Men with crewcuts, women with cotton print dresses

Yesterday I visited the Exploration Place Museum here in Prince George. The main purpose was to see the temporary exhibit on “Uncle” Ben Ginter, the wealthy industrialist who accidentally wound up with a brewing company that tried to undercut Canada’s ‘Big Three’ beer makers through innovations like bottle deposits and pull-tabs on cans, and whose mansion is now just a foundation in a dog park.

But I also went to see the new permanent exhibit Hodul’eh-a: A Place of Learning, a colloboration with the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation that one a Governor General award this year.

It was nicely done, with information about recent archeological digs affirming the presence of people here for at least 10,000 years and nicely synthesizing complex histories.

The part that struck me most was a wall of photographs, mostly from the early 20th century.

It reminded me of a section from Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories in which he talks about Edward Sheriff Curtis, who in roughly the same timeframe as these photos were taken, embarked on his North American Indian project.

“Curtis was fascinated by the idea of the North American Indian,” King writes. “He was determined to capture that idea, that image before it vanished.”
The problem, King recounts, is that ‘Indians’ were, for the most part, not vanishing, nor did they look like the romantic, stoic, last-of-their-kind version informing Curtis’s ideas.

And so, “To make sure that he would find what he wanted to find, [Curtis] took along boxes of Indian paraphernalia. Wigs, blankets, painted backdrops, clothing, in case he ran into Indians who did not look as the Indian was supposed to look.”

One of Curtis’ photos

King says Curtis’s job was to capture the cultural expectations already put on what Indigenous people were supposed to look like, not what they did.
But he wishes that he would have, occassionally, photographed, “Indians as he found them, the men with crewcuts sometimes, and mustaches, the women in cotton print dresses.”

What struck me, looking through the family photos on display at the Exploration Place is I was seeing, for the first time, what King was talking about– photos “that suggest that Native people can negotiate the past and the present with relative ease.” I was seeing them as they were, not as settlers imagined them to be.

One of the things I value about Twitter is being able to hear Indigenous voices, directly and unmediated, telling the story of themselves as they are, not as someone else expects or decides them to be. Seeing these photos, I feel the same way.

(Clockwise from top: Unidentified man sitting outside a log cabin, unidentified man standing in a wheatfield, unidentified man and Father Coccoloa on horseback with one unidentified man and a moose calf, Catherine Seymore (nee Ogin) dressed in a hat and suit, unidentified man in front of a blanket backdrop, unidintified girl standing on bridge, Captain Brown of the BX Sternwheeler and his wife Minnie with Bernice, Albert Ray, Betty O’Donnell and Yan, Max and Rose Prince wearing suits standing in front of a bridge)