One photo captures a building designed to look like an iceberg. A two-story structure made from logs is beneath the fake ice. At the top of the building stands a sign that reads "ESKIMO." Below it is the main entrance, in front of which stand "real" Eskimos, "real" dogs, and "real" dogsleds. This is Pay Streak, the amusement section of the otherwise very serious Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle in 1909. Millions of people came here to celebrate the past (the gold rush that transformed Seattle from a tiny town to the center of the Pacific Northwest) and the future (the trade in the Pacific Rim). A poster of the image, whose photographer is unknown, hangs in the Burke Museum's politically charged exhibit Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Indigenous Voices Reply.

This is the exhibit's mission: to generate sparks from a confrontation between living Native Americans and historical representations of their culture, which was coded as uncivilized or barbaric. But these sparks are weak and throw little light on this unhappy area of our history. It's not that the art by the living Native Americans is bad—separated from the show, each of these photographs, sculptures, and installations could easily exert a strong impression. But in this context, the context of a reply to or confrontation with the past, their force is reduced by something in the old photographs that is as deep as it is troubling. These old photographs are no longer just about white people who wrongly/arrogantly see themselves as civilized and others as uncivilized. That is just the surface of something stranger and harder to grasp.

This is the surface of the old pictures: The year of the exposition, 1909, is still in the 19th century (which ends with the start of World War I). European and North American faith in progress has yet to be broken. Western culture thinks of itself as the cutting edge of a universal project to make the earth a better place for human life. These assumptions dominate the exposition—particularly Pay Streak, which has an international flavor: Chinese Village, Street of Tokio, belly dancers, and "Hindoo" amusements.

This is beneath that surface: In the picture of a group of Igorot people dancing and drumming on a stage in the Igorrote Village—one of the most profitable attractions of Pay Streak—we see a crowd of fully dressed Americans staring at the half-naked dancers from the Philippines. (The photo, at left, was taken by Frank H. Nowell.) But the barbarians are not innocent. This is their job, to re-create the simple traditions of a culture that has already been commodified. What the people of today see in the picture is not the barbarism of the dancers but the glaring (indeed embarrassing) barbarism of the audience. These brutes lack our developed or refined sense of political prudence and cultural caution. We of today would not be so easily open about our status and position in the world. Because the arrogance and smugness of the people in the picture is so apparent, so exposed, they are more naked than the half-naked men and women on the stage. Those on the stage are performing and aware of this fact, whereas the Americans are not ("Barbaric Dress Causes Flurry on Streets in University District," reads a headline from the Seattle Daily Times). This makes the Americans (who see the performance as real) the ignorant savages.

In photo after photo of this exhibit, the primitive shifts from the object of the gaze to the gaze itself. And here is the troubling part: What exactly is our position, we who relocate the primitive or barbaric in these pictures? Are we not making the same mistake as the European Americans in the image, gawking at brutes? We look at our ancestors the same way they looked at the belly dancers, or the Eskimos, or the "Hindoos."

The Americans in the picture are savages to us because they foolishly think they are better or higher than the performers. This situation, however, is not good. It can only mean one thing for us: We (those who gaze at the gaze that has the other as its object) are doomed to be the next barbarians. Meaning, in the future, this exhibit will be the new locus of shame. When will it end, this progress of the primitive?