From Sea to Shining Sea: Travelers, Tourists, and Tribal Sovereignty

What does it mean to be a traveler in the United States, whether voluntarily or involuntarily? What does it mean to be a tourist? How does tourism shape (or warp) our understanding of American history?

Historian Katrina Phillips explores these questions in the context of Native American history. Through her examinations of late 19th and early 20th-century tourism across the United States, Phillips argues that tourism, nostalgia, and history converge to form what she calls “salvage tourism”—a set of practices that documented the histories, languages, and cultures of Indigenous people while reinforcing a belief that Native American societies were inevitably disappearing.

Join scholars Katrina Phillips and Joseph Whitson in conversation as they draw on the interconnected themes of tourism, American expansion, and Native histories. Placing these themes within the history of the forced removal of Native nations from their homelands, Phillips and Whitson will explore what it means to move through spaces and places.

Katrina Phillips, an enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, is Assistant Professor of American Indian History at Macalester College and author of the new book, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History.

Joseph Whitson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Kaplan Institute on the Humanities at Northwestern University.

This event is part of programming for our exhibition Crossings: Mapping American Journeys, which will open at the Newberry on February 25, 2022.