Make a Picture of Yourself: Indigenous Portrayals in the Reservation Diaries of Abby Williams Hill

Abstract

Make a Picture of Yourself:Indigenous Portrayals in the Reservation Diaries of Abby Williams Hill Tiffany Aldrich Macbain In the summer of 1902, an artist named Abby Williams Hill (1861–1943) camped with her children at Trout Lake, Washington, not far from their home in Tacoma. A few days into their stay, Hill found herself drawn to a large group of Yakama people who had established an encampment nearby. She approached the camp, according to her diary, with the twin desires to experience "Indians" not living "among the whites" and to sketch them in their "national costume[s]" (Journal, Aug. 1902, 304). In this account we find the romantic language and sympathies Hill typically reinscribes when writing in her diaries about Indigenous people. Her common recourse to received ideas about "the Indian" imposes cultural, emotional, and intellectual distance between her and her Native American subjects and signals the dominant cultural assumptions that shaped her artistic vision. Another diary entry from Trout Lake typifies these conventions of representation and, written early during what would be a decade of travels, provides a baseline understanding of the contradictory ways Hill imagined herself in relation to Native people:1 The next day we tramped back again to see / temporary camps + picturesque enough we found them—Unlike our Indians, satisfied with a 50 ct calico wrapper, these Indian women wear a national costume made of a strip of very gay calico with a hole in / middle, gores on / sides + a straight piece over / sleeves which are fastened to some undergarment. [Hill includes a sketch.] It sets off their sturdy forms well[.] They were all made by hand[.] They wore many bead ornaments, handsomely made usually a bead belt with purse attached[.] I priced one, it was 3 dollars (/purse)[.] I did not buy. I asked a handsome squaw sitting in her wigwam door if I might sketch her. I had passed chocolate freely + thot [sic] myself on pretty good terms but she persistently refused however a young brave consented[.] (Journal, Aug. 1902, 304)2 [End Page 22] Evident here are Hill's cultural biases and practices—her insistence on stereotyping Native American people and romanticizing and appropriating their lived experience. Her emphasis on clothing signals her preoccupation with white women's dress reform and her abiding opinion that traditional Native attire was preferable to the frippery and changing fashions of her own culture.3 Elsewhere in the diaries she acknowledges Western clothing as a function of forced assimilation, but here she holds the Puyallup people—"our Indians" in Tacoma—responsible for moving away from tradition. In relation to the Yakama encampment at Trout Lake, Hill positions herself as surveyor of a scene that satisfies her aesthetic preferences. Though aloof from her surroundings, she also wishes to claim elements of the culture before her, like images of the women she entices with chocolate or the "national costume" that might suit her own "sturdy form." Laying bare Hill's colonial impulses and enriching the diary's status as a historical record is the confounding performance of one Native American woman who—by way of Hill's own documentation—disrupts the stock narrative of cultural contact and draws attention to Hill's part in the exchange. As Hill completes a sketch of "a young brave," another figure, whom she refers to as the "/ chief woman of / camp," approaches and watches "with an ever deepening frown." Through an interpreter the woman commands Hill: "You make picture of yourself!" Hill's clumsy use of dialect does not diminish the significance of the interruption; the woman's disapproval adds friction to the smooth workings of the artist's colonial vision. Hill puts her off with the excuse, "I can not see myself," at which point the woman leaves, only to return moments later with a hand mirror. "Now," says the woman, "you make picture of yourself." In holding a mirror to Hill's face, the woman obstructs Hill's perspective and imposes a new image for her to behold: Hill as both artistic (and colonial) subject and object. The moment reads as one of forced self-recognition, for Hill must regard herself in the mirror as the imperial "I" and the...