"Smiling Indians"

1896 portrait of Princess Angeline by Edward Curtis

Although his name might not be familiar, the prolific portraits of American Indians by late 19th and early 20th century photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis probably are. Shot during between 1868 and 1952, Curtis shot his iconic photographs during the famous Harriman Alaska Expedition (see lesson plans here), a Montana expedition with George Bird Grinnell, and as part of a $3,000 offer from J.P. Morgan to publish a 20 volume work of 1,500 such photographs.

Curtis' work has been often criticized for being "staged", or manipulated by removing "modern" objects and posing his subjects in ceremonies or costumes that there was little historical evidence for. The portraits are also famously serious, even dour.

Artist Ryan Redcorn has set out to remedy this with his video "Smiling Indians". He discussed his motivation for the installation with Indian Country:

Take a visual inventory of Native images—which you can do by just running a Google image search on “Native American.” That will tell you what images recur and what images rank highest. And what you see is that Curtis really controlled, and still controls, that image. And his pictures are really good; they deserve to be celebrated. All jokes aside, he was an amazing photographer. But they shouldn’t dominate our idea of how Indians look or who they are. I think people can only process a certain amount of media. We need to add more of our own images to compete against Curtis’s. We have to be aggressive about it—my attitude has always been, create, create, create. Create more and better art and you’ll take up more bandwidth and tip the scales.

Watch the video below (you may have trouble viewing this video if you are using a District connection):

Share your thoughts below!

"Pepper Ann Dances with Ignorance"

Who remembers the show Pepper Ann? I do! (Barely.) Check out this episode titled "Pepper Ann Dances with Ignorance" (from Native Appropriations):

Quick synopsis: teacher tells the class they're doing heritage reports, Pepper Ann decides all of her European ancestry is "boring" and then her Dad informs her she's actually 1/16 Navajo, and gives her a concho belt that belonged to her ancestor. Pepper Ann then gets super excited, relying on every stereotype possible to represent her new "Indianness"--war whooping, crying a single tear for littering, putting her brother in a cradle board, beating "war drums", etc. The whole time her friends are telling her she's being offensive and wrong, but she's too caught up in her ficticious identity to care.

Then she invites a "real" Navajo family over for dinner, she makes a complete fool out of herself in a plains Indian costume, building a tipi out of bed sheets, making smoke signals, suggesting they do a rain dance. The family gets offended and leaves, and later Pepper Ann eventually goes to apologize, learns the truth about Navajos, and gives a culturally correct and sensitive classroom presentation. I'm not really doing it justice. You should watch it.

Reactions? After several strong responses from readers, Adrienne responded with this follow-up post. What are your thoughts?

This is what a Native American/First Nations/Inuit/Metis/Aboriginal/Indigenous person looks like:

From a recent tumblr thread (via My Culture is Not a Trend). This might be a good way to spark discussion, or even a similar project, with students:

custerdiedforyoursins:

svnoyi:

littleojibwe:

hes-a-buster-anyway:

lols08:

Due to the amount of cultural appropriations and misconceptions about Native people on tumblr this post was created to show the diversity of Native American people in North and South America.
If you are adding a picture to this post please add your Nation/Tribe underneath the picture you are adding. I will do my best to keep track of this post so if you would like to submit a picture to this post please message me at lols08.tumblr.com.



Kanien’keha (Mohawk) and Mi’kmaw

ojibwe

Ungava Inuit & Anishnawbe 

Eastern Band Cherokee

Paiute