The Early Years of Native American Art HistoryThe field of Native American art history, and our idea of whatcomprises Indian art itself, were molded largely by the policies of themuseums and institutions that established their ethnologicalcollections in the second half of the nineteenth century. Objects housed in the great natural history museums collected andseen first as natural history specimens and later as 'primitiveart' have long been considered to be normative Native Americanart, rather