Native American

Some of the most striking portraits ever made in America are of Native American men and women, and many of them were taken at a time when the government was working hard to end the ways of life the pictures show. Photographers began working with Native subjects in the 1850s and 1860s. Many of the earliest portraits were made in Washington, D.C. Tribal leaders traveled to the capital to negotiate treaties, and while they were there they were photographed in studios, often in their finest dress. Those delegation portraits are some of the most dignified pictures in the archive.

After the Civil War, photographers went west with survey parties, the Army and the railroads. They photographed villages, camps, ceremonies and reservation agencies. By the late 1800s, most tribes had been confined to reservations, children were being sent to boarding schools, and the photographs from those years show a world under great pressure.

The best-known work is Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian, published in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930. Curtis spent decades photographing dozens of tribes, and his pictures are beautiful. They are also posed. He believed he was recording a vanishing race, and he sometimes supplied costumes or removed signs of modern life from the frame so his subjects would look untouched by the present. Knowing that does not spoil the pictures, but it changes how to read them.

The archive also holds the other side of the story. There are pictures of Native people as farmers, ranchers, students, soldiers and town residents, wearing the same clothes as their neighbors. There are posters from Wild West shows, where Native performers played themselves for paying crowds. And there are prints and paintings made by people who never saw the West at all.

When looking at a portrait, read the caption carefully. Names were often written down by outsiders and spelled any number of ways, and tribe names were sometimes wrong. The person in the picture was a real individual with a family and a history, and the best captions try to give back that name.