Human Zoos

The display of humans to other humans has taken many forms over the ages, but surely there have been few as problematic, and often degrading, as the practice of displaying human beings in zoos. The image at left is from Carl Hagenbeck's Hamburg "Tierpark" (Animal Park), and shows a group of Labrador Inuit who appeared there in the fall of 1911. The group included Nancy Columbia, whom Arctic historian Kenn Harper has aptly described as the most famous Inuk of her day; she was actually born in an Eskimo display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and over the course of her career appeared at well over a dozen world's fairs and expositions from Seattle to St. Louis to Madrid and Paris.

Inuit, of course, were very far from the only indigenous peoples displayed in these venues: there were Samoans, "Igarottes," Native American "Indians," Zulu warriors from "Darkest Africa," and even villages of seemingly civilized folk ("The Streets of Cairo," "Japanese Village," and so forth). In perhaps the most disturbing iteration, an "Old Plantation" was populated with African-Americans portraying themselves as slaves. And, before the era of the great expositions, all manner of smaller shows, many of just a single individual, can be traced back to Elizabethan times.

Altick's subject is London, and it's the people displayed there that are at the center of his chapter. The cause célèbre of these was Sarah Baartman, who arrived in London in 1810 and was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Given the sobriquet the "Hottentot Venus," her appearance was both enormously popular but also controversial, even at the time. Similar exhibits of Africans displayed as "primitives" appeared throughout the Victorian era; one of them, a group of "Zulu Kafirs" shown at Hyde-Park Corner, is among the shows referenced by Dickens in his "The Noble Savage."

The other show that caught Dickens's attention was that of George Catlin who, in his efforts to sell his paintings of native American "Indians," engaged the services of a troupe of Ojibway who had been in England for an unrelated exhibition. He brought them to the Egyptian Hall, where they performed some of their native dances and rituals, while Catlin and his assistant answered questions from the audience. This was, in a way, a step up from Catlin's earlier events, which featured tableuax vivants of white people in "redface" makeup and feathered headbands.

These types of exhibits gradually declined in number and popularity in the early twentieth century, as many nations began to ban the exploitation of their indigenous people for such purposes, Nancy Columbia, the star of her "Eskimo" troupe, enjoyed a brief career in Hollywood films, including 1911's "The Way of the Eskimo," which credited her as its screenwriter. She left show business in 1920, and lived quietly in Santa Monica, where she died in 1959.