This article reveals the history of the unstudied “Indian Colony” of Gilded Age New York City through the life of its founder and governor, Harriet Maxwell Converse. Converse was a white woman adopted by the Senecas and a salvage ethnographer, a potent combination of Indigenous “authenticity” and scholarly authority that made her an object of fascination to white New Yorkers who read about her in extensive newspaper coverage. The Colony itself was composed of boarding houses, Converse’s own townhouse-turned-museum, and was connected to the New York Police Department. It provided housing and support to resident and visiting Native Americans who found work in the city’s “Indian trade” and booming entertainment industry.

By highlighting the extensive newspaper coverage of Converse and her Colony, this article reveals a hidden history of the Indigenous people who lived and worked in the city. It also pushes the periodization of the earliest urban Indian communities backward in time by more than a decade and shows how the media fused the daily life of Converse and the Colonists with popular stereotypes of “savage” and “vanished” Indians, immigrant stereotypes, assimilation, gendered expectations, and the predatory academic desires of museums and salvage ethnographers.

本文通过其创始人兼州长 Harriet Maxwell Converse 的生平揭示了镀金时代纽约市未经研究的“印度殖民地”的历史。Converse 是一位被塞内卡斯家族收养的白人女性，也是一名救助民族志学家，她是土著“真实性”和学术权威的有力结合，这使她成为纽约白人的着迷对象，他们在广泛的报纸报道中读到她。殖民地本身由寄宿公寓、匡威自己的联排别墅改造成博物馆组成，并与纽约警察局相连。它为在该市的“印度贸易”和蓬勃发展的娱乐业找到工作的居民和来访的美洲原住民提供住房和支持。

通过突出报纸对匡威及其殖民地的广泛报道，这篇文章揭示了在这座城市生活和工作的土著人的隐藏历史。它还将最早的印度城市社区的分期推后了十多年，并展示了媒体如何将匡威和殖民者的日常生活与流行的“野蛮”和“消失”印度人的刻板印象、移民的刻板印象、同化，性别期望，以及博物馆和救助民族志学家掠夺性的学术欲望。