Images of Indians of North America

Delegations and Government Relations: Among the earliest true portraits of Native Americans are those made of tribal leaders or delegates who visited European capitals and Washington, D.C. for diplomatic purposes. These visits and visitors, as well as Indian-white relations such as treaty negotiations, legal affairs, land claims, and protests, are well documented in lithographs, drawings, studio portraits, posters, and photographic prints.

RIGHT: This work is apparently the earliest engraved portrait made from life of a Native American. Drawn and engraved by the Czech printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar, it depicts a twenty-three-year-old Algonquian Indian of Virginia who visited London in 1645. [LC-USZ62-114953 (black & white copy film negative); LC-USZC4-4603 (color transparency)]

Federal Government Surveys and Other Expeditions: Some of the most important portrayals of native peoples were produced by artists and photographers accompanying exploration teams into the western parts of the United States, Canada, and Alaska during the 19th and early twentieth centuries. Images in this genre range from fanciful to authentic and include lithographs, stereographs, and photographs, many of which appeared in published reports.

LEFT: One of the first photographs demonstrating Navajo weaving was taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan on the federal government's Wheeler Survey in 1873. [LC-USZ62-8561 (black & white film copy negative)]

Indian Wars and Confrontations: Since the first encounters, Indian-white relations have been largely characterized by hostility and violence, causing the term "Indian wars" to gain wide currency. Artists portrayed these bloody conflicts, sometimes literally and sometimes imaginatively, in drawings, prints, and in illustrations for popular newspapers and magazines. Because of limited technology, photographers were limited to documenting the grim aftermath of skirmishes, tribal leaders and combatants, battle sites, and other stationary subjects such as forts and military equipment. The Division's holdings reflect the full range of this sort of graphic and photographic documentation.

RIGHT: Although no photographs of the actual massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, exist, George E. Trager was the first photographer to record the burial of the frozen corpses of Lakota Sioux Indians in January 1891 [LC-USZ62-44458 (black & white film copy negative]

The Frontier, Villages, and Reservation Life: Away from the confines of the studio, independent and frontier photographers recorded life in Indian communities, on or near reservations where tribes were forced to relocate. The daily activities of many native tribes west of the Mississippi are well documented in historical photographs of domestic life, homes, ceremonies, games, and work of tribal people and their families.

LEFT: A devout young Crow wearing a prayer shawl, shakes the traditional peyote rattle and holds a feather fan and staff during an all-night ceremony on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, 1957. Photograph by John Vachon. [LC-L9-57-7402-O, #18 (black &. white film negative)] (see:Look Magazine Photograph Collection rights information)

Expositions, World's Fairs, and Wild West Shows: The spectacle of "real Indians" featured in west show performances, anthropological exhibits, and world's fairs attracted artists and photographers who documented staged tableaux and memorialized many of the Native American participants in photographs. Performers are particularly well documented in the Division's collection of studio portraits while the actual shows are represented in other photographs and in posters advertising such attractions.

RIGHT: The Wild West Show became a popular form of entertainment for people east of the Mississippi and in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Native American performers helped recreate sham battles and performed traditional dances in the productions. Lithograph by Courier Lithographic Company, 1899. [LC-USZ62-1164 (black & white film copy negative); LC-USZC4-778 (color transparency)]

Pictorialist Photographs: Unlike documentary photographers, pictorialists tended to create romantic, idealized, and aesthetically pleasing images of Native Americans and Indian life, often using soft-focus, artificial settings, and other means of manipulation. Images in this category include more than 2,500 first generation prints created by the most famous and successful pictorialist photographer of Indians, Edward S. Curtis, who documented life among more than eighty North American tribes.

LEFT: In the 1906 work "Watching the Dancers," Edward S. Curtis photographed Hopi girls on a rooftop of Walpi pueblo. [LC-USZ62-80169 (black & white film copy negative)]

Satires, Stereotypes, and Polemical Representations: The image of the North American Indian has, since the Age of Discovery, served a number of imaginative and symbolic purposes for artists and photographers, especially to mirror political or social trends. Depictions of Indians in the Division's satirical prints, advertising prints, posters, and photographs exemplify the many ways in which pictorial images have conveyed and disseminated powerful and influential ideas, both favorable and unfavorable to Native Americans.

RIGHT: Awkwardly holding the white man's weapon while inadvertently spilling his liquor, this dazed and inept Native American is among the many historic caricatures devised by non-Indian artists. [Process], printed by Vance & Parsloe, 1875. [LC-USZ62-92901 (black & white film copy negative)]

Major Reference Works