False Faces in the Mirror

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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

© M. Clara Núñez-Regueiro

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 nonIndian 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.

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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 nineteenthcentury 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.

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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).

Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001).

10

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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 Clara Núñez-Regueiro

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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 EuroAmerican 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.

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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) Clara Núñez-Regueiro

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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.

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Fig.1 Mirror, Mirror38

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, "AngloIndian 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.

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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 precontact 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.

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

Fig. 2. Before the white man came - Palm Cannon48

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).

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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.

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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.

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Fig.3 The Pool - Apache58

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.

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Fig. 4. Vanishing Race - Navaho61

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.

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

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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 - Navaho63

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-land64 63 64

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

Ibid, plate no. 38.

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“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 - Navaho65

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.

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.

66

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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: Cheyenne70

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.

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.

70

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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 Cloud72

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.

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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 EuroAmericans 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?) Clara Núñez-Regueiro

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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-man78

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.

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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.

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).

80

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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 82

Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 9.

Dyer, Whiteness, 304.

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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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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. "The Reality Effect." In The Rustle of Language, 141-8. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979.

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