“The Great White Mother”: Harriet Maxwell Converse, the Indian Colony of New York City, and the Media, 1885–1903

Abstract

Abstract This article reveals the history of the unstudied “Indian Colony” of Gilded Age New York City through the life of its founder and governor, Harriet Maxwell Converse. Converse was a white woman adopted by the Senecas and a salvage ethnographer, a potent combination of Indigenous “authenticity” and scholarly authority that made her an object of fascination to white New Yorkers who read about her in extensive newspaper coverage. The Colony itself was composed of boarding houses, Converse’s own townhouse-turned-museum, and was connected to the New York Police Department. It provided housing and support to resident and visiting Native Americans who found work in the city’s “Indian trade” and booming entertainment industry. By highlighting the extensive newspaper coverage of Converse and her Colony, this article reveals a hidden history of the Indigenous people who lived and worked in the city. It also pushes the periodization of the earliest urban Indian communities backward in time by more than a decade and shows how the media fused the daily life of Converse and the Colonists with popular stereotypes of “savage” and “vanished” Indians, immigrant stereotypes, assimilation, gendered expectations, and the predatory academic desires of museums and salvage ethnographers.