‘This stuff speaks to me’: Settler materiality, identity and nationalism among collectors of Native American material culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the collection activities of Paul Dyck (1917–2016), a collector of Native North American Plains objects. Paul Dyck’s extensive archive is employed to explore networks of collectors and their practices, spanning the entirety of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Weaving ethnographic material conducted with private collectors and heirs alongside Dyck’s correspondence, Dyck’s activities are situated within the history of anthropological thought, a discourse on the nature of settler colonial practices of collection, and U.S. settler identity formation. The article draws on these insights to introduce settler materiality, a new theoretical term and definition with relevance for anthropologists, Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars, historians, and settlercolonial theorists interested in the way material culture functions in settler colonial societies.