Mathers Museum spotlights their famous Wanamaker Collection

By Jen Eberbach

Reprinted from The Ryder Magazine. (Bloomington, IN). May/June 2007

The Mathers Museum of World Cultures houses a well-researched collection of early 20^th-century expedition materials. Father and son department store moguls John and Rodman Wanamaker financed a series of trips, including “Expeditions to the American Indian,” taken between 1908 and 1923. They hired the director of the Education Bureau, Joseph Kossuth Dixon, to collect images of Native Americans to put on postcards that sold in the stores. Dixon took photographs of individuals, families, settlements, daily life, and military and political activities. He also collected data through field notes and questionnaires that he administered to Native American WWI veterans.

The Mathers Museum has gathered many of the surviving Wanamaker expedition materials, which were dispersed between the Wanamaker Store, and several foundations, museums and collections. The museum is highlighting a selection of the materials in an in-house exhibit, Images of Native Americans, and hosting an abbreviated traveling exhibit, which will visit smaller communities throughout Indiana. View the 125 images featured in the exhibit and learn more about the collection, until June 8, 2008.

One cannot ignore how different race relations are today from the turn of the 20^th-century. Contemporary perspectives on American colonialism and political relations with Native Americans differ vastly from the picture Dixon’s images create of Native American life. However, the images present the viewer with a paradox to consider that problematizes debates surrounding euro-centric propaganda and ethnic stereotyping. Although a limited view of Native Americans’ individual experiences is present in his images, Dixon can be considered a political progressive in the context of early Modern thought. The Mathers Museum gives the viewer the responsibility of “reading” the photographs actively and considering what they tell us about the way white people viewed Native Americans, as well as what they tell us about Native American culture. The contemporary viewer is challenged to distinguish between the spontaneous and the staged; the natural and the affected; real experience and fantasy.

During his three trips, Dixon visited over 150 Native American communities and took over 8,000 photographs. “Expeditions to the American Indian” brought him to Crow Agency, Montana, where he produced the classic motion picture after the Crow epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, in 1908. Dixon returned there in 1909 to gather tribal leaders and Chiefs for, what Dixon called, the Last Great Indian Council. This event was completely staged, created by Dixon in order to achieve a spectacular vision of Native American leaders maintaining their pride through a time of political surrender.

Mathers Museum public relations director Judy Kirk described how certain images in the collection reveal how Dixon, “like most of the photographers at the time, [was] caught up in the myth of the vanishing race. He was trying to capture the final days of glory.” The popularly-known image of a lone Native American warrior riding his horse into a hazy horizon, titled The Sunset of a Dying Race, is an exemplary instance of Dixon’s perception that the political annihilation and cultural assimilation of Native American culture were inescapability imminent.   

Dixon was highly involved in Indian Affairs and lobbied for full citizenship, voting rights and involvement in American’s military. One way that Dixon made a political case on behalf of Native American interests was through his photography. His images emphasize his subjects’ nobility and military honor, an ethnographic practice commonly associated with the myth of the noble savage. Although this myth has many negative connotations, at the time Dixon’s portrayal of Native American individuals subverted racist notions of them only being savage.

The Wanamaker Collection contains a large number of portraits of individuals, mothers and children and political leaders. As is the case with Dixon’s images of the Last Great Indian Council, some of the portraits were staged; the individuals dressed in clothing they would not normally wear, which occasionally came from completely different tribal communities. However, many of the images are not staged and give the viewer a rich sense of Dixon’s subjects’ ethnic and personal identity.

Kirk named Dixon’s landscapes and portraits as the works in the exhibit that contain the most information about Native American life. Panoramic shots of tee-pees and infrastructure set up along a winding river; images of spiritual places; portraits of political leaders - all of these hold some semblance of life at the turn of the century. However, it takes a good deal of examination and contemplation to determine exactly how much information the images offer about Native American experiences. The images certainly contain visual qualities that rival the romantic visions of early Modern photographers, “like Edward Curtis,” states Kirk. Dixon’s sense of atmosphere, tone, composition, and the humanity of his subjects make these works worth viewing for their aesthetic beauty and technical achievements. Kirk explains, the images “can be moving, evocative, but they are manipulated images” and “must be read carefully.”

The traveling exhibit will visit locations around the State that, according to Kirk, “reach communities of people who might not have opportunities to view these types of materials, like we do here in Bloomington.” It is designed to visit libraries, schools, and other community spaces that serve as alternatives when there is no museum in town. The Wanamaker exhibition schedule and supporting educational programs are supported by Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Moveable Feast of the Arts Program. Find out more about the Wanamaker Collection, at http://www.indiana.edu/~mathers/collections/photos/wanamaker.html.