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Descendants of Black Hawk: Generations of Identity in Sauk Portraits
- American Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 63, Number 2, June 2011
- pp. 301-335
- 10.1353/aq.2011.0017
- Article
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While much critical attention has been paid to white audiences' use of images of "the Indian" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, less is known about how indigenous people at the time may have understood or used these images. This essay examines the photographs of local historian John Henry Hauberg to track the uses of portraits of the Sauk leader Black Hawk and his descendants as they were interpreted by both white audiences and by members of the Sauk nation in the early twentieth century. While Hauberg encouraged white audiences to identify with the patriotism and masculinity of Black Hawk, displaced members of the Sauk nation negotiated the symbolic system represented by photography—its claim to authenticity, its power to organize experience, its function as a tool of remembrance—to generate meanings and histories more compatible with their own experiences.