Photographing the Places of Citizenship: The 1922 Crow Industrial Survey

CROW TRIBAL MEMBERS Hazel Red Wolf and her husband, Three Foretops, received a visitor on July 12, 1922 at their log house in the Little Horn Valley, a mile above the town of Lodge Grass, Montana. Crow Agency Superintendent Calvin Asbury came to visit them, their three children, and one grandchild—equipped with a camera and a survey to complete. Asbury intended to photograph their house as a supplement to a narrative survey form requested by the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), as part of their massive Industrial Survey project (1922–29).

The OIA initiated the Industrial Survey—an attempt to photograph and narrate every household on every federally recognized Indian reservation across the country—two years before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, “to ascertain their condition, needs, and resources, with the view to organizing the work of the reservation service so that each family will make the best use of its resources.”¹ Asbury’s survey sought information ranging from demographics to qualitative data on the “industry” and “health” of tribal members, and their household’s “general condition.” The photographs he took, however, made the 1922 Crow Industrial Survey unique within the context of the dozens of surveys commissioned by the OIA of the reservation era (1880s–1934). For this represented the OIA’s first and last unified, national attempt to connect its data to a vast visual archive of Indian households under government “guardianship”—which during this time period included even “citizen Indians” nominally, but not actually, free of government supervision.

We do not know what Three Foretops and his wife thought when Asbury arrived at their home. Asbury’s impressions, however, constitute the remaining archival record of the visit. Asbury wrote of the family’s home, “Fair house, fairly kept.”² His overall assessment reads, “The conditions are only fair. They live at home most of the time and have this year some very good crop. . . . [Three Foretops] says that he is getting too old for work and has to go slow, but he does considerable farming.” Supplementing Asbury’s assessment was this photograph.

Three Foretops’s log cabin dominates the center of the image; the sky above the house is clear, and in the distance rambles a low line of trees to the left and foothills to the right. Three Foretops and Hazel Red Wolf, two tiny figures in front of their log cabin, remain mysterious. We cannot see their faces, even though the photograph exposes their bodies, their house, and a portion of their lands to Asbury, to the impersonal and assessing gazes of the OIA bureaucracy members who received and filed the survey documents, and to our own gaze.³

Figure 1.

Three Foretops and Hazel Red Wolf home, Crow Industrial Survey.

Photograph by Charles Asbury; courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

This photograph—along with the blizzard of similar images produced as part of the Crow Industrial Survey and the larger Industrial Survey project completed across the country—represents a valuable source base for historians of Native America. The survey and its photographs provide a literal and discursive snapshot of Native American life in the late reservation era, on the eve of the Indian Reorganization Act. And although the national Indian Affairs bureaucracy planned the survey, local Indian agents and their agency employees—“boss farmers,” clerks, and the like—saturate the narratives and photographs with their own voice and framings. Thus, interrogating the Crow Survey—a survey of a “small place,” distinctive and specific—reveals not only Native lives, but also the lives of reservation Indian Agency bureaucracies and the priorities and intentions of the national Indian Affairs bureaucracy itself. The Crow Survey lends itself to this analysis not only due to its manageable size (photographs and narratives of approximately 250 households), but also because of the well-developed historical work on the reservation-era Crow.

This essay explores the sources that make the OIA’s Industrial Survey truly unique: its photographs. To do so, I read the images using the context...