Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers (review)

In the preface to Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers, coeditor and photographer Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muskogee/Diné) states the critical importance of connection by Indigenous photographers not only to their work and the images they capture and create but to a larger context beyond themselves. What exactly is that connection? This is what the twenty-six Indigenous photographers included in this catalog address in the body of their work.

Our People, Our Land, Our Images looks at the camera in the hands of Indigenous photographers with an Indigenous eye to reveal a rich culture of stories and images spanning generations from the early 1900s to the present. Most non-Indigenous photographers since colonization were focused on documentation and the continued exploitation and stereotyping of Indigenous peoples by and for non-Indigenous people, as coeditor Veronica Passalacqua precisely states in the catalog's introduction. However, this collection shows emphatically that the person holding the camera has changed, as has the end viewer.

The importance of the images captured and by whom as well as the Indigenous viewer's response to those images are considered. The counternarrative Tsinhnahjinnie and Passalacqua have pulled together is impressive, extraordinary, and very bittersweet. As young people growing up, how many times were we assaulted with image after image by Edward S. Curtis and the popular Indian on the postcard only to be left in bewilderment as to how those images related to who we are and where we come from? The Indigenous photographers in Our People, Our Land, Our Images address these very questions and more in their work not just for themselves but also for their families and for their communities.

While the catalog is set up in three sections ("Our Past," "Our Present," and "Our Future"), as one goes through the photographs and writings there is a circular movement and connection to the images and the words. To see the photographs by Benjamin A. Haldane (Tsimshian, 1874–1941), Jennie Ross Cobb (Aniyunwiya [Cherokee], 1881–1956), Martin Chambi (Quechua, 1891–1973), and Bertha Felix Campigli (Coast Miwok, 1882–1949) was exciting. The images leapt off the page and were rich with the stories of what was going on with the people or the community. Rather than being frozen images in time, these photographs are still very much alive. Why? Because the personal connection to those stories, to those communities, was kept alive by the retelling of the stories through the generations. The people and images are as alive as the day the photographs were taken. These images are also important to help understand what was happening to Indigenous peoples in the 1900s to the late 1930s in terms of their resistance and continuance in the face of assimilation and relocation.

In the "Our Present" and "Our Future" sections there is a vast collection of images by Indigenous photographers from across the globe from the 1940s to 2006. These photographers are not just capturing a particular image or scene but are taking the images and incorporating them into an artistic expression of importance to themselves and their communities. Whether it be elders, family, sacred places, sense of place, connection to the land, time, identity, stereotypes, war, politics, or technology, the photographers show why having the camera in their hands is critical. The subtleties and complexities of the stories and issues captured in the photographs and images would have been lost to a non-Indigenous photographer. It is the continued personal connection to the people and the places being photographed that make these images far more powerful, meaningful, and vital to the empowerment and continuance of Indigenous communities.

Our People, Our Land, Our Images is necessary, important, and a long-over-due contribution to Indigenous peoples and communities across the world. The collection gives the viewer a strong sense of how Indigenous photographers have taken the camera, a tool that has long been used to exploit and misrepresent them...