American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.