Unfair Labor?
Unfair Labor? is the first book to explore the economic impact of Native Americans who participated in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. By the late nineteenth century, tribal economic systems across the Americas were decimated, and tribal members were desperate to find ways to support their families and control their own labor. As U.S. federal policies stymied economic development in tribal communities, individual Indians found creative new ways to make a living by participating in the cash economy. Before and during the exposition, American Indians played an astonishingly broad role in both the creation and the collection of materials for the fair, and in a variety of jobs on and off the fairgrounds.
While anthropologists portrayed Indians as a remembrance of the past, the hundreds of Native Americans who participated were carving out new economic pathways. Once the fair opened, Indians from tribes across the United States, as well as other indigenous people, flocked to Chicago. Although they were brought in to serve as displays to fairgoers, they had other motives as well. Once in Chicago they worked to exploit circumstances to their best advantage. Some succeeded; others did not.
Unfair Labor? breaks new ground by telling the stories of individual laborers at the fair, uncovering the roles that Indians played in the changing economic conditions of tribal peoples, and redefining their place in the American socioeconomic landscape.
Praise for Unfair Labor?
“Unfair Labor is the most thorough analysis we have of Native Americans’ involvement with the 1893 fair.”—Robert Rydell, Journal of Arizona History
“Beck details the ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that Indigenous people brought to Chicago—and took home—in the 1890s.”—Katrina Phillips (Red Cliff Ojibwe), Western Historical Quarterly
“David Beck remains a major scholar in the field of twentieth-century Native American history and Indigenous urbanity. Unfair Labor? is an excellent addition to his remarkable body of work. The book captures how Beck continues to influence and trend with studies that emphasize Native labor and urbanity as critically important categories of analysis, especially in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”—Douglas K. Miller, Reviews in American History
“Unfair Labor? is a scrupulously researched and stimulating contribution to both Native American and American labor history.”—Robert Jarvenpa, Journal of American History
“Scholars of expositions, including Chicago’s, have long bemoaned the difficulty of penetrating the thick hegemonic screen of (mostly white male) investors, sponsors, administrators, and publicists in order to discern the voices of marginalized groups – minorities, workers, women, everyday visitors, and folks on display. Accepting the challenge, Beck has given us a master class in historical research and interpretation. Drawing on an impressive array of previously unseen sources – newspapers, personal papers and diaries, official business records, fieldwork notes, and more – he has assembled a picture of Indian-White relations that, while notably unequal, nonetheless display Native American agency and determination in numerous directions. He has the numbers, too.”—Curtis M. Hinsley, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
“This is a fascinating account that adds an important and little-researched perspective on both Native American and labor history…. [It] is an important and deeply researched contribution and recommended reading for social and labor historians as well as those in Native history.”—Julia Guard, Great Plains Research
“[T]his is a compelling well-researched monograph that deftly illustrates how Indigenous peoples’ participation in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was complex, contested, and a means to participate in the modernizing world as a contemporary people, despite the preset narratives created by the white fair organizers and spectators. UnFair Labor is a must-read for anyone wanting a nuanced study of Indigenous participation in the cash economy through cultural production.”—Karl Hele, Anishinabek News
“Beck’s study is an entry in the burgeoning field of Native labor history, as well as a new perspective on the much-studied 1893 Chicago fair. Unfair Labor? shows that the story of Indians at the 1893 Expo was complex, dynamic, and often deeply personal.” — Stephen Hausmann, New Books Network
“Historian David Beck has made a huge shift in the literature on world’s fairs in recognizing that Indigenous people were there, negotiating pay, travel, and the nature of their labor…. Beck contextualizes the fairs in an arc of Native history rather than one of representation.”—Liza Black, in Picturing Indians
“Beck, a seasoned historian with a reputation for lucid prose, is modeling (particularly in the appendix but throughout the book as well) a scholarly generosity that tacitly acknowledges how historical knowledge is built, distributed, absorbed, and remade.”—Meredith Conti, Theatre History Studies
“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.”—Paige Raibmon, Native American and Indigenous Studies
“There is no other in-depth study of the Native Americans in this significant fair, and some labor historians will welcome the consideration of the commodification of labor in these tribes and its limits. It is a fresh way of thinking about this moment.”—Rosemary Feurer, Nebraska History
“Beck creatively extracts American Indian participation in the fair from the letters of Putnam and other ethnologists to paint a picture of the market economy on the reservations and Canadian reserves.”—Thomas J. Lappas, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
“Beck’s history convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous workers understood their market value and were ready to defend themselves against abusive and unethical employers. His discussion of labor activism among Native fair workers offers an especially compelling case study of this Native resistance.” — Lisa E. Emmerich, Labor: Studies in Working Class History
“Unfair Labor? offers a significant new exploration of American Indian people in primitivist performance, seen through the physical toil of collection, commodity production, travel, and wage labor. In this well-researched volume, Dave Beck makes a critical contribution to the emergent literature on Native labor, globalization, and the new histories of capitalism, while always centering indigenous people’s efforts to survive, adapt, and thrive.”—Philip J. Deloria, professor of history at Harvard University and author of Indians in Unexpected Places
“David Beck’s rigorously researched and engagingly written book is a long-awaited examination of Native American participation in the 1893 World’s Fair. . . . Unfair Labor? is a fascinating and deeply illuminating analysis of Indigenous labor at the World’s Fair, and makes a superb contribution to our understanding of Native life in the late nineteenth century.”—Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums