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In July 1908, Grace Nicholson, a basket trader, amateur ethnologist, and photographer made the first of several purchasing expeditions among the Karuk in northwestern California. Equipped with a camera, she was eager to record the authenticity and origin of her purchases. In a photograph taken by her business associate, Carrol S. Hartman, she and an elderly Karuk woman, known to her as Snappy, or Emma, sit together on the ground, seemingly oblivious to the camera's eye (.g. 1). At first glance, the women's postures and body language suggest a relation of equality, trust, and closeness, a relation made visually striking by their dramatically different clothing and features. Yet a phrase in the trader's travel diary suggests the inequities of the encounter: she noted that she was able to "secure her [Snappy's] picture without any trouble." 1 The resistance Nicholson may have anticipated from her informant is conditioned by the Euro-American occupation-physical, scientific, cultural, and visual-of the space these two women inhabit. They share this common ground only briefly, framed by the photographer's gaze. A closer examination suggests that, as documentary verification, this image is most notable for what it does not show: the featherband Snappy sold to Nicholson. The absence of the visible sign of the transaction that brought them together raises questions about other stories and material objects also absent from the vast archive of Indian photographs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Little-known photographs such as this one expose the complex stories of unconventional, well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class women such as
INTRODUCTION - EMPIRE OF THE LENS Women, Indians, and Cameras Nicholson, who fulfilled personal and professional aspirations by working or living in Native communities. The four photographers we write about here-Nicholson (1877-1948), who worked with the Karuk and other northern California tribes, and her near contemporaries, Jane Gay (1830 -1919), who spent four summers among the Nez Perces in northwest Idaho; Kate Cory (1861-1958), who made her home among the Hopis in northern Arizona for seven years; and Mary Schäffer (1861-1939), who was a neighbor of the Stoney in Alberta- inhabited multiple and at times conflicting roles. They were tourists, artists, and writers; ex-oficio documentary photographers, amateur ethnologists, and collectors; and brokers to museums and private collectors. Hundreds of their photographs, now largely unknown, chart a continuum of encounters, from close relationships to fleeting interactions, with Native peoples of the U.S. and Canadian Wests.
Like other New Women of their day, Gay, Cory, Schäffer, and Nicholson came from prosperous families, had been well educated, and did not follow the conventional patterns of marriage and child-rearing that had characterized the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. Eager for adventure and achievement, willing to risk reputations, and careless of comfort, they headed into new territory. Western life among the "uncivilized" helped them to reject the constraints and capitulations of middle-class Victorian womanhood and domesticity: to trade a parlor for a tent, a gown for a beaded jacket, a ball for a Snake Dance, a bath for a rain barrel. As they pursued new occupations in the arts or social sciences and revised older feminine roles in tourism and art patronage, they turned to Native peoples, cultures, and values to reinvent themselves. At age fifty-eight, after having worked as a teacher, a dead-letter-office clerk, a nurse, and a writer, Jane Gay set out to learn the new craft of photography so that she could document her friend Alice Fletcher's ethnographic projects. For four summers, these two friends rode a Pullman "palace car" across the continent to the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. Here, where the temperature on a summer afternoon often exceeded 108 degrees, they lived in tents and clapboard shelters, drove rickety wagons over dirt roads or hiked mountainous terrain, and facilitated the allotment of land to the Nez Perces. Gay made over four hundred images of the allotment process.
Intending only to tour the Far West on a vacation from teaching painting at Cooper Union School of Design, the forty-four-year-old Kate Cory got off the train at Canyon Diablo in 1905 to visit the Hopis and never used her return ticket, spending seven years on the mesas and the rest of her life in Arizona. Living on the second floor of her Hopi landlady's house, she said, "gave [her] a new point of view," expressed in the over six hundred remaining negatives of her work. Three thousand miles to the north, Mary Schäffer horse-camped across the still-remote Canadian Rockies, reveling in "the emancipation from frills, furbelows, and small follies"; her confession that the "mountains had thrown a glam- our" over her remind us that Euro-American women's deeply complicated turns toward the Native were transnational in scope. Finally, Nicholson's move to southern California in 1901 for health reasons linked white women's embrace of western locales to broader cultural currents more often associated with literary males who found in "wild" terrains their "west cures." 3
Our title, Trading Gazes, evokes and acknowledges the history of often unequal exchanges in "trading posts" throughout the West and points to the interchange that was taking place among cultures in a frontier contact zone. We explore the asymmetries of power that made these images possible in their own moment and that have preserved (or obscured) them for our own age. White women working or living within Native communities frequently initiated trades-of gifts, goods, services, objects, and knowledge-that resulted in what we have now come to see as the alienation of the cultural and intellectual property of Indian nations. At times, they mediated exchanges in which tribal concessions were traded for supposed political benefits. Their photographs were integral to these relations: sometimes they gave prints to tribal members; more frequently, they circulated their work in private albums, magazine articles, public lectures, travel books, and as a part of museum collections and displays.4
Today, the photographs these women took serve as complex and sometimes contradictory markers of cultural exchange. Some grace the walls of tribal museums: Cory's photographs have hung on the walls of the Hopi Cultural Center. Others, like those of Gay and Schäffer, enrich archival collections and state historical society libraries. Reviewed from new perspectives, these photographs bear witness in contemporary times: under legal provisions such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (1990), items like Snappy's featherband, long out of sight but not out of mind, may be eligible for repatriation. Donated to the Peabody Museum by one of Nicholson's wealthy clients and for over a century part of its permanent ethnographic collection, the featherband and its provenance might now be documented by a photograph .rst intended to establish its authenticity to a buyer or collector. Ironically, perhaps, Emma Telling Grace Nicholson about Featherband chronicles both Karuk survival and the ways in which contemporary Native nations continue to reshape the archive of Indian photography.
Yet these photographs, like those made by women teachers, government employees, and missionaries, remain largely absent from official or public photographic archives. Often characterized as amateur, they do not follow the conventions of content, framing, and pose used by the men engaged in the "grand endeavors" of scientific, anthropological, or aesthetic photography.5 Their makers, although sometimes sponsored by governmental or educational agencies, were generally unaffiliated and marginal to official undertakings. These photographs constitute a counter-archive, inviting comparisons with other images of indigenous peoples from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They re-turn our attention to the circumstances under which such images were made and ask viewers to mark their own complicity in interpreting them.
In Trading Gazes we explore this counter-archive of images produced by Gay, Cory, Nicholson, and Schäffer. Tracing the intersecting histories of these women and their Indian subjects, we consider their place in the larger histories of Native peoples and in Euro-American westward expansion. We investigate how gender and race may affect access to political and cultural power and thus result in different kinds of writing and photography. We consider the contexts in which these women's photographs and texts have been received: at the moment of their production in a specific interaction between photographer or writer and subject; as they were collected into albums, travel books, and memoirs, or into more culturally capacious museums and archives; and, in the larger sense, as they become parts of the histories of tribes and nations. We explore the ways in which these photographs sometimes record acts of violation and dispossession, but we include no images of ceremonial practices or sites. Instead, the photographs featured in Trading Gazes direct us toward the successes and failures, inevitable contradictions and compromises, of intercultural understanding during a watershed era of U.S. and Canadian Indian history.