fabricating Whites

doi:10.1017/9781009314008.003

Chapter 1 - Archiving Indians/Indios and Fabricating Whites

Colonial Spanish-American “Antiquities” and Late Eighteenth-Century Elites in Philadelphia

from Part I - Transacting

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2025

Ruth Hill

Edited by

Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez and

Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela

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Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez: Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela: Affiliation:
King's College London

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Summary

White cultural elites in the US capital of Philadelphia in the 1780s and 1790s depicted Native Americans (or “Indians”) as vanishing peoples, soon to be replaced by Anglo culture. The fledgling nation’s premier naturalist Bejamin Smith Barton and the consecrated poet of the American Revolution Philip Freneau turned to Spanish American antiquarianism to invent a glorious antiquity for North America. They learned from Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticas Americanas (1772) and Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Storia Antica del Messico (1781) how to practice antiquarian materialism, then chose early Republican literary and scientific periodicals to disseminate their conquest of the Native American past. Those two americanistas in particular showed how to collect Indigenous artifacts, assemble them, and invest them with European meanings, which inspired the first generation of US Americanists to relegate Native American life to the dustbin of prehistory and at once fabricate their own Whiteness.

Keywords

Antiquarianism Americanists eighteenth century race Whiteness Indians Philadelphia Spanish America

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Type: Chapter
Information: Latinx Literature in Transition, 1444–1886 , pp. 27 - 54

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009314008.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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