Indians Illustrated: The Image of Native Americans in the Pictorial Press by John M. Coward (review)

A majority of nineteenth-century middle-class Americans became familiar with American Indians thanks to their representations—or more often misrepresentations—in popular illustrated weekly publications that widely circulated starting from the 1850s. John M. Coward's book adds to our understanding of this phenomenon by examining American Indians' depictions in two of the most widespread periodicals of the time. Looking specifically at Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly, Coward argues that the images published therein stemmed from "the racial ideology" of the time in that they contributed to "sustain and reinforce a number of powerful ideas and beliefs about Indians and Indian life" (5). People already held assumptions about American Indians—as cultural others, as ruthless and violent savages—and the visual representations printed in the illustrated press further confirmed these misconceptions and, consequently, the intrinsic racial differences between the two groups.

Using a cultural approach to communication first advanced by James Scary, Coward analyzes the depictions of Indians printed in Leslie's and Harper's as "constructed artifacts" (5), that is, as images created and crafted for the purpose of reinforcing the existing social, political, cultural, and racial divide Euro-Americans built to distance themselves from their nonwhite neighbors, including African Americans. The hundreds of illustrations published in these two magazines, in fact, were rarely faithful representations of reality; on the contrary, they were sketches mostly drawn in East Coast studios loosely based on true events, people, or stories. These images embellished, aggrandized, demonized, and dehumanized Native peoples to fit a specific political and racial agenda. Thus, a drawing of a serene camp scene becomes an exposé of female subjugation and abuse, portraits of Indian leaders turn into nineteenth-century criminal mug shots, and Indian men defending their lives and lands suddenly morph into bloodthirsty warmongers. As a result, these fabricated depictions not only devalued Indians as human beings and their respective cultures but also belittled their political influence and their role in American society, thus bringing reassurance that government policies toward them were fully justified.

Coward examines a selected number of images grouped under six main categories, one category per chapter. Chapter 1 considers portraits of individual Indians and delegation groups, for the majority of tribal leaders were photographed on momentous occasions. These pictures were later turned into illustrations for Leslie's and Harper's as well as for two additional publications, Gleason's Pictorial and Ballou's Pictorial. Whether representations of noble savages or angry warriors, these illustrations stereotyped Indians and rendered them safe to the viewers, that is, as nonthreatening and harmless. Chapter 2 discusses illustrations of Indians' everyday lives and customs such as camp life, ceremonies, female-male relations and trading with non-Indians among others, focusing in particular on the works by W. C. Cary, one of the most prolific artists of the late nineteenth century. Representations of Indian women are the subject of chapter 3. Highlighting the conventional dichotomy princess-sq**w, these images offer glimpses of "curious others" rarely seen by white Americans, but also reveal the fascination they engendered and the inevitable comparison to Anglo women. In chapter 5, readers can examine illustrations of Indian wars and Indian-white violence that confirmed widespread ideas about Indian savagery and the necessity to finally solve the Indian problem. What may not be very well known, although anticipated, is that the majority of these illustrations were realized in studio, were not accurate or based on true facts, and purposely aggrandized Indian viciousness to fit the magazines' narratives.

If chapter 5 presents Indians as savage warriors, chapter 6 wants to "make sense of savagery" (132) by explaining the use of cartoons in the New York Daily Graphic before and after Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn, as these types of illustrations became a sign of changing ways of perceiving Indians. The Daily Graphic drastically shifted from the occasional nonthreatening, and even silly, sketch...