Pagers, pageants and powwows - Native American photography, video and art, various artists, Light Factory, Charlotte, NC

Afterimage, May-June, 1999 by Chuck Twardy

Edward Sheriff Curtis has garnered his share of retrospective disdain for his once-celebrated photographs of Native Americans. While the curators at The Light Factory acknowledged him as "a visionary artist and ethnographer" for choosing to focus on the story of American Indians, they accepted contemporary revisionist practices in describing his portraits as "often romanticized."

Consider a review by Kelly Morris in the British journal The Lancet of the 1998 photography exhibition "Native Nations" at London's Barbican Art Gallery:

With their vision of Native life inextricably entwined with the shrinking wilderness, photographers perpetuated the myth of the vanishing race. Curtis was one of the greatest culprits. In his romantic mission to document all surviving tribes, he produced an extraordinarily beautiful but flawed archive, often manipulating the photographs . . . by blurring the images of white tourists or posing the scenes. One of the most radical effects of this belief was the removal of aboriginal children to boarding schools to "save" them by assimilation.(1)

No doubt Curtis's project was romantic, and quite likely it helped spark misguided efforts such as Morris describes. By packaging Curtis's photographs with contemporary portraits and with a suite of works by Native American artists The Light Factory's curatorial staff seemed to perpetuate the negative attitude toward his work. But if you turned from studying his Okuwa-tse (Cloud Yellow) San Ildefonso (1905), you confronted an eerily similar portrait of a contemporary Native American. Anna Brown Branham, Catawba Linguist and Dancer, Catawba Nation, SC (1996) was among the 46 selenium-toned silver prints by Charlotte photographer Carolyn DeMeritt in "As Long as the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the South and East," an exhibition drawn from DeMeritt's collaboration with Frye Galliard, the former Southern Editor of the Charlotte Observer. In many ways, DeMeritt's portraits evoke Curtis's work of nearly 100 years ago.

DeMeritt and Galliard traveled through 17 states and parts of Canada in 1997 and 1998 to document life among Native Americans in the East, a project as "romantic" as Curtis's had been, although with significant differences. Where Curtis saw himself recording a dying race - and this was not an extravagant concept during a time when the United States was more or less officially hastening that end - DeMeritt and Galliard recorded the obstinate determination of contemporary Native Americans to maintain their traditions.

The motives and idealizations of outsider documentarians were central to much of the work in the third component of the trio of Native American-related exhibitions at The Light Factory. "Authentic American Indian Art!: Photography and Video" comprised works by Native Americans, mostly dealing with issues of representation, such as in Doug Coffin's Cigar Store Indian: No Forked Tongues Allowed (1998), a crudely carved figure, its face supplanted by a monitor showing a loop of Native American faces and scenes from Western movies.

Depending on how you chose to progress through the three shows, "Authentic American Indian Art!" either set up a context for Curtis and DeMeritt/Gaillard or provided a new context in which to consider contemporary work by Native Americans. Its subtext, that Native Americans, having thwarted extermination and still weathering poverty and neglect, are necessarily wary of how the majority views them, must temper assessment of even well-intentioned efforts by outsiders. In his 30-minute video Imagining Indians (1998) Victor Masayesva interviewed Native Americans who worked on films, including an extra for Dances with Wolves (1990, by Kevin Costner) who recounts how a crew member brought water to the set dogs while he and other extras sweltered nearby. Masayesva intercut these segments with a story in which a white dentist, his office decorated with old "Indian" movie posters, extracts a tooth from a Native American woman while blathering about the "spirituality" of Dances with Wolves and his financial investment in a "higher-consciousness resort." Eventually the patient approaches the camera, obliterates her own face by scratching white crayon on the lens and pushes the tripod over.

"We still continue to be props," Charles Sootkis, a Cheyenne tribal leader, observes elsewhere in the video, suggesting that between Curtis's and DeMeritt's photographs, the lens trained on Native Americans has shifted, but only slightly. Native American suspicions must serve as the lens through which we consider these projects. We blame Curtis for romanticizing his subjects, but we might note that DeMeritt and Galliard also viewed their subjects from the outside. Like many documentarians, they made subjective choices about what to see and what to report. Their observations, whether they acknowledge challenges or celebrate endurance, are in some sense as distant from what Native Americans say about themselves as were Curtis's portraits.