Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman Cindy Ott (bio) Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography By Nicole Dawn Strathman. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography By Nicole Dawn Strathman. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. In any good book about photographs, the images themselves should tell a valuable story, not just the text. Photographs alone can change our thinking and make us question our assumptions. In Through a Native Lens, Nicole Dawn Strathman has gathered photographs by and about American Indians that do just that. Photography has been central to the image-making of American Indians for as long as the technology has existed. Yet up until recent years, historians thought that American Indians had little to nothing to say about the photographic process or the images. An important turn in that thinking was Shamoon Zamir's The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian (2014). He argues that American Indians who posed for Curtis participated in, and contributed to, the creation of those famous sepia-toned, soft-focus images of bygone days. Yet no matter the level of revisionist history, those powerful images of precolonial ways of life stick in our heads. Strathman sees herself following in Zamir's footsteps. And while she critiques classic portraiture from the early twentieth century, her most important contribution is to dig up and present images that defy categorization, before she even applies her deft interpretation. Images include young American Indian boarding school students goofing around in front of the handheld Kodiak Brownie of their Kiowa classmate Parker McKenzie. We see them in relaxed, playful interactions rather than posing before the official school photographer's large-format mounted camera in military precision, or at work in the classroom. The Native subjects of indigenous Alaskan Benjamin Haldane wore the latest fashions and directed their stare at the camera. They created self-portraits of wealth and sophistication, Strathman writes, rather than of exotic cultures from a distant time and place. Strathman's main and essential point is that American Indians, from the photographers to those who posed for them, controlled the technology and used it to their own ends. With Curtis's images still dancing in our heads, this is a useful reminder. Yet the value of Through a Native Lens doesn't stop there. The author also describes how Tribal communities have relied on these new technologies and images to document their history and perpetuate their values. In this way, the photographs become modern-day petroglyphs, ancient images incised or drawn on boulders, which Native people rely on as pneumonic devices to recall stories of who they are as a people. These photographs, and the stories about them, also make clear [End Page 898] that American Indians, even those from the same community, are never one and the same. Strathman presents images of American Indians in a variety of clothing, at work and play, with multiple motivations to use photography. She describes the controversies that the Tlingit photographer and anthropologist Louis Shotridge caused in communities when he took photographs against their will. This example highlights the diversity of experiences and opinions among Native people. Strathman's work is organized thematically, and it shifts from famous to everyday American Indians who sat for photographers, to professional and amateur American Indian photographers. The book synthesizes recent scholarship. The author cites Philip Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), for example, to explain why modern American Indian women would pose as stereotypical princesses. Strathman owes a great debt to Johanna Cohan Scherer, longtime photo archivist at the Smithsonian Institution's Department of Anthropology. Scherer has spent decades studying and cataloging images of American Indians, and her comments, laced throughout the book, lend weight. Strathman offers many close readings of images based on extensive historical research. Yet sometimes she veers too far into speculation. She describes the motivations of the sitters with a certainty that lacks the documentation she needs to back up her assertions. In general, she moves on quickly from one image or person...