false faces in the mirror

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© M. Clara Núñez-Regueiro

FALSE FACES IN THE MIRROR: AMERICAN INDIAN PHOTOGRAPHS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN LATE XIX AND EARLY XX CENTURY

Key Words: INDIAN, PHOTOGRAPHS, XIX-CENTURY-IDENTITY

Clara Núñez-Regueiro False Faces in the Mirror of 28

False Faces In The Mirror: American Indian Photographs And National Identity In Late

Xix And Early Xx Century

… Indians and Whites are false faces peering into a mirror,

each reflecting on the other.

-Jean-Jackes Simard, White Ghosts1

This work looks at photography‟s role in America‟s nation-building project between

1886 and 1907. It argues that the United States government and an aspiring middle class created

mental images of American Indians along racial lines, which enabled the formation and

reinforcement of a national identity, that simultaneously served to advance the United States‟

economic and expansionist interests.2 This understanding is important because in spite of

rhetorical transformations, similar conceptions continue to inform Indo-European relations,

policy making, and mainstream historical and cultural research in America today.

My examination attempts to create what bell hooks calls a “counter-memory,” which

problematizes the analytical model that presupposes racial constructs as black/white

dichotomies, by bringing red into the analysis. My selection looks at ways in which, following

the popularization of photography, the concepts of white and red influenced collective identity in

the United States, thus legitimizing imperial expansion policies.3 Borrowing Shawn M. Smith‟s

definitions, I analyze the archivist function of the American nation-state in these still formative

decades. I explore two complementary divisions of this photographic collection, and attempt to

reorganize the archive.4

First, photographers, reformers, and political planners utilized images of American

Indians -who performed their own indianness for the camera, - in order to fabricate a mythology

of the agricultural west and of the imminent extinction of the noble savages. Alongside this

collection, scientists, photographers, and the U.S. army recorded and compiled proof of ethnic

difference and U.S. power. Racial constructs were indispensable for the U.S. government‟s

legitimation of a physical and cultural genocidal campaign. The myth of a vanishing race was a

result of, and a means for, this empire-building work.

1 Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans 1880-1930 (New

York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 3. First published in 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow‟s lengthy epic poem The

Song of Hiawatha, became very popular in the mid and late nineteenth century. The poem describes a noble and

extinguishing race of Indians. Entrepreneurs hired American Natives to perform spectacles of indianness for non-

Indian audiences. Hiawatha was not the mythical personage of Longfellow‟s poem, however. He was the founding

father of the Iraquoi League. He was an Onondaga chieftain who lost his daughters to a neighboring tribe. Custom

required that he soothe the spirits of the departed through vengeance, which is why his daughters had been killed in

the first place. Instead, demonstrating his diplomatic abilities Hiawatha chose to befriend the man who was

presumably guilty for the deaths. He wanted to create a new world of peace and break the cycle of violence.

Archaeological evidence estimates the Iroquois League formed around 1450. By the time Europeans arrived in the

Chesapeake Bay, the League had consolidated six nations that comprised the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondangas and

Senecas into one longhouse. Some scholars believe that the Iroquois League‟s law system, intertribal unity and tribal

autonomy, served Thomas Jefferson as a model for the U.S. Constitution. Collin Calloway, The American

Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), 44-8. 2 Depending on the context, this paper uses the words image and figure to signify, alternatively, a visual

form or a mental concept. 3 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 167.

4 This division into 2 categories is merely an analytical tool. It would be interesting to compare conclusions

from alternative partitions.


Many History and American Studies scholars have studied the intersection that gathers

cultural texts, a supremacist historical discourse, and the governmental usurpation of Indian

lands and natural resources.5 Photography was instrumental for fixing this image in the minds of

non-Indian Americans because it provided what visual culture scholars Roland Barthes, Walter

Benjamin, and Geoffrey Batchen, identify as a unique jumble of past and present; synchronic

death and eternal life.

Western notions about Amerindian peoples have altered since the first Indo-European

contact in the fifteenth-century.6 This paper, however, focuses on an iconography of indianness

which began to develop after the popularization of the daguerreotype, and coincided with

aggressive expansionist policies and national consolidation.

I have separated this examination into four thematic sections. First, Consolidating

Identities places the affirmation of a national character into a historical framework. Secondly,

Looking into the Mirror: Race, Science, and Photography, examines this rhetoric and looks at

how photography influenced the practice of ethnic stereotyping. Vanishing into the Landscape

examines the fictional image of the vanishing red man and explores how this fantasy served

political and commercial interests. Finally, Reflections looks at the relevance of incorporating

visual culture theory to expand historical research, as well as the importance of including what

disciplinary conventions separate into various ethnic histories, into mainstream historical

examinations.7

Consolidating Identities

In the second half of the nineteenth century, immigrants poured across American borders

crowding port cities, and providing increased labor needed for the factories that would accelerate

the industrializing processes in the North. According to immigration historian Roger Daniels,

some five million immigrants represented thirteen percent of the total population in antebellum

America.8 As a consequence of industrialization and immigration, mid and late nineteenth-

century cities in the United States underwent vigorous growth and dynamic change. Nativist

sentiment and other efforts to construct ideas of otherness grew, as immigrants inundated cities

through the second half of the century. What was it about the multitude of people who flooded

the United States during that time, which provoked such a sense of threat and produced so much

anxiety in the Gilded-age community? Were there not enough lands, capital, or natural resources

5 See Coco Fusco, and Brian Wallis, , ed. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New

York: Harry N. Abrams,2003); Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to

Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha; Shelley

Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2002). Streeby looks at how mid nineteenth-century imperialist policies were

perceived in the national conscience, through an examination of sensationalism in mass and popular literature. 6 Robert Jr Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indians from Columbus to the

Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). A multitude of travel chronicles, correspondence, governmental and

other documents and literature attest to this transformation. 7 I use the term ethnicity as that with which individuals collectively identify, as opposed to the word race,

which is how individuals are identified by others. The reference above does not make allusion to ethnohistory but

rather to the differential study of Afro-American history, Indian history, even women‟s history, etc., as separate

from History with a capital h, which focuses on the study of the past according to western perceptions. The latter

excludes rich information and perspectives that helps illuminate past evens. See also p. 10. 8 Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York

City: Harper Collins, 1990), 129. Some five million immigrants represented thirteen percent of the total population

in antebellum America.


to support these numbers? Or did immigrants bring, along with their poverty, dangerous ideas

that placed the vary foundation of national virtue at risk? What other factors influenced

American constructions of otherness?

The nineteenth-century was a convulsive time world-wide. During the 1840‟s, European

crop failures, generalized unemployment, poverty, and religious as well as political tensions,

seemed to have caused generalized discontent among the masses in many European countries.

Historians refer to the year 1848 as the year of the revolutions. Italy, Poland, Habsburg and other

principalities of present-day Germany, all underwent revolutions. In that year, the French

Republic ended in despotism when Napoleon‟s nephew, Luis Bonaparte, established a coupe

d‟état to dethrone King Louis Philipe. The same year, Karl Marx published his Communist

Manifesto.

As historian John Tosh observes, obeying the epoch‟s trend to conform various European

chiefdoms into nation-states, Leopold von Ranke compiled Monumenta Hermanie Historica

from 1826 to 1860, a project that served to support Germany‟s nation-building agenda and one

which would culminate with the creation of the first official history.9 It thus becomes clear that it

was not so much numbers as ideas, which worried Americans about the arrival of newcomers in

the young nation. Communism, feminism, and social idealism did not receive a warm welcome

from a Christian Anglo-Saxon nation who was trying to establish itself –and become defined- as

an imperial power.

The revolutionary episteme affected not only economic, social, and political ideas. It was

evident also in the realm of science. In 1830 Sir Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology,

which argued that observable geological processes were adequate to explain geological history in

1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species which, incidentally, came about the

same year Marx published his Preface to a Critique of Political Economy. Then, in 1863, Lyell

authored Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, which challenged creationist Christian

conceptions. Not long after, According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen,

anthropology also became constituted as a disciplinary institution in France, Great Britain and

the United States in the 1850‟s.10

During this century, widespread political turmoil alongside

new scientific findings shook the very foundations of knowledge, beliefs, and understandings

white Americans had about the world.

Subversive notions did not fare well with nation builders, neither at the levels of

government or citizenry. The poor living conditions of immigrants who concentrated in urban

centers, fomented ethnic stereotyping, and fueled racial violence and nativism. Trachtenberg

rightly observes that in the national conscience, perceptions of immigrants, Indians, and

expansionist interests interacted in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to increase a need to

affirm the face of the nation. This story takes us momentarily to the century‟s beginning.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and his people received the new century with a monumental

task ahead. But what was this republic exactly? As Carolyn Gilman posits, the shaky nation had

been unstable before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. National identity had not been birthed yet,

since people did not share a common history. The following year, Meriwether Lewis and

William Clark set off to fulfill the President‟s mission to find waterways that connected the

9 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 3rd. ed. (London: Pearson 2002).

10 Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London and Sterling, VA:

Pluto Press, 2001).


Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean “for the purposes of commerce.”11

Although the Northwest

Passage was elusive, Jefferson‟s explorers brought back the report that land was rich and for the

taking: Only Indians inhabited the vast continental lands and with very few exceptions,

diplomatic relations with Indians would be difficult, if not impossible. The American agricultural

and commercial dream had been clear since the Declaration of Independence. As Thomas Paine

remarked, the United States had a goal and the justification to do what was necessary to secure

the new State and a new race:

It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude a body

of reasonable men; virtue, as I have already remarked, is not hereditary, neither is

it perpetual. Should an independancy be brought about by the first of those means,

we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the

noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to

begin the world over again.12

… The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and

Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating

the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to

whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party

Censure, is the [end of paragraph]13

For Jefferson, the wisdom of territorial expansion was confirmed.

The Civil War‟s end consolidated North and South into a single political unit, and

emancipation added anxiety for the white dominant class. More than before, white America

wished to construct its national character. With an aggressive empire-building project underway,

the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo marked the end of the U.S.-Mexican war in 1848. The

document conceded territories with heavy Indian populations: New Mexico, Arizona, California,

and portions of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, to the United States.14

Indian nations‟ occupation of

these rich territories presented an obstacle to national expansion and the United States

aggressively undertook the extermination of Indian cultures and peoples that stood in the way of

progress.15

Long before the 1980s, therefore, the United States was fully committed to

appropriating Indian lands for the purposes of commerce.

11

Quoted in Carolyn Gilman, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide (Washington and London: The

Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 16; Thomas Jefferson, "To Meriwether Lewis, Instructions," in The Thomas

Jefferson Papers Series 1. General Correspondence, 1651-1827 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, June 20,

1803), 6I. 12

Thomas Paine, "Appendix," in Common Sense (Philadelphia: Bradford, 1776). Paine addressed to the

inhabitants of America, on the following interesting subjects. I. Of the origin and design of government in general,

with concise remarks on the English Constitution. II. Of monarchy and hereditary succession. III. Thoughts on the

present state of American affairs. IV. Of the present ability of America, with some miscellaneous reflections, by

Thomas Paine. The entire address sheds light on what Anglo Saxon Americans were trying to accomplish

politically, economically, and how they were working through definitions of nationhood, ancestry, and ethnicity. 13

Paine, “Introduction”, paragraph 4. 14

Collin Calloway, First Peoples, a Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 2nd. ed. ed. (Boston

and New York: Bedford/St. Martin, 2004), 78; Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism; Streeby, American

Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. 15

Gold in California and the Black Hills caused president Grand to propose the purchase of the hills from

Sioux tribes in 1875, which they refused. The Sioux prepared for war as gold seekers ventured into the hills; a

conflict that ultimately ended in Custard‟s defining loss. Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism, 60-2. The

Black Hills had been central to the Sioux since Siouan tribes had first settled in their vicinity, though they had been

an important geographical point for Indian tribes since ancient times. The hills were an important center of


Treaties, Acts, and agreements became preferred tactics for dealing with the Indian

problem in the nineteenth-century.16

The Indian Removal Act (1830) legislated an already

practiced policy of uprooting tribes and relocating them west of the Mississippi.17

The 1851 Fort

Laramie Treaty divided lands among Indian nations, and the 2nd

. Fort Laramie treaty, in 1868,

confined the Sioux to reservations. Finally, the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, demanded the

division of reservation territories among the male heads of households and attempted to

eliminate anti-American ideas of communal property.

Considering how this complex problematic interacted in American notions of self gives

us a glimpse into the attitudes and perceptions of nation builders. Conflicts in Europe, massive

immigration that brought about new ideas and increased urban poverty, scientific and

technological advances, as well as nation-building interests, all generated tensions that made

nation planners and an aspiring white middle class seek to consolidate a common identity that

stood for its national equivalent. As Trachtenberg observes; the collective self was inseparable

from its racial counterpart.18

Americans now had to define who –and to what degree- belonged to

the nation, which in Trachtenberg‟s words, “took to itself the generic name of America… an

American now meant a citizen in a particular civil entity.”19

Racial ideology gathered new

impetus as plantation and industrial capitalism both, sought to justify slavery on the one hand,

and Amerindian removal efforts on the other.

Assisting the imperative to maintain racial inequality for the sake of national identity,

important technological advances provided the practical capabilities for improved transportation,

communication, documentation, and propagation of ideas. The explosion of mass and popular

literature as a result of advancements in printing technologies and transportation, made possible

the popularization of a romantic myth of the frontier and of racial constructions in the American

mind through the printing and wide distribution of popular, periodical, and advice literature.

Looking into the Mirror: Race, Science, and Photography

commercial, social, and cultural exchange and central to the life of Plains peoples, whose commerce connected them

with nations from present-day Canada to South America. Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The Archaeology

of a Continent (London: Thamwa and Hudson, 2005), 137-56. Mt. Rushmore, however, is a permanent reminder of

the Sioux loss of the Black Hills, not long after the Battle of Greasy Grass. It also serves as a national cautionary tell

of insurgence and punishment. American Woody Guthrie‟s song “this land is your land” is an example of how Euro-

American folk music immortalizes the conquest. The song is ripe with images of private property, land extensions,

non-indigenous crops. This is the musical version of Mt. Rushmore, celebratory fables of conquest. 16

After Congress abolished Treaties in 1870, these were replaced by agreements. Both resources had the

same spirit: getting Indians give up increasing rights and natural resources and, while maintaining the facade of a

humanitarian government. Abolitionist reformers pushed for “a new surge of self-styled „humanitarian‟ concerns

about Indians, added pressure to end warfare on the Plains…. [Many non-Indian Northerners] hoped to extend the

moral reformation of American society that had resulted in slavery‟s abolition.” Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S.

Colonialism, 46. 17

Ibid.Ostler; See also Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular

Culture, 36-8. Some tribes signed removal treaties with Thomas Jefferson‟s agents as early as the 1820s. These

treaties established a delineated frontier that would be reserved as Indian Territory. The removal of one-hundred

thousand Eastern Indians, and the thousands of deaths along the “many trails of tears… mocked any pretense to

Honor.” In the late 1840s U.S. policies turned to a different form of ethnic management by confining tribes to

reservations. 18

Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha. 19

Quoted in ibid., 25.


As urbanization and rapid population growth fed the industrializing progression, there

arose a need for a scientific approach to manufacture that would facilitate mass production.20

The

synchronic incidence of the economy of industrialization along with Lyell‟s, Spencer‟s and

Darwin‟s publications, and the dawn of ethnography‟s professionalization, fomented a reliance

on scientific methods. Science increasingly became the cognitive episteme and discursive tool

that legitimized the rhetoric of a dominant white Christian middle class.21

The invention of the

daguerreotype in 1839 and the rapid adoption of photography lent credence to scientific

discourse by proving lasting, visual proof of scientific observations. Intimately intertwined,

science, photography and race became mobilized as instruments for imperialist, nationalist, and

capitalist projects.

As Coco Fusco remarks, the institutionalization of the social sciences enabled the

classification of human kind into hierarchies which, in turn, “engendered a network for the

production and circulation of knowledge about racial difference.”22

Cultural anthropology

attempted to explain social and cultural deviance by delineating a marked distinction between

western and non-western civilizations, as well as among non-western societies. Ethnographers

thus created an unbridgeable split that resulted in the confection of a them-us divide.23

Brian

Wallis rightly notes that “„race‟ is a political issue, a product of subjective choices made around

issues of power, a function less of physical repression than of construction of knowledge.”24

Within this framework of knowledge construction, photography provided criminologists,

anthropologists, doctors, and psychologists with the technology that enabled them to produce

visual documentary proof of difference. Roland Barthes refers to this attribute as the reality

effect of photographs.25

Not only was photography quickly adopted by scientists but its advent

affected the critical role of the visual, as proof of captureable certainty. This gave a central role

to the power of the gaze. Photographs combined “a faith in the universality of the natural

sciences and belief in the transparency of representation;” what Alan Sekulla calls instrumental

realism.26

In the hands of social scientists, photography helped to “define both the generalized look

– the typology –and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.”27

Ethnographic

photography “produced race as a visualizable fact.”28

As Fusco has observed, “[w]hiteness often

requires otherness to become visible.29

Andrea L. Volpe states that cartes-de-visite, which would

replace daguerreotypes, “capitalized on the bourgeoisie‟s interest in self-representation.”30

20

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York:

Hill and Wang, 1982). 21

Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. 22

Coco Fusco, "Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors," in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of

the American Self (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 41. 23

Mauricio Boivin, Ana Rosato, and Victoria Arribas, Los Constructores De Otredad: Una Introducción a

La Antropología Social Y Cultural (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1999). 24

Brian Wallis, "Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz‟s Slave Daguerreotypes," in Only Skin Deep:

Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 163. 25

Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986),

141-8. 26

Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39(Winter 1986): 81. 27

Ibid., 7. 28

Fusco, Racial Time, 16. 29

Ibid, 38. 30

Andrea L. Volpe, “Cartes de Visite Portrait photographs and the Culture of Class Formation,” in Looking

for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, Ardis Cameron ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005)


Photography thus became an identity formation device of an ascendant industrial middle-class

during the second half of the century.31

European forefathers had, after all, controlled the

nation‟s prosperity and progress since time immemorial –immemorial to Euro-Americans. No

one questioned the social evolution of civilizations from primitive hunting gathering societies

that seek to advance towards a westernized type of progress.32

Photography thus played an

important role not only for scientific discourse which would influence middle-class perceptions

of what was normal, but by adopting photographic portraiture, the white middle-class home also

adopted measuring sticks against which they could further consolidate their class and racial ties.

Observable differences in skin color and physiognomic types were considered as racial

distinctions and worked in direct relation with white America‟s need for self-definition. By 1900,

scientific racism “had become an article of faith among most Euro-Americans,” while Fusco and

others agree with the view that racial notions became “one of the most forceful means of

circumscribing American identity” along a physical color line.33

As W.E.B. Du Bois, Smith, Richard Dyer and others have observed, we develop self

awareness as racialized or non-raced individuals from what we see in the mirror, in opposition to

how we see others. The reflection in the mirror can give us information about who we think we

are and how others might perceive us, what Du Bois identified as second sight.34

Smith notes that

for Du Bois the color line stood for a visual arena “in which racial identities are inscribed and

experienced through the lens of a „white supremacist gaze‟” because it is always non-whites who

are racialized.35

Challenging race studies‟ traditional focus on black bodies, a recent body of work

questions the invisibility of whiteness and seeks to bring it as a racialized concept to the fore.36

As Dyer argues, “the point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position

of power.”37

While this is an invaluable analysis for understanding racial relations and hopefully

there is more to come about the mechanisms that variably make whiteness appear and disappear,

indianness remains largely absent from mainstream racial studies scholarship. Indian studies –

like Latino, Islamic, Asian studies, and others - are still conceived as separate from mainstream

American culture and history.

Andrea L. Volpe, ed. Cartes De Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation, Looking for

America: The Visual Production of Nation and People (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,2005), 43. 31

Sekulla, 102-3. 32

Many American Indiana nations followed a different pattern, however. From agricultural societies they

evolved into nomadic lifestyles after contact with Europeans. Calloway estimates that in 1450, much of the

American territory was inhabited by agricultural peoples connected through well-traveled roads and river systems

for the purpose of trade and communication. People had farmed corn for centuries. Hunting societies developed

mutually advantageous economic relations with farming communities to supplement their respective diets, 27. See

also E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains, (New York, University of Chicago Press,

1960), 2. By the 1830‟s the Cheyenne had already abandoned farming and adopted, instead nomadic hunting

practices as a consequence of the adoption of the horse and European weapons technologies. 33

Trachtenberg, Shades, 13. 34

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” in Atlantic Monthly 80 (1897): 194-198. 35

Shawn M. Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham

and London, Duke University Press, 2004), 25. 36

Richard Dyer, “On the Matter of Whiteness,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep; Smith; Sekulla;

Dyer; Fusco, Racial Time; and Wallis, Black Bodies. 37

Ibid, 301.


Fig.1 Mirror, Mirror

38

Race cannot be separated from notions of ownership anymore than it can be severed from

a discourse on bodies. Unlike blacks and other minorities who have aspired to gain the privilege

to belong to mainstream society, to earn a share of the supremacist gaze, Amerindians considered

themselves as sovereign nations and relentlessly held on to their respective tribal identities.39

As

in previous centuries, Gilded age Amerindians led violent confrontations against invading and

treaty-breaking Euro-Americans.40

When defeated, or if they chose not to fight, Native

Americans devised adaptative strategies for cultural survival, thanks to which members of Indian

nations still maintain strong community cohesiveness today.41

38

Carrie Mae Weem, ”Mirror Mirror,” Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY. All

photographs are accompanied by the photographer‟s original title and are reproduced herein with artist‟s permission

or that of his/her agent. 39

Trachtenberg, Shades. See also Calloway. 40

Ostler. 41

When the seventeenth-century English attempted to make the coastal Algonquians more docile through

the civilizing effects of trade and Christianity, Powhatan Opechancanoug demanded English instruction of Powhatan

warriors on the use of muskets in exchange for allowing his people to be Christianized.41

Frederick Fausz, "Anglo-

Indian Aggression and Accommodation Along the Mid-Atlantic Coast, 1584-1634," in Cultures in Contact: The

Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institutions, A.D. 1000-1800, ed. William W. Fitzhugh

(Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 231; Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North

America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45. This is a good example of American Native adaptation to

European presence in territories. For a good ethno-historical anthology about Native American women and cultural

adaptation, see Nancy Shoemaker, ed. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women

(New York and London: Routledge,1995). These essays demonstrate how Indigenous women creatively adapted

some of their traditional conceptions to accommodate western imposition, in ways that allowed them to ensure their

cultural survival. The book also offers a useful sample of interdisciplinary methodologies that broaden historical

analysis.


This capacity to negotiate change is not an attribute unique to Indian relations, however.

Like all other world populations, Amerindians had always taken useful knowledge from

extraneous cultures with whom they were in contact.42

Indian peoples did not aspire to become

white, in spite of the imposition of boarding schools that sought to educate youngsters out of

their indianness. Wovoka and other nineteenth-century Indian prophets foretold the return of

better conditions for Amerindians if they remained cohesive, danced the sacred Dances, and kept

to traditional ways and did no harm to non-Indians.43

This obstinate cultural resistance –sometimes subtle and sometimes bellicose –interfered

with white America‟s sense of Manifest Destiny.44

Indian cultural resistance and critique of

western life flew in the face of everything white Americans knew to be right. Armed conflicts

against the government‟s appropriation of the Black Hills, and governmental policies against

Indians, underscored the white belief that Indians were vicious, a notion Americans had inherited

from the previous three centuries of Indo-European relations. As bell hooks observes, “one

fantasy of whiteness is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist.”45

The Indian had to be

disarmed, not only in battle and through removal, confinement, and assimilation, but also in the

collective mind.

Defining indianness as a mental concept and bringing that notion under white control,

became imperative for the national self. The advent of the public museum in the nineteenth

century reflected this supremacist quest for identity, and the bourgeois obsession with

collections, science, and spectacle.46

Collectionist interests both expressed and found a perfect

outlet through the sciences and through other such projects as the systematization of the annual

census, criminal and health statistics, cataloguing of body types, and an assortment of

compilations of natural history specimens and ethnographic information.47

What better way to

42

The Hodenosaunee system (People of the longhouse) or Iroquois League is a good example of pre-

contact adaptation. Archaeological evidence suggests the League may have formed after 1450 and completed around

1525 but exact dates are not available. Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondangas, Cayulas, Senecas combined into a larger

political and military body to end a tradition of intertribal rivalry and strengthen their position against other enemies

in Northeastern United States. The League is important for the study of U.S. History because it is one of the oldest

political bodies in N. America. Some scholars say, served as model for T. Jefferson‟s constitution. See Calloway,

American Revolution in Indian Country, 44. This is one of many examples of animosity and adaptive measures to

overcome attempts at colonization. 43

Ostler, 243-63. The Sun Dance was given to Oglala Rocky Bear in 1881, and Wovoka received the Ghost

Dance and philosophies in 1889. 44

By the time the first English arrived in North America, virgin-soil epidemics had decimated entire

American Native populations. See Calloway. Although O‟Sullivan is accredited with coining the term in the mid

nineteenth-century, Manifest Destiny was an ever-present notion since much earlier. When he witnessed the

devastating death toll of Indian populations as a consequence of epidemics, he wrote that “it was the worke of our

God through our means and that wee by him might kil and slaie whom wee would without weapons and not come

neere them [sic].” Quoted in Fausz, 233, from (Harriot 1955:I, 378-9). 45

hooks, Representations, 129. 46

Bennet proposes that the significant transformation of nineteenth-century museums was that these

national institutions opened up to the masses. The museum became arenas for national education projects. For

Bennett, the idea of visiting the nineteenth-century public museum as a way to perform social spectacle, enforced

new disciplinary and behavioral management technologies upon a middle-class-aspiring working population. See

Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 2003), 59-88. 47

The University of Virginia library has digital census information from 1790 to 1960, See The University

of Virginia library, "Historical Sensus Browser," http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus. Although

in 1874 resistance to censor takers was central for what culminated as the Wounded Knee massacre, the 1860 census

already includes, for the first time, the category of Indians.


understand and control the world than through the fetishistic minimization and collection of its

parts?

Fig. 2. Before the white man came - Palm Cannon

48

Walter Benjamin has noted that mechanical reproduction –including photography –is “a

technique of diminution,” a means to possess that which, for whatever reason, is beyond people‟s

reach.49

Photography not only produced visual proof of truth; it also rendered the world within

people‟s grasp. Photographs had the ability to turn the mystery –and both –of Indian life into

manageable objects which individuals, families, and institutions could own.

Whether through reproduction, collection, or imagination, minimization alone –does not

adequately serve to stereotype an Other, however. Social psychologists have observed that

stereotypes cannot be constructed without first crafting a mental universal image of the target

group.50

Individuation leads to understanding, respect, and empathy; not good attributes for a

people trying to colonize and silence entire ethnicities. Nineteenth-century photographers of

Native Americans employed the techniques of generalization, exaggeration, oversimplification,

48

Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian: Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the

Indians of the United States, and Alaska, ed. Frederick Webb Hodge (Northwestern University, Digital Library

Collections, 2003). Original: The North American Indian, (1907-1930) v.15, Southern California Shoshoneans. The

Dieguenos Plateau Shoshoneans. The Washo ([Seattle] : E.S. Curtis ; [Cambridge, Mass. : The University Press],

1926), plate no. 508. Photogravure. All Curtis images courtesy of Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special

Collections, Northwestern University Library. 49

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter

(London: New Left Books, 1979), 253. 50

Ervin Staub, "The Psychology of Bystanders, Perpetrators, and Heroic Helpers," in Understanding

Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust, ed. Ralph Erber and Leonard S. Newman (New York and

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).


and performance of indianness, as mechanisms for crafting images that reflected their beliefs

about Amerindians.51

Trachtenberg posits that by appropriating that which was unique to America, namely the

Indian and his virtues the nation-building plan sought to convert European immigrants into

American citizens. The Indian problem continued to be managed through a genocidal process

and removal policies, but cultural producers such as writers, artists, performers, scientists,

photographers, and army officers, were free to construct indianness as a fading phenomenon.52

The vanishing Indian suited need for an icon that could represent a rising middle class, as well as

the financial and political interests of capitalist entrepreneurs and politicians.53

Trachtenberg

observes that “the old vanishing race, if recovered in its racial purity, could lend itself to the

making of the new race” of Americans.54

So official was this secular Eucharist, in fact, that the

United States took the bold eagle from Amerindian spiritual semiology to represent the nation.

Photographers thus set out to capture an iconography of indianness. The noble savage

and the myth of a vanishing race were all part of this semiotic project.55

Discourses of

nationhood and –Anglo Saxon –whiteness utilized these figures as a means for mystifying and

defining American notions of self. Claims to the legacy of Indian goodness, bravery, and nobility

51

Scholars continue to be tempted by oversimplification even today. Historian Willard Hughes Rollins

argues that Both Protestants and Catholics failed to Christianize the Osage people.51

Although they remain spiritual

to this day, many Osages are Christians while others have chosen to stay away from Christianity and yet a new

generation seeks to claim its Osage identity by reconstructing ancient rituals, which are sometimes borrowed from

other tribes. Although there are Protestant Osages and the Native American church, has found a way to merge

Catholicism with traditional Osage spirituality varies among this Nation, much as they do anywhere else. See

Willard Hughes Rollings, Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance to the Christian (1673-1906): A Cultural

Victory (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2004). (1673-1906): A Cultural Victory Willard Hughes

Rollings, Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance to the Christian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

Press, 2004). 52

Non-Indian America interpreted the massacre at Wounded Knee and subsequent surrender of remaining

Ghost Dance leaders, as a signal that the Indian problem was under control. In a later narrative, John G. Neihardt

misquotes Big Elk‟s recounting of the massacre and Ostler argues it is in this moment that the image of a broken

sacred hoop that points to Indian defeat and is based on deeply seeded notions at the time, of a vanishing race. In

Ostler, 361. Apparently the interviewer‟s narration tells of Black Elk‟s feelings that “the national hoop is broken…

the sacred tree is dead.” Ostler observes, however, that a transcript of the narration indicates Black ended the

description of the slaughter with the words: “two years later I was married.” 53

“The Treaty of Fort Laramie and the Struggle for the Black Hills.” The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty tricked

the Plains Sioux into allowing roads to be opened in order to reach the gold mines in Montana, through reservation

hunting grounds, restrict them to reservations, send their children to compulsory western schools to be educated out

of Lakota ways and forced them into farming economies. In 1878 Cheyenne defy the U.S. government by staging

The Long March Home and “they fought and marched, fought and marched until they reached their beloved

homeland, whereupon they laid down their arms.” Ultimately all but about thirty escaped the U.S. retaliation. Later

reservations were established in Montana and South western Oklahoma, Calloway, American Revolution in Indian

Country, 2-3, 294-300. 54

Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha, 86, 201. 55

Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian, 3-32. Berkhofer quotes early reports from Christopher Columbus‟

correspondence. Columbus describes “their women, being very lustful, cause the private parts of their husbands to

swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed and disgusting... They live according to nature, and may be

called Epicureans rather than Stoics.”(Berkhofer, 8). Possibly this image comes from early descriptions of Spanish

conquest efforts which refer to bearing Indian or tamemes-s and beasts of burden. According to a 1546 account of

Hernando de Soto‟s Northern conquest, discusses the use of Indians as servants for the purposes of carrying Spanish

baggage and booty. Rodrigo Rangel, ed. Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando De Soto, 2

vols., vol. 1, The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North America in 1539-1543

(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,1993), 288-940.


relied on the sentimentalized conception of a red vanishing race, and capturing it before its

evaporation became paramount at as the twentieth century approached.

Vanishing into the Landscape

More than any other early photographer, Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) was

instrumental for compiling a photographic record of American Indian ethnography, though his

work was not well known until the 1970‟s. Curtis believed in the myth that true Indian peoples

were doomed to extinction; a tale contradicted by the numerous Indian nations in existence

today. With financial backing from Theodore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan and the kings of England

and Belgium, Curtis set out to “assimilate „the North American Indian‟ not by acculturation…

but just the opposite: by preserving difference as a beauty lost forever, the spectral beauty of

national origins.”56

The sequence of the photographs below represents the first and last few

images in Curtis‟ first of twenty volumes of photographs and ethnographic descriptions. Looking

at them in the order in which Curtis conceived them, yields a surprisingly clear narrative of

extinction.

The first image opens up Curtis‟ impressive first volume of work from its frontispiece

(Figure 3). Curtis‟ photographs always indicate the nation that is subjected to his camera -

Arapaho, Navaho, and so on. The image in figure 3 takes from Amerindian myths of origin,

which are, of course, almost as varied as there are Indian peoples. Some tribes believed to have

emerged from beneath the water. Water was thus valued in these communities, as that from

where all life springs.57

“The Pool” conveys the idea of birth and specifically appears to narrate

the origin of America, while simultaneously playing with notions of transcendence.

56

Trachtenberg, Shades, 171. For a history of Curtis‟ expedition see Christopher Cardozo, ed. Sacred

Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore: Simon

& Shuster, 2000). 57

The Osages‟ name for their people in their own language is Wazhazhi. Although Omaha ethnographer

Francis La Flesche underscores that it is difficult to translate Osage words neatly into English, Wazhazhe refers to

the myth of origin whereby after descending from the sky and wondering innocently through the Earth, they come to

a moment of revelation when they encounter a man standing in the water. The man in the water tells the group that if

they make of them their bodies, their children will live to old age and their people will know bounty. Francis La

Flesche, A Dictionary of the Osage Language (Hamburg, MI: Native American Book Publishers, 2007), 210.

Reprint from La Flesche, Bulletin / Smithsonian Institution. Bureau of American Ethnology, 109, 1935. This part of

the creation story resonates with other religious traditions. In Christian mythology, humankind also comes from a

celestial presence (God‟s breath) that becomes embodied through the earth (Adam is made of mud). Adam and Eve

then wonder around in Eden, innocent and nude until the moment where they receive divine knowledge –the

awareness of their sins. The elements used in both mythologies are, of course, notably different: Adam and Eve

commit a sin in contrast with Wazhazhi notions of peace and plenty. The intersections, however, are interesting and

important in the context of constructing western images of Indians as innocent people in commune with nature.

Indian and Christian mythology merge in these photographs by utilizing a visual language that westerners can

understand and with which they could identify in order to decode. Here the Indian is frozen in a state before the

“eating of the apple.” In some cases, such as with the Pueblos who first revolted against Spanish Christian

imposition and corn and labor quotas but later chose more subtle forms of resistance, such as the performance of

Catholicism for Spanish eyes by wearing crosses and attending mass while maintaining traditional religions

underground, many Indian nations adopted Christianity because it am at a time when diseases, war, and hunger had

devastated populations by the millions. Furthermore, Christian beliefs shared elements with many tribal religions

and this made it easy to see Christianity as new hope.


Fig.3 The Pool - Apache

58

Richard Dyer explains that “the centrality of whiteness in western visual culture depends

on Christian ideas about incarnation and embodiment.”59

“The Pool” showcases traditional

Christian baptismal iconography. The human body, its incorporeal presence in the mirror image

of the water, and the light which surrounds and focuses the viewer‟s eye on the sacred action, all

hint at the divine.60

The vertical line formed by both human images –the body and the reflection

–cross the line where the water meets the earth, forming a cross. The lush natural setting draws

on mental images of Eden and associates Adam with the first American inhabitant while

simultaneously helping to equate indianness with nature. Whether experiencing this photograph

through Christian or Amerindian eyes, the man emerging from the pool is pure and innocent, and

thus free from of malice.

58

Edward S. Curtis, “The Pool,” Vol. 1, portfolio 1, frontispiece (1907-1930). Northwestern University

Digital Library Collections, images on photogravure plates. Original photogravure produced in Boston by John

Andrew & Son. http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/index.html. Curtis originally conceived a five-year project to

document Native American life, but the effort was cut short due to prohibitive expenses. 59

Richard Dyer, "On the Matter of Whitenes," in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self,

ed. Coco and Brian Wallis Fusco (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 200), 1-41. 60

All titles are from taken from the original captions.


Fig. 4. Vanishing Race - Navaho

61

The next photograph in this sequence is the first large plate included in volume one of

The North American Indian. The title, “Vanishing Race - Navaho” needs little interpretation

(Figure 4). The image shows a group of Navaho riding away into the sunset with the sun behind

the mountains. The photographer‟s manipulation of the depth of field blurs the figures as they

move away from the camera. The viewer cannot distinguish the age, dress, mood, or sex of the

subjects. This faceless image does not concern itself with individuality, which suggests Curtis

favored the narrative power of the composition rather than its ethnographic potential. Only the

subjects‟ backs –their past –is clearly discernable. Their future as a people lays uncertain in front

of them as they ride away towards darkness. Not only is this gloom associated with death in

western culture, but Native American cosmology makes a similar link. According to old Osage

traditions, the East is associated with maleness, light, strength, and life. The west, in opposition,

represents the night, death, and femaleness.62

Once again, Curtis links Amerindian and western

conceptions in a visual purification ritual. The image invites the viewer to think of a venerated

time and people in their last moments. The next three descriptions correspond with the last three

photos in Curtis‟ volume one.

Like the previous photograph, “Out of the Darkness” shows Navaho people coming out

of the shadows (Figure 5). After western purification –the photographer‟s art and craft –these

men are raised from the dead like Christ. The Navaho thus emerge into the light renewed and

invigorated by the power of the myth, only this time, their faces are visible. Although there is not

enough light to see the subjects clearly –they are only just coming out of the shadows because

the myth is just beginning-, we can distinguish certain details. The viewer can see these are men;

it was probably cold –in the dark-because they are covered with blankets, and the man in the

61

Curtis, The North American Indian, plate No.1. 62

For information about nineteenth-century Osage culture, see John Joseph Mathews, Wa’Kon-Ta: The

Osage and the White Man’s Road (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932). John Joseph Mathews, Wa’kon-

Ta: The Osage and the White Man’s Road (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932).


front appears to be rather young. Is this also a promise of eternal youth connected in Curtis‟ mind

with heavenly notions?

Fig. 5 Out of the Darkness - Navaho

63

The sequence then shows Amerindians in a heavenly place, tucked away safely in Curtis‟

imagination, and on the object of the photograph (Figure 6). Once again, the subjects are stripped

of their singularity. The composition emphasizes light and conveys a general feeling of peace

and goodness.

Fig. 6 . Sunset in Navaho-land

64

63

Curtis, The North American Indian, plate N0. 37. 64

Ibid, plate no. 38.


“Alhkidokihi - Navaho” is the last image in volume on one of The North American

Indian (Figure 7). This time there are no bodies, no faces; only the ghostly apparition of a

people‟s cultural legacy, which is conveyed both by the intricate art work on display and by the

photographer‟s choice to entitle the image using a Navaho word, whose meaning is not

translated. It remains veiled, mysterious and nostalgically distant –from western knowledge –for

all time.

Fig. 7 Alhidokihi - Navaho

65

Many scholars have explored the powerful relationship between photography and death.

Trachtenberg‟s observation of ghostly demarcations in photographs of Amerindians resonates

with Benjamin‟s and Barthe‟s notes about the quality of photographs to preserve the dead within

the image. For Benjamin, the photograph‟s aura “is never entirely separated from its ritual

function.”66

This cult of remembrance “offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture…. But

as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its

superiority to the ritual value.”67

Barthes picks up on this combination of exhibition and a

phantasmagoric presence, transformed into “the Sepctrum of the photograph, because this word

retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is

there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”68

The photograph turns the subject into “total

image,” which is death personified. The sitter then becomes an object that can be possessed,

65

Ibid, plate no. 39. 66

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 224. For more on the memorial function of photographs, see also

Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,

2004). Batchen states that “in these pictures within pictures, the subjects want to draw our attention not only to the

image they hold, but also to photography itself as a touchable entity, to the comforting solidity of its memorial

function… [and as a possession. This seems to work in opposition to Images of American Natives where the

possessor both claims its own identity and reaffirms his property] Speaking of the act of remembrance, Batchen

associates it to a state of revere… [i]nvolving an illogical warm feeling toward the past, a kind of pleasurable

sadness, the past has become a profitable commodity (14). 67

Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 226. 68

Barthes, 9.


catalogued and utilized in a variety of contexts, conveying a multitude of meanings, and with any

intentionality.69

Curtis and other photographers capitalized on the medium‟s ability to trigger a sense of

revere, sentimentalism, and the ghostly presence of a glorious Indian past for perpetuating the

myth of a vanishing race. In Gilded age United States; Indians were an extinguishing people

whom white nineteenth-century Americans could possess and claim as part of their nationhood

through the photographs. Photographic images provided Americans the artifacts they needed to

initiate a national cult of remembrance through the capture of the presence of a past that survives

only in the image. For this strategy to function, the photos had to be conceived in a way that

would be easily digestible to western eyes.

Fig.8 Chief Wolf Robe: Cheyenne

70

All the photographs I have encountered during the research for this project target a white

western viewer. The portrait below, employs western portraiture and artistic conventions as well

as visual signifiers of indianness to evoke in the western viewer, the necessary solemnity,

respect, and nostalgia (Figure 8). The image exposes the subject‟s lack

of blackness. If it were not for his attire, this could be a white man. The feather on his hair and

his long braids, however, reveal his ethnicity. Once this is observed by the viewer, the portrait

triggers other associations. The photographer has directed Chief Wolf Robe to look up and away

from the camera, a pose that people –western or Indian- seldom use unless they are performing

displays of pride or superiority –moral or spiritual.

The image guides the viewer towards the conclusion that this is a proud and noble man.

Light bathes his face from above and his body language denotes calmness, nobility, and strength.

The wear on his skin emphasizes age and experience; it denotes wisdom. He becomes a proud,

noble, strong, and wise man. The reflection of the light on the presidential medal leads the eye to

69

Ibid, 14. 70

Frank A. Rinehart, "Chief Wolf Robe: Cheyenne," Library of Congress, American Memory,

http://photoswest.org/cgi-bin/imager?10032033+X-32033. Reproduced hereing with permission of Western

History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library History of the American West, 1860-1920: Photographs

from the Collection of the Denver Public Library.


this national symbol of Indian submission and treaty-making. The shot was taken after Wounded

Knee and the removal Act. Along with the award, the western shirt the sitter wears over his

Sioux garment accentuates the position of subjugation both as a viewed subject and as an

Amerindian whose glorious present is long gone.71

The image suggests this subject will not offer

resistance. He maintains his dignity in spite of his loss. It is this dignity that we wish to capture.

It is the point where white and red merge into one. Chief Wolf Robe appears to embody national

values; all that in America was good, and can once again be recaptured through the mental

incorporation of the Indian. The themes of U.S. triumph over Indians runs through many of these

portraits of Indian leaders. Their capture in the photograph serves a disarming function. Curtis

photographed several of these rebellious leaders.

Fig. 9 Red Cloud

72

Red Cloud‟s portrait above is an example (Figure 9). In 1868, Red Cloud led an alliance

of Lakotas, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho against the U.S. who was trying to establish a trail

across Sioux territory (given to the Sioux by the 1st. Treaty of Fort Laramie) to mine gold in

Montana. The conflict led to the second Treaty of Fort Laramie. The goal was to end warfare and

consolidate Indians into reservations.73

Curtis took this picture after Red Cloud had experienced

reservation life for years. Although he continued to struggle to protect his people through

accommodation, the portrait depicts him as a broken man; so hurt and tired he keeps his eyes

closed. Is he alive? Is he dead? The portrait becomes emblematic of Indian defeat

71

Ostler: 361-9. The Sioux remain strong in their quest for the return of the Black Hills and for cultural

persistence. Lakota Sioux continue to fight legislatively for the return of the Black Hills, even to the point of having

rejected a1 1979 Claims Commission ruling, and the subsequent Supreme Court‟s affirmation the following year, to

compensate the Sioux nation for the Black Hills. The Si Tanka Wokiksuye (Big Foot Memorial Ride), a yearly trek

along Big Foot‟s path, is a form of healing. They are known as Ghost riders and they gathered 350 Lakotas gathered

at the WK mass grave site and performed a ceremony to both the end their mourning, and releasing the spirit of the

victims (Ostler, 368). 72

Curtis, The North American Indian. vol. 3, plate no. 103, “Red Cloud – Ogalala). Photogravure. 73

Ostler, 316.


Until the eighteen-hundreds, Euro-American experience with Indians, on the whole, had

not been a pacific one. Most Indian tribes had, at one point or another, confronted Euro-

Americans with fierce resistance in defense of their territories and communities from the

invaders.74

The Corps of Discovery‟s expedition confirmed the suspicion that the Indian element

had to be extinguished once and for all because it stood in the way of domestic imperialism as a

stubborn obstacle to the bounty of natural resources available in the continent. Once more,

photography provided a vehicle for the production of a kind of stereotyping that would serve this

disarming purpose.75

Parallel to the image of the noble savage, the army set about to record U.S. victories over

Indians, thus creating a simultaneous and contradictory archive of armed confrontation and

ancestral nobility to which non-Indians could only aspire. A counter archive was,

unintentionally, created by the U. S. Army. Wounded Knew. Events like this contradict this

crafted view.

Fig. 10 Miniconjou Chief Big Foot lies dead in the snow

He was among the first to die on December 29, 1890.76

Photographers‟ portrayal of Indians as noble savages utilized dignified mythological figures that

always appear to hold important secrets or knowledge. Medicine-man shows Slow Bull in a

mystical pose that becomes accentuated by his countenance (Figure 11). He stands erect, with his

chin raised and his eyes look back at the viewer from an unreachable place in time and space.

74

Fagan, Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent; Calloway, American Revolution in

Indian Country; Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America. 75

Language was another unarming technology. Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, who ……. Is a good

example of how this worked. His Lakota name was, according to his son‟s account, Tasunke Kokikapi, which means

“They (the enemy) fear even his horse.” Reference cited in Ostler, 55, from Stephen Return Riggs, Dakota

Grammar, Texts, and Ethnography, Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol.9, ed. James Owen Dorsey

(Washington, D.C., 1893), 230. 76

Wounded, Knee, http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm Wounded Knee,

http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm Original photograph available at Smithsonian Institution,

National Anthropological Archives. Reporduced also in Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival:

A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 153; Ostler, The Plains Sioux and

U.S. Colonialism, 333. Handwriting on the image reads, “”Bured of the Dead at the Battle of Wounded Knee S.D.

Copy Righted Jan 1 1991 by the North Western Photo Co Chardon Neb Nel (Net?)


The man is scantily clad, which suggests both the lack of civilization characteristic of the

discourse of western progress, and the absence of a need for material possessions. This man

authorizes capitalist interests to appropriate his land. He does not need it; he will never use it for

grand-scale farming, or lay claims to private ownership of the property. Slow Bull holds a pipe

which unfamiliar eyes can interpret as a peace pipe or relate it to hallucinogenic visions of

spirituality. The only other element that the photograph clearly focuses is a bovine skull –

presumably a bison –which links death, the buffalo and the Indian into a single semiotic notion.77

This is an important part of the iconography of the noble savage. The conceptual formula that

turned Indian nations into natural history collections required a photographic equivalent that

associated indianness with nature.

Fig. 11 Medicine-man

78

A number of photographers captured or staged images of Native peoples who seem as

part of the landscape. In “On the Shores of Clear Lake,” a man sits on a rocky ridge. The

subject‟s eyes fixed on an imaginary horizon as if he were thinking of –or feeling –something

sublime (Figure 12).

77

Plains Indian cultures subsistence systems depended heavily on buffalo herds. Commercial hunters,

Euro-American encroachment on grazing grounds by farmers and ranchers, the railroads, and barbed wire,

collectively reduced one-hundred million -conservative estimates- bison were to 34 heads between 1800 and 1900.

Ostler, 43, 53, 57-8.Because of their dependence on the buffalo, declining food supplies ultimately devastated the

Plains tribes. Ostler, 43, 53, 57-8. 78

Curtis, vol. 3, plate no. 76. Slow Bull, “Medicine man.” Photogravure.


Fig. 12 On The Shores of Clear Lake.

79

It is an appealing and dreamy image. A series of triangles dominates the composition,

accentuated by the apex of the ridge, the mountain on the background, and even the man‟s hair,

which seems to blow gently in the breeze. Behind him, Clear Lake; a still body of water that

barely shows any motion. The breeze was soft that day. As I begin to inspect the figure, I notice

the punctum –that detail that traps the viewer and urges her or him to continue examining the

image. 80

For me, the punctum in this picture is the man‟s right knee. Not only does it fall near the

center of the composition, but light abruptly makes it visible. I look for the man‟s left knee and

realize it is bent, as the figure rests the weight of his body on his left foot. He uses his left arm to

help achieve balance and reduce the burden on his foot. Is he sitting or getting up? Why is he

there? Does the roughness of the rocks hurt his skin? The artificiality of the pose now makes

itself manifest. This man is tense and struggling to appear casual when everything about his

body, including the performed facial quietness, reveals the discomfort to which the photographer

subjects him. Suddenly the image‟s calmness fades away to reveal tension.

Although the artist‟s purpose was to give the composition a natural look, the subject‟s

typical raised-chin pose further betrays the photographer‟s intervention. As I continue to

examine the bent knee I notice it almost rests directly on a petroglyph. Now the picture turns the

viewer into an anthropologist and art historian. I want to know what animal the drawing depicts.

It looks like a llama, were there camelidae near Clear Lake? I do not think so. What is this

animal? Why did someone preserve it in the safety of the rock? What is the connection? Are this

man‟s ancestors present in the drawing and in the photograph? Is there, again, a promise of

perpetuity in the capture? I find myself consuming this image with hungry western eyes and

decide to focus my attention back on the photographer. Why did he choose that particular

location? It is possible that he noticed the art on the rock and purposely connected ecology,

indianness and art by this choice? Why is this man there… if not to accommodate the

photographer? What is striking about this picture is that in spite of the presence of the

79

Curtis, “On the Shores of Clear Lake,” Plate 477. 80

Punctum is Barthes‟ term for the detail about a photograph that attracts the viewer‟s attention and urges

her or him to scrutinize the image more closely. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,

trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).


photographer and of the camera, the man truly seems, at first sight, to be in commune with

nature. Yet this image was not “just captured.” The photographer carefully staged it to awaken

nostalgia. It snaps together man, peace, art, and environment for western consumption, in one

click of a button.

Reflections

The relevance of this paper for better understanding American history and culture is

three-fold. This analysis suggests some of the ways in which a close reading of photographic

images can be a useful source of historical information. Historians should not take photographs

at face value but rather, they must take the time to dissect them and allow the images to yield the

greatest possible data. Indian and Euro-American history are intricately interwoven. It is

important to bring Indian history to the fore as part of mainstream historical research. As

Calloway notes, “American history without Indians is mythology –it never happened.”81

Confining Indian History to a sub-discipline will continue to yield myopic accounts that ensure

the perpetuation of inaccurate collective memories.

Racial conceptions have complex mechanisms that need further analysis. This

exploration follows in the footsteps of scholars who are opening up a space for a conversation

about identity construction strategies in American culture, in ways that seek to complexify

dichotomous biracial lines. By looking at indianness in the nineteenth-century, whiteness

acquires a new dimension. In spite of European and U.S. efforts to the contrary, Indians continue

to work diligently towards their social, ethnic, economic, cultural, and linguistic survival. Still,

Indians do not exist in mainstream consciousness, as a current, real part of the United States.

During a recent mock-conference about American photography, students read papers

about an assortment of fascinating topics. The audience –the same group of students –was

engaged and questions abounded about every paper, except for three. Interestingly, these were

also the three papers that were read, one immediately following the other, at the end of the

conference. For these presentations, the facilitator had to state that “class would not end until all

presenters had at least one question.” For the reader who, right about now, should be wondering

about the topics of these three papers, I note that they dealt with images of whiteness in relation

to Chinese women, Amerindians, and Eastern Europeans. I should also mention that the man

who read a paper about African Americans, war, and God, also received great attention. What

impacted me about this event is that after an entire semester of learning to analyze photography

as a tool to question the validity of constructs such as race, whiteness, and the truth value of

photography in American culture, memory, and history, people whose job is to analyze

American culture had nothing to say about the matter when it fell outside the biracial line in

which we have learned to believe. The fantasy of the American melting pot is alive and well

preserved in the United States. But how much have we melted into one culturally diverse people

when we still perceive other Others –Hispanics, Chinese, Indians, Polish, Jews, etc. –as outside

our realm of interest, even within contexts that are designed to foment such curiosity. As Dyer so

incisefully observes, we “may be on our way to genuine hybridity, multiplicity without (white)

hegemony, and we won‟t get there until we see whiteness, see its power, its particularity and

limitedness, put it in its place and end its rule. This is why studying whiteness matters.”82

An Argentine archaeologist once wrote telling me the court had summoned him as an

expert witness. It seemed someone had found human remains inside funerary urns in the

81

Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 9. 82

Dyer, Whiteness, 304.


basement of an abandoned police station. The nation wanted to know whether these were Indian

remains or could they belong to the increasing numbers of disappeared –individuals who were

victims of the military dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s.83

This provokes, in the

strange workings of my mind, the following questions: in what ways is this important? Is it to

find out our entitlement to grief? Is it to know whether to burry or study the remains? If so; why

the differential treatment? One question haunts my thought: when we look, what do we see in the

mirror?

83

People whom para-police groups, known as the AAA- abducted and never again resurfaced are known in

Argentina as desaparecidos (disappeared ones). The Military rule lasted from 1976 to 1983.


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false faces in the mirror

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national identity

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