Reading A Picture

BRIAN: Some of the most iconic images of Native Americans come to us in the form, not of paintings, but of photographs. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the photos created by the ethnologist, Edward S Curtis. In 1907, Curtis published a giant, 20 volume set called The North American Indian.

In one striking image, we see a Navajo family on horseback in single file. They’re riding away, you might even say disappearing into the wilderness. And while some of Curtis’s work paints Indians in a heroic, as well as tragic light, there are many who have criticized them is exploitative. Subjects had no say in how the images would be used. And some say native peoples were portrayed as an undifferentiated mass, a backwards race, primitive, defeated in war, and destined to fade from history.

PETER: Martha Sandweiss is a historian who has written about early photographs of American Indians. And she tells a more complicated story, one that takes us all the way back to the very first photos of native people produce in the 1840s. These were daguerreotypes, the first ever photographic technology and a wonder of the day.

A single portrait could take hours to produce, and yielded a single image on a silver coated plate that could not be copied. They demanded the subjects’ active participation. And largely because of that, says Sandweiss, those pictures told a different story than the later images did.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: You see people at a Cherokee political convention in 1843 inviting a photographer to make their pictures. You see a missionary in Great Britain in 1845 pausing to have his photograph made to further his fundraising efforts. Or you can look at a daguerreotype studio in Saint Louis in 1847 and see the great chief Keokuk being photographed, along with his family, which suggests that Keokuk, like anybody else, wanted a family portrait to take home.

And he is in Saint Louis probably to negotiate tribal business with the resident Indian agent who lives there in that frontier city. So he’s wearing a spectacular bear claw necklace. He has silver rings in is ear. He’s wearing a huge silver peace medal that he’s gotten from the federal government. And he’s holding a silver tipped cane, which is also a symbol of his status within his tribe.

PETER: Yeah, and he would accentuate his, what we call otherness, his difference. Because it’s going to work to his advantage.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Exactly. And let’s face it, he’s got a lot of bling on.

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The bear claw necklace, the silver peace medal. You know, I think Keokuk is calculating how best to make an impression on the photographer and all the people who will see this picture. He’s a person to reckon with.

BRIAN: Well, looking forward, Marty, what happened? If image making, image taking in the first period does seem to be a negotiated activity and it’s not imposing the stereotypical images, it’s not something that’s taken from Indians. it’s a product of collaboration. What happens? Is it so just technological that photography with negatives we have replicable images and they circulate? What’s happening with photography?

MARTHA SANDWEISS: I think technology really changes everything. When glass negatives become popular in the late 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, suddenly photographers can make a theoretically infinite number of paper prints from their glass negative. Then they can make money by selling many copies of their portraits of Indians.

PETER: Yeah, So the sitter doesn’t control the image anymore, or at least once the negative exists it’s out of the sitter’s control.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Exactly. So the photographer, instead of pleasing the sitter, is anticipating, how can I please oh, those hundreds or thousands of people out there who might want to buy this photograph?

PETER: And so what happens with those images? Do they become stereotypical, less flattering? How does the imagery change?

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Well, a couple of things happen once you can make these multiple copies of paper prints. They’re on paper. They’re mounted on cardboard mounts. And in the vast majority of cases, they’re sent out into the world with words attached to tell you how to understand the photograph that you’re looking at.

PETER: Right. These pictures are deployed for a variety of purposes, first to make money, but also to serve the purposes of the government, serve the purposes of white society. Describe some of those uses and the way, in effect, these pictures are reframed, repackaged, and tell a different story.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Well, one of the largest producers of photographic portraits of Native Americans during the 19th century is really the federal government. The federal government is sponsoring expeditions that go west. And the federal government is interested in recording the faces of mostly men and sometimes women who come to Washington as part of diplomatic missions.

And in 1877, the federal government gathers together many hundreds of these pictures into a catalog. Every textual description of a person has a number. And you could go to the federal government and order picture number 483. And when they sent you picture number 483, it would have a copy of the very caption from that catalog cut out and glued to the back.

So when you acquired the photograph, you would flip it over. And you would learn how you were supposed to understand it and interpret it. And sometimes the captions for these photographs change.

PETER: Oh, interesting.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: There’s one fantastic photograph in the catalog of a Sioux Indian named Little Crow. And when the photograph was first made of him in the 1850s, he was a good Indian. And he had promised to have his hair cut and become civilized. That’s what an older caption tells us.

But later, Little Crow leads a battle against the whites in the so-called Minnesota massacre of 1862. And his caption in the catalog changes. And he becomes a parable for the treacherous Indian and for the idea that you really can’t trust them.

PETER: Native Americans wouldn’t be too keen on this. What is the reaction to the extent you can surmise, or what evidence do you have, for how Indians feel about the history of this imagery, of pictures of them?

MARTHA SANDWEISS: You know, it’s really risky to generalize about how Indian peoples responded to photographic technology. Some tribes welcomed it. Other tribes, associating camera technology with other kinds of technology that had been hurtful to their tribes, guns, cannons, were much more reluctant to collaborate with photographers.

But I think what many people are coming to understand now is that the meanings that were attached to photographs in the 19th century, those words that were scrawled on the back that told you Uncle Joe was a good Indian. Or Uncle Jack was a bad Indian. You know what? Those aren’t the only stories we can attach to these photographs. Photographs don’t have a single, fixed meaning.

PETER: Right. So Uncle Joe may have become generic Indian as his image was circulated. But it is possible, and it has happened, that he can be re-embedded, re-contextualize, re-appropriated, taken back by his descendants.

MARTHA SANDWEISS: Exactly and the Yankton Lakota tribe during the 1980s did a project just like this. They got together a number of those Indian portraits that had been published in the government catalog of 1877. And they reeled those photographs back in. And families attached their own stories to those photographs. And they published their own catalog.

They know who was a good hunter, and who was a good dad, and who fought the whites, and who refused to sign the treaty. Those stories have been handed down. And now those stories are being reattached to a picture. And I think that’s a tremendous project. And it suggests that photographs that people may have discounted for, you know, well over a century now, can live again in powerful ways within native communities.

PETER: Martha Sandweiss is a historian at Princeton University. You can see examples of some of the early daguerreotype images she talked about in her book, Print the Legend, Photography in the American West.

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BRIAN: It’s time for another break. But stick around. Because when we return, the President of the United States breaks ground for– wait for it– the biggest cigar store Indian ever.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

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