Customer Reviews

Native American Portraits

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I mean my review title literally. In fact, these photos move me emotionally far more than any icons of saints, Catholic or Orthodox, that I've ever seen. These images of people from stone-age cultures face-to-face with representatives of the age of the camera are potent statements of our equal humanity and our equal human condition.

I picked this book up on a recent visit to the National Portrait Gallery, one of the great museums of Washington DC, which houses an immense collection of 19th and early 20th Century photographs of Native Americans. The photos in this book all come from the private collection of Kurt Koegler. Across the monumental plazas from the Portrait Gallery, you'll also find the architecturally superb new Museum of the American Indian, which has the noble mission of reminding people that genocide was not complete, that vibrant Native American cultures still exist and still contribute to the America we are.

The brief introduction to this collection of 100+ photos focuses on the activities and intentions of the photographers who took them, WH Jackson, LA Huffman, Alexander Gardiner, Frank Rinehart, and others. The subjects range from the nameless Navajo boy on the cover to the great resistance leaders, Red Cloud, Gall, Joseph, Geronimo. There are also photos of women, children, and old men who simply survived. Many of the sharpest and most photogenic images are of trans-Mississippian chiefs who courageously traveled to Washington to negotiate treaties that were never sincerely meant to be kept by the invaders. Red Cloud, for instance, came to DC by train after successfully halting the construction of roads and forts in his people's land. Among other acts of the handlers assigned to impress him was a scheduled visit to a DC bordello. Red Cloud returned to his Souix villages to declare that the White Man was more numerous than leaves, and that resignation was the only strategy for survival. His photo on page 58 shows him sitting, looking remarkably like Abraham Lincoln as sculpted in the great Lincoln Memorial. That an equal memorial to Red Cloud has not been built is a sad demonstrative that Americans remain convinced of the justification of their conquest.

Face after face in this book stirs my appreciation of the humanity of the peoples we Euromericans dispossessed. They are icons of conscience. It's appropriate, I think, to approach them worshipfully.

Joseph, of the Nez Percé, was a hero as intrepid and as tragic as Hector of Troy. When he was finally cornered by General Nelson Miles, America's Agamemnon, just a few miles from Canada, the land of freedom, he supposedly made this speech:
"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
Ironically, the speech was probably assigned him by Lt. Charles ES Wood, who scribbled the words in a report and who later became a poet. For a few dozen words, Lt. Wood channeled Homer.

I loved Native American Portraits. Hathaway captured beautifully the turbulence and tragedy of the time and the photographs are truly distinctive.

I found this book wandering through B-Daltons about a year ago. It is by far a work of a master. The pictures featured in this book are ones that I have not been able to find anywhere else. Nancy Hathaway has put together a great tribute book. I love the pictures within the pages of this book, it's a great gift for yourself or a friend interested in Anthropology, Native American Studies, or just for the coffee table. I LOVE THIS BOOK. I look at it everyday and truly have some favorite pictures!

While this book would be of interest to anyone attracted to Native American life in the late 19th Century, it would be particularly invaluable to any artist who wishes to practice drawing or painting fascinating portraits. I like that it shows so many men with hodge-podge combinations of traditional Indian clothing mixed with Cavalry uniforms and "modern" 19th Century Western clothes. Another aspect of this book I really like is that it shows so many women, maidens and children. One classic photo is of the frowning "squaw" with a sparkle-eyed, smiling baby behind her shoulder! In short, anyone aspiring to be a (or already a professional) Western artist of Native Americans should have this book as a reference.

This book documents important Native Americans from the 1860s
into the first quarter of the 20th century. The pictures are
topical and realistic. They depict both the poverty and the
greatness of Native Americans. For instance, Tim O'Sullivan
depicts an 1867 scene. Famous Native Americans shown include:
- "One Who Forbids His Home" (English translation)
- "One Afraid of the Eagle" (English translation)
- Chief Ano Ylosk
- Great Wolf
- and many others too numerous to list here

The work would be an important cultural research document for a
wide constituency of scholars in the American educational
experience. This acquisition would be a perfect gift for the student in your house. It is well-researched and topical.

I was so angry at just reading the front flap that I didn't purchase the book. These descriptions of Native culture "captured" by the camera just before it "dissappeared forever" and culture on a 'precipitous decline' are dangerously innaccurate and paint us as a vanished people with no past or present effect on society. The author should have been more careful in constructing this summary, or in relegating the duty to someone else so dramatic and ignorant.