Souvenirs from North America: Understanding and representing ‘Indianness’ in nineteenth-century Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Swedish museums curate numerous objects made by indigenous peoples of North America. Collected already in the seventeenth century, their numbers increased in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While some of them were collected systematically by scientific expeditions, majority of these objects were obtained as personal mementoes. Scrutinizing examples of North American souvenirs collected in the early nineteenth century by Swedes visiting America and donated to the Lund University Historical Museum, this article explores souvenirs as a particular category of representational objects. It relates them to the early nineteenth-century popular notions of the American Indian stemming from the popular literature and investigates how these two tools of representation informed one another to create and perpetuate a stereotype of Indianness.