North American Indian Portraits

The magnificent portraits of North American Indians collected in this volume were taken between the years 1908-13 on a series of three expeditions, sponsored by John Wanamaker, the department store magnate, and his son Rodman and led by Joseph Kossuth Dixon, a highly-skilled photographer and self-promoter. Unlike his better-known contemporary Edward Curtis, Dixon concentrated on portraiture and in so doing created an enduring collection of character studies. His subjects are not anonymous representatives of a time outside of history; they are living, breathing individuals, who can in most cases be identified. The Wanamaker expeditions had a political agenda; they were an attempt to save Indian culture from extinction by publicizing Indian history and thereby gaining citizenship for the members of the tribes in America. In 1908, the first expedition went to the Valley of the Little Bighorn in Montana, with the aim of making a movie version of Hiawatha with an all-Indian cast. The second expedition returned to the Valley, in 1909, for a meeting of what was expected to be the Last Great Indian Council. In 1913, Wanamaker sponsored the Expedition of Citizenship. This final expedition covering over 20,000 miles was undertaken in order to present the American flag, as a symbol of citizenship, to everyone of the 189 Indian tribes. The Indians were granted American citizenship in 1924. The three Wanamaker expeditions produced 11,000 negatives on glass plate and nitrate film, as well as fifty miles of motion picture film. Following the deaths of both Dixon and Rodman Wanamaker in the late 1920s, their Indian materials were dispersed. The bulk of the collection came into the possession of the William Hammond Mathers Museum at Indiana University. Thomas Kavanagh, has selected the prints for this important new volume and provided a lucid introduction, placing these photographic treasures in their proper historical, cultural, and artistic contexts.