Native American Transformations
“Wichita Squaw in Summer Dress,” is a common misrepresentation of a Plains woman in the nineteenth-century. Her bare chest suggests “natural wildness,” open sexuality, and a failure to assimilate to a modernizing nation. Her empty expression is symbolic of the “Stoic Indian,” and her necklace gives the photo a "tribal" quality. She sits as the antithesis of white, feminine purity.
Soule's photography style catered to the expectations of popular belief: stereotypical images on the Western frontier. His photos included Native Americans, Mexicans, and European immigrants, as well as landscapes, villages, construction sites, and military forts. By representing the Wichita woman in this manner, he contributed to the myth that Indigenous people were uncivilized and incapable of modernity or progress. This kind of image kept Indians in a static place in the American imagination.
The same holds true for "Comanche Chief." This photo captures a Comanche man dressed "authentically" from his headdress to his moccasins. He holds a bow and arrow and stares away from the camera. His representation also caters to the myth of the disappearing Indian that took root in the mid to late nineteenth-century. Photographers, including Soule, cashed in on the marketability of images such as these.
Over time, ideas and images about Indigenous peoples have changed depending on colonial and national agendas. In the early American period Native American tribes were deemed the “lost” souls of the New World who desperately needed the guidance of Christian missionaries. In travel literature, captivity narratives, and other forms of print, Indians were depicted as peoples from heathen cultures, with a natural “wildness” that European immigrants might succumb to. Soule's work was an extension of this after the invention of the camera. Such rhetoric and images justified and reinforced dispossession, violence, gender roles, and Anglo superiority.
In the Revolutionary era, Anglo colonists dressed as Native Americans to protest their grievances with Great Britain. This occurred most famously during the Boston Tea Party. Historian Philip J. Deloria writes, “In the national iconography, the Tea Party is a catalytic moment, the first drumbeat in the long cadence of rebellion through which Americans defined themselves as something other than British colonists.” Deloria’s Playing Indian shows how Anglo-American men found ways of representation and self-identification through fraternal organizations such as the Philadelphia Tammany societies, or the multiple Orders of Red Men. While Anglo-American settlers strived to feel a “natural affinity” for the land as the Indians did, they simultaneously brutalized and displaced Indigenous people from the land. According to Deloria, this contradiction exemplifies the image of Indians as noble savages:, “a term that both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and dispossess them.” Despite the mock play and dress, their actions towards Native Americans revealed how they despised them at the same time.
Eighteenth and nineteenth-century Enlightenment philosophies and western expansion, including into the Pacific, portrayed Indians as violent, cannibalistic, hyper-sexualized beings who ravaged Anglo settlements, and raped and tortured Anglo women and children. To depict the Indian in this way served the newly emerging American empire as some looked to expand economically and geographically.
