Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection. Sun Tracks, Vol. 53 (review)

From their first contact with the Europeans arriving on the continent, American Indians have been depicted as exotic and different. The dominant white culture used images depicting members of the tribal nations as wild, savage, remote, noble, stoic, picturesque, or even keepers of the Earth. In fact, the lopsided power relationship between the dominant culture and Native Americans fostered the idea of Native Americans as a vanishing race. Hundreds of thousands of photographs, postcards, stereotypes, and photogravure prints stereotyping Indian peoples were sold across the United States and elsewhere between 1890 and 1920.

While most photographs of Indians recorded one hundred years ago rendered Native peoples in flagrant stereotypes, a series of portraits made by Frank A. Rinehart revealed a dignity and pride among Native peoples. Rinehart was the official photographer of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha in 1898. The exposition has been called the most successful world's fair ever held in the United States. James Mooney of the Smithsonian Institution arranged a living ethnographic exhibition of Native Americans who were invited to be delegates to an Indian Congress convened as part of the exposition. A total of 545 Indian delegates traveled to Omaha, representing many tribes—Apache, Southern Arapaho, Crow, Flathead, Iowa, Kiowa, Omaha, Oto, Ponca, Potawatomi, Santa Clara Pueblo, Sauk and Fox, Lakota, Tonkawa, Wichita, and Winnebago. A valuable historic record was made when Mooney contracted with Rinehart to make photographic portraits of the delegates during the last week of the Indian Congress.

Rinehart and his assistant Adolph Muhr were able to make five hundred extraordinary glass-plate negatives and twelve hundred platinum prints in a temporary studio set up at the Expo grounds and during the ensuing two years. The Rinehart series of photos of Native Americans in their traditional dress is recognized as one of the finest collections of American Indian portraits and as one of the best photographic documentations of Indian leaders of that time. For years after the exposition, copies of the portraits were sold as platinum prints and colored prints.

Today, Rinehart's original glass plates are preserved and housed in the Haskell Cultural Center and Museum at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. In his new work, Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection, Acoma Pueblo poet, essayist, storyteller, fiction writer, and University of Toronto professor Simon J. Ortiz has selected one hundred of the original negatives in a photo-anthology that offers an unusual perspective on the Rinehart collection. The images in Beyond the Reach of Time and Change are portraits that reflect the individual personalities and traditions of their subjects. The subjects of these images are portrayed in a dignified manner. These are not the kind of stereotype-building "wild Indian" photos of the genre promulgated by another photographer of that period, Edward S. Curtis. The text accompanying Ortiz's selection of photos includes fourteen essays in which modern Native American writers, artists, and educators describe how they see their heritage in the images. Some of the essayists are descendants of the photographic subjects.

Contributors to the work include, in alphabetical order: Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Gregory A. Cajete (Tewa), Julie Cajune (Salish and Kootenai), Debra Earling (Salish and Kootenai), Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Geary Hobson (Cherokee-Quapaw-Chickasaw), Ted Jojola (Isleta Pueblo), Carole Nez (San Carlos Apache-Navajo), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), Bobbi Rahder (Haskell Indian Nations University), James Riding In (Pawnee), Beverly R. Singer (Santa Clara Pueblo-Navajo), Laura Tohe (Navajo), Ray A. Young Bear (Meskwaki), and Alfred Young Man (Chippewa-Cree).

The powerful photographs in Beyond the Reach of Time and Change create a thought-provoking catalyst for a colloquy between Indian peoples from the turn of the twentieth century...