Native American Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth Century

This study analyzes the visual works from Black Elk Speaks, My People the Sioux, and the films Fatty and Minnie He-Haw and Mickey. All of these works were completed at the end of the Assimilation Era (1887-1934) when many Native Americans denounced the assimilationist policies. Some Native figures such as Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, and Carlos Montezuma worked in traditional academic and high society jobs to change the perception of the Indian, while others worked outside of traditional intellectual jobs, such as the entertainment industry, to accomplish the same goal. This study analyzes the contributions of Black Elk, Standing Bear, Minnie Devereaux and Luther Standing Bear in the aforementioned visual works to form a genealogy of Native American Visual Culture. I draw on Visual Culture efforts to confront structures of power that determine how history is represented and the politics of looking. More specifically, the concepts of visualization and countervisuality from the field of Visual Culture allows me to show that each work used visual representations in order to engage with American society’s conceptualization of “the Indian.” Rejecting simplistic binary of assimilationist or anti-assimilationist, each other aimed to present their audience with a different visual representation of what it means for them to be Indian. I begin tracking this genealogy of Native American Visual Culture as a way to show Native Americans at the forefront of Visual Technology in the twentieth century.PhDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/178083/1/swpellet_1.pd