About the Project

The Natural Face of North America, a public web portal to the Maximilian-Bodmer collection, is the result of a collaboration between three institutions: Creighton University, Joslyn Art Museum, and the Nebraska Indian Community College. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the portal intends to increase access, exposure, and interpretation of the most significant archive of German prince Maximilian zu Wied and Swiss artist Karl Bodmer’s expedition along the Missouri River in 1832-34.

The Natural Face of North America brings Maximilian’s travel journals to a fully-integrated, searchable platform offering multiple entry points into text and image. It centers Indigenous territories, circulations, and languages, linking them to Bodmer’s watercolors and a map of the trip. This multi-layered approach aims to facilitate new understandings of the Native peoples and landscapes of the Great Plains at a crucial historical point for Indigenous land sovereignty.

The portal’s content is the product of consultations with members of tribal nations to ensure its accuracy. Indigenous advisors have developed a curriculum to provide K-12 students a body of knowledge about nineteenth-century Plains Indigenous life as represented in the collection. Five scholarly essays delve into critical aspects of the collection, including Indigenous representation. Finally, users can follow the expedition using a georeferenced map, engage with multimedia content featuring Native elders and cultural leaders discussing the material, and native language speakers recording key vocabulary. The latter is part of an ongoing project in collaboration with multiple tribal cultural language preservation initiatives.

The portal makes use of the NEH-funded transcription and translation of Maximilian’s three journal volumes, printed by the University of Oklahoma Press between 2008 and 2012. Bodmer images reflect 2019 conservation efforts completed by the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) in Philadelphia under the direction of Joslyn Art Museum. The entire collection was photographed with a high-resolution camera for digital preservation and website use.

Financial support for The Natural Face of North America has come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Nebraska, the College of Arts and Sciences at Creighton University, and Joslyn Art Museum.

The Maximilian-Bodmer collection is preserved at the Joslyn’s Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies, on the traditional homelands of the Umoⁿhoⁿ people, currently known as the city of Omaha. We thank the Umoⁿhoⁿ people for serving as hosts and fellow stewards of the collection and the land it is housed on.