he Paya Indians, Baer had seen "-or at least he thought he had seen," notes Marsh-
the first white
Scope of Course
Indians of tha
t expedition. With the aid of a friendly chief, Baer
had been taken to
Course Overview
a small house in the jungle beyond the village; As he entered, a frightened young girl, the only occupant, rushed out of the house into the jungle. She wore only a loin cloth. Her entire body and long hair had been dyed a very dark blue, almost black, but her eyes were decidely blue, and the skin around her eyes and on other parts of the body where it had escaped the dyeing process was distinctly white. The arrival of a number of angry Paya Indians prevented Baer from making any furt
- her search for the girl, an
- d he was not permitted to return to the is
- olated house. I had no doubt [writes Marsh] that the girl was a yo
- ung white Indian. Baer's vision was a desperate one. On account o
- f his illness he had had to plead with Marsh to c
- ontinue with the expedition, stating that "this
- was the greatest scientific opportunity of his
- life. If he was the first accredited anthropolog
- ist to study the white Indians, it would be the makin
g of his career
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had already sp
ent time weighing the bodies, brains, and other organs of monkeys they had found. (134) A new species of small white frog had been discovered by Breder, the naturalist from the American Museum of Natural History, and Baer's excitement had been further aroused by his own measurements of around 100 " Chocois" Indians for their "Cephalic Index," and his discovery that the hair of a great many of the children was decidedly light brown. Doubting the endurance of this obese man, who was in poor physical condition, Marsh had only accepted him to begin with because he wanted the Smithsonian represented, together wi
th its guarantee of scientifi
c authority. But no doubt the
n needed Marsh, too, with his promise of authentic t
ropicana nicely packaged in mysterious overlays of sex and color, mimesis and alterity. The iconographic framing
of Marsh'
- s book evokes just this intimacy, a transcendent need to merge science with the unknown as woman. The long dedication in its opening pages laments the deat
- h of Professor Baer, "Anthropologist and Ethnologist of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C.," while opposi
te the title
page is a full-page frontispiece of a young woman with a crown of feathers, captioned just as reproduced here. It is as if this woman will resurrect Baer, if not
white science itself, wh
- ich died taking her measure. There is every reason to conclude that this use of woman to figure the white Indians is part of a more encompassing urge by which the aura of Indianness per se can be most meaningfully figured by white Indian wom
- A screen suitable for viewing at any angle by the entire class.
- en. Where whiteness is unavailable, the
- text nevertheless provides hallucinatory encounters with "ordinary" Cuna women, alb
New Mexico Tech and TEEX Contributions
eit "lightskinned," as in the following episode wh
- en Marsh awoke in what
- had been an unoccupied house to find a wo
- man looking down at him. She was a beautiful young woma
- n, with a splendid figure and the very light olive skin typical of so many of the mountain Cunas. She had
done me the honor of treating me as a familiar house guest, not as a stranger. That is, in accordance with Tule [Cuna] woman's custom within the confines of her own house, she had taken off her long skirt and appl
iqued blouse and was dressed like the Chocoi women in merely a short loin cl
