Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 242-44.
Abstract
Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features.
First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and, as such, anticipated and paralleled the exhibition of the same title mounted during the spring of 1999 at the NMAI's George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. The NMAI inevitably possesses large numbers of famous pictures, but this collection's editor has avoided reproducing too many of them. Indeed, when such images as Charles M. Bell's portrait of a seated Red Cloud, with a single feather in his hair, or George Trager's sobering depiction of the mass grave of the massacred at Wounded Knee do appear, they serve a specific purpose, usually contrasting with a lesser known image that constitutes the subject of discussion.
As is true of the NMAI archive itself, the book includes images from the whole of the Americas, but with an emphasis on North America, especially the western regions of the United States. It offers images from all phases in the evolution of photography, from daguerreotypes to recent color snaps, with a concentration on images made during the early twentieth century by the anthropologists and others who collected artifacts for George Gustav Heye. Natasha Bonilla Martinez, in an authoritative historical survey of the archive, records the role of patronage in its formation, a discussion worth extending to patronage's role in determining how Indians have been represented. Pamela Dewey's brief essay moves in this direction pointing out that while artifacts were carefully identified in photographic captions, the Native people portrayed often went unnamed.
A second notable feature of Spirit Catcher is its determination, in the manner of such groundbreaking collections as Lucy Lippard's Partial Recall (1992), to foreground Indian experience, an emphasis found in a major recent British exhibition and book, Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography (1998), curated and edited by Jane Alison. Portfolios of present-day work by a variety of Native photographers-including gloriously informative yet unpeopled Taos casino scenes by Larry Gus (Navajo) and deliberately conventional portraits by Dorothy Grandbois (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) of student life at Riverside's Sherman Indian High School-punctuate Spirit Capture. Moreover, several essays are by Indian scholars, most notably those by the editor Tim Johnson (Mohawk), Richard W. Hill Sr. (Tuscarora), and Linda Poolaw (Delaware- Kiowa), who contributes a chatty study of the large body of work produced by her father Horace Poolaw ( also featured in Native Nations). Throughout, contributors speculate appropriately on the responses of the indigenous subjects of these images. The often described "other" looks and writes back.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln