Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian - Review

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Alfred Mayor

The National Museum of the American Indian has a collection of ninety thousand photographs of the Indians of the Western Hemisphere. Two hundred are reproduced in this book of essays by Indians and non-Indians about the collection, George Gustav Heye (1874-1957) who assembled it, and the much debated issue of whether the pictures portray their subjects realistically.

Using a fortune of nearly $10 million he inherited in 1915, Heye collected everything made by and representing Indians. Beginning with a hide shirt in 1897, he ended up with more than a million objects. Many of these were acquired on ethnographical and anthropological field trips that Heye financed, most of them before 1930. In addition to having the objects photographed in situ to record how they were used or worn, Heye purchased the work of other photographers, who were on balance a rum lot. Among them was General Nelson A. Miles, a famous Indian fighter in the 1870s and 1880s, who nonetheless "believed the Natives could be redeemed by civilization. He advocated education and instruction in agriculture and husbandry, and endorsed policies to rescind the 'protected' status of Indians on the reservation." Paradoxically, George Heye himself "didn't give a hang about Indians and he never seemed to have heard about their problems in present- day society," according to one of his associates.

In the early days after the introduction of the daguerreotype about 1839, the photograph was hard put to rival the precise drawings possible with the aid of a camera lucida. This simple, portable device consisted of a prism on a stick with a clamp at the other end to attach it to the drawing board. By peering into the prism, the artist saw the scene before him reflected in all its detail on his paper, ready to be traced. In the early 1840s the Englishman Frederick Catherwood, armed with his camera lucida, and the American explorer John Lloyd Stephens, armed with his daguerreotype camera, recorded the Mayan ruins at Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico. The daguerreotypes suffered from the bright light of YucatAn, which bleached out some details and left others in deep shadow. By contrast, Catherwood's camera lucida drawings were exact except for groups of Mayans he added for local color and scale. Both drawings and photographs were submitted to the engravers who made the illustrations for Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).

The collaboration of John Charles Fremont and the German artist and cartographer Charles Preuss was distinctly less amicable during an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1842. Although he failed to mention it in his official report, Fremont's daguerreotypes were a washout, as Preuss revealed waspishly in his diary: "Yesterday afternoon and this morning Fremont set up his daguerreotype to photograph the rocks; he spoiled five plates that way. Not a thing was to be seen on them. That's the way it often is with these Americans. They know everything, they can do everything, and when they are put to the test, they fail miserably."

A particularly intriguing essay about the role Indians played in their own stereotyping is written by Richard W. Hill St., a Tuscarora, who points out that the Plains Indians who fought the famous battles in the West became the standard Indians. Thus "all Indians were assumed to live in tipis, ride horses, wear full-feathered headdresses, and be expert at Native crafts." The accouterments of the Plains Indians were knocked off and sold in toy stores across the United States, and Indians of all tribes began to live up to this stereotype, which was spread by Wild West shows in which the epic battles were re-fought by Indians of all tribes dressed as Plains Indians. With the invention of photography, "Indians became collaborators, captured for eternity in strange poses that were not always of their own making.... One enduring stereotype is that of the stoic star of the silent savage," which Hill suggests could be the result of the slowness of early photographic processes or the sitter's annoyance at posing at all. After all, "spirit capture," the title of the book, is what many Indians feared was happening to them when their photograph was taken.

There is some repetition from essay to essay, but on the whole this is a refreshing contribution to the current quest for the American Indian's real role in our past and the admission of the white man's role in creating the Indian he needed.