Delia Akeley and Osa Johnson’s Early 20th Century Ecomedia and Colonial Extraction
My childhood volume About Animals, with its well-worn page on platypuses, and my fascination with cuttlefish because of a PBS Nova episode are both indirect products of the ecomedia Delia Akeley and Osa Johnson made. Delia was perhaps the first woman to work on museum habitat dioramas and the first woman to lead a museum expedition. Osa was a pioneering expedition filmmaker whose work laid the foundation upon which the nature documentary genre continues to build. These expeditioners shaped popular animal narratives in the early 20th century, and their influence can still be seen in museums and wildlife media.
Ecomedia is media entangled with environmental issues, both in depictions and in impact. Through their ecomedia, Delia and Osa shaped public understanding of animals and Indigenous communities, and the impact of such colonial science persists a century after their expeditions. Recovering Delia and Osa’s work highlights women’s contributions to museum animal displays and to animal documentaries. But that recovery also necessitates ecocritical analysis, holding them both accountable for the racism and speciesism inherent in the expeditionary colonial science that they perpetuated in their ecomedia.
Delia’s habitat diorama work, expeditions, and writing are problematic Western narratives of relationships among humans and with nonhumans. A teenage runaway who married young, Delia (1869-1970) met Carl Akeley in her teens through her first husband and began assisting with Carl’s pioneering habitat dioramas. Carl is often considered the innovator of modern museum dioramas, creating life-like animal habitats with clay sculpting and detailed ecosystems. Delia gathered leaves, made molds, photographed environments, and created thousands of wax leaves individually for the Four Seasons of the Deer diorama, one of the early Field Museum acquisitions. She also worked with Carl for years to collect animal specimens for the Field and for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. Perhaps her most prominent contribution is the Fighting African Elephants display—she killed the larger of the two elephants—in the Field Museum’s Stanley Field Hall, where every visitor enters.
Delia Akeley standing between two elephant tusks in the Mount Kenya Region in Africa. Photo from The American Museum Journal, 1915 (Wikimedia Commons)
Beyond the fact that the Akeleys’ work is still revered and emulated, the display has given untold numbers of visitors an experience with life-like animals. The Field Museum has millions of visitors each year and has drawn crowds for over a hundred years. Generations of school groups have seen the African elephants, the Four Seasons dioramas, and other animals they may never see in the wild, so such dioramas shape our understanding of nonhuman animals, for better or for worse. Delia’s role in that is both impressive and problematic. Killing endangered animals to preserve them for scientific and educational purposes prioritizes human knowledge over the animal subjects. It is hard to look at dioramas of endangered or extinct animals without being fascinated and horrified.
That fascination and horror are also true of her solo expeditions in which she both broke from gendered stereotypes and perpetuated colonialist narratives. After divorcing Carl, she was the first woman to lead a museum-funded expedition, traveling across the African continent collecting specimens and writing. Her intent was also to live among the Indigenous tribes, essentially making specimens of them. Detailing living with a community in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Delia writes in her 1930 book Jungle Portraits, “I honestly tried to view the natives … as naturally as I viewed the specimens I was collecting.”
But she also wrote of the difficulty of that approach as she integrated into the communities. No matter the reverence in their generosity and the empathy for their struggles she exhibits in certain passages, her tone is patronizing, writing, “We may … rob them of their freedom and force civilization upon them, … but we will never wholly understand them … they are they and we are we, and no human effort … can change that biological fact.” While she seems to lament colonial intrusion at some points, she also participates in buttressing the ideologies inherent in it.
“If we are to recognize Delia and Osa’s lasting contributions to popular animal science and the ways they broke gendered stereotypes, we also have to hold them accountable for their part in the lasting impacts of colonial science, making both humans and nonhumans extractable capital.”
Osa Johnson (1894-1953) and her work equally impacted American narratives of other cultures and nonhuman animals. Her 1940 book I Married Adventure was the top nonfiction bestseller that same year, according to Pascal James Imperato and Eleanor M. Imperator, and her 1939 book Osa Johnson’s Jungle Friends and its accompanying stuffed animal line sold well, winning toy awards and accolades from the National Wildlife Federation. Likewise, with scenes of extended close ups of animals in their habitats, Osa’s wildlife films, made with her husband Martin, served as examples for later conservation films. Osa’s work set her up as an authority on popular science for American audiences. She played a significant role in creating narratives of human and nonhuman relationships—cuddly toys, hunted objects, and sensational beasts.
Most striking about the films, though, are the staged and real colonial violence. Both the Johnsons’ early ethnographies and their animal documentaries include staged scenes that conflate people of color and nonhuman animals as colonial objects for visual and physical extraction. The 1929 film Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson focuses largely on biological and cultural differences in the various communities they visited in Australia, Hawaii, the Belgian Congo, and the South Pacific—dramatizing staged cannibalism and shrunken heads. In the 1937 Borneo, the narrator talks about the laziness of the Indigenous community members as they build the Johnson’s camp house: Osa “managing” while comedic music plays, and one subject is staged leisurely picking up sticks with his toes while watching over his shoulder for Osa. These films are stomach-turning in their overtly racist depictions and in their violence.
That same colonial visual extraction applies to the nonhuman animal subjects of the Johnsons’ films, which they treated as colonial objects for physical extraction. At the end of Across the World with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, they seem to stage a lion stalking them and film the kill (we know they staged other scenes, keeping a sort of expedition studio for some of their films to capture contrived scenes of the wild). The scene is difficult to watch today, as is the climax of Borneo—a violent capture via starvation and tear-gas of an orangutan, one of over a dozen orangutans the Johnsons captured for sale. They also sold other animals. Baby elephant Toto Tembo died shortly after the Johnsons sold him to the St. Louis Zoo. And two male gorillas, Mbongo and Ngagi, they sold to the San Diego Zoo drew scientists “from around the world to observe their behavior.” Like so many historical figures in museum expeditions and zoo acquisitions the question remains of how to recognize the value of their contributions and still hold them accountable for the harm done.
Martin (left) and Osa Johnson (right) with their camera (Flickr | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Both Delia and Osa defied gender norms of their eras and contributed to popular science ecomedia in ways that continue to shape museum dioramas and nature films. Museums are set up the way we know them, with habitat dioramas and gift shops full of stuffed animals, because of the work of Delia and Osa. The wildlife shows I used to watch, such as Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Wild America, clearly utilize some of the same overhead videos of herds from an airplane and close ups of stalking predators that the Johnsons pioneered. Despite some lasting contributions to such ecomedia, they also left a legacy of extraction and environmental racism that we must contend with.
Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams propose an ecological justice that “involves attention to the historically pernicious relations of humans to the planet and the corollary, intersecting exploitation of ethnic and racial difference,” asserting, “We must at once preserve and rewrite the knowledge of our past, present, and future relations.” If we are to recognize Delia and Osa’s lasting contributions to popular animal science and the ways they broke gendered stereotypes, we also must hold them accountable for their part in the lasting impacts of colonial science, making both humans and nonhumans extractable capital. They deserve more scrutiny in the 21st century during the Sixth Extinction and continued environmental racism. Not enough has changed in a hundred years.
Image credit: Tsavo Maneaters display at the Field Museum in Chicago. Photo from the Annual report of the Director to the Board of Trustees for the year 1925 (Internet Archive Book Images, Flickr)
