Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2025
Published In
Habsburg Encounters With Native America: Familiar Strangers
Abstract
This chapter concerns the Great Lakes Indigenous peoples whose artifacts may be found in the Vienna Weltmuseum. It situates these artifacts within the larger framework of exchange modalities among Indigenous peoples, together with the Leopoldine Society, an organization founded in Vienna in 1829 to minister to German-speaking Catholics in North America. To convey this framework, the chapter recalls Indigenous artifact collections of British officers active in the region, as well as the gift giving of Odawa leader Jean-Baptiste Assiginack. It also devotes close attention to Georg Schwarz, whose inventory of Indigenous artifacts remains the centerpiece of the North American collection in Vienna. In Assiginack and Schwarz, the issues of the chapter converge—the Habsburg turn to North America, the Leopoldine Society, and the complex overlays among the ambitions of Austrian traders, practices of Indigenous exchange, and the contemporary Weltmuseum collection.
Keywords
Jean-Baptiste Assiginack, Austrian-American relations, Frederic Baraga, Johann Georg Schwarz, Leopoldine Society, Odawa, Ojibwe, Pays d’en Haut, Weltmuseum
Published By
Central European University Press
Editor(s)
J. Singerton, M. Křížová, and Michael Burri
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Michael Burri.
(2025).
"Reencountering Trade Legacies, Indigenous Histories, And The Early Leopoldine Society Circle In The Vienna Weltmuseum".
Habsburg Encounters With Native America: Familiar Strangers.
181-204.
DOI: 10.1515/9789048571819-011
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-german/72
Comments
This work is freely available under a Creative Commons license.