Rather than dismissing archival images as ugly, disempowering, or meaningless, Indigenous communities have been reclaiming them since the 1980s. Fueled by worldwide 1970s activism, Indigenous peoples in Australia, the US, and Canada have used the so-called ‘ordinary’ or popular photos as evidence of historical misconceptions and sources for writing new histories.

Beginning in 2016, a team from Michigan State University including art historian Laura Smith, digital librarian Megan Kudzia, along with Navajo weavers Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Jean Ornelas began talking about building a website that would feature a collection of stereographs held in the MSU Museum. The project pilot focused only on Diné (Navajo) subjects. Three featured weavers working on a loom. Five others were easily connected to the early twentieth-century weaving industry on the Navajo Reservation. For this reason, Lynda and Barbara were interested in using the images to teach weaving from the Navajo perspective. They suggested that we contact other weavers to write on the images as well including Velma Kee Craig (Diné).  We are now in the process of adding more images and writings to the exhibit as we build partnerships with other community representatives.

This work builds upon Laura Smith’s preliminary research conducted as part of MSU Professors Safoi Babana-Hampton and Rocío Quispe-Agnoli’s 2017-2018 College of Arts and Letters Collaborative Grant and resulting symposium Picturing Others: Indigenous Photography, (Self)Portraits, Preservation and Epistemic Disobedience. The focus of this initiative and subsequent symposium was to examine the representations of others by social groups, and on native and local subjects who have used/use technological inventions (such as photography) associated with modernity to explore their own selves and to represent their others, namely those in power. Her publications have largely focused on Indigenous artists who have used photography, video, and digital media to control representation, affirm and explore identities, and to challenge their disenfranchisement under American settler colonialism. She is the author of Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). This book examines and critiques the perpetuation of entrenched ideological distinctions between modernity and Indians that have privileged white male artists in exhibitions and scholarship on modern American art.

Since 1992, there have been multiple collaborative projects that have challenged the colonial paradigm for seeing and knowing historical Native North American photographs. Most of these initiatives featured prominent Indigenous writers, artists, and scholars who contributed individual reflexive essays focused on one or more images of their choice. Others have repurposed colonial photographs of Indigenous subjects by naming them, connecting ancestral faces with their descendants, and returning copies of the portraits to them. In addition to these methods, there are those studies that directed attention to the photographic moments of resistant bodily actions. Lucy Lippard and Gerald Vizenor have examined Indigenous subjects’ faces, eyes, and gestures for evidence of resistance.

This latter focus on the body is particularly useful to approaching 3D pictures of Indigenous peoples. Through their visual and sensual augmentation of their bodies, early immersive technologies demonstrate Indigenous subjects’ vitality. Here, faces are sometimes turned away from the camera; yet seen in a viewer, stereographs expand an entire figure's breadth. Through the enhanced illusion of depth, solidity, and perspective, stereographs transport viewers vicariously into Indigenous homelands to encounter the lives of past generations.  Far from vanishing, a power of presence is physically manifested. Jane Lydon credits photography’s sensual vitality, as enhanced by the stereoscope, with undermining notions of colonial surveillance and monolithic cultures. Colonial vision, as many have theorized, depends on a distant, disembodied, and unfeeling gaze to assert control. By bringing Indigenous subjects closer to colonial perceivers through the stereoscope, the power relations between them can get blurred. It follows also then that the stereoscope threatens clear notions of cultural difference, which informed the civilizing mission.

A secondary dimension for this research is to insert images into Indigenous sociohistorical contexts and ways of knowing. It may never be possible to identify the Indigenous subjects' names or reconnect those pictured with their families. But, Native stories and worldviews can link those pictured to industries, memories, and social practices that continue to sustain communities. The information shared by Indigenous cultural specialists, artists, and writers will help make those connections. Through their engagement with living people, the stereographs can further evoke a power of presence, not a past demise.

The final, third dimension for this exhibit is to address the issues of authority and accessibility in the study, presentation, and curation of Indigenous knowledge and visual culture. Digital technologies have enhanced the opportunities for a variety of individuals to work creatively together, and for their productions to be globally engaged.

Laura E. Smith

Sources:

Brook Andrew and Jessica Neath. “Encounters with Legacy Images: Decolonising and Re-imagining Photographic Evidence from the Colonial Archive,” History of Photography, Vol. 42, No. 3, August 2018.

Lucy Lippard, "Introduction," Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, Lucy Lippard, ed. New York: The New Press, 1992.

Jane Lydon, “RETURN: The photographic archive and technologies of Indigenous Memory,” Photographies Vol. 3, No. 2, September 2010.

Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 158.