Negative Space and Printed Visions:
Picturing Native American Assimilation
(Exert from Longer Essay)
‘The Indian must die as an Indian and live as a man.’1 Such was the conviction held
by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the first off-reservation Indian boarding school in
1879. Pratt pioneered an educational system built on the premise that the Indian, if immersed
in white man’s ways, could shed all traces of native culture and evolve into a fully-fledged
American citizen. He believed the Indian was potentially fit for equal citizenship in civilized
society and should be put into competition with whites.2 Cultural assimilation was a midnineteenth century hypothetical solution to the on-going ‘Indian question’. The future of the
indigenous population within the modern nation was contested during a period of intense
racial debate.3 The nation was forced to reconcile its denouncement that Native Americans
were a ‘vanishing race’, with the very living presence they continued to impose. Assimilation
theory demanded readdressing a history of racial contact, and the innate attitudes postcolonial American society harboured towards its native people. In a significant divergence
from the annihilation stance of previous removal attempts, recognising the potential citizen in
the Indian was to collapse the barrier of ‘Other’ and open the nation’s arms to its wonted foe.
Through its professed salvation of the Indian, I argue, the visual propaganda of the Indian
school system fortified a racially potent reception of the Native American culture. Picturing
1
M. A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (London, 2002), p. 41.
R. H. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904 (Hartford, 1964),
pp. 213-14.
3
J. Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (London, 2007), p.
xiii.
2
Native American assimilation meant only to carve an isolated atemporal space for them
inside the modern nation.4
The so called ‘transformation’ portraits which emerged in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, with the institutionalisation of Native American children, could not have
circulated within the discourse of assimilation without the roots of photography having first
been grafted to various disciplines.5 The concept that a photograph could picture persons in a
way which would make visible the intrinsic signifiers of race, and that sets of photographic
images could be used for comparative purpose, to monitor change, were key foundational
suppositions that enabled photography to behave as a verifier and propagator of assimilation
ideology. I endeavour to expose the modes of production and consumption of transformation
photographs as a tactic which conspired to bring the Native American closer to home, thus
enabling the most calculated exorcism of indigenous culture endured. I will examine the ways
in which photographers grappled to portray an ideological construct, and make it credible;
and unearth the rationale behind the reversion to encoded tropes in their overt and covert
agendas.
Photographic Line-ups and Transformation
‘I send you today a few photographs of the Indian youth here. You will note that they
came mostly as blanket Indians. A very large portion of them had never been inside of a
school room. I am gratified to report that they have yielded gracefully to discipline and that
our school rooms… are, to our minds, quite up to the average of those of our own race.
Isolated as these Indian youth are from the savage surroundings of their homes, they lose
J. Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, p. 15.
E. Edwards, ‘Evolving Images: Photography, Race and Popular Darwinism’, in Endless Forms: Charles
Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, eds. D. Donald, J. Munro (Cambridge, 2009) p. 167.
4
5
their tenacity to savage life, which is so much of an obstacle to Agency efforts, and give
themselves up to learning all that they can in the time they expect to remain here.’
Captain Richard Henry Pratt in a letter to Spotted Tail. 6
Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania,
was the first to employ photographs to advertise the success of his assimilation regime to
both the public and government.7 The photographs he commissioned are in the mode of
carefully orchestrated before-and-after images, intended to convey the Indian children on a
progressive path from savagery to civilization.8 Envisioned to be viewed together, the pairs
invited close scrutiny and visible traces of difference signified cultural transformation. The
photographs were disseminated to the government, the Indian tribes whose children had been
taken, and were issued to subscribers of the institute’s monthly magazine, ‘The Indian
Helper’.
(Fig. 1) shows a group of Chiricahua Apache children upon arrival at Carlisle Indian
School in 1886. The children stand grouped on a porch, with no apparent organization, apart
from instruction to face the camera. The foreground, the area of the photo most in focus,
displays a row of bare feet on the brick surface. The bare feet here, seem to demarcate the
children’s circumstances as Indians, plucked straight from running free in their uncivilized
surroundings. The boot scraper to the far right of the children, for whom it is clearly an
unnecessary prop, stands as a signifier of what these individuals are not, and how far they
have to go on their ascent to civilization. An array of individual clothing styles is visible,
their long untamed hair hangs loose around their faces which are suntanned and offset by the
backdrop of whitewashed surface behind. Essentially, in the process of composing this initial
6
Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, p. 248.
E. Margolis, ‘Looking at Discipline, Looking at Labour: Photographic Representations of Indian Boarding
Schools’, Visual Studies, 19. no. 1, (2004 ), p. 78.
8
Sandweiss, Print the Legend, p. 41.
7
photograph, the photographer had the latter image already in mind. For the reformation to be
deemed a success, the most extreme indices of change were presented.
(Fig. 2) is a photograph of the same group, taken four months after the initial one.
Now contained in an interior setting, the children are arranged in a tight composition with
equal spacing between them. All are dressed in uniform, coherent in style, tone and texture.
Their wild hair has been cropped and tamed into partings or pinned back to reveal visibly
paler faces; the bare feet are gone and in their place are polished shoes and the pleats of
skirts. The composition of the latter image appears to have been carefully considered to
provoke a number of conclusions about what has taken place in the duration between the two
sittings. The central group of girls are arranged in gestures of affection, their bodies
manipulated to act out easily readable western modes of expression. The folded arms and
determined scowls in the first photograph, the only visible indicators of resistance, have been
remoulded. Their new postures do not appear wholly natural or comfortable for them. The
boys stand regimented with hands positioned across their chests or rigidly in their laps in
poses resembling formal portraiture and military conduct. The configuration of the portrait is
intended to imply that the apparent mutation which occurred is not only physical – hair, dress
and skin tone – but that the children have reached a new mental state, expressed by their newfound codes of body language and countenance. The photographs aim to demonstrate a
shedding of one culture and the embodiment of another, a visual manifestation of Pratt’s
conviction that ‘the Indian must die as an Indian and live as a man.’9
The transformation photographs seem to have found corroboration in nineteenth
century anthropological practice which reproduced the actualities of the natural world in
controlled conditions which allowed for their analysis.10 In the initial portrait of Chiricahua
9
Sandweiss, Print the Legend, p. 41.
E. Edwards, Ordering Others: Photography, Anthropologies and Taxonomies (Oxford, 1997), pp. 55-8.
10
Apache children, the print has been numbered in red ink. It can be deduced that the rationale
behind this numbering of figures was that it would make for easier comparison with the later
photograph once the children had been converted. The children were reduced to specimens in
Carlisle’s cultural mission. Its visual propaganda paraded in the guise of the conventional
portrait; operating in a genre Allan Sekula terms ‘Instrumental Realism.’11 The before-andafter structure was intrinsic to the assimilation ideology because it connoted progress. The
photographs apparently provide two fixed moments in time; yet there is no contextual
information to suggest this was occurring in contemporary America. The Indian children are
contained in a photographic nowhere, a limbo detached from threatening coexistence within
the modern nation.
The same formula was applied to a trio of Sioux boys (Fig. 3, Fig. 4). Here the degree
of transformation is enhanced by traditional Native American dress in the earlier portrait; the
boys are clothed in buckskins, blankets, moccasins, fur, and feather headdresses, with the
central child completely enveloped by textiles. In the sequential photograph the boys have
been elevated from their site on the carpeted floor to sit on chairs, and meet the viewer, as
opposed to their prior diminished position in relation to the camera lens. Their physical
elevation in space can be interpreted as picturing progression toward civilization and a
position almost equal with the anticipated white audience. The children, it is suggested, have
earned the privilege of sitting on a chair, just as the Indian must earn the right to be
photographed within the conventions of Anglo-American photographic tradition. The final
photograph then is not only used as a visual benchmark of change, it is itself a rite of passage
into American culture.
A. Sekula, ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. C.
Fusco, B. Wallis (New York, 2003), p. 81. ‘The social-scientific appropriation of photography led to a genre I
would call instrumental realism, representational projects devoted to new techniques of social diagnosis and
control, to the systematic naming, categorization, and isolation of an otherness thought to be determined by
biology and manifested through the “language” of the body itself.’
11
The setting of this pairing is somewhat incongruous within the intentions of the
photographic project; the backdrop sits comfortably behind the latter, finale portrait, but not
with the first. Painted scenery including a balustrade, urn and foliage correspond with the
type of studio portraiture fashionable from the 1860s which involved illusory and theatrical
staging.12 A painted element of a photograph, devoid of the claims of truth which its
mechanical collaborator was bound to, the backdrop was free to manoeuvre between actual
space and imaginary. Operating as a veneer employed deliberately to distract from real time
and place, the photographer’s studio was a generalized fictional realm not fixed to a precise
location. It could be anywhere, or rather, nowhere. In consenting to the theatricality of the
studio, for a white audience, assimilated Sioux boys did not have to inhabit a
contemporaneous reality.
A photograph of Tom Torlino on arrival at and ‘after transformation at Carlisle’
shows a bust which appears to loom out of its bleached surrounds (Fig. 5, Fig. 6). He is first
pictured wearing Navajo clothing: tasselled buckskin across one shoulder, carved jewellery,
earrings and headscarf. Dark hair is allowed to weave across his shoulders. The sequential
portrait seems to show an incredible metamorphosis. Here the colour of his face has been
substantially lightened and the amount of contrast reduced so that sharp highlights no longer
fiercely accentuate his bone structure. All signifiers of his Native American customs have
been stripped and a neck tie, stiff collar and crisp lapels symbolize the outward adoption of
gentile civilized culture. John Choate, official photographer at the Carlisle school, carefully
doctored the photographs to produce images expressing the ‘whitening’ process which
accompanied the Americanization of Indian students at the institution.13 Visible in the portrait
of Tom Torlino, he employed front lighting and white powder to convey an impression of
12
M. Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (London, 1989), pp.
90-1.
13
Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, p. 163.
racial bleaching, and with it social evolution; something that was impossible under America’s
binary ‘one drop’ racial classification.14
The focus on physiognomy in this image indicates that the photograph circulated
beyond a discourse primarily concerned with transformation made apparent through the
formal portrait, towards one which drew on ethnographic representations of Native
Americans. Tom Torlino is projected against a bare white backdrop, as the prime subject of
the visual interrogation. Sharp highlighting of facial features to accentuate the contours of the
profile is a technique employed in contemporaneous ethnographic photographs of Native
Americans (Fig. 8). Anthropological attention to physiognomy and phrenology as indexes of
intellectual ability and racial identity permeated the portrait.15 Scientific racism propagated a
philosophy of cultural evolutionism, which at this time denied Native American capacity for
assimilation. The racial preoccupations of this pairing undermine its testimonial to change.
Tom Torlino, it professes, is destined to remain in his primordial savage state. The images
draw on a pre-established lexicon of ‘Indian’, which magnifies the difference between
‘before’ and ‘after’ by signifying ‘Indianness’ as both an internal genetic and external
cultural condition. The evolution pictured and engineered by the camera was then, in every
sense, miraculous.
In attempting to visualize the integration of Native Americans into white culture, the
photographs created a kind of visual stalemate. The eye could dart across from the first
picture to the second, comprehend the changes, but it could also be drawn back. The cyclical
relationship of the paired photographs implied the transformation could be easily reversed,
their subjects suspended in an irrevocable flux between Indian and Anglo-American states.
The transformation photographs expose the complexities in the perception of how effortlessly
Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, p. 163.
P. Hamilton, R. Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century
Photography (Aldershot, 2001), p. 85.
14
15
Indianness could be banished from the national consciousness; how immediately tangible the
effects of assimilation would be, and how simple it would be to shake off their own
prejudices towards Native American people if they were to shake off their origins.