American Indian Culture and Research Journal

People have been taking pictures of Native Americans for well over a century-for almost as long as they have been taking pictures. The earliest known photograph of an American Indian was exposed soon after the invention of the medium in 1839. Ironically enough, it was taken in Great Britain in 1844, and it depicted Kahkewaquonaby (known as the Reverend Peter Jones), the son of a Mississauga Indian and a Welshman. Thus, from its very beginnings, the photography of Native Americans has been inextricably bound up with the crossing of cultural boundaries. As photographers fanned out across the American continent, native peoples struggled to render their strange activities comprehensible. A term that appears to have been devised repeatedly and independently was shadow catcher. This ominous phrase spoke to one of the most profound aspects of photography: its seemingly magical ability to appropriate and remove some sort of essence of a person’s character. As it was phrased by Yurok author Lucy Thompson, “The old Indians do not like to look at a photograph or to have their photographs taken because they say it is a reflection or a shadowy image of the departed spirit, O-quirlth.” Contemporary Creek writer Joy Harjo remembers her “Aunt Lois’s admonishments about photographs. She said that they could steal your soul. I believe it’s true, for an imprint remains behind forever, locked in paper and chemicals."

Although Alfred Kroeber is universally regarded as the founder of California Indian studies, his important use of the camera as an ethnographic tool is virtually unknown. In fact, Kroeber was one of the first anthropologists to photograph California native peoples. California has never attracted as many photographers as other regions of Native America, such as the Southwest, most likely because of the rapid depopulation and massive acculturation of California Indians. By the time of Kroeber’s fieldwork at the turn of the century, there were comparatively few native people left in the state, and from a naive, Anglo perspective, they did not look particularly native. Most of the earliest surviving photographs of California Indians are by a handful of professional photographer. In the fall of 1892, Henry W. Henshaw photographed the Pomo living near Ukiah for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. With these pictures, Henshaw became probably the first photographer of California Indians who made his living as an anthropologist-although his training had been in biology. Several years later, in 1899, Roland Dixon, a Harvard graduate student working for the American Museum of Natural History, began to photograph the Maidu. About the same time, Pliny Goddard, a Quaker missionary among the Hupa, was also taking pictures, which he published later, when he was an anthropologist at the University of California. Finally, in 1901, just before Kroeber joined the University of California, Dr. Philip M. Jones took a series of California Indian pictures for Phoebe Hearst, the founder of the university’s Museum of Anthropology.

Concern over the ethics of depicting Native Americans in photographs grew out of postmodern critiques of power relations and representation, as well as the rising political and cultural awareness of Native Americans themselves. Native American activism and the "Red Power" movement preceded Foucault and Derida, and the latter postmodern authors reflect the concerns already raised by minority and indigenous authors. At the same time as concern over the rights of indigenous peoples has grown, public interest in Native Americans and the photographic record of their history has also burgeoned. The period from the 1970s to the present has been marked by a spate of books on photographers of Native Americans. On the whole these books trace an increasing awareness of the representational issues raised by both Native Americans and postmodern critics, although reviewers have accurately pointed out significant areas for improvement. Collections of photographs by Edward Curtis, the best known photographer of nineteenth-century Native America, illustrate the evolution of sensitivity to indigenous concerns. Beginning with works whose titles retain the "vanishing race" notion fostered by Curtis (despite his own awareness that it was inaccurate), one moves through time to Brown's still ambiguously titled collection of 1972, The North American Indians, which could be taken to imply that Indians, like Curtis, are part of the past (despite the editor's interior contrary statement). Next, Graybill's and Boesen's 1981 title, Visions of a Vanishing Race, is perhaps better, for "visions," in contrast to the earlier "portraits," could at least imply a false perception. Finally, in the 1990s, Lyman unambiguously titled his Curtis compilation, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusion.

Photography has been in existence for approximately 130 years on the southern Northwest Coast. During this time, thousands of images of Native Americans have been produced, many of which are preserved in regional archives. These photographs were made by both professionals and amateurs who approached their subjects with a variety of motivations. The question of how the subjects responded to having their pictures taken is an important one that this author has explored in a previous paper. In brief summary, responses varied considerably according to circumstances. One early twentieth-century historian traveling along the Washington coast described positive reactions by an individual of high rank posing for his camera. The historian concluded that the subject felt his social position could be enhanced by a permanent likeness, especially if it included an object symbolizing his status. Other written sources describe reluctance and even aversion to being in front of the camera, especially among members of earlier generation. According to one contemporary source, many ”old timers” still feel ”nervous” about being photographed.

This essay derives from the simple fact that the Navajo seldom have had much input into their imaging in photography. But this fact has many more implications than might initially appear-some implications common to all minority groups subject to a powerful and very aggressive majority with a discursively saturated Western technology at its disposal, and some implications peculiar to the Navajo and their experiences with the West. Photographers of Navajo derived from Western conventions, registers, tropes, photographic practices, and constitutions that dictated their project-whatever their intentions and however much they might have assumed or argued or quite genuinely felt they were representing Navajo. So we will be examining something of what it means to be Navajo, in photographs.The essay is also but a scan-more detailed treatment may be found elsewhere in an extended volume devoted specifically to a critical history of the photography of Navajo. Despite the tenacious classic view, no one would now argue that photography is simply transparent, and photographers present themselves and their cultural history in the exercise, by the exercise; the assumption that somehow we can learn much about Navajo culture (rather than literally the Western view of Navajo culture) from these images is indeed bizarre. How could such images present Navajo if they were not Navajo presentation? Of course, all kinds of other things may be learned, mostly about the discourse guiding the photographers and Navajo in Western history and in interaction with the West.

I would like to begin with a story that I hope will demonstrate how I researched the two books of photography, Navaho Means People by Leonard McCombe and The Enduring Navaho by Laura Gilpin. I remember showing the books to an elderly Navajo woman sitting at a table in a chapter house. She carefully turned each page of the two books. Midway into Laura Gilpin’s book, she stopped and said, “I used to sleep on a dirt floor just like that. These pictures seem so old, so far away. If it wasn’t for all the silver and turquoise, I would think they were real. Nobody wears their jewelry all the time.” I later asked to photograph her and she nodded and then told me, “Wait. Let me go home and put on my jewelry.” I want to discuss photography and the Navajo, in particular, the work of Laura Gilpin and Leonard McCombe. But, before I get into that I think it is important to speak just a little about the Navajo. I want to qualify almost everything I shall write by saying that this is from a Navajo point of view. You may dispute the facts, but you cannot dispute the point of view. At first glance, we are a very easy tribe to photograph. Everywhere you look there is a striking image. The landscape is rugged and spectacular. The land changes from a desert environment to sandstone mountains and deep canyons. To say it is a beautiful reservation is an understatement. The reservation is the largest in the country, and the government is as full of red tape as any state. Most important, Navajo culture is alive and Navajo history is rich. This is what makes the Navajo people appear easy to photograph.

INTRODUCTION In the very near future-if it has not already happened while this journal was in press-the governor and the tribal council of the Pueblo of Zuni will formally request that museums and archives holding photographic images of Zuni religious ceremonies place restrictions on access to these images by scholars and commercial users. This position ultimately has its origins in the well-documented objections that some community members had to the making of these images in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is paralleled by similar requests from other Indian communities. In this article, I do not intend to speak on behalf of the present-day Zuni religious leaders from whom this request originates. Rather, my intention is to discuss the double challenge of photography of Zuni religious ceremonies. First, I will discuss how photography in religious contexts was a challenge to nineteenth-century Zuni community standards with no straightforward solution.

Indians and photography are inextricably intertwined in strange and persistent ways. From the earliest beginnings of photography to the most recent prints from the trip to Santa Fe, Indians are subject matter for generations of non-Indian photographers. Their cameras search out our homes, our clothing, our kids, our arts, our hands, and our faces in an attempt to capture our spirits through photography. This search parallels the development of photography and western expansion. It has become an American tradition to photograph the Indian. Why has the Indian been so important to white photographers, and what ethical questions arise from the use of 150 years of photographs of Indians? From the time of the arrival of Columbus to the current argument about the use of Indians as sports mascots, conflicting images of Indians have emerged and re-emerged in American popular and high culture. Often based on historic cultural and racial stereotypes, these persistent images give us a distorted view of Indians, a distortion that affects the past as well as the present. In one sense, we are surrounded by images of Indians. We grow up with these images in our cartoons, in textbooks, in films, in television shows, and in the names of sports teams. Museum collections are full of paintings and photographs of Indians from our collective past. Toy stores are full of plastic Indian warriors on horseback, tomahawks in their hands. Hollywood continues to bring stereotyped images right into our homes. Company logos continue to use Indian images for advertising everything from baking powder to bullets.

Photographs, and work with photograph collections, are among the delights of archival research. We are visual creatures; images speak to us with an immediacy and on a different level from that of words. For that reason, photographs taken across cultural boundaries present problems and issues that need to be revealed and addressed. This essay is concerned with archival photographs of Native American tribes and pueblos in the American Southwest; it will describe issues specific to the Southwest that have been raised in a series of discussions carried on by archivists, curators, and members of the surrounding American Indian communities that have an interest in photographs. This informal group has been meeting at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe since 1990. The use of historic images of Native Americans can be viewed from three different perspectives: that of archivists, that of Indian users, and that of non-Indian users. Each of these groups has special interests and each raises issues, and within each there are divisions and different voices. In this essay, I shall explore how these groups overlap, contrast, and differ, and I will explain how important some of these issues are, yet how they seem to collide.

Guide to Abbreviations LM Love Medicine BQ The Beet Queen T Tracks SAIL Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures NDQ North Dakota Quarterly {} Indicates a numbered item on the bibliography () Indicates a page number in a work Louise Erdrich’s novels Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks form the first three installments of a loosely defined tetralogy, in that some characters appear in two or more of the novels, and many of them are either biological or ”soul” relations. Elaine Jahner’s (811 prophetic remark described Love Medicine as ”complex enough to affect consciousness . . . compelling enough to attract wide readership.” This seems to have been true of The Beet Queen and Trucks as well, and the novels have achieved a combination of popular success and critical attention.

Dear Dr. Champagne: An article by Professor Joseph G. Jorgensen entitled "Ethnicity, Not Culture? Obfuscating Social Science in the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill" recently appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.The article discussed Order No. 190 of In re the Exxon Valdez, Case No. A89-0095 (March 23, 1994), in which the court granted Exxon Corporation's motion for summary judgment on Native Alaskans' claims for non-economic damages stemming from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The article is based on several serious misconceptions. In Order No. 190, a copy of which is enclosed, the court considered the Alaska Natives' claims that the Exxon Valdez oil spill damaged their culture and subsistence way of life. The Alaska Natives argued that their claims were cognizable as a maritime public nuisance. Private individuals can recover for a maritime public nuisance if they can show a special injury, different in kind from that suffered by the general public. The court, after considering the applicable case and statutory law, ruled that Alaska Natives' cultural claims were not of a kind different from those suffered by the general public. The court noted that all Alaskans have the right to lead subsistence lifestyles, not just Alaska Natives. Thus, the court held that the Alaska Natives' claims were not different in kind from that of the general public and did not state cognizable claims for maritime public nuisance. The court also held that the Alaska Natives could not establish a claim for private nuisance because they did not have a possessory interest in the oiled land. A claimant must have a possessory interest in the burdened land to support a private nuisance claim. The land in question was owned by either the United States, the State of Alaska, or various Native Corporations who pursued their own damage claims.

I have no issue and took no issue in these pages with the case law on which Federal District Judge H. Russel Holland based his grant of Exxon’s motion for summary judgment on native claims for noneconomic injury in relation to the infamous oil spill of the Exxon Valdez (Order No. 190 in the U.S. District Court of Alaska, 23 March 1994) [henceforth #1901. Whereas I take exception with some minor issues in the judge’s response, here and in the original article in these pages I focus on his egregious mistakes. As minor issues go, a casual reading of my article demonstrates that I did not identify the precise amount that attorneys for commercial fishermen or the claimants shall collect from judgments against Exxon, nor did I identify the precise amount that native claimants or their attorneys shall receive from their settlement with Exxon. The more serious mistakes are his unwarranted assertions about differences between natives and nonnatives. I take the judge at his word that he arrived at his misconceptions independently of Bohannon’s similar errors. Let me once again assess Judge Holland’s bent for generalizing in the absence of evidence. To be courteous, his generalizations might be framed as hypotheses. To be accurate, his generalizations are unwarranted assertions. It was the unwarranted nature of his assertions, rich throughout his decision and consonant with similar assertions made by Exxon's anthropological expert, that drew comment from me in "Ethnicity, Not Culture? . . ."