Colonial Encounters at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: “Unsettling” the Personal Photograph Albums of Andrew Onderdonk and Benjamin Leeson

Abstract

Photography has been used by settlers to document and fictionalize colonial encounters in Canada since the mid-nineteenth century as an attempt to displace Indigenous peoples from the land, to contain them within settler albums. In this essay, the author looks at visual practices of settler photograph albums in British Columbia from the turn of the twentieth century to argue that this is a key site of settler forgetting and erasure of colonial violence. Specifically, the author analyzes the visual practices of depicting the before and after of colonial encounters in the personal photograph albums of contractor Andrew Onderdonk (c885) and photographer and civil servant Benjamin Leeson (1887-1900). Paulette Regan’s methodology of “unsettling” (2010) guides a destabilization of the historical narratives that are supported by these personal photographic albums, and asks how they produce settler denial and guilt about Indigenous-settler relations, as well as what we can learn about colonial injustice and violence through an unsettling encounter with these same images.