Yet the Army Medical Museum collections of American Indian and African American bodies bring together two nineteenth-century topics usually studied separately: Reconstruction (and the South) and the Indian wars (and the West). The narrative of Reconstruction centers on issues freedom and the incorporation of non-white citizens into the body politic. In contrast, the narrative of the Indian Wars tells a story of conquest and the attempt to annihilate non-white peoples based on racist arguments of innate inferiority. These two national histories, however, did not occur in isolation, but tangibly intersected in the institution of the U.S. Army responsible for commanding both campaigns. The promise of racial inclusion was in direct and immediate dialog with the process of exclusion.
What is striking about the Army Medical Museum collections after the Civil War is that the curators collected American Indian and African American bodies in very different ways and for different purposes. A close reading of the Museum’s practices demonstrates race-making in action. In building a collection of “raced” and “non-raced” body parts, the Army Medical Museum endowed the nation with a race laboratory–a national archive—that survives to this day and that has served to frame several generations of different scientific and cultural practices
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