Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography by Nicole Dawn Strathman (review)

When one searches for Edward Curtis on the internet, the results show a website: “Edward Curtis—A True Friend of the Indian.” Most commonly known for his relationship and depictions of Indigenous communities in the American West, Curtis’s photographic work supports the assumption that Native American culture and life faded with North America’s open wilderness. His work, coupled with artistic depictions of the same model, assume that Native Americans allowed for this ethnographic study with no participation in the process whatsoever. In Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography, art historian Nicole Dawn Strathman directly challenges that interpretation and explores Indigenous photographers’ involvement in capturing and documenting their own communities. Many Native Americans shifted focus and challenged the understanding that their people faded away from American culture. Instead, they reinforced their survival, their sovereignty, and their agency in being practitioners of their own destiny. Native photographs, just like Native communities, survived the American colonial project. This study drastically approaches new realms to understand how Native American people interacted with their self-image in American culture.

Strathman’s book makes a strong argument that Native American photographs “did not show noble savages or assimilated groups but instead depicted a proud and resolute people retaining their cultures while embracing modern technologies” (p. 3). In so doing, Through a Native Lens makes two crucial scholarly contributions. The first is an intervention in how Native Americans are viewed in photography, as Strathman seeks to demystify the familiar trope of Native Americans as “passive victims of Western photographers (although they were sometimes just that) [to] emphasize their photographic representation” (p. 9). The second is the analysis of both Native American photographers—those who worked in their own studios on reservations or as freelance amateur shooters—created “counter images” and “enduring memories” of their communities that challenged American colonialism and systems that have attempted to erase them and place their communities on the periphery of American nation-building. Strathman’s book refocuses on the participation of Indigenous photographers as a means of survival and resistance to colonial structures.

This revival of Native American participation in photography comes from the detailed research of the slew of individual actors, all of whom reframed their role in the photographic process. As Strathman organizes Through a Native Lens by Native American participations and practitioners—and that section separated between Professionals, Semi-professionals, and Amateur photographers—we see that many Native Americans had different experiences within the realm of photography. To assume they had the same experience neglects individual community understanding of representation and imagery. From portraits to landscapes and from posed to candid, we see from the different types of photographs Native photographers documented a wide array of scenes and images during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, not all Native Americans worked in tandem when it came to photographing their communities; some worked for profit, and others preserved the images to produce a body of work for the future’s consumption. Benjamin Haldane (Tsimshian) and Richard Throssel (Crow/Scottish/Adopted Cree) both opened photographic studios on reservations to be at the center of the action and capitalize on the portraiture of Native Americans. Others, who Strathman labels as “Amateur snap-shooters,” like Henry Sampson (Northern Paiute) and Jennie Ross Cobb (Cherokee), snapped photographs that later would provide useful information for studying the past. Similarly, Parker Mackenzie (Kiowa) photographed his experiences at the Phoenix Indian Boarding School, portraying a more relaxed view of the boarding school experience (p. 110).

This book has much to offer readers interested in the artistic depictions of Native Americans in American history and relationships with Indigenous sovereignty and a resurgence of self-claimed power that challenges powers and structures that often control their community narratives. While her book successfully develops an interesting argument that deploys new tactics to examine nonwhite sources and an ethnohistorical approach to focus on Indigenous communities themselves, the book might have explored how Native American communities...