"The authors provide us with rich and original insights into the complex relationships of Euro-Americans and Indians at a moment in time when increased restrictions on Indian lives and cultures opened up possibilities for New Women seeking to escape traditional gender constraints."-Lois Rudnick, author of Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture

"This book offers a new lens through which to view the histories and cultural exchanges of whites and natives in North America from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Rich, exciting, and important insights emerge from this collaborative venture."-Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

" This book sets the standard for scholarship recovering women's creative work. Making available photographs of Native Americans far more intimate and varied than those with which most of us are familiar, the authors address the photographs, and the women who took them, in ways that are historically informed, judicious, and extraordinarily illuminating."-Sandra A. Zagarell, Oberlin College

The story of westering Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been told most notably through photographs of American Indians. Unlike this vast archive, produced primarily by male photographers, which depicted American Indians as either vanishing or domesticated, the lesser-known images by the women featured in Trading Gazes provide new ways of seeing the intersecting histories of colonial expansion and indigenous resistance. Four unconventional women-Jane Gay, who documented land allotment to the Nez Perces; Kate Cory, an artist who lived for years in a Hopi community; Grace Nicholson, who purchased cultural items from the Karuk and other northern California tribes; and Mary Schaffer, who traveled among the Stoney and Métis of Alberta, Canada-used cameras to document their cross-cultural encounters.

Trading Gazes reconstructs the rich biographical and historical contexts explaining these women's presence in different Native communities of the North American West. Their photographs not only record the unprecedented opportunities available for Euro-American women eager to shed gender restrictions, but also reveal how women's newfound mobility depended on the increasing restrictions placed on Native Americans in this era. By tracing the complex, often unexpected relationships forged between these women, their cameras, and the Native subjects of their photographs, Trading Gazes offers a new focus for recovering women's histories in the West while bringing attention to the complicated legacies of these images for Native and non-Native viewers.

Susan Bernardin is an assistant professor of Native American and American Literature at SUNY-Oneonta. Melody Graulich is a professor of English/American studies at Utah State University and the editor of Western American Literature. Lisa MacFarlane is an associate professor of English and coordinator of American studies at the University of New Hampshire. Nicole Tonkovich is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego.