Horace Poolaw
Encyclopedia
Horace Poolaw was a Kiowa
photographer from Mountain View, Oklahoma
.
, tribal cultures underwent profound changes, including the arrival of white settlers to the Plains, the division of tribal lands into farm allotments and the disappearance of some traditional religious practices.
. He was able to document this huge transition from the inside. His photographs differ significantly from photographs taken at the same places and same times from non-Natives. Poolaw was able to show Natives in day to day life. He photographed Kiowa women in the latest fashion as well as Kiowas in cars with headdresses. Horace was able to capture the transition of children being taken into boarding school
. They had their worn Native clothing when they arrived and transition was drastic – they transformed into boarding school children in their new hard shoes and military uniforms, as well as the cutting of the hair that represented so many different spiritual things in Native culture. Poolaw was capturing the transition from the inside out as opposed to the official documentation by the government. Horace Poolaw captured the truth in the transition, which makes his photography so precious. He visually proved how adaptable Native people really are.
.
I grew up in Oklahoma in a small town next to Pawnee, Oklahoma
the home of Pawnee Bill
and the origin of the Wild West Show. Poolaw took pictures that are very different than the ones displayed at the Pawnee Bill Museum, as well as publications of that time period. He photographed people being people and Natives with dignity. Many other photographers were photographing propaganda.
Together, Linda Poolaw and Charles Junkerman developed the year-long seminar as a special project. Students helped print all the negatives and research the individuals represented. They also assisted in the selection of a group of photographs for an exhibition at Stanford. Linda Poolaw and her students traveled to Anadarko, Oklahoma on three separate occasions to enlist the help of Kiowa elders who sifted through the photographs identifying people and events. The process of remembering brought the Kiowa generations together, as children were introduced to the photographs of deceased relatives, and younger people were confronted with images of their parents or grandparents.
After a lifetime of work Horace Poolaw wanted only that his people would be remembered for who they were. He documented the time in transition to who the Kiowa were becoming. Pictures show the truth and Poolaw did a great service to humanity to capture the transition of a culture in transition, from a Native perspective.
The assimilationist impulse took on missionary zeal in the careers of Frank C. Churchill (1850-1912), a United States Indian Agency employee, and his wife, Clara, both of whom photographed life on reservations. Mrs. Churchill gave slide lectures on Indians – a simulated version of one is in the show – in which she emphasized the progress they were making, how much they were just like us. But in a photo of Mrs. Churchill herself observing impoverished Apache women waiting in line for rations, the real us-them dynamic snaps into place.
Such jarring shifts in perspective recur everywhere in the show, which has been organized by Richard W. Hill Sr., a photographer and teacher at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and Natasha Bonilla-Martinez, director of education at the California Center for the Arts in Escondito. Just beyond the images of the aftermath of Wounded Knee
are pictures, taken in the same year, of a pitched battle in progress between Indian warriors and white soldiers. This life-and-death skirmish, however, was being performed by actors in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, which toured the United States and Europe to popular acclaim.
Hollywood gave final form to the feathers-and-tomahawk version of the Indian – often enacted by Indians themselves – that is still current. At the same time, corrective views emerged. Some came from anthropologists like Frank G. Speck (1881-1950), a renowned scientist and a native rights advocate. Others came from American Indian photographers.
The exhibit Spirit Capture: Native Americans and the Photographic Image, that features Poolaw's work, showed at the National Museum of the American Indian
, Smithsonian Institution, George Heye Center, in New York in 2002.
Spirit Capture is giving us another kind of experience, an expository history-book experience, one that might not have been as effective, or able to put across such difficult, layered information, in another form. Poolaw once said that he didn't want to be remembered for his photographs; he wanted his people to be remembered through them. Those are the priorities that seem to be operative in this exhibition, and, for the most part, at the National Museum of the American Indian itself.
Kiowa
The Kiowa are a nation of American Indians and indigenous people of the Great Plains. They migrated from the northern plains to the southern plains in the late 17th century. In 1867, the Kiowa moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma...
photographer from Mountain View, Oklahoma
Mountain View, Oklahoma
Mountain View is a town in Kiowa County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 795 at the 2010 census.-Geography:Mountain View is located at ....
.
Background
Born in Oklahoma in 1906, Horace Poolaw apprenticed himself to a local photographer at age 17, later becoming the most prolific Indian photographer of his generation. During the five decades in which he photographed the Plains IndiansPlains Indians
The Plains Indians are the Indigenous peoples who live on the plains and rolling hills of the Great Plains of North America. Their colorful equestrian culture and resistance to White domination have made the Plains Indians an archetype in literature and art for American Indians everywhere.Plains...
, tribal cultures underwent profound changes, including the arrival of white settlers to the Plains, the division of tribal lands into farm allotments and the disappearance of some traditional religious practices.
His work
Horace Poolaw was a photographer in a time of huge transition for Native American PeopleIndigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
. He was able to document this huge transition from the inside. His photographs differ significantly from photographs taken at the same places and same times from non-Natives. Poolaw was able to show Natives in day to day life. He photographed Kiowa women in the latest fashion as well as Kiowas in cars with headdresses. Horace was able to capture the transition of children being taken into boarding school
Native American boarding schools
An Indian boarding school refers to one of many schools that were established in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to educate Native American children and youths according to Euro-American standards...
. They had their worn Native clothing when they arrived and transition was drastic – they transformed into boarding school children in their new hard shoes and military uniforms, as well as the cutting of the hair that represented so many different spiritual things in Native culture. Poolaw was capturing the transition from the inside out as opposed to the official documentation by the government. Horace Poolaw captured the truth in the transition, which makes his photography so precious. He visually proved how adaptable Native people really are.
His times
The body of work that Horace Poolaw spent his life amassing has proved invaluable for Kiowa people and historians. It was a time when he was doing photography the 1920s through the 1950s in Oklahoma that was a very racist time for Native American people. He captured the truth about how we were just people living and working, relishing our new found freedom after the incarcerations as prisoners of war. The strangest thing is that so many people moved to Oklahoma that hated Indians knowing it was where they put so many different tribes after the Trail of TearsTrail of Tears
The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation and movement of Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830...
.
I grew up in Oklahoma in a small town next to Pawnee, Oklahoma
Pawnee, Oklahoma
Pawnee is a city in Pawnee County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 2,230 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Pawnee County.-Geography:Pawnee is located at...
the home of Pawnee Bill
Pawnee Bill
Pawnee Bill , born Gordon William Lillie, was a Wild West showman and performer.Best known for his short partnership with Buffalo Bill, Pawnee Bill was born February 14, 1860, in Bloomington, Illinois. Pawnee Bill and his show made several false starts during the latter part of the nineteenth...
and the origin of the Wild West Show. Poolaw took pictures that are very different than the ones displayed at the Pawnee Bill Museum, as well as publications of that time period. He photographed people being people and Natives with dignity. Many other photographers were photographing propaganda.
Legacy
Poolaw's photographic legacy – which his daughter, Linda arranged to have printed, catalogued and exhibited after his death in 1984-record this intersection of cultures and transformation of family life, work and leisure in images of engaging thoughtfulness and sensitivity. The exhibit, titled "War Bonnets, Tin Lizzies and Patent Leather Pumps: Kiowa Culture in Transition 1925-1955," traveled around the country in the early 1990s and was the subject of a major documentary video.Together, Linda Poolaw and Charles Junkerman developed the year-long seminar as a special project. Students helped print all the negatives and research the individuals represented. They also assisted in the selection of a group of photographs for an exhibition at Stanford. Linda Poolaw and her students traveled to Anadarko, Oklahoma on three separate occasions to enlist the help of Kiowa elders who sifted through the photographs identifying people and events. The process of remembering brought the Kiowa generations together, as children were introduced to the photographs of deceased relatives, and younger people were confronted with images of their parents or grandparents.
After a lifetime of work Horace Poolaw wanted only that his people would be remembered for who they were. He documented the time in transition to who the Kiowa were becoming. Pictures show the truth and Poolaw did a great service to humanity to capture the transition of a culture in transition, from a Native perspective.
Context: Photographic documentation of Native Americans
Other before-and-after matches are less dramatic but equally compelling, as in the case of two pictures of Apache children at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1886. In the first, taken when they arrived, they are longhaired, barefoot and dressed in worn native clothes. In the second, shot a month later, they are trimmed, shod and wear school uniforms. The pictures were meant to demonstrate the transforming powers of civilization. They are also studies in cultural obliteration.The assimilationist impulse took on missionary zeal in the careers of Frank C. Churchill (1850-1912), a United States Indian Agency employee, and his wife, Clara, both of whom photographed life on reservations. Mrs. Churchill gave slide lectures on Indians – a simulated version of one is in the show – in which she emphasized the progress they were making, how much they were just like us. But in a photo of Mrs. Churchill herself observing impoverished Apache women waiting in line for rations, the real us-them dynamic snaps into place.
Such jarring shifts in perspective recur everywhere in the show, which has been organized by Richard W. Hill Sr., a photographer and teacher at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and Natasha Bonilla-Martinez, director of education at the California Center for the Arts in Escondito. Just beyond the images of the aftermath of Wounded Knee
Wounded Knee Massacre
The Wounded Knee Massacre happened on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, USA. On the day before, a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M...
are pictures, taken in the same year, of a pitched battle in progress between Indian warriors and white soldiers. This life-and-death skirmish, however, was being performed by actors in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show, which toured the United States and Europe to popular acclaim.
Hollywood gave final form to the feathers-and-tomahawk version of the Indian – often enacted by Indians themselves – that is still current. At the same time, corrective views emerged. Some came from anthropologists like Frank G. Speck (1881-1950), a renowned scientist and a native rights advocate. Others came from American Indian photographers.
Spirit Capture Exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian
Outstanding among them is Horace Poolaw (1906-1984) from Oklahoma, who put together a substantial body of work beginning in the 1920's. His pictures in the exhibition, from shots of Indian fairs to casual portraits of family and friends, effortlessly mix the archetypal and the personal, as does a reminiscence written by Linda Poolaw, his daughter, in the fascinating exhibition catalog.The exhibit Spirit Capture: Native Americans and the Photographic Image, that features Poolaw's work, showed at the National Museum of the American Indian
National Museum of the American Indian
The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum operated under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution that is dedicated to the life, languages, literature, history, and arts of the native Americans of the Western Hemisphere...
, Smithsonian Institution, George Heye Center, in New York in 2002.
Spirit Capture is giving us another kind of experience, an expository history-book experience, one that might not have been as effective, or able to put across such difficult, layered information, in another form. Poolaw once said that he didn't want to be remembered for his photographs; he wanted his people to be remembered through them. Those are the priorities that seem to be operative in this exhibition, and, for the most part, at the National Museum of the American Indian itself.
External links
- The Poolaw Photography Project 2008, work on the Poolaw photographic archives