Anthropology and Photography at the American Museum of Natural History

It is, at first glance, a solemn scene—men’s hats removed, the stiffness of the phonograph’s operators, some heads bowed towards the earth. The photograph’s meaning that is mediated through the archivist’s words and categories also suggests this reading; we know that the photograph, taken in 1913 and attributed to Joseph K. Dixon, comes from the Wanamaker Expedition—a search in the American Museum of Natural History’s library catalogue reveals that the full title of this mission was “The Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian,” carried out in the Summer and Autumn of that year. Drawer 104-26 in the AMNH’s library photo archives, from which this photograph was taken, contains other photos from the expedition that confirm a theme of patriotism and imperialism—indeed, the category of “President’s Address” is followed by “Declaration of Allegiance,” and “Flag.” The details of the expedition’s colonial themes of naturalized Native disappearance, American hegemony, and assimilation exercised through the mechanism of citizenship add both pathos and a sinister quality to the image. The photograph seems to be witness to a moment of oppressive expansionism and imperialist nostalgia, a simultaneous longing for un-contacted worlds and a disavowed transformation, through colonial projects, of those same ways of life (Rosaldo 1989:69)—according to this reading, it is no wonder that the phonograph appears to confront the Suquamish men.

But even though the photograph is firmly located, archivally and thematically, in the context of this history, small details of the photo as image and as object unsettle this meaning. Indeed, as Christopher Pinney has pointed out, photographs are only certain according to one historical trajectory that neglects the ways in which photos always betray their claims to truth, because their meaning is so malleable, vulnerable to and changeable through words and contexts (1992:82). In this way, photographs may be regarded as “synthetic objects”(Edwards and Hart 2003:49), palimpsests made up of the residues of their multiple lives, including their construction through the archive, but also their other histories of production, circulation, and consumption. Crucially, what these accretions, uncertainties, and multiple trajectories embodied in photographs means is that, in Elizabeth Edwards’ words, “even the densest of colonial documents can spring leaks if we keep our theory ‘close to the ground’ and interrogate…the distinctions and points of fracture in the image”(2001:12)—offering an alternative to the limiting history of one-way, totalizing power in colonial encounters (Pinney 1992:90).

This potential of photographs for unsettling histories is of relevance to the Wanamaker Expedition photo that is the subject (and object) of this paper. Indeed, there are numerous “points of fracture” both in the photograph as image and in its complex materiality as object. Consider, for instance, the careless punctum of the scattered recording case that betrays the formality of the moment, or the detached, unruly semblance of the crowd, only some of whom meet the camera with their eyes. Or turn over the photograph, recently pasted onto acid-free cardstock and covered with a removable protective film, and notice its complex and layered history as a museum object—indeed, its most recent and specific attribution as the production of Joseph Dixon and an image of the Suquamish tribe at the curiously rendered “Port Ma(dison), WA” is written in pencil, in a different hand than the original information. This new attribution, whose source is unknown, unsettles the generic, assimilating qualities of the expedition, and tantalizingly suggests a form of historical memory that the narrative of the “disappearance” of the North American Indian would preclude.

Some of these complex materialities, histories, and above all, “points of fracture” form the basis for this paper. Proceeding from Edwards’ emphasis on “photographic experiences”(2001:3), or the particular attention to histories and meanings constituted by and of specific photographs, I have tried to let the photograph’s imagery and materiality structure this analysis. By examining the photograph along three over-lapping valences that are suggested by it, I hope to articulate some of the narratives and counter-narratives of the Wanamaker Expedition that have not been addressed in its text-based scholarship, working through and between the complex “parallel histories”(Pinney 1992) of anthropology and photography that embody both powerful looking relations and uncertain meanings. In doing so, my analysis draws on literature that articulates importance of object-based analysis both in and of socio-cultural anthropology (e.g. Geismar 2006; Wright 2003), and suggests the potential of future work along these lines on the Wanamaker Expedition photographs. Indeed, as I will argue, the circulation of these photographs tells an important story about the creation of a public for anthropological knowledge in the museum, and at the same time, that this individual photograph perhaps speaks to and may even have been constitutive of an erasure of an unruly “other” history of anthropology—and thus may also be read in ways that suggest how this other history (Pinney 1992) may be uncovered from its “points of fracture.”

Flagpoles and Power Lines: The 1913 Wanamaker Expedition

It was an expedition of citizenship. The gigantic enterprise of rearing a National Memorial to a great race of people might have been undertaken and completed independent of the knowledge or of any participation on the part of the Indian. The larger thought obtained. These Red Men are to be harmonized, uplifted, and are to have a share themselves in the great Memorial that is to stand, a lonely, lofty figure, where the sea will forever moan a dirge for a vanished race.

- Joseph K. Dixon, “The Purposes and Achievements of the Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian.”

In the middle ground of the photograph, between the distinctive foliage of the Pacific Northwest and the marked contingent of Suquamish men, is a tall pole, whose extent exceeds the photo’s frame. This is a significant detail, and interrogation of this pole within the contents of the archive leads one through an engagement with the official purposes of the 1913 Wanamaker Expedition; indeed, a photograph in the “Declaration of Allegiance” section of drawer 104-26 (Fig. 1), which features the same pole and the same people, albeit incorrectly attributed as “Susuanish,”(3) seems to confirm that this pole is indeed a flagpole, onto which the American flag is about to be raised—a man of Euro-American appearance is poised at the ropes, which are also visible in the initial photograph, as the Suquamish man clad in a blanket and wearing a headdress, likely a chief given his prominent position at this moment of ceremony, points to a feature of the document laid out on top of the flag. What was this expedition that, the archive tells us, included the playing of a speech on the phonograph, a declaration of allegiance to the American flag, and, likely, a subsequent flag raising?

In this section, I want to trace out the story of the photograph that is suggested by the flagpole, the “official” story of the 1913 Wanamaker expedition. Such a narrative, which is supported by the writings of Joseph K. Dixon, the leader and attributed photographer of the expedition, and in contemporary scholarly interpretations, is one that lends itself quite well to a particular history of photography and ethnology. Pinney has articulated this history as involving an emphasis on the role of the camera as a “predatory weapon”(1992:75), its disciplining functions mapped out within Foucauldian notions of governmentality and bio-power. There is a great deal of evidence in the photograph and its archival associations that supports this interpretation: the militaristic construct of an “expedition,” articulated through britches and boots, and the use of technology, the phonograph, to impose a particular ideal of citizenship, a citizenship that requires allegiance—and assimilation. But before delving into the complex materialities of American power, it is useful first to clarify some of the historical context that may shape our reading of the photograph.

Official Histories

The Wanamaker Expedition of 1913 was the third in a series of expeditions to Native American reservations across the United States led by Joseph Kossuth Dixon, a former Baptist minister and amateur ethnographer of American Indian life (Stearns 1996:211). The expeditions, which had different purposes but the same general theme of recording “vanishing” ways of life, were financed by Rodman Wanamaker, the son of John Wanamaker, a wealthy Philadelphia businessman famous for his eponymous department stores. Both Wanamakers had an interest in Native American life, as did Dixon; indeed, the latter had been hired as the director of the Educational Bureau at the Wanamaker stores in 1906, where he decided to focus on American Indians in his research (Kavanagh 1996:9). Following the second of these expeditions to “Indian Country”(Dixon 1913b: 1) in 1909, Dixon published a book called The Vanishing Race (1913a), which chronicles the “Last Great Indian Council,” a meeting of chiefs from Plains and Plateau tribes at the Crow Reservation in Montana that he arranged. The book is filled with the tropes of the romanticized and naturalized “passing” of Native Americans, concluding that as the chiefs leave the council, “they are riding into the sunset and are finally lost in the purple mists of evening”(1913a: 206). Importantly, however, Dixon also articulates the documentary “salvage” function of his travels, and the importance of photography in achieving these goals. In his monograph, he argues that “all future students and historians, all ethnological researches must turn to the pictures now made and the pages now written for the study of a great race”(Dixon 1913a: 7). Thus, the camera intersects with a particular moment of salvage ethnography, an important point to which I will return in the next section. But for the moment, it is crucial to note the purpose and centrality of the 11,000 still photographs and miles of movie film (Kavanagh 1996:7) that were produced during these three expeditions.

The 1913 expedition from which the Port Madison photographs come was carried out along similar thematic lines—the perceived passing of the American Indian, and the necessity of documentation. However, the third expedition also had two more explicit and inter-related goals. The first of these was to create a memorial to the American Indian, a bronze statue “larger than the Statue of Liberty, of an Indian with right hand uplifted in the peace sign of his race”(Reynolds 1971:2) to be erected at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, New York (Stearns 1996:212)(4); indeed, the first photograph in drawer 104-26 is an image of this Act of Congress “To provide a suitable memorial to the memory of the North American Indian,” signed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate. The 1913 expedition is thus framed both archivally and historically by this act of cultural policy that attempts to inscribe the American landscape with the proof of the vanishing Indian: a memorial.

The second goal of the 1913 expedition, articulated as an aim of offering American “citizenship” to the Indian by Dixon in the passage quoted at the beginning of this section, may also be interpreted as an act of imperial nostalgia carried out through cultural policy. Significantly, Dixon frames the expedition as a solution to the “Indian problem” (1913:8), a new cultural policy based on assimilation. The effects of these policies cannot be underestimated. Indeed, as the program for a lecture given by Dixon points out, both his “Last Great Indian Council” and other assimilationist acts of the first two expeditions premised on ideas of a vanishing race justified “the Department of Indian Affairs in reversing their entire Indian Policy”(AMNH Program, 1912:2). As Thomas Kavanagh has pointed out, the irony of these cultural policies is that at the same time as Dixon and Wanamaker were memorializing Native Americans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had reported that the self-defined Indian population of the United States was actually rising, a statistic that Dixon disavowed on the basis of its inclusion of “mixed-race Indians” (1996:13). While further historical research would be necessary to trace the complex conflations of race and culture articulated in the relationships between these statistics and Indian policy, the fact that Dixon and Wanamaker were successful in having their memorial approved points both to the power relations involved in dictating policy and the pervasiveness of this mythology of a “vanishing race.” Indeed, the ideological stakes of this third expedition were high as Dixon and his staff, composed of his son, Rollin Dixon, and assistants W.B. Cline and John D. Scott (Reynolds 1971:3), boarded the Signet, their train fully equipped with a photographic studio and darkroom (Reynolds 1966:21), on their journey to visit over 250 reservations (Kavanagh 1996:11), including the Port Madison Suquamish reservation depicted in the photograph.

Materialities (5)

The power articulated in this official history is palpable. The fully-equipped Signet, the massive intended bronze statue, President Wilson’s speech on wax-cylinder specifically commissioned by Dixon and Wanamaker for the purposes of the exhibition (Stearns 1996:212), the phonograph “the first diamond-point machine ever used”(Reynolds 1966:26)—all of these objects embody and circulate the power of American merchant capitalists through the expedition. In the photograph taken at Port Madison, the phonograph is placed in such a way that is suggestive of this power. It is associated with the men in britches, who, through comparison with published photographs (see, for instance, Reynolds 1971:3), may be identified as Joseph Dixon (far right) and probably his son, Rollin, the youngest member of the expedition—a presence that does beg the question of whether one of his assistants was behind the camera. Regardless, though, of who took the image, the photograph does work as an imperial document, an object created by Dixon’s team with a particular temporality and “biographical intention” (Edwards 2001:14) in mind: a documentation of a historic moment to be used in the future. From this perspective, one is tempted to regard the photograph itself as a kind of memorial and commemoration, capturing both an end and a beginning brought about through the power, money, and objects of the Wanamaker Expedition—indeed, in this way, the photographs could have provided a more movable version of this kind of imperialist commemoration, potentially circulating the same message of the intended monument in New York.

As Barbara Mathé, the head archivist at the AMNH library, suggested out to me, the photographic process used in creating this image also articulates the networks of power in which the image is enmeshed. Specifically, the negative of the 8 X 10 print is a glass plate of the same size, and, based on its commercially-produced even edges and uniform emulsion surface, is likely a dry plate negative (Weinstein and Booth 1977:177), probably provided by the George Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, since we know that Dixon had recruited his assistant W.B. Cline from George Eastman (Reynolds 1966:30). The use of this process in 1913 is striking; given Dixon’s relationship with George Eastman, it is surprising that he did not use less expensive and cumbersome roll film on the expedition, which had been introduced in 1903 by the Kodak Company (George Eastman House Timeline, in Weinstein and Booth, Appendix 1). As Mathé pointed out, such a decision may reflect the desire for the fine detail afforded by the glass plate process and the ability to obtain it through the powerful financial backing of the expedition. Moreover, I think that the use of glass-plate negatives also suggests the desired formality of the images, appropriate to a memorial, afforded by a more labor-intensive process. Indeed, many of Dixon’s other photographs from the expedition in the AMNH archive are posed portraits, either taken on board the Signet or more carefully ordered images of citizenship. In this context, the strange and almost unruly pose of the Port Madison photograph raises tantalizing questions about the desirability of this image in Dixon’s eyes that will be returned to later on, but the use of an expensive, formal process in producing in the photographs also clearly materializes the power relations of the expedition.

But although this official history of expedition, allegiance, and imperial nostalgia told in accounts of the expedition and in the archive perhaps articulates an intentionality of the photograph from Dixon’s end, there are also other valences present in it, both relating to the complexity of “salvage ethnography” in the history of anthropology and, to use Hulleah Tsinhahjinnie’s phrase, the other photographic sovereignties (2003:41) that may be at stake in the photograph as both image and object. It is to these “other” histories that I now turn.

The Explorer and the Phonograph: Tales of Ethnographic Salvage in the Museum

Language, specifically, and sound more generally are an important aspect of this photograph’s materiality. Indeed, both the centrality of the phonograph and the visualized presence of presumably listening citizen-subjects suggest a significant valence of the image, and of the expedition as a whole: to materialize both the memorial and the citizenship of Native Americans. But as scholars have pointed out, the materiality of the image’s content was not the only thing being mobilized in early ethnographic photographs; rather, photography’s perceived certainty, and, crucially, the ability to mediate this certainty through words, also helped to bolster the truth claims of the ethnographic project (Griffiths 2002:93; Pinney 1992:81) (6). In this way, photographs may be understood not only to be important technologies of anthropology, but also directly involved in constituting and materializing the discipline. Indeed, as Haidy Geismar has shown in her study of early ethnographic photographs from Malakula, the production and circulation of images was and continues to be crucial in the development of anthropological knowledge, facilitating cross-cultural encounters and ways of thinking (2006:535). What is suggested by these “parallel histories”(Pinney 1992) of anthropology and photography, and the agentive role that photographs played in them (Geismar 2006:524), is that historical photographs may also be examined in terms of their role in anthropological knowledge production.

What kind of anthropology is materialized through this photograph from Port Madison? While a thorough answer to this question could only be achieved through more historical research, I want to suggest some tentative directions that this answer might take based on the histories of production and circulation of Dixon’s photographs. Two important aspects of his photographic “life histories” should be emphasized: first, while Dixon saw his photographs as contributing to the ethnological project of documenting past ways of life (1913:7), and one obituary claimed that he was “perhaps the foremost living authority on American Aborigines” (Philadelphia Public Ledger, in Stearns 1996:212), Dixon was not an anthropologist by training; rather, he held honorary Doctorates in Divinity and Laws (Stearns 1996:210). However, it is also clear from the circulation of his photographs that he did occupy the public role of scholar and anthropological authority on the Native American groups he documented. Indeed, Dixon gave at least one public lecture at the AMNH in 1912 about the second Wanamaker Expedition, entitled “The Last Great Indian Council: The Farewell of the Chiefs.” According to the program for the lecture (Fig. 2), it was “illustrated with superbly colored slides and motion pictures”—a complex mediation of images through words that helped to constitute public knowledge about Native Americans, as well as Dixon’s anthropological authority based on his “unique and complete study of this great race”(AMNH Program, 1912:1). Thus, while Dixon was not a trained ethnographer, his images may have played a role in establishing anthropology as a discipline by helping to constitute an interpretive community in the museum for anthropological knowledge (cf. Edwards 2001:34). Also, the continued presence of these photographs in the archives of the AMNH also perpetuates their anthropological authority, demonstrating the ways in which photographs not taken by anthropologists may nevertheless form important conduits for anthropological knowledge due to their interpretive potential (Geismar 2006:549).

However, a second point to bear in mind, and one which appears initially to circumscribe the first, is that of the roughly 11,000 photos taken on the Wanamaker Expeditions, only about 350 were ever published during Dixon’s lifetime (Kavanagh 1996:7). It is also difficult to determine how many of these images have even been shown to a public audience. Based on the slide lists from Dixon’s museum lecture, and even more contemporary sources such as a 1979 exhibition called “The People Shall Continue” of the AMNH’s Wanamaker photographs at C.W. Post College at Long Island University and Charles Reynolds’ 1971 book American Indian Portraits from the Wanamaker Expedition of 1913, the formal portraits of Native Americans from the expeditions seem to be the photographs that have been most widely circulated. I was only able to find a reference to a single image from Port Madison in “The People Shall Continue,” and not the one that is the subject of this paper.

However, I want to suggest that something may also be deduced, or at least speculated about, based on the lack of circulation of this particular image. I have already indicated that its meaning is far from certain, and perhaps its uncertainty of meaning, and uncomfortable possibilities, were actually too “excessive” to be brought into the discursive space of anthropological knowledge production in the early twentieth century. As Pinney has argued, a recognition of the indeterminacy of photographs is amenable to the negative strategy in anthropology of defining the discipline by what it is not: “It appears that all we can ever say is the what is of photography, like that of anthropology, lies in its what it is not, its con-text”(1992:90). Perhaps this image, with its clearly marked Natives, and its insistent coevalness and complicities of ethnographer, Indians, and public witnesses, were not enough like the discursive space of salvage that early anthropology had carved out for itself, rendering the selective public display of images that were not this one an important aspect of its life history. This lack of ‘fit’ is what Edwards and Hart refer to as the “residual nature” (2003:56) of images, the stubborn aspects of photographs that can only be awkwardly and imperfectly arranged according to institutional paradigms—the pure, untouched ‘ethnographic present’ of early anthropological practice (Griffiths 2002:115), for instance. In the next section, I will elaborate on these possibilities in relation to the “points of fracture” in the image.

Buried Meanings: Suquamish Land and Memory

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.

- Chief Seattle, Suquamish, 1854 (7)

Look closely at the crowd in the Port Madison photograph (Fig. 3). Although the Dixons and their phonograph are literally foregrounded, and the implied sound of the recording pervades the image, there are other visceral details that compete for attention. A child covers his face with his hat; the tallest man squints into what the shadows cast by the phonograph and a woman’s open umbrella suggests that it may have been a bright day. And then there is the swell of earth, upon which the Suquamish man rests his foot; his position is virtually the same in another photograph of this crucial moment of citizen-making (Fig.4) while others have shifted their poses. There is something strange about this particular swell of earth. The soil immediately in front of the Suquamish contingent is different, overturned and barren, in comparison to the grass on which the phonograph and that wax-cylinder recording case, perhaps blown from behind the camera into the photograph’s frame, rest.
It is a grave.

In this section, I will explain how proceeding from this swell of earth and tracing it through the archive has led me to this conclusion. In addition, I want to return to the materiality of the photograph, and its mysterious attribution history, to suggest another possible meaning, one that exists beyond imperial nostalgia, and perhaps troubles the nature of the encounter between Dixon and the Suquamish. In doing so, I do not mean to undermine the reading of this photograph as a salvage document, nor the one in which the power of the Wanamaker expedition is palpable. Rather, I want to suggest other meanings that a reading solely based on Euro-American ‘power lines’ can submerge. Indeed, such a reading is particularly problematic in photographs of encounter, in that it may deny “the possibility of parallel realities and indigenous agency…that photographs might have other meanings and perform in different spaces” (Edwards 2003:92)—including the space of salvage ethnography, in which a complicity between subject and ethnographer can work to perform kinds of power and authority beyond ethnography (Mathé and Miller 2001:110). These “other meanings” may be traced through some of the visceral details of the photograph as image and object.

Memorials

Proceeding from the swelling of the earth, suggesting the possibility of “buried” meanings, I looked through drawer 104-26 for other photographs of Port Madison. Aside from another photograph of the same moment (Fig. 4), the only photograph I found was in the “Pledging Allegiance” section (Fig.1), which I have already discussed in relation to its flagpole. But there is something else significant in this image: directly in front of Dixon’s foot, and the feet of the Suquamish man in the blanket and headdress are a bucket or container and a stone marker, the words “Chief” visible on its surface. The position of the flagpole, the shadows cast by the sun on the curved stick held by the Suquamish man with the painted face, and above all, the plant to the right of the flagpole, which is present in the initial image in the same position (see detail, Fig. 3), suggests that this is indeed the same site, seen from a similar angle—which, in turn, suggests that the Suquamish men may be blocking the headstone in the initial image. The word “Chief” was also suggestive; if this was indeed a burial, what did it mean about the choice of site for this photograph? Was it chosen by Dixon to increase the pathos and capacity for memorial of a “disappearing” way of life? Or the result of a more complex arrangement?

I did not find an answer in the “official” categories of the archive. Indeed, the only other photographs in drawer 104-26 from Port Madison were picture of Chief Sealth’s (or, in the Euro-American rendering, “Seattle”) grave, including one of great granddaughter at his tombstone (Fig.5) filed under the category “Northwest Coast.” But in the “Miscellaneous” category in the drawer directly below 104-26, I found a photograph that implicated all of these things (Fig. 6): the container, the headstone, the discolored earth—and Chief Seattle’s gravestone (8). Lacking the flagpole and other orienting markers, it is not possible to say definitively that this is the site of the initial photograph; however, based on the angles of the initial photograph, and the ones of “Pledging Allegiance,” it is entirely possible that it is. Two other pieces of historical evidence support this reading.

First, as would have been known to Dixon and the Suquamish, Chief Seattle gave an important speech to Governor Isaac A. Stevens in 1854, the meaning of which has become a matter of historical debate. What seems to be agreed upon is that this speech was partially a statement of a Suquamish claim to land, and the continued presence of ancestral spirits in these lands since time immemorial (Furtwangler 1997:36); the quotation from Chief Seattle at the beginning of this section is one of the pieces of this speech that is marshaled in support of this interpretation. Given this historical context, it seems likely that the site of Chief Seattle’s grave, which is on the Port Madison reservation, would have been appealing to the Suquamish chiefs in 1913. Indeed, the grave could then index the power of the contemporary chiefs, using photographs as objects “that demonstrate relations with others, the living and the dead, helping to fashion particular types of individuals through those relationships” (Wright 2003: 165). The grave site performance and the photograph itself could then also serve as a continued statement of the Suquamish claim to land—one which was distinctly at odds with the imperialist nostalgic assumptions of the Wanamaker Expedition. In this context, the firm positioning of the man with the drum’s foot becomes significant, a statement of sovereignty which becomes a “photographic sovereignty” (Tsinhahjinnie 2003:41) when the photograph is re-framed in its light.

Second, Peter Stearns has argued that the recorded and transcribed speeches given by the Klamath and Yakima chiefs at their flag-raising ceremonies during the 1913 expedition should be understood within a framework of resistance as well as acquiescence to the ideals of citizenship. Specifically, Stearns points out that at the ceremonies, “Native Americans transformed the meaning of that event, shifting its focus from the symbolic level of flags and citizenship to a more material discussion of land and the costs of citizenship”(1996:210, emphasis mine). Given the positioning of the site for the citizenship ceremonies at Port Madison on burial land, even if it is not actually Chief Seattle’s grave, Stearn’s interpretation suggests that this framework of resistance should not be discounted in an analysis of the Port Madison photographs. Indeed, the materiality of the resistance embodied in the points of fracture in the photograph—the swelling earth, the firmly planted foot, the visceral coevalness of the “Native” and “non-Native” members of the crowd—seem to invoke Tsinhahjinnie’s caution of the dangers in reducing conquest to words, to official written “acts”:

No matter how many words are written on a piece of paper declaring ownership of land, no matter the towns and metropolitans possessing foreign names, America will always be Native land. (2003:42)

The same may be said of the words that mediate photographs, which often ignore “complexities that cannot be reduced to a three-sentence caption”(Tsinhahjinnie 2003:46), including the material complexities of Native sovereignty.

And perhaps this complexity is ultimately the reason that this photograph did not have much of an “official” life in Dixon’s publications; perhaps, confronting this image in his darkroom on board the Signet, he was troubled by its implications for the meaning of American citizenship once it was bestowed upon those who could not quite be fit into its frame.

Life Histories

Finally, the mystery of the photograph’s specified attribution remains. It is tempting to suggest that in researching the 1979 exhibit The People Shall Continue, exhibition staff who wanted to use the photograph of Chief Seattle’s great-granddaughter drew the same conclusions that I have about the positioning of the 1913 expedition at the Port Madison gravesite, and corrected all of the photos that seemed to be on Suquamish land. Another possibility is that Charles Reynolds, in locating the names of individuals for his book American Indian Portraits from the Wanamaker Expedition of 1913, connected some individuals to the Suquamish tribe, although none of their portraits appear in his book (9). Or, perhaps even more likely, a member of the contemporary Suquamish tribe recognized a grandparent, or an event preserved in oral history, while combing through the AMNH archive; indeed, we should not discount the possibility that historical photographs have had a complex material and oral afterlife (cf. Rippe 2007) in Suquamish communities.

What the photograph’s mysterious attribution history suggests, when coupled with the complexity of the encounter depicted in this image, is that a photographic repatriation project (see “Talking Visual Histories,” in Peers and Brown 2003) with the Suquamish tribe could help to shed new light on some of these issues while enabling new connections between Suquamish people and the AMNH archive—an “enlivening” of the museum that would betray some of its limited temporalities, and, in Edwards’ words, serve to “let go of meanings so that photographs fulfill the potential of their infinite recodability” (2003:97). Such a project could, indeed, use museum objects to highlight the counter-narratives, the “points of fracture,” that unsettle the still-dominant histories of colonial encounter and imperial expansion. Within such a project there is the potential also for re-writing some of the historical connections between different institutions and source communities (Bell 2003:120)—indeed, a project tracing the Suquamish material would require research at Indiana University, the University Museum in Philadelphia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the AMNH, all of which have some of the Wanamaker photographic materials (Kavanagh 1996:7). There is also, of course, the possibility that the present readings could be unsettled, layered with new residues through their visual affirmations of relations and histories (Tsinhahjinnie 2003:52), proving their recodability as material objects. Indeed, even the attributions that have been so useful in this paper—“Suquamish, Port Madison”—could change. Such possibilities point to what Barbara Mathé and Thomas Miller have described as the potential of historic collections of photos to “constitute a powerful and potentially contested resource in the reanimation and reinvention of tradition”(2001:110) in Native communities—in other words, a new after-life.

Conclusions

I have attempted to research and write “from the photograph itself” in order to remain open to the counter-narratives and “points of fracture” suggested by this object and its documentation—both its “object-ness” and its mediation through language. I have traced three over-lapping histories, each of which tells a slightly different story of the photograph’s meaning and life history; when fitted together, these stories tell a complex tale of encounter that disrupts the too-neat categories of domination and resistance, and also unsettles some of the early discursive boundaries of anthropological knowledge production by demonstrating what may be left out of publicly circulated narratives and images. I hope to have shown that both “parallel histories” (Pinney 1992) of photography and anthropology may be fruitfully encountered and interrogated for their particularities in the image that is the subject and starting point of this paper.

I am also aware that my own reading is merely another layer in the photograph’s life history. Indeed, while working on this photograph in the AMNH archive, I wondered if what I uncovered would have an effect on future classifications, or in the stories that are told in the archives about these images. For as much as I worked on the photo, the photo also worked on me: I was reluctant to let it go back into the folder, and back into the drawer, without some imprint of what I had uncovered being left upon it. However, in spite of this sense of attachment, I hope that this paper has also demonstrated that this is not entirely my story to tell, and that only further work in Indian country could establish the limits of the histories that adhere to the image.

Eugenia Kisin, NYU Anthropology

Notes

(1) It is possible that the person wearing the most elaborate feathered headdress is a woman, especially since she is actually in the second “row,” as are the other women present. Additionally, given the history of contact, it is impossible to know who “is” Suquamish, and who is not in this photograph, beyond the phonograph’s operator. Indeed, all we can deduce from the image is that the men in front are markedly Suquamish—the present paper attempts to consider the implications of this marking, while resisting conclusions about the make-up of the crowd.

(2) The legitimacy of this attribution is a major conceit of this paper; however, as discussed in the last section, there is further evidence in the archive that suggests its accuracy.

(3) This attribution was also corrected to “Suquamish,” in the same handwriting as the photograph that forms the basis for this paper, a tantalizing detail of all the Port Madison photographs.

(4) Because of the First World War, this monument was never completed (Stearns 1996:210).

(5) Another “materialization” of the expedition that is beyond the scope of this paper is the 1991 novel Shadow Catcher by Charles Fergus that chronicles the expedition; future research could focus on the ways in which images have been materialized through this written form, as well as on its historical narrative.
(6) Pinney has argued that anthropologists came to embody the apparatus of the camera, objectifying and producing an “ethnographic present” through their monographs, which, while lacking photos, have a photo-like quality (1992:82).

(7) This version of the speech may be found on contemporary Suquamish Tribe’s official website at http://www.suquamish.nsn.us/speech.html.

(8) This photograph was originally attributed to the Wanamaker Expedition of 1913, but had been marked with a post-it that proclaimed it not to be from that expedition, which probably accounts for its ending up in the “Miscellaneous” category of the archive.

(9) There is one possible exception: a man identified by Reynolds as “Albert Evans: Makah” bears an uncanny resemblance to the man directly to the left of the Suquamish man with the curved stick in the Port Madison photograph. Clearly, more research in the archives and the in the community would be required to unravel the meaning of this—perhaps it was not only Suquamish present at the ceremony in Port Madison, but members of other Northwest Coast tribes, demonstrating trans-National allegiances.

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