Fawn Hoof was displayed, then sold, then exhibited in Lexington, then examined by the American Antiquarian Society in Washington, D.C.

The display of human remains and associated cultural materials was not questioned as a practice.

It was the standard response of the period.

The early nineteenth century understanding of Indigenous peoples in North America was shaped by the same colonial frameworks that drove the displacement and dispossession of those peoples.

The ancient mummies and the ancient artifacts found in Mammoth Cave were treated as evidence of a vanished or vanishing race — interesting for what they could reveal about the past, not as the ancestors of living peoples with standing to determine what happened to their relatives’ remains and belongings.

This attitude persisted well into the twentieth century.