/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/PHOTOGRAPHY-U.S.: Exhibit Counters Native American Stereotypes

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Susan Lee

NEW YORK, Nov 6 2001 (IPS) - The bodies of Native Americans lay tumbled across patches of white snow, faces contorted in shock.

The series of photographs captured the aftermath of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre in the U.S. state of South Dakota, where the corpses of dead Lakota Indians killed by the U.S. army literally froze where they had fallen.

‘Spirit Capture,’ an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian here, coincides with November’s observance of American and Alaskan Indian Heritage Month. It includes photographs taken at the massacre and nearly 200 other images from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The curators also have gathered a handful of more recent works intended to counter the often-stereotypical earlier work.

The photos document a history shaped by non-Indian photographers who often manipulated the medium to advance their own economic, political, and religious agendas.

But the exhibit also is a celebration of the spirit of Native Americans. Its title is taken from a Native American belief that a person’s spirit can be stolen and imprisoned inside a photograph, although many of the subjects willingly posed for pictures, which they saw as objects of pride for their families and friends.

“The main objective of the exhibit is to share the history of photography as a tool, how it shaped perceptions of Native Americans,” says project manager Ann Silverman. “But it’s not just about Native Americans as victims. It was about having a limited set of choices, but within that set, trying to come away with something beneficial.”

The Wounded Knee photos, however, shot as proof by soldiers who had defeated the Lakota tribe, served as a grim warning to those who challenged the U.S. government’s programme of relocating American Indians onto reservations to solve the “Indian problem”.

Like the Wounded Knee photos, images used as political or social propaganda prevailed in the representation of American Indians at the turn of the 20th century.

Portraits of Native Americans were taken to accentuate the difference between the “civilised” and “uncivilised” worlds.

“By showing a naked Indian, a photographer could suggest a backward lifestyle,” one caption notes.

But some Native Americans, like Geronimo, an Apache who agreed to sit for pictures in exchange for money, exploited the medium for both political and economic purposes. In one portrait that opens up the exhibit, Geronimo leans on one leg while the other props up a rifle, a symbol of modernity.

Images of the famous Native leader sparked fear and hatred among many whites at the time.

“The career of Geronimo, Chief of the Apaches, gave point to the proverb that a good Indian is a dead Indian. Geronimo, aged nearly 90 years, is dead,” the New York Times declared on Feb. 18, 1909. “Crafty, bloodthirsty, incredibly cruel and ferocious, he was all his life the worst type of aboriginal savage.”

Geronimo is best remembered for his 16-month evasion of 5,000 soldiers and federal agents after fleeing from the San Carlos reservation in Arizona with 144 men, women and children.

The exhibit continues with the work of Edward C. Curtis (1868- 1952), a white photographer who set out in 1900 to photograph 80 tribes and their vanishing way of life. He devoted three decades to a dangerous and expensive expedition and created more than 40,000 images, 20 volumes of ethnographic text, and a seminal documentary film about the Kwakiutl tribe.

Curtis’s work is respected for the beauty of his photographs but despised by many for the means by which he shot them. For a documentary film made in British Columbia, Curtis was accused of coercing Native Americans to wear traditional clothing and to allow him access to sacred rituals that were off-limits to outsiders.

But contemporary Iroquoian-Canadian photographer Jeff Thomas says much of the criticism of Curtis is “uninformed.”

“Like any director, he used props and so he was working from the fact that at the time, the long history of Native Americans was ignored and Native Americans had no voice,” Thomas says. “Curtis, essentially, was the messenger…so we owe him at least that recognition and we are fortunate that he created these powerful images.”

Thomas, who started taking pictures in the 1980s, wanted to reconcile Curtis’s images with his own experiences on the reservation compared to city life.

In one of Thomas’s photographs, a young man is dressed in traditional Iroquoian garb, wears face paint, and carries a tomahawk. In a second image juxtaposed next to the first, the same man is dressed in modern street clothing.

Other photographers who shaped the perceptions of non-Native Americans were Clara and Frank Churchill. Husband and wife, they visited nearly 100 tribes from 1899 until 1908 as federal Indian Service agents, accumulating more than 2,000 photos of reservation life.

Hired by the U.S. government’s Peace Commission, agents traveled all over the country to “integrate” Native Americans. A slide show with a voiceover by Clara in the exhibit humanises her subjects, yet still leaves the agent’s role of “assimilating” Indians ambiguous.

The exhibit ends with the idea of “finding a balance” between being the subject versus the object of one’s own history.

Displaying the works of contemporary Native American artists, the curators suggest that the true celebration of ‘Spirit Capture’ begins with a relationship of mutual respect and understanding between photographer and subject.

The exhibit will be on view until July 2002 and may travel to other museums in the US, according to Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby. More details are available online at www.si.edu/nmai.