Framework
Our interest in the topic of “Pacific America” draws inspiration from the burgeoning scholarship in indigenous studies, especially that which is challenging traditional thinking about trade, exchange, collecting and display. While the “Pacific turn” in recent scholarship on the early modern period has been a productive one, we find that indigenous histories—especially for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—remain under-studied. Moreover, each region of the Pacific coast has its own strong historical literature, yet it is still (too) rare for scholars of these geographies to work collaboratively, especially in the context of an “American” frame. Our project therefore asks how scholarship focused on Alaska or Hawai’i might inflect that of California and vice versa: are there productive ways that debates about the objects Captain Cook collected, religious art created on California missions, or the development of Tlingit trade objects can engage each other and, as well, histories of early American art writ large? No less importantly, the period from 1750-1850 overlaps with a crucial period of nation-building in the United States, one shaped by global trading ambitions. Collecting from–and across—the Pacific world resonates through early American history, but indigenous art of this period and region still tends to play too peripheral a role in our art histories.
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How does the history of American art shift if indigenous art from the Pacific world is seen as foundational rather than marginal, and what are the intellectual stakes in advocating such a shift,— for indigenous communities, for historians of early America, for scholars of global history, and or for museum curators?
How can the increasingly robust scholarship of indigenous studies re-focus interpretive work on Pacific America, and, especially, challenge traditional interests in exoticism and luxury, commodity and extraction?
How can the writings, images, and circulation of people across the Pacific Ocean and along Pacific coasts—be their foreigners or indigenous—help us understand the new nation of the United States in terms of global history?