Brown peoples in boxes

We were in New York in December and while there, we visited the American Museum of Natural History. I love natural history museums...those huge bone-sets of dinosaurs and mammoths, whales precariously hanging from ceilings, elk and egrets staring at you with glassy eyes that betray no hint of resentment. Takes me back to my days as a little kid, wandering the halls of Bombay's natural history museum, spotting Great Indian Bustards and White Rhinos. Imagine my utter dismay, then, as I saunter through the Museum in New York, walk past the gallery with the orangutans and the lemurs, and find myself confronted by a semi-naked brown man blowing darts at an unseen victim. I had never before seen a fellow brown man in a glass box, and needless to say, though he was made of wax, the effect was jarring. It did not stop with the semi-naked man blowing darts. The Museum is apparently full of glass boxes with brown peoples of all shades in them--South American, Polynesians, East Asians, South Asians, Africans, Arabs, Plains Indians, Coastal Indians. Where, I wondered, have all the white folks gone?! There is something profoundly disturbing about seeing a flock of curious ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed kids gather around a glass box with a brown person in it. Some colonized, brown core of me balks, my inner knee buckles. Surely, if peoples of other lands and cultures were interesting enough to put in a Natural History museum, then why not throw in some Bohemians, some Teutons, some Gauls. I'd have loved to see a diorama of a smoky Parisian cafe (with a label about how with the recent smoking ban, this little scene would soon be extinct)? Or a snapshot of the running of the Bulls in Pampalona? A scene from Oktoberfest? A few Vikings thrown in for good measure? Nope...none of that. Only brown folks. I could have accepted prehistoric brown peoples, but there were exhibits from the not very distant past and the 20th century-- a diorama of Samakhand complete with Persian carpets and hookahs, or the box with the Mongolian yurt, for instance. What we're seeing here is the classic association of the non-"Western" with nature and with the past. The brown person, placed in a glass box flanked by Mammoths and Orangutans.