Colonial costuming: representations of playing Indian in photographs, settler Colonialism and the appropriation of native North American culture

Hikka Ingrid Forster

doi:10.32920/ryerson.14662755

Abstract

This thesis examines the cultural significance of “playing Indian” in photographs: the practice of non-Native peoples dressing up in Native North American costumes and posing for photographs. It addresses photographs made both inside and outside the studio of people playing Indian, during both the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and looks at the extent to which these photographs reinforce settler colonial ideology prevalent within white society during this time period. Examples from two collections will be explored, portraits from the Notman photography collection at the McCord museum, which includes examples of white Europeans and North Americans dressing up in Native “costumes” and photographs of children playing Indian in the First Nations collection at the Archive of Modern Conflict Toronto. Themes of masculinity, nation-building, “Canadianness,” and childhood in relation to indigeneity are explored by situating the photographs within their historical and cultural context and subsequently relating them to the already existing theories on playing Indian.

Highlights

The Dead Indians I’m talking about are not the deceased sort
In this thesis I have focused on material from two collections, the Notman Studio collection held at the McCord Museum and the Archive of Modern Conflict, in developing my argument, but as noted in the introduction, these images belong to a much larger framework of people “playing Indian,” of which there are countless photographic examples
I have looked at the cultural significance of the photographic representation of playing Indian, that is, the portrayal of a practice in which non-Native peoples dressed up in Native North American costume

Summary

Introduction

The Dead Indians I’m talking about are not the deceased sort. Nor are they all that inconvenient. -Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian This thesis examines the cultural significance of “playing Indian” in photographs: the practice of non-Native peoples dressing up in Native North American costumes and posing for photographs. It addresses photographs made both inside and outside the studio of people “playing Indian,” during both the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which coincided with an existing visual culture in Europe and North America that was fascinated with a highly romanticized image of the “Indian” and at the height of colonial photography of Native peoples. Native cultures are often referred to as tribes, or nations, but both terms

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion