The North’s Darkest Displays: When Humans Were Put on Exhibit

In 1893, more than 27 million people visited Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. On the Midway Plaisance, organizers contrasted the “civilization” of the White City with displays of supposedly more “primitive” cultures. Native people came to the fair not only as objects of that gaze but as workers, performers, vendors, and protesters. South Sámi performer Daniel Mortensson stood in that same exhibitionary world. For North American readers, that matters: this history was never only European. It unfolded on American ground, before American crowds, and helped teach a mass audience how to look at human difference.

That is one reason this subject remains so unsettling. The darkest part of these exhibitions was not only that people were displayed, but that the display itself trained viewers to rank human beings. What later generations often compress into the term “human zoo” belonged to a broader world of “living human exhibitions”: world’s fairs, zoos, circuses, amusement parks, and industrial expositions where people were arranged, interpreted, and sold to the public as knowledge, entertainment, or both.

This nuance matters especially in the North, where a flattering regional self-image has often softened the colonial edge of the story. Recent scholarship on “Nordic exceptionalism” argues that the region’s reputation for benevolence and equality has obscured a shared history of colonial complicity and ongoing coloniality toward Indigenous and minoritized peoples. Museum researchers writing about Sámi collections put it more plainly: the Sámi were caught up in what they explicitly describe as “Nordic colonialism,” and their culture was long collected and exhibited through exoticizing frames.

Denmark offers one of the clearest cases. Research indicates that more than fifty exhibitions of so-called exotic people took place in Denmark from the 1870s to the 1910s, several of them in Copenhagen Zoo, where constructed villages held men, women, and children performing curated versions of daily life for paying visitors. The 1905 Danish Colonial Exhibition in Tivoli, the only colonial exhibition held on Danish soil, displayed people and objects from Greenland, the Danish West Indies, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands as part of an effort to stage Denmark as a proper colonial power.

Its most painful symbol may be Victor Cornelins and Alberta Roberts, two children brought from St. Croix after organizers failed to secure enough adults for the West Indian section. Archive accounts say the children became a sensation. An enclosure was built to keep them from wandering, and Victor later called it a cage. When the exhibition ended, they were not returned home to St. Croix, but placed in an orphanage in Copenhagen. That one story contains nearly everything this history tries to hide: empire, spectacle, childhood, and the bureaucratic ease with which a public display could become a life-altering removal.

Even within Tivoli’s exhibition, empire sorted northern peoples differently. The Icelandic Student Association protested being displayed alongside Greenlanders and people from the Danish West Indies, whom the racial thinking of the time ranked below Icelanders and Danes. The result was a small but revealing change in the exhibition’s title: it shifted from an exhibition for Iceland and the Faroe Islands to one from them, signaling that some northern societies could claim the status of active cultural nations while others were cast as passive colonial material.

The Sámi story is more difficult still, which is exactly why it deserves care. Archaeologist Cathrine Baglo has documented roughly 400 Sámi participants in live exhibitions between 1822 and 1950. She argues that reducing this history to unilateral exploitation misses something essential. There were also wages, contracts, travel, hard choices, and debates among Sámi themselves over who had the right to represent Sámi life. Some participants used exhibition work to make a living; some learned languages and built experience from it; some were exploited when promises were broken. None of that makes the system innocent. It simply restores the people inside it to history as actors, not only as symbols.

Chicago sits at the center of that complexity. At the 1893 fair, a group of Southern Sámi negotiated a contract governing their work assignments, pay, travel expenses, and medical supervision for both people and animals. The agreement even included first-class hotel accommodation during the exhibition. Yet the same source notes that contracts were not always honored and that conditions could still fall short of what participants had been led to expect. Agency existed, but inside an unequal stage built by others.

Baglo also suggests that these fairs could become early Indigenous meeting grounds. She points to Daniel Mortensson standing beside Sioux performers in Chicago and sees such encounters as part of the background to later Sámi political awakening. North American scholarship on the fair reveals the same complexity from the other side: Native people came to Chicago to work, perform, sell goods, and protest; some Midway performers reported better treatment and higher pay than official exhibits, while Inuit performers protested abuse, were confined, escaped, and in some cases staged their own exhibit outside the fairgrounds. The fair was not a simple tableau of silent victims. It was a coercive system that still left room for refusal, maneuver, and survival.

The Baltic story also deserves more precision than it usually gets. The archival picture is uneven, but Latvia in particular was not merely adjacent to this history. Research from the University of Latvia states that present-day Latvian territory, then part of the Russian Empire, had hosted more than eighteen ethnographic and freak shows and anatomical exhibitions by the turn of the twentieth century. A related study argues that exotic shows in the Baltic provinces, especially in Riga, brought a form of entertainment invented by modern colonialism into a region that was itself shaped by imperial power. In other words, the Baltic world was not outside the spectacle; it had its own local stages for it.

Why does this matter now? Because the afterlife of spectacle does not end when the fairground closes. It survives in museum collections, school narratives, tourist imagery, and in the old belief that the North was somehow outside empire. That belief is being challenged from within. Berlin’s Museum Europäischer Kulturen says much of its Sámi collection was assembled in a colonial context and that Sámi culture was long framed as Europe’s exotic “other.” Today, the same museum is working with partner museums and communities from Sápmi to investigate provenance and reconnect objects with Sámi names and stories. In Finland, the National Museum describes the return of its Sámi collection to Sápmi as a significant act of repatriation. The goal is not to flatten the past into a morality play with tidy heroes and villains. It is to refuse the comfort of innocence, and to let the people once placed on display re-enter the story as subjects, not scenery.