COUNTERPOINT.

Emergence from the Shadow: First Peoples' Photographic Perspectives

Canadian Museum of Civilization 

Hull, Quebec, Canada

October 23, 1999-January 2, 2001

It has long been accepted that the photographic gaze marks a site of aboriginal subjugation in North America. From images produced for midnineteenth-century geological and ethnographic surveys to Edward Curtis's romanticized portraits of a "vanishing race" to the Hollywood western, photographic and filmic images of native North Americans have proven themselves to be effective vehicles for promulgating stereotypes and enacting colonial power. The camera's power appeared so intractable to native communities that prohibition seemed to be the only viable form of resistance. In one celebrated example in 1975, the Hopi (Pueblo) nation banned photography outright rather than having sacred ceremonies further exposed to and sensationalized by legions of gawking "snapshooters" and postcard merchants.

With this history in mind, it is difficult to imagine that anthropological photographs could be recouped and even prized by aboriginal viewers as valuable links to their past, but that is precisely one of the key messages underlying "Emergence from the Shadow: First Peoples' Photographic Perspectives." This intelligent and multi-faceted exhibition attempts to reclaim the aboriginal subject through new readings of historical material and contemporary interventions.

Organized by photographer and curator Jeffrey M. Thomas, a member of the Onondaga tribe of Six Nations, "Emergence from the Shadow" constructs a bridge between two ideologically and historically divergent practices: early twentieth-century ethnographic images made under the auspices of the former Geological Survey of Canada (GSC, the precursor to the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and contemporary photo-based work by six socially engaged aboriginal artists: Barry Ace, Mary Anne Barkhouse, Rosalie Favell, Greg Hill, Shelley Niro and Greg Staats. In varying ways. the contemporary artists address the politics of racial representation by responding to photographs from the anthropologists' negatives selected by Thomas. These enlarged historical prints form a broken wall through the center of the exhibition space, at once delineating and connecting the two halves of "Emergence from the Shadow."

The binary organization of the exhibition reflects Thomas's own photographic practice. His work is well-known, in part through Ali Kazimi's 1997 documentary Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas. Thomas, who has been active as a photographer since the late 1970s, has regularly examined the dualities in aboriginal experience and representation. In the series "Strong Hearts" (1981 -85), for example, he juxtaposed portraits made at various pow wows of aboriginal dancers in ceremonial costume with the same figures in "street dress." For the ongoing series "Cold City Frieze," which he initiated in 1997, Thomas combines photographs of Euro-Canadian monuments depicting First Peoples, with the image of an lroquoian wampum belt. This work, recently exhibited at the McCord Museum in Montreal, provides an aboriginal counterpoint to institutional images of a native "other." In solo exhibitions, Thomas has also paired his work with historic anthropological photographs--in effect, providing a point of departure for his own reworking of the native image. Additionally, Thomas's interest in historic images led him to curate two earlier exhibitions for the National Archives of Canada: "Aboriginal Portraits from The National Archives of Canada" (co-curated with Edward Tompkins, 1997) and "Pride and Dignity" (1998).

The present exhibition arose out of Thomas's experience researching photographs made for the GSC. As a boy, he had heard about anthropologists from the GSC visiting the Six Nations reserve in southwestern Ontario where he spent part of his childhood; Thomas was, in effect, searching for visual evidence of that community in the archives. He likened the experience of going through the collection of glass plate negatives to "finding an old photo album in the attic." [1] Rather than being drawn to images recording traditional activities such as basket weaving and snowshoe-making, Thomas was more intrigued by what he terms fieldwork portraits-likenesses of individuals or small groups made by anthropologists as part of their interview process.

Anthropological fieldwork portraits, dating from 1912 to 1949, make up the first half of "Emergence from the Shadow." They are the work of four anthropologists affiliated with the GSC: Charles Marius Barbeau, Sir Francis Howe Seymour Knowles, Harlan Ingersoll Smith and Frederick Wilkerson Waugh. Each gathered information among the First Nations. Waugh studied Iroquois, Mohawk and Ojibwa groups in central Canada; Knowles worked among the Iroquois of southern Ontario and western New York; Smith researched First Peoples of the Plains, Plateau and Northwest Coast; and Barbeau, one of the most influential anthropologists and folklorists in Canada from the past century, documented the Huron peoples in Qu[acute{e}]bec and Ontario as well as native groups on the west coast. For all four of these figures the camera was just one tool among many--including the tape recorder and calipers--used in calibrating and documenting the physiological characteristics, customs and environments of their native subjects.

The photographs chosen for the exhibition, in some cases printed for the first time, were intended to provide detailed and authoritative physiological information. Particularly in the case of Smith's work, the images include extensive captions with valuable information about family lineage, community roles and daily life. Often the sitter is shot. closeup and isolated against a white wall in Barbeau's studies and juxtaposed with a wooden building in Knowles's. They suggest an intimate dialogue between sitter and photographer. Yet, anthropological uses of photography, as Elizabeth Edwards has argued, "represented technological superiority harnessed to the delineation and control of the physical world ... [and in part through them] the power of knowing was transformed into a rationalized, observed 'truth.'" [2]

Although text panels provide some informatiom about the scientist/photographers and social conditions of the time, Thomas purposefully strips away much of the context of early twentieth-century anthropological fieldwork. Instead, he presents the portraits In isolation. Each 8 x 10 inch print is shown, for example, without a frame and is mounted 2 1/2 inches off the wall. This design decision, according to Thomas, allows for "a sense of moving past the document." [3] In short, the installation--like the design and thesis of the exhibition as a whole--is intended to encourage alternative readings of the historic images and thereby allow the possibility of reclaiming the aboriginal subject from the imperialist context of the anthropological project. Thomas has said that he wants the exhibition to "encourage people in our community to write new stories to accompany the images." In this respect, "Emergence from the Shadow" echoes other recent attempts to reclaim Euro-North American photographs of an aboriginal "other" for the very community they represent. [4] The danger of this curatorial approach, however, lies in the potential aestheticization of the images. With each anthropologist's work presented monographically in a separate alcove and isolated from the other products of their research, it is easy to imagine a viewer being drawn into the "artistry" of these works to the utter neglect of the important cultural implications that Thomas is attempting to illuminate.

The effort to promote multiple readings of the anthropological images--thereby reclaiming them for the community they represent--works most successfully with those linking the two sections of the exhibition. The design of the exhibition effectively signals the malleability of photographic meaning. In these instances, anthropological images are enlarged to mural size, etched onto glass and placed in front of a light source. As a result of this scale and presentation, detailed clarity is diminished; the images cease to be authoritative visual facts and instead become evocations. Each is situated across from the work of a contemporary artist with accompanying text encouraging the viewer to relate the two seemingly antithetical forms. Smith's image entitled Walking Buffalo Family (1925), for example, faces three photographs by Kanyen'kehaka (Mohawk) artist Hill. Smith's fieldwork portrait depicts a Plains family, in full ceremonial dress, who provided entertainment for tourists in Banff, Alberta. Hill's series, irreverently titled "Plastic Indians (from Outer Space)" (1999), also examines popular culture's marketing of the native image through the use of tiny plastic figurines of Plains warriors. These familiar toys, mostly made in China, were objects of childhood fear and uncertainty for Hill. They no more reflected the native culture he knew than life on Mars. Hill, accordingly, denaturalizes the figurines through humor and photographic manipulation--in effect remaking the toys as the extra-terrestrials he imagined them to be. His digitally altered photo-transparencies, blown up to six feet in height, depict the figurines in day-glo colors. To each, Hill has added extra arms, antennae or a Star Trek insignia. Not only are these whimsical images themselves biting cultural critiques, they also effectively redirect our reading of Smith's anthropological image across from them. They lead the viewer to examine the commodification of aboriginal culture as well as the disparity between European notions of "Indian-ness" a nd actual native life.

Like Hill, the other five contemporary artists included in "Emergence from the Shadow" also address Euro-North American conventions of aboriginal representation. In the interactive installation "Wassechgan" (1999), ("window" in Ojibwa), for example, Ace adopts the role of anthropologist in order to tell the histories of his own mixed-ancestry family. The artist asked seven family members to each select one object that sparked significant personal memories. The objects themselves, which include family photographs and a beadwork basket, are displayed in a case in a parody of conventional anthropological presentation. An accompanying interactive computer installation allows the viewer to read Ace's interpretation of the objects and homages to the lives of these, his elders. The inclusion of the artist's own recollections provides an alternative to anthropological readings. In works presented under the title "Time Travels Through Us" (1995), artist and filmmaker Niro explores female ancestry through the combinat ion of photographic portraits and artifacts. In a 1995 work, for example, she depicts her mother, sister and daughter each in a separate portrait beside an elaborate beadwork object: a corn husk doll, a beaded. bag and a feathered fan. The series reasserts the importance of women's work within lroquoian society while positing an alternative model of portraiture in which identity is demarcated by the sitter's production as much as by his or her physical appearance. Winnipeg-based M[acute{e}]tis artist Favell, too, addresses racial and gender representation in the series "Plains Warrior Artist" (1999). Like Hill, her work irreverently combines images of popular culture using digital technology. In this series, Favell invokes a nineteenth-century male Plains tradition of warriors drawing records of their exploits on the pages of ledger books. Her updated female version features Favell herself in the guise of television's Xena, Warrior Princess, involved in a number of escapades. She first appears as a young girl with a native doll, is later transformed into the battling warrior princess and finally awakens to greet the spirits of M[acute{e}]tis leader Louis Riel and Dorothy's Kansas family from The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps the most politically charged work in the exhibition is Barkhouse's Wolves in the City (1998). The artist employs the image of the wolf, whose return from near extinction, she notes in an artist's statement, "parallels the cultural resurgence and self-determination movement of today's aboriginal people." She pairs cyanotype prints of signage, monuments and other sites with collaged black and white photographs of wolves. Staats's work from 1999--with its contemplative nature and less overt politics--stands somewhat apart from the others. His poetic images of the natural and urban world--crows dotting the sky and obsessively bundled sticks resting on a city curb--offer juxtapositions of his childhood memories on the Six Nations Reserve and his present life in Toronto.

Through technical manipulations, recontextualization and humor, these contemporary projects, like Thomas's subtle representations of anthropological photography, destabilize conventional Euro-North American readings of a native "other." If aestheticizing the anthropological images runs the risk of masking or neutralizing colonialism, here art serves a critical function. "Emergence from the Shadow" provides a powerful counterpoint to the imperialist message of early twentieth-century anthropological photography and offers new models for envisioning aboriginal representations.

CAROL PAYNE is an assistant professor in Carleton University's School for Studies in Art and Culture: Art History in Ottawa, Canada.

NOTES

(1.) Jeff Thomas in his paper delivered at "Canada's Art Histories--Part I: Aboriginal Art Histories," Carleton University, Ottawa; January 29, 20OO.

(2.) Elizabeth Edwards, "Introduction" in Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven and London: Yale university Press in association with The Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1992), p.6.

(3.) Thomas, ibid.

(4.) Examples include the essays by aboriginal artists and writers in Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans (New York: The New Press, 1992) and the scholarship in Brock Silversides, The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians, 1871-1939 (Saskatoon, Canada: Fifth House Publishers, 1994).