American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.