According to exhibition curator Associate Professor Stuart D. McKee, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British, French and American colonial agents traveled to Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and recorded what they experienced of the indigenous peoples there. They worked to disprove western prejudices by augmenting the western intellectual tradition, by encapsulating the native conceptions of cultivation and learning, to educate the West.
The volumes on display feature maps that illuminated native knowledge of geography; vocabularies and a dictionary that broadened Enlightenment notions of philology; and engravings that documented native society and culture in action.