LibGuides: Native American Rhetorical Traditions: Photography

Photography

Photos
Scholarship

PHOTO ESSAYS

Matika Wilbur's project is dedicated to photographing, blogging about, and filming over 562 federally recognized tribes in the US to create a repository of imagery and oral histories that accurately portrays contemporary Native Americans.

Photo Credit: Matika Wilbur

Camille Seaman. “We Are Still Here.”

Ciril Jazbec. “Waiting to Move.”

The village of Shishmaref, home to a modern Inupiaq community, is located on a small barrier island in the Chukchi Sea in northwestern Alaska and has been inhabited for 400 years. The island, approximately a quarter mile wide and 3 miles in length, is facing evacuation due to erosion, increasingly powerful storms, and the thawing of permafrost.

NATIVE AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY in the MEDIA

Ganteaume, C. R. (2020, March 24). “Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field” Presents Contemporary Native Experiences from the Inside. Smithsonian Voices.

Estrin, J. (2018, May 1). Native American Photographers Unite to Challenge Inaccurate Narratives. The New York Times.

Mida Donnessey at her home in Upper Liard, in Canada's Yukon in July 2015. Photo credit: Kali Spitzer. Image Source

Billard, J. (2017, November 24). 8 Contemporary Native American Artists Challenging the Way We Look at American History. Artspace.

Brice, A. (2018, April 13). Photographer reveals complexities of Native American history, contemporary lives. Berkeley News.

Taylor, A. (2013, April 8). Native Americans: Portraits from a Century Ago. The Atlantic.

Six Navajo on horseback, ca. 1904. Library of Congress/Edward S. Curtis. Image Source

ARTICLES

Margolis, E., & Rowe, J. (2004). Images of assimilation: photographs of Indian schools in Arizona. History of Education, 33(2), 199–230.

This paper examines recently discovered photographs of Arizona Indian schools. A major goal of this study is to suggest ways that photographs can be used as primary source data in historical and social research.

Kemper, K. (2012). Sacred Spaces: Cultural Hybridity and Boundaries for Visual Communication about the Hopi Tribe in Arizona. Visual Communication Quarterly, 19(4), 216–231.

This history and ideological critique of tribal laws and policies about photography and other image taking of religious ceremonies of the Hopi Tribe of Arizona explains how the Hopi exercise sovereignty over visual communication about them.

BOOKS & ALBUMS

Excavating Voices by Michael Katakis
Call Number: E89 .E9 1998
ISBN: 9780924171567
Publication Date: 1998-01-29
Three authors from diverse backgrounds contribute essays to this volume of photographs of Native Americans from the archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Noted photographer and author Michael Katakis, Professor of Native American literature and American Book Award winner Gerald Vizenor, and Associate Curator of the American collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Robert Preucel have contributed very personal and sensitive essays inspired by the portraits in this volume.
We Are at Home by Bruce White; Gerald Vizenor (Foreword by)
Call Number: TR654 .W363 2007
ISBN: 9780873515795
Publication Date: 2007-06-01
In this collection of photographs—ranging from daguerreotypes to studio portraits to snapshots—historian Bruce White explores historical images taken of Ojibwe people through 1950. The author considers the negotiation that went on between the photographers and the photographed—and what power the latter wielded.
We Are Still Here by Laura Waterman Wittstock (Text by); Rigoberto Menchu Tum (Introduction by); Dick Bancroft (Photographer)
Call Number: E 98 T77 B35 2013
ISBN: 9780873518871
Publication Date: 2013-05-15
The photographs of activist Dick Bancroft, a key documentarian of AIM, provide a stunningly intimate view of this major piece of American history from 1970 to 1981. Veteran journalist Laura Waterman Wittstock has interviewed a host of surviving participants to tell the stories behind the images
Native American Photography at the Smithsonian by Smithsonian Institution Staff (Contribution by); Paula Fleming
Call Number: E89 .S58 2003
ISBN: 9781588341211
Publication Date: 2003-12-17
This book of Native American portraits reflects the tragic history of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee, Cherokee, and other groups whose leaders traveled to Washington in the mid-nineteenth-century to negotiate treaties with the US government. These images provide a close-up, unromanticized record of Native American life at a critical time in the history of relations between the US government and Native Americans, just after the Civil War and at the beginning of the great westward expansion of US territories.
Arapaho Journeys by Sara Wiles; Frances Merle Haas (Foreword by)
Call Number: E99 .A7 W55 2011
ISBN: 9780806141589
Publication Date: 2011-05-05
Through more than 100 images and 40 essays, the author creates a visual and verbal mosaic of contemporary Northern Arapaho culture and portrays people whom she met at Wind River while she was a social worker, anthropology student, and adopted member of an Arapaho family.
The Photograph and the American Indian by Alfred L. Bush; Lee Clark Mitchell
Call Number: ARCHIVE E77.5 .B87 1994
ISBN: 9780691034898
Publication Date: 1994-09-26
A comprehensive look at photographs of Indians by both Native and Anglo Americans, from 1840 to the present.
North American Indians by Paula R. Fleming; Judith L. Luskey
Call Number: E77.5 .F54 1986
ISBN: 9780060155490
Publication Date: 1986-12-01
This book tells the story of ways in which photography was used to picture North American Indians prior to the first World War. Contains a list of over two hundred individual photographers and photographic studios known to have played active roles in photographing Indians during this period.