Native Americans

Many of the best-known photographs of Native Americans were made by people trying to record what they believed was a vanishing way of life. The people in the pictures had other ideas. Their nations are still here, and their descendants are still reading the captions.

The photographic record begins in the mid-1800s, and much of it was made in Washington. Tribal delegations traveled to the capital to negotiate treaties and press their claims, and studios such as those run by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographed them in formal portraits. Some of the leaders wore their own finest clothing, and some wore the suits or medals given to them by federal officials. Both choices said something.

Later in the century, photographers went west with government surveys and the Bureau of American Ethnology. At the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha in 1898, Frank Rinehart made a large series of portraits of people from many nations who had gathered there. In the early 1900s Edward S. Curtis began his huge project The North American Indian, published in 20 volumes over more than 2 decades.

Curtis's pictures are beautiful, and they should be looked at carefully. He sometimes asked sitters to wear older styles of dress, supplied props and removed signs of modern life such as clocks or wagons from the frame. Other photographers did similar things. The pictures are real people, but the scene is often arranged.

Captions are the other thing worth watching. Many old captions use names for nations that the people themselves did not use, misidentify the tribe or leave the sitter unnamed altogether. Where an individual's name is recorded, it is worth using. Look at the faces, the beadwork, the clothing and the settings with care. These portraits are among the most powerful in the American archive, and many of the people in them knew exactly how they wanted to be seen.