Year of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

Anthropology (Cultural Heritage Option)

Department or School/College

Anthropology

Committee Chair

John Douglas

Commitee Members

Kelly Dixon, Wade Davies

Keywords

Fort Shaw, 1904 St Louis World Fair, Emma Sansaver, Emma's Dress, Basketball, Boarding school

Subject Categories

History | Museum Studies | Native American Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Women's History

Abstract

This thesis examines the life of Emma Sansaver’s beaded buckskin dress as both a material object and a cultural witness. Worn during her time at the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian Boarding School and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the dress intersects with assimilationist policy, Indigenous resilience, public spectacle, and personal memory. Unlike the regalia of her teammates, Emma’s dress was preserved, first by Emma herself, then by her descendants, and continues to be cared for and displayed in educational and institutional settings today.

Using the theoretical frameworks of Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff, this project approaches the dress through its shifting regimes of value and cultural biography. Its meaning and function have changed over time, moving from performance regalia to cherished heirlooms to museum artifacts, each stage marked by acts of preservation, reinterpretation, and reclassification. Through historic sources, family history, and conservation records, this study follows the dress’s path to ask what it has come to represent for Emma’s family and broader conversations around Indigenous history and material culture. Through the dress, this thesis foregrounds the ways in which objects can hold, carry, and transform meaning across generations. Emma’s Dress is not simply what remains; it is part of an ongoing relationship between people, place, and history. As both subject and storyteller, the dress offers insight into how survival, care, and identity continue to unfold through material forms.

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© Copyright 2025 Lauren I. StGeorge