Blended Identities in American Photography

Blended Identities in American Photography Earnestine Jenkins (bio) In my private collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs is an image of a young brown-skinned woman that raises questions about Black and Indigenous identities in America (fig. 1). The photograph is one of a set of five pictures taken in a professional photography studio. The photographs depict a Black family made up of three young adult males, two females, and a toddler with inquisitive large dark eyes. The same painted backdrop of draped curtains opening out onto a lush landscape, with an elaborate stand placed in front of the painted window, is apparent in three of the photographs. In separate images, the young women stand next to the same wooden chair in identical positions. The subjects are [End Page 20] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Photographic postcard portrait of a young woman dressed in Western and Indigenous clothing, early twentieth century. Courtesy of the author. fashionably attired in the contemporary suits, dresses, and hats characteristic of turn-of-the-century America. It is the younger woman (or younger sister?) who styled herself in a manner that suggests blended Black and Indigenous identities integrated into the family's representation of itself. It is her unique style of dress that, in the absence of any textual evidence of where the photographs were taken, points to a location in the American West. The visual documentation of race and ethnic identity in the photograph, combined with the subject's distinctive costume, guides my interpretation of this portrait. Although the artifact is a photographic postcard dating from the turn of the twentieth century, it references a history of contact between Indigenous people and people of African descent dating back to the eras of "discovery," exploration, and colonization in the so-called New World. These [End Page 21] intersectional histories remain largely invisible. The photographic image likely references the history of the Indian Freedmen once enslaved by the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples. During the 1830s, Black people were forced to evacuate the Southeast, accompanying Native American slaveholders on the Trail of Tears to Indian territory out West (Krauthamer 38–39). Upon arrival, Indigenous peoples rebuilt their communities; they established their nations anew with Black enslaved labour, crushed slave resistance with violence, and sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. This history of entanglement, characterized by both conflict and cooperation, endured throughout Reconstruction and the advent of the Jim Crow era. After the Civil War, Black regiments made up of veterans of the conflict between the states helped settle the western frontier, participating in most of the major military campaigns that conquered the Plains Indians and forced them onto reservations (Viola 53). During the late nineteenth century, the federally appointed Dawes Commission began documenting individuals of Native American ancestry (Walton-Raji 82). The most extensive of such genealogical records, the Dawes Commission's list included individuals and families of mixed Black and Indigenous heritage. Government authorities usually excluded applicants with Black Indian ancestry from the list, while those with European lineage were accepted on the rolls and identified as "Indian." Such was the nineteenth-century historical context in which blood and cultural ties were shared between African Americans and Indigenous people in the South and in Indian territories out West. This unique photograph is a testament to how such convoluted histories of identity are rarely visualized in American art and visual culture. It documents Indigenous women's histories of clothing and distinctive styles of dress following colonization. Government boarding schools for Indian students trained girls to sew as part of a broader civilizing mission, providing them with survival skills appropriate for domestic servitude (Gordon 27). They would return to reservations prepared to run households and Americanize others, a federal agenda that instilled subordination in Indigenous children (Gordon 4). Sewing classes instructed girls in making Western clothing, such as shirtwaists, skirts, aprons, and dresses. Numerous photographs from the early twentieth century show Indigenous women sewing while dressed in Western clothing. By this time, home sewing was a significant part of everyday life for women in America, across ethnic, racial and class differences. Millions of American women...

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