"Copying People55: Northwest Coast Native Response to Early Photography*

[Photographs]... owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject — mediated by an ever simpler and more automated machine... which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong (Sontag, l913'-53)-... the portrait, reflecting a multi-faceted human being, must be realized in a moment, and once realized remains fixed and unchangeable. The problem becomes more complex when the photographer's aim and the sitter's desire go beyond recording facial features to a more penetrating portrait of the individual (Heyert, 1979:53). Regardless of how else it might be viewed, an historical pho tograph must be recognized as the outcome of an interaction between photographer and subject matter. W h e n the subject of the image is h u m a n, the inter-action is, of course, all the richer and more complex. There exists a large visual archive of such historical interactions between early photographers and British Columbia native Indians. Historians and anthropologists are aware tha t such images are capable of providing a wealth of ethnological and cultural historical data, bu t to fully unders tand them one must know not only what the photographers bring to the act of creating images but also the ideas natives hold about the images, their creation and their functions. Al though photographers have not always been explicit about what they do or why they do it, the documentat ion of their work is far richer than the record of native response to their activities. T h e cultural milieu of Victorian image-making — the photographers, the subjects of * Several people have contributed in substantial ways to the final version of thi