Captured on plates or behind glass exotic people are on show this week, around Cambridge and Boston.

Other Peoples, Other Cultures, opening May 20 through June at the Carpenter Center.

Purportedly an anthropological exhibit, this is really a zoo. The assorted and rather unsorted tribesmen parade impressively among the objects of their daily life; strange, colorful, and unexplained. An exhibit likely to leave the average Caucasian fascinated, but with only a facile understanding of these other worlds.

America's own rare feathered inhabitants populate Boston galleries. The auction of E.S. Curtis's photographs of American Indians, at Sotheby Parke-Bennett in New York, demonstrated what expensive collector's items these sepia portraits of a vanished Indian have become. Boston galleries who bagged one or two of these trophies have made the pictures the core of exhibits.

The American Indian, Panoptican Gallery, 69 Newbury St. through May 27.

Curtis, Haynes, Rinehart, and other enthusiasts.

The North American Indian, Kiva Gallery 231 Newbury St.

More and better Curtis.

F.J. Haynes, opening May 27 at Enjay Gallery, 35 Landsdowne St. through June 19.

Photographs from the "Chester A. Arthur Presidential Album"; white man's view of Indianland reclaimed. Arthur and the White House get in the act, too, unfortunately.

There is a certain irony in this final exploitation of the American Indian and his pride--making him into Art. But these photographs force the viewer to respect and admire these dead; perhaps they are also some posthumous Indian victory.

Some living (and losing) minorities on exhibit:

Hamilton Smith, at the Museum of Afro-American History, 90 Warren St. Roxbury. Through July 9.

Blacks of Boston (and the lower middle-class, yet) made beautiful, photogenic, in Smith's turn-of-the-century pictures.

Women of Photography at Wellesley Art Gallery through May 30.

Women worth seeing.