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Negative Space and Printed Visions:
Picturing Native American Assimilation
‘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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
Modern Indian Envisioned
Philip Deloria has interpreted the flexible ideology surrounding the American Indian
in the late nineteenth century as a repercussion of the admission to the reality of a physical
and social Indian presence.16 The Indian was simultaneously construed as noble savage, a
sacrificial component in an aggrandized national history, to be eternalised in the efforts of
salvage ethnography; or, as a living, culturally vacant apparition of authentic indigenous
character.17 Such polarised representations of the Indian can be interpreted as cultural anxiety
towards Indian assimilation. The authentic Indian was an ideological construct that could
only ever permeate reality as artificial imitation, and the authentic itself was maintained by its
position mounted in opposition to the inauthentic, contemporary Native American. A
primordial people could not be reconciled with a modern age; yet the Indian, once stripped of
his native culture, was irredeemable, because of the persistence of race.
Native Americans were increasingly viewed through the frame of ethnography at the
end of the nineteenth century.18 ‘Native with Tepees’ (Fig. 7) exposes an effort to imitate the
‘authentic’ Indian. The figure is situated before a painted backdrop with tepees, rolling
grassland and overcast sky; he stands on grass and clustered logs. Laden in traditional
costume, the man prominently clutches a pipe across his body. Here the archetypal Indian is
16
P. Deloria, Playing Indian (London, 1998), p. 90.
Deloria, Playing Indian, pp. 90-1. ‘The only culture allowed to define real Indian people was traditional
culture that came from the past rather than the present. Even as they continued to live and propagate, then,
Indian people in the present were necessarily regarded as inauthentic because their culture did not conform to
that of the second Iroquois epoch.’
18
Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 93.
17
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resurrected in three emblematic realms: the painted backdrop, a fictionalised homeland
alluding to the real American landscape, but existing in an indeterminate historical past. The
mid ground is the studio floor, exempt from signs of temporality, scattered with props which
signify nature to forge a fluid extension of the photographer’s studio into the backdrop. The
third space is that of the Native American man himself, inhabiting actual space and time at
the point in which the photograph executed. The severing of the floor in the foreground of the
image denies the existence of the Native American on a shared trajectory in space, physically
and temporally, with the photographer. As the caption for this photograph suggests, signifiers
of ‘Native’ validate the Indian’s authenticity. Tepees, open space, grass, buckskin costume
and pipe together operate as synecdoche for Indian, to augment the perception of this
photographic identity.
The career of Edward S. Curtis, an enterprise of salvage ethnography, was immersed
in memorialising the last tribes of a vanishing race.19 He produced images which claimed
both scientific and artful, aesthetic representation; and diminished the threat of contemporary
American Indian existence by banishing their cultural difference to the sphere of the
photographic chronicle.20 His photographic survey ‘The North American Indian’, 1907-1930,
comprised twenty volumes, documenting over eighty native groups who, according to Curtis
‘still retained to a considerable degree their primitive customs and traditions.’21 He set out to
represent the untainted authentic Indian: ‘I resolved at an early period in my work with the
Indians that my work must show the native without dress or artefact that betokened his
contact with white civilization if possible.’22 Curtis equated ‘traditional’ Indian with authentic
J. Faris, ‘Navajo and Photography’, in Photography’s Other Histories, eds. C. Pinney, N. Peterson (London,
2003), p. 91.
20
A. Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha (New York, 2004), pp. 171-4. ‘Curtis set about to assimilate ‘the North
American Indian’ not by acculturation - the method of the allotment policy and the boarding school – but just
the opposite: by preserving difference as a beauty lost forever, the spectral beauty of national origins.’
21
M. Gidley, ‘Edward S. Curtis’ Indian Photographs: A National Enterprise,’ in Representing Others: White
Views of Indigenous Peoples, ed. M. Gidley (Exeter, 1992), p. 103.
22
Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha, p. 176.
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Indian. In his fieldwork he went to extraordinary lengths to remove signs of transculturation
and the twentieth century; to the extent of providing wigs to cover shorn hair, issuing props
and costumes.23 His efforts to achieve photographs of the authentic, pre-contact North
American were apparently working in an opposing vein to assimilation propaganda, but both
agendas ultimately excluded the Native American from a recognisable present in white
American society. One aimed to eradicate all evidence of transculturation, the other enforced
it to a suffocating degree. Throughout the history of America, the Indian was continuously
portrayed through white man’s lens, and the temporal discrepancy surrounding the nineteenth
century construction of the Indian, his memorialisation, meant that the modern Indian could
not be consolidated in a photographic image.
The photographs by Curtis employ a peculiar light, are often heavily cropped which
result in seemingly intimate close-up portraits, with very little contextual space. Where
background is provided it often appears in the form of a blurred, unfocused landscape or a
nondescript space suffocated by shadow. The portraits in (Fig. 8) and (Fig. 9) bathe in this
light, which provides the figures with an ephemeral presence. It caresses their features and
threatens to dissolve them completely. Curtis consistently pictured his subjects with light
falling solidly on the brow and nose, accentuating their profile, so that often one half of the
face would loom out of darkness, the other, swathed in black, losing all substance. In his
close-up portraits, Curtis staged the image as if to show the Indian in the process of
vanishing, physically disintegrating before the camera. An Indian with no material presence
could offer no threat to a white American audience.
His corpus of images also displays an extreme attentiveness to detail, often focusing
in with uncomfortable proximity (Fig. 10). Frequently, skin texture appears the sole focus of
the camera’s attention; he seems to have relished the way in which his sharp lighting effects
23
Gidley, ‘Edward S. Curtis’ Indian Photographs’, pp. 103-4.
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played on the skin’s surface. Creases, pores, and scars are treated with the same, if not more,
photographic precision as clothing and accessories, as if the intrinsic secrets of the Indian,
their fate, were inscribed on their face. Curtis was drawing on the techniques of visual
anthropology, alluding that biologically determined signs of primitiveness and inevitable
cultural decline were explicit through scrutiny of the subject’s image.24
A photograph which casts the living, nineteenth century Native American in
opposition to the vanished, archetypal Indian is ‘Class in American History’, by Francis
Benjamin Johnston (Fig. 11). Johnston was assigned to photographing students at Virginia’s
Hampton Institute in 1899, an undertaking similar to that of Choate at the Carlisle School, but
here it was predominantly the ‘after’ view in the assimilation process which was heralded.
Johnston’s Hampton pictures were exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1900, designed to
demonstrate to the civilized world that Americans were successfully educating their nation’s
‘darker races’.25 As propaganda, they functioned to gain financial support and prestige for the
institute, which was committed to inducting the nation’s minorities – blacks and Native
Americans – onto the path of American progress.26 Johnston photographed both manual trade
and classroom scenes; in which the children are consistently projected as model students,
willingly embarking on a journey into white culture and self-enlightenment.27
‘Class in American History’ depicts a classroom scene in which a group of black and
Native American students are engaged in a history lesson. The subject of their gaze, and in
fact the focus of the lesson itself, is a live Indian man elevated on a bench at the front of the
class; dressed in full tribal regalia, a Sioux feathered bonnet, and holding a pipe. Clearly he
has been positioned there as artefact, to be studied alongside the stuffed eagle also on
24
Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha, p. 207.
J. Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (London, 1991), pp. 23- 5.
26
Guimond, American Photography, p. 23.
27
Guimond, American Photography, p. 40.
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display.28 It is impossible to know if Johnston actively instigated the composition, or whether
she truly was an anonymous observer, a flâneur documenting the rhythms of the school, as
the photographs imply.29 Many of her photographs elicit a sense of sophisticated direction,
providing a strong impression of order, ease, composure, and intense concentration from the
students, apparently sedated by white culture (Fig.12, Fig. 13).30 In addition, it is impossible
to derive the nature of the discussion taking place in the history lesson photograph, but what
is evident is that the students and teacher are clearly separate, a world apart, from the Indian
man.
In Johnston’s composition the students are grouped to one side, in a frieze along the
back wall. The Indian man appears to have been allocated his own space, physically staged.
He is detached by the strong vertical of the doorframe behind - which seems to continue to
splice unseen in the space between him and the male Native American student. Their forms
could be seen to touch were it not for this metaphorical divide. Here the contemporary Native
American students are counterpoised in relation to the Indian man; the legacy of authentic
Indian claimed by ‘history’, he becomes a mute ethnographic object, a passive player in a
realm dominated by embryonic American citizens. The photograph can be seen to condense
the before-and-after image pairing into one implicit narrative. The perceived fate of Native
Americans is laid bare: they must progress and be assimilated into civilized society, or else be
consigned to history.
Yet this composition is not confined to two temporal zones, but three. For the viewer
does not partake equally in the class, participating instead as a disengaged witness to the
whole performance. Situated at a right angle to the determined viewing arena, the rows of
desks, the spectator is granted a commanding view which intercepts the main viewer28
Margolis, Looking at Discipline, p. 86.
Margolis, Looking at Discipline, p. 86.
30
Margolis, Looking at Discipline, p. 86.
29
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spectacle hierarchy penetrating the scene horizontally, from right to left. By inverting the
perceived viewing relationship, the spectator seizes the most powerful position, subordinating
the assimilated pupils’ viewing agency. The strong orthogonal lines piercing the picture plane
out towards the viewer, delineated by the edges of the desks, articulate this intersection of
space. This relationship subjugates all non-white peoples in the frame to the position of
passive spectacle. The dissolution of the non-white people’s spectatorship rights can be seen
to speak to a more forceful conclusion: the loss of their citizen rights, and the fallibility of the
assimilation process. The rehearsal of the colonial dominant-subdominant paradigm, which
operated to uphold a power structure, here served to reinforce a perception of weakness and
inequality. It was the white viewer who refused to see Native Americans on an equal plane.
Some illustrations of education at the Oregon Indian training school have in turn been
executed to recall photographs (Fig. 14, Fig. 15). Issued as propaganda, it is interesting to
consider the credibility these drawings were perceived to inherit through their reference to
photography, as documents of actual events. The artist endeavoured to present snapshots of
everyday life at Oregon, and these images attest to the assumptions about photography and its
success in capturing evidence of Native American assimilation. Like in many of Johnston’s
photographs, a white figure of authority is a continuous presence, to enforce discipline and as
a constant marker of civilization, of what the Indian children are not. The figures have a
cartoon-like quality, which works against the substantiation of fact to give the impression that
they are characters in a fiction, not infringing on real life. The illustrations aimed to capture
the essence of assimilation in action: here it is reduced to the familiar markers of neat
cropped hair, homogenous dress, subservience to work, and passivity indicated by the
downcast gaze. Once again this is set against an indeterminate enclosed space, in which even
the windows do not disclose a glimpse of the outside world that the students may one day
hope to inhabit.
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George Catlin’s ‘Pigeon’s Egg Head Going to and Returning from Washington’ (Fig.
16) is a painting which confronted the anxiety surrounding the authentic Indian in the
national consciousness, with regard to the transformed Native American in mid-nineteenth
century culture. The painting is divided in half, and a paradigm constructed between the two
sections. The left side is dedicated to a full-length profile portrait of an Indian chief dressed
in tribal costume with a pipe in hand and buckskin draped across one shoulder. His statuesque
figure gazes solemnly out to an elsewhere beyond the picture frame. Loose trails of paint
denote the textures of animal skin, feathers, bone and beads. In the right-hand side of the
image, an extreme metamorphosis has occurred. Now sporting Anglo-American tailoring, a
plumed top hat has displaced his feathered bonnet, and he grips an umbrella in place of his
pipe. His figure, modelling a fitted, elaborate black military coat, white gloves and slick
heeled shoes, turns his back on his former self. But Catlin’s narrative has a satirical tone,
Pigeon’s Egg Head has not understood the cultural transformation quite right. In his
zealousness he has acquired a pink fan, which he prizes. Catlin caricatures the Indian’s
attempt at assimilation into white culture. The accoutrements of a dandy have altered his
whole posture, which has evolved into a pompous swagger. His cigar smoking, strut and new
self-esteem are mocked: it will take more than a change of clothes, Catlin implies, to civilize
the Indian.31 The whisky bottles which peak out from his coat pockets allude to an untimely
death even within white American culture.
Catlin has employed the profile portrait in both images. Pigeon’s Egg Head’s profile
operates as the fixed constant with which to check each portrait against amongst the
variables. Here he draws on an evolutionist discourse of fixed racial identity/destiny, the
primordial state believed to inhibit the successful infiltration of Native Americans into
31
G. Gurney, T. T. Heyman, eds., George Catlin and his Indian Gallery (Washington, 2002), p. 202.
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civilized white society.32 In the left segment the Indian is juxtaposed against the white
buildings of Washington, in the right, against a settlement of tepees, unable to inhabit either
realm freely. Pigeon’s Egg Head is presented as both an inauthentic contemporary gentleman,
because he is first a Native American; and an inauthentic Native American because he is
forging an identity in the nineteenth century. Out of this arises the possibility that the
authentic assimilated Indian could not exist, or at least could not be manifested in the national
mind’s eye. The iconic, successfully assimilated Native American had not yet emerged. In
this way, the transformation portraits can be seen to demonstrate a process of prediction, of
what ‘real’ assimilated Indian children should look like.
Deloria has observed the ways in which Native American culture was paradoxically
being frolicked with as a means of formulating American identity; at this particular point the
primitive provided an alluring antidote to the modern age.33 In a perverse discrimination of
Native American culture, the juncture of the twentieth century saw white American children
encouraged to dress as Indians as an extracurricular indulgence whilst Indian children
simultaneously were physically and emotionally stripped of their own parentage and forced
into white culture through total institutions.
‘Ernest Thompson Seton’s Sinaway Tribe at Standing Rock Village, Wyndygoul,
Connecticut, 1903’ (Fig. 17) is a photograph of Ernest Seton’s Woodcraft Indians, a boys’
youth development organization in which an idyllic Indian life was recreated through tales,
costumes and outdoor activities.34 Many of the negative savage characteristics associated
with the Native American solidified in the century before were now reversed as positive
qualities seen to be lacking in the modern American citizen, such as oneness with nature and
J. Fear-Segal, ‘Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism Versus Evolutionism,’ Journal of
American Studies, no. 33 (1999), p. 324.
33
Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 105. ‘To reaffirm modern identity, Americans needed to experience that which was
not modern… To be modern, one acted out a heuristic encounter with the primitive.’
34
Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 96.
32
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American soil itself.35 The boys pictured stand barefoot in a clearing before a decorated
tepee. The chests of some are exposed, painted with imitation tribal tattoos, others drape
printed blankets over one shoulder; they wear face paint and feathered headdresses, and two
boys aim their bow and arrow towards the camera. For these children, Native American
culture could be dipped into, played with and then discarded when white society appeared
more appealing. Native American culture was exploited, as something to be derided to boost
Americans’ own sense of civilization; or celebrated as an ‘Other’ which could accessorise the
modern world, so long as they were not a physical presence in it.
The philosophy of assimilation was hinged on a notion of perceptible change, a
colonial vision thoroughly dependent on substantiation in visual media. Photography was
given the role of fabricating views of the assimilation process because of its capacity to
image distorted representations of the world and deliver them as untouched, evidential fact. It
could provide immediate reassurance that assimilation yielded results, a cultural experiment
which, it was realized, might take generations to produce signs of achievement. 36 Since the
outcome of the assimilation scheme was yet to be envisaged, its propaganda depended on the
time-honoured strategies of picturing Native Americans already engineered through
ethnography and popular portraiture.
Presented through transformation images, assimilation was the discernible shedding
of native traditions and the adoption of white culture. The covert agendas in which
assimilation images were constructed reveal nineteenth century America’s pessimistic
preoccupations regarding the Native American and its fascination with a medium which
could be seen to displace them. It was a tool which could visually order and tranquilise those
Deloria, Playing Indian, p. 105. ‘Seton, for example, saw many of the negative qualities now embodied by
interior savage Indians in a very different light of the exterior, antimodern authentic - laziness became freedom
from labour, tramping became a carefree lifestyle, and refusal to leave the reservation now meant a folk
rootedness to rural place.’
36
Fear-Segal, ‘Nineteenth-Century Indian Education,’ p. 330.
35
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within its viewfinder, whilst in reality, the Native American existence outside of the frame
was perceived to pose an unrelenting threat to civilized white society. The transformation
images speak to a metaphorical rebirth that was perceived to necessitate the passage to
Americanization, ‘the Indian must die as an Indian and live as a man’, the adoption of a new,
whiter skin.37 In reality, to attain equal citizenship, a physical rebirth was required; but this
urge could not be satisfied through the camera’s visualisations. The trappings of white culture
could be presented in a photograph, but for the white viewer, these inextricably alluded to
charade and the skin beneath persisted. Redemption for Native American culture in the late
nineteenth century was perceived as assimilation, which itself inflicted cultural and individual
deaths.
Photography’s role within the assimilation process at training schools was forced to
negotiate visually that which had not yet occurred, that which could not be envisioned and
that which was unwillingly conceded. Assimilation policy produced images which presented
total eradication of native traditions, actively operating to ‘vanish’ the Native American from
view. As a supposed means of continuing indigenous survival, assimilation, against its
professed philosophy, was another form of cultural extinction, foreshadowing the appeal
emanated by eugenics in the twentieth century. Photography could bring the Native American
into focus only to force him to the peripheries of vision and the fringes of American society.
Contemporary Native American photographer, Dugan Aguilar has produced a series
of portraits which present Native American identity as evolving and thriving in the twentieth
century. ‘Native with Trophy’ (Fig. 18) fuses opposites in creating a portrait of a twentieth
century Paiute man. Confronting transculturation, the marriage of cultures embodied by this
figure rejects the suffocation of native identity, and instead strengthens its autonomy. The
image’s title speaks to the previous century’s ethnographic studio portraits and the ways in
37
Sandweiss, Print the Legend, p. 41.
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which indigenous culture could be contracted to a number of indexical signs. The Paiute man
is earringed and wears a traditional turquoise necklace, his neck length hair topped with a
baseball cap. He sports a jacket advertising the recognisable logo of an insurance company,
alongside an Indian athletics team badge, combined with pin-striped baseball trousers and
boots.38 The slither of white t-shirt visible behind the trophy is emblazoned with a clichéd
image of a Plains Indian chief.39 Within the portrait’s focus of inverting previous
representations of Native American culture, the t-shirt logo can be interpreted as an autoethnographic inscription of identity by the subject. Assimilation in this image is something
wholeheartedly controlled by the individual. Native American identity in twentieth century
America is conveyed as multifaceted, resistant to categorization, and possessing vitality in a
society which sought to repress it. Taken in 1985, less than a century after assimilation
photographs were being produced, Dugan Aguilar’s portrait demonstrates the way in which
photography can be given a new life in the contact narrative. That is not to suggest that
history can be unravelled, but that Native Americans can perhaps reclaim photographic
presentation from a mode of erasure, to document cultural survival.40
38
A. L. Bush, L. C. Mitchell, The Photograph and the American Indian (Princeton, 1994), p. xxv.
A. L. Bush, L. C. Mitchell, The Photograph, p. xxv.
40
J. Rickard, ‘The Occupation of Indigenous Space as ‘Photograph’’, in Native Nations: Journeys in American
Photography, ed. A. Philippa (London, 1998), p. 57.
39
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