JOSEPH ZORDAN: What we have here are two miniature busts made of marble. I almost can’t help but think of them in my hands. Between the hide and the fur and the feather and hair and skin, there’s just so many different ways that the marble itself feels more human, more embodied.

NARRATOR: Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor of Black and Indigenous heritage, made these busts around the age of 24. She sold them out of her studio in Rome, where she launched her career among other American artists in the years after the Civil War.

“The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” she declared.

JOSEPH ZORDAN: Everyone must make a living, and Lewis did so by producing works for tourists on the Grand Tour in Europe.

NARRATOR: Joseph Zordan, a PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and member of the Bad River Ojibwe.

JOSEPH ZORDAN: These works would have had a major draw to American tourists, because of who they're representing, Hiawatha and Minnehaha from Longfellow's epic poem published in 1855.

The noble savage as a stereotypical form arises, this idea of Indigenous peoples as particularly stoic and with a highly idealized sense of self or purpose and meaning.

These kinds of figures quickly became adapted into American nationalism and American culture.

NARRATOR: The stereotype didn't start with Lewis's busts. But she’s knowingly participating in it.

JOSEPH ZORDAN: She just happens to be an Indigenous person who is taking advantage of that to make a living, to make a life.