Photos in Transmotion: Images
of Survivance in Ledfeather
ALISON TURNER
Stephen
Graham Jones' Ledfeather (2008), a
semi-epistolary, semi-historical novel, poses questions about how historical
knowledge is made and what to do with it. While scholars have studied the
novel's postmodern attributes as methods for subversive critiques of
historiography in Indigenous colonial contexts, as of yet no study prioritizes
the novel's use of photographs toward these aims. After situating Gerald
Vizenor's framing of "the indian [as]
poselocked in portraiture" in histories of photography and Indigenous colonization,
I illustrate through postcards archived at the Montana Historical Society how indian
images work symbiotically with written text (146). I then examine the
rhetorical role of photos in Ledfeather,
showing how the photos enact Vizenor's sense of transmotion, or "the tease of
creation in pictures, memories, and stories" (173). I argue that the photos in Ledfeather expand
how postmodern historical fiction can push native art beyond the frame of
"poselocked portraiture."
Early photographs sent east from
the American West were feats of tenacity as much as art: photographers hauled
heavy equipment in wagons and to the tops of mountains and used snowmelt to
clean glass exposure plates. In Photographing
the Frontier (1980), Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler describe how Louis Daguerre
and Nicéphore Niépce's 1839 invention was believed to "make permanent images
from life," giving consumers of photographs the possibility that "A moment in
history could be permanently recorded, accurate in every detail" (11). This
sense of "accuracy" has since been challenged by postmodern theorists: in the
words of Susan Sontag, "A photograph changes according to the context in
which it is seen" (106). A snapshot from a vacation stacked in a shoebox
compels a different effect than the same image framed over a mantel or printed
in a gift book. It is due to these multiple contexts, Sontag suggests, "that
the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of
the very notion of meaning" (106). The wide-reaching roots of photographs as a
site of "permanence" and accuracy" have not, however, been erased (Hoobler 11).
To the contrary, photographs continue to support attempts to understand the
past as something that is fixed and factual.
In Stephen Graham
Jones' Ledfeather, photographs
contribute to a narrative world in which the past overlays with the present and one narrator's
perspective overlays with a dozen others.' The novel is set in Browning,
Montana in both the present, through several narrators whose stories loosely
circle around a young man named Doby Saxon, and the years following the
Starvation Winter in the 1880s, from which the letters of a fictional Indian
Agent named Francis Dalimpere eventually reveal his role in 600 Piegan people
starving due to colonial conditions. Several scholars explore Ledfeather's postmodern aesthetic, which
is readily identified by characteristics including multiple and "fractured"
storylines (Gaudet 23); a structure that contains a "level of signifiers," such
as the use of sous rature to "add a
sense of direction, metafiction, and différance" (Baudemann 161);
polyvocality and a "heteroglossic" narrative that moves "down corridors of event, memory, language
itself—English, French, Blackfeet" (Lee 81-2); and a narrative structure that builds
"a relationship between the past and the present that does not center on
possession" (Pennywark 90). Building on these explorations, I trace how
photographs contribute to the text's postmodern aesthetic and epistemology that
questions meaning and values uncertainty.
Photographs
contribute to the complex structure of Ledfeather
as objects in the narrative in three forms: ID cards, postcards, and snapshots.[1]
Gerald Vizenor describes the expectations for permanence and accuracy in
photographs as indian images, which
can exist in the same space as photos that are in transmotion, moving stories
of native survivance.[2] Indian images, which Vizenor also describes as simulations, are
produced for viewers who are not native as "public evidence of dominance, not the private stories of
survivance" (157). While orienting the novel in contexts of photography's
relationship with colonialism, tourism, and commodification of natives in the
American West—an orientation that I supplement with material from
postcard collections archived at the Montana Historical Society—I examine
how photographs in the novel complicate these historical relationships. Just as
the narrative itself moves between narrators, time, and protagonists,
photographs do not provide "permanence" or "accuracy" but complexity,
storytelling, and survivance.
I. Indian images and the "army of tourists"
In Fugitive Poses (1998),
Vizenor shows how images have been used since the earliest settler colonies as
rhetoric that establishes an idea of indian
that erases native presence. Spanish and Portuguese "narratives of
discovery" often included "drawings of natives" that were engraved and
reproduced, creating "iconic enactments of the other" that "are seen
with no sense of a native presence" (150,146). With the development of photography, Vizenor continues,
images from drawings and engravings could include "captured countenance and action"
(155); Vizenor's word "captured" aligns with how the Hooblers describe early
excitement around photography as an invention that could "make permanent images
from life" (11). Indian images are
attempts by non-natives to freeze the stories of natives into "permanent"
interpretations.
The coinciding development of
railroad infrastructure and photographic technology ignited a tourist campaign
that fed on indian images. Photos of
natives in the nineteenth-century show natives as "separated" from community,
land, and presence, surrounded instead by objects that make up "the obscure
simulations of indianness," such as
beads, leather, pipes, and feathers (Vizenor 157, 160). Photographs of natives
were constructed into indian images
through several methods, including photographers paying natives to "pose and .
. . revise their ceremonies to provide more photogenic material" (Sontag 64)
and provision of costumes for any chief who arrived to be photographed in
"white man's clothing" (Hoobler 24). It is these strategies, among others, that
contribute to Vizenor's claim that "The indian
is poselocked in portraiture," which is a "simulation of dominance" over
"native presence" (146). Work from photographers such as Edward Curtis, who
produced more than 40,000 images, continues to shape scholarship today, even among
researchers (Vizenor 160-1).
Zachary Jones shows how what he calls "contrived photos," which include staged
scenes and non-Native impersonators, have been used in "academic conferences
presentations, publications, and exhibits without knowledge of these images
being contrived" (8-9, 13).[3]
The early understanding of photography as accurate and permanent becomes more
ironic over time.
As colonial settlers moved west in the United States, indian images contributed to a campaign
of tourism promotion and broader forms of white identity building. Philip J.
Deloria explores the complex and paradoxical ways that natives have been
implicated in white identity building: "There was . . . no way to conceive an American identity without
Indians. At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while
they remained" (37). In See America
First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (2001), Marguerite Shaffer
details how this identity-building manifested in the West through what she
calls "national tourism" (4), a phenomenon starting in western lands
newly available by rail. Tourism
promoters, including railroad owners and hotel builders, "encouraged white,
native-born middle- and upper-class Americans to reaffirm their American-ness
by following the footsteps of American history" (Shaffer 4). Sontag describes
the role of the camera during this process as "colonization through
photography," as "an army of tourists," so "eager for 'a good shot' of Indian
life . . . invaded the Indians' privacy, photographing holy objects and the
sacred dances and places" (64). Photographs gave potential and active tourists
"an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal . . . [helping] people to
take possession of space in which they are insecure" (Sontag 9). Promotional
campaigns used photography to sell not only vacations but participation in the
formation of national identity.[4]
This booster campaign relied not only on indian
images, but also on indian descriptions. When J.C.H. Grabill described
one of his photographs as "The great hostile Indian camp on River Brule near
Pine Ridge, S.D," for example, the Hooblers suggest that the word "hostile" was
a deliberate attempt to "stimulate sales of stereo cards in the East" (161).
Just as indian words like hostile
might be added, so could native words be taken away: Morgan Bell shows how
photographers deliberately erased native names, replacing them with titles such
as "an unidentified Comanche woman delegate to Washington, D.C." when the
photographed person's name was known (88). This relationship between indian images and text is particularly
visible on postcards, which were one of the most successful devices of booster
campaigns. By the late 1890s
postcards emerged as one of the most popular categories of souvenirs, "allowing
tourists to document and preserve a visual record of their journey and
send personal messages to friends and relatives back home" (Shaffer 266-7). Later
versions of similar postcards are archived in the Montana Postcard Collection
and among the Thomas Mulvaney real-photo postcard collection at the Montana
Historical Society. The written messages on many of the postcards in these
collections show how indian images
furthered indian rhetoric. For
example, the text accompanying a postcard of Chief Eagle Calf explains, among
other information, that "Many of these native Americans spend their summers in
the park and add much interest through their colorful tribal dress" ("Chief
Eagle Calf"). The phrase "spend their summer" is an indian description of hotels employing natives to entertain
tourists. Or, on the back of an image titled "Blackfoot Chief, Last Star or
Weasel Feather," the postcard explains that "Blackfoot Chief, Last Star or
Weasel Feather, proudly displays his elaborately fringed and beaded buckskin
tribal dress" ("Blackfoot Chief"). The word "proudly" is an indian simulation, inserting
characteristics that will be consumed by recipients.
Postcards
also reveal the perpetuation of indian
rhetoric by consumers: text is produced not only by publishers creating the
product but by the tourists who purchase the images. While many of the cards in
these collections do not have writing on the back (they were perhaps purchased
with similar intents as Ledfeather's
fictional tourist, not to send but to keep, a desire I explore below) several
of those that are marked show text responding to indian images.[5]
Below I share four examples of indian images
on postcards and the corresponding note on the back, transcribed from the
handwritten text.[6]
|
"Blackfeet Squaw and Papoose": A woman with
her back to the camera, her head turned over her shoulder as she carries a
baby on her back in a cradleboard. |
"Untitled": A white man in a tuxedo stands between two chiefs. A
sticker labels the image: "Glacier Nat'l Park Jul, 1930: Chief Two Guns White
Calf at left." |
|
Partial Transcription: "This baby seems to enjoy his queer
carriage + is quite comfortable. Wish you could be with me to enjoy the
beautiful flowers etc." |
Partial Transcription: What do you think about our
being right around these Indians? They wanted us to dance with him last
night; but we thought it more fun to watch the others do it. We are having
the grandest time." |
|
"Blackfeet
Indians, Glacier National Park, Montana." Six Blackfeet
people pose in front of a teepee: the men wear feather headdresses and the
women wear long dresses. |
"A Council of the Blackfeet Indians In Glacier National
Park" Six Blackfeet people gather in front of teepees in front
of snow-capped mountains: one man stands in a headdress pointing at the
others who sit on the ground. |
|
Partial Transcription: "We have seen quite a few Indians.
Have had a very nice time and the weather has been fair. Love Grandma". |
Partial Transcription: "Here is a bunch of wild Indians I
[licked?] They all had guns and bows and arrows but I [skipped?] up and took
the guns away from them, then I beat them up. I got all the guns if you want
one. Write and I will send one to you." |
These notes range from trivial comments
about the picture to violent indian
fantasies. Both forms of commentary respond to and extend the indian images on the front. The
tourist-author of "Blackfeet Squaw and Papoose" suggests that the baby is
"quite comfortable" alongside the words "enjoy" and "beautiful flowers,"
portraying an idyllic experience. Or, in the postcard signed "Grandma," this
woman includes having "seen quite a few Indians" alongside polite notes about
having a "very nice time" with "fair" weather: everything, she seems to say, is
going how they had hoped. No less dependent on indian images but more aggressive in the extension of indian rhetoric, the authors of the two
postcards in the right column invent interactions with the people photographed.
In the untitled image, the author conflates "these Indians" in the image with
people who wanted them to "dance last night"; the question "What do you think
about our being right around these Indians?" suggests that this proximity is
both an event that is (literally) worth writing home about and an event the author expects to put him or her in high esteem
with their audience. Finally, the last image puts into words violent fantasies
that emerge without incitement, as the image itself portrays no hostility or
guns. This last photo shows how quickly indian
rhetoric can accelerate from image to text.
Native peoples
resisted, and continue to resist, indian images through a variety of
methods. The Hooblers list among the most insistent resistors Red Cloud and
Crazy Horse: the first was "reported to have chased away a photographer who
tried to take his picture" and was not "captured" by a photograph until
visiting D.C. in 1870; and the second "always resisted capture" by
photographers, so that "No authentic photograph of him is known to exist" (122,
133). Vizenor argues that indian images
themselves show resistance: "Watch the eyes and hands in fugitive poses to see
the motion of natives, and hear the apophatic narratives of a continuous presence" (165). While
costumes and poses can be directed, eyes and hands are a person's own. Bell explores
how native photographers such as Benjamin Haldane (1874-1941) and Jennie Ross
Cobb (1882-1958) contributed to early movements of photography in the American
West (95-6), and Kimberly Blaeser explores techniques used by contemporary
photographers to "re-vision . . . early colonized representations" (164). Blaeser
identifies collections of "alter-native" photos as those using multi-temporal
and sometimes multi-spacial compositions as a form of "humanizing" rather than
"museumizing" people in the photos (164). The three materialized photos in Ledfeather
are not revisionist in their own compositions but add to dimensions of the
"alter-native" composition of the novel at large.
The
first photos that the reader encounters in Ledfeather
are not described but are implied as images on a spread of ID cards. An unnamed
narrator drives Doby Saxon, the protagonist of the contemporary half of the
novel, to the casino and watches how Doby "spread all his ID cards out on the
dash of my car, then picked out his own" (20). The narrator explains that
The
rest were for the liquor store, for videos, for off-rez, for wherever one
Indian was the same as all the rest.
The
casino's different, though.
If
their shiny new gambling license gets pulled, then fifty or a hundred people
lose their jobs like that, come looking for whoever let that minor in the door.
And then they go looking for that minor. (20)
These documents narrow Doby's age to over 18 but under 21:
he uses "his own" license to enter the casino, where the legal age is 18 and
over, but needs a fake ID to buy alcohol. While using fake IDs is perhaps an
American pastime for young adults on- and off-rez, this passage emphasizes how
the colonial context of the reservation shapes Doby's practice. He leverages
his invisibility off-rez, where people will not distinguish him from other indians; this invisibility is countered
by the hypervisibility of the "shiny new" casino where a license can be pulled
by an off-rez authority. Doby's age range is framed by legal categories
determined by off-rez laws; ID cards negotiate this framing and his identity
within it.
Though this short scene is the only place in the novel in
which ID cards are physical objects in the narrative, they engage with the
power systems surrounding Doby and his community. Sontag explores how photographs became "enrolled in the
service of important institutions of control . . . [I]n the bureaucratic
cataloguing of the world, many important documents are not valid unless they
have, affixed to them, a photograph-token of the citizen's face" (21-2).
Further, that the ID cards are shown to the reader in front of the casino is no
coincidence. The casino is next door to a museum that is described later in the
novel as "The one that's shut down most of the time now, since the
casino opened, like they can't be that close to each other" (89). In her exploration of how gaming
functions in contemporary Native American literature, Becca Gercken interprets
this relationship between museum and casino as indicating that "the
museum's . . . version of Blackfeet history is not available for those who
might choose to learn on their own. The energy and funds that could be
supporting the museum have been diverted to the casino" (9). After Doby enters
the casino, he goes on an
early winning streak at the blackjack table and then loses everything before
starting a fight. His mother, Malory Sainte, appears and physically defends him.
Gercken suggests that "While Malory is indeed protecting her son, she is
failing as an elder: she is encouraging Doby to escape the consequences of the
gambling habit he learned from her" (8). While Malory's role as an "elder" is
complex, interpreting the scene in the framework of Doby's many IDs emphasizes
not the "failure" of Blackfeet elders but a misalignment between the Blackfeet
community and government-imposed systems.
III. "Achingly Beautiful": Postcards of
the GLACIER PARK INDIAN
After
Doby enters the casino with "his own" ID, the perspective switches to that of
an unnamed, middle-aged tourist who witnesses Doby's rise and fall at the
gambling table. Soon after the fight between Doby's mother and a security
guard, the tourist retreats to the casino gift shop. She narrates,
I finally
bought. . . a pack of postcards made from old brown and white pictures. Each
one had a little history entry on back. It was the least I could do. The girl
smiled when she gave me my change, and her teeth weren't perfect, no, but they
were achingly beautiful, gave her just such personality. I hope she never fixes
them. (26)
The
phrases "the least I could do" and "achingly beautiful" (in the context of
"imperfection") expose the tourist's perspective as not only an outsider, but
an outsider who patronizes and commodifies locals. Sontag writes that "Photographic seeing
meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as
too ordinary" (89). The gaze of a tourist can share the gaze of a photographer,
both perspectives seeking the feeling of capturing beauty in what is
"ordinary." Further, the tourist has specific plans for the postcards she has
purchased, and her detailed description of these plans reveals their emotional
role. She explains:
I wasn't going to send any of them, I'd decided. Instead I was going
to leave them on the coffee table so Charlene's kids could find them, carry
them to me, ask if I really went there, their little voices so pure and so
hopeful. What I'd do then . . . would be to let the children look at each
photograph while I read them the historical entry from the back. That way the
Indian on the front could look back at them, and they could know his story a
little bit. The good one, I mean. (26-7)
These postcards, depicting what Vizenor
would describe as natives "poselocked in portraiture" offer the narrator a way
to engage with her grandchildren (146). The striking phrase "The good one, I
mean," is both a postmodern acknowledgment that there is more than one story to
tell about history as much as it is an attempted erasure of the stories behind
the postcards. The tourist's idea of a "good story" likely differs from one
that the person on the postcard would tell, just as it would have one hundred years earlier.
After the
tourist's purchase of indian
postcards, she encounters Doby in the parking lot. He startles her and she
drops her postcards; as she stoops to pick them up, he offers for sale what she
describes as "just a bundle of crunchy animal skin tied together with rawhide"
and "black with age" (27, 31). The scene continues:
"I--I--" I said, lowering myself all at once to the postcards.
He
helped . . .
When
we stood again, the bundle was on the ground between us.
He
understood, nodded to himself about this and handed me the cards back, just
stopping at the last instant to look at the top one, laugh a little.
. . .
"If
you-- if you want I can..." I started, digging in my purse for the money anyway,
for all of my money, but the boy was already shaking his head no, backing away,
into the night. (32)
Though
the reader does not know it yet, this "bundle" is an object that Doby has
stolen from the neighboring museum of Blackfeet artifacts; in this bundle are
letters written in the 1880s by the fictional Indian Agent Dalimpere, whose
pages compose nearly half of the Ledfeather novel. The reader also
learns later that the postcard on top of the pile that makes Doby "laugh a
little" is an image of Yellow Tail, Doby's ancestor. Between them, then, are
the indian postcards of Blackfeet
chiefs and a bundle that has been stolen from a museum of Blackfeet history and
artifacts. That the tourist desires the postcards and not the
bundle—indeed, she would rather give Doby money than take the bundle when
he offers it—emphasizes
the desire for indian images as
"possessory" (Vizenor 16). She desires something beautiful to remember her trip
to Blackfeet territory, in the sense of the salesclerk's "imperfect" teeth that
the tourist hopes never change, rather than something "crunchy" and "black with
age." She wants to possess memories of this trip that will contribute to her
own imagined identity as someone who is surrounded by her grandchildren,
telling the "good stories" instead of the stories of the Starvation Winter, or
about how Doby's mom will go to jail for defending him when he lost her money
at the casino.
However, history in this novel is superimposed with the
present, so that this tourist brings with her alternatives to the "good
stories," too. As she and her husband drive their RV out of the parking lot,
her desires are rejected. She looks down at the postcards on her lap:
On
top was one of the old time Indians, his skin brown and greasy, the fingers of
his right hand wrapped around some spear or staff. What he was doing was
staring hard into the camera like he knew what I'd done, what I hadn't done.
The sign at his feet said GLACIER PARK INDIAN. Scratched into the print beside
it like they used to do, his name, Yellow Tail.
I
had to turn that postcard over. (32-3)
The tourist's reaction to this postcard enacts Vizenor's
emphasis on the eyes as "the secret mirrors of a private presence . . . [that]
hold the presence of the photographer on the other side of the aperture" (158).
More
directly for the reader of the novel, the image "staring hard" at the tourist
anticipates the way that Yellow Tail stares at Indian Agent Dalimpere, as
described in his letters: "he watches me even as I write this"; he "is still
watching"; "then Yellow Tail was watching me" (48, 50). Though the tourist
participates in national tourism that depends on indian others, her purchase will not sit still with the "good
stories" that she expects: the indian images
are pasted over native stories, and after her experience with Doby, the edges
of the image begin to curl.
IV. "I had to say
yes": The photo from Kalispell
The third photograph that appears in the novel is taken by
a white couple with a Blackfeet character called only "the boy" (who can later
be identified as Robbie Cut Nose, a friend of Doby's).[7]
The boy recalls being taken to Kalispell as a child with an adult woman
he didn't know: his mom's boyfriend left him with an ex-girlfriend, who
had to go to Kalispell "for some reason" so took the boy with her (125-6).
Sixteen years later, after what appears to be an attempted suicide that puts
the boy in the hospital, the boy's nurse is the very woman who took him to
Kalispell. This chain of relationships is confusing, and it is tempting to
dismiss the connections; however, when the photo appears in the narrative, this
list of peripheral characters and their relationships to one another is a form
of storied presence behind an indian image.
When the nurse
recognizes the boy in the hospital, she explains to him that her brother was
dating a girl and that her brother "came back from her place once with this
smelly old bundle, and hid it in my room"; but he owed her money, she
continues, so "I took that pack, that bundle thing...and sold it in Kalispell.
Forty dollars, yeah?" (136-7). This "bundle thing" is likely the same bundle that Doby tries to
sell to the tourist outside of the casino, going by the bundle's index card
listing it as "reclaimed from pwnshp [sic] (Kal)" as well as the parallel price
of forty dollars offered to the nurse back in Kalispell and forty dollars asked
by Doby from the tourist (31). The nurse says, "We used to sell all that
stuff back then . . .. It was in every closet, yeah? Oh, and some people wanted
to take a picture with you too . . .. A white couple . . .. I had to say yes. They thought you were mine, I
mean. It was all like a joke" (137). This moment brings the history of
tourism and commodification through indian
images to the present. More specifically, it implicates the photo from
Kalispell in various indian economies,
including white appropriation of indian images
for their own identity building, and, more locally, commodification of
Blackfeet objects in exploitative and coercive contexts.
Though it is not
made explicit, it is likely that the white couple were tourists, so excited to
see indian people that they want to
take a photo. Their desire for this photo re-enacts Shaffer's notion of
"national tourism." This kind of tourism, Shaffer observes, "allowed white, native-born
middle-and upper-class Americans to escape the social and cultural confines of
everyday life to liminal space where they could temporarily reimagine
themselves as heroic or authentic figures" (5).[8] One
imagines the white couple flipping through photos from their trip to Montana,
pointing out, and here we are with some
Indians... A photo taken
with local indians provides tourists
proof of their presence in foreign space, a frontier that remains wild and
unknown in the U.S. white imagination.
Though the nurse
says that "it was like a joke" for the white couple to take a picture with her
and the boy, she also says that she "had to say yes," attaching this
interaction to a century of coercive collecting of Blackfeet objects by white
collectors. Bob Scriver's gift book The
Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains (1990) illustrates not only his
family collection of Blackfeet objects but also the historical relationship in
Montana between white and Indigenous communities. Scriver explains:
Artifacts that museums and collectors of today deem extremely
desirable were thought of in my dad's day as worthless 'old' things by the
Indians themselves and were discarded in exchange for newer items . . . As this
evolution occurred, there came to be many Indian items on the reservation that
could be acquired. (xv)
Hugh Dempsey,
author of the foreword to the book of the Scriver collection, frames
colonial-settlers as saviors of Blackfeet artifacts who are now wrongfully
charged with taking these objects. He writes that in the 1960s, "Indians
suddenly became aware that their culture was rapidly disappearing and a whole
era of spiritual renewal began," so that some began to "object" to Scriver's
collection of artifacts (vi). Dempsey's word "suddenly" stands out, as does his
final presumption that "As time passes, more and more Blackfoot will come to
appreciate what [Scriver] has done in seeing that their artifacts are preserved
in a museum for the benefit of future generations" (vi). The dismissed status
of the museum in Ledfeather suggests
otherwise.
The white couple's sense of entitlement to a photo with local indians emerges from these systems and
impacts the boy's relationship to the photo. The boy had no memory of the photo
before the nurse told him of it; yet, when a few days later he wakes up in his
hospital bed with "two crisp
twenties folded into his hand," the narrator confides that "What he really
wanted was the picture" (137). For the boy, this photo is a form of evidence in the sense that
Sontag proposes: "Something
we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it"
(5). Though the trip to Kalispell is seemingly small in the boy's life, his
knowledge of the photo emerges sixteen years after the photo was taken, so that
his memory comes only from the photo. Sontag writes that "To photograph people
is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having
knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be
symbolically possessed" (14). This visiting white couple has information about
the boy that he does not have.
A
few pages later, the boy's desire for this photo clarifies: "What if that white
family in Kalispell had just taken him, back then? He hated himself for even
thinking it, but thought it all the same, on accident" (139-40). Because this
thought occurs while the boy is in the hospital after attempting suicide, his
desire for the photo is connected to his suffering; it also reverts the
tradition of white appropriation of Indigenous identities. While the white
couple desires an indian image and
the nurse senses that she "had to say yes," the boy desires the photo to
understand his own stories. Before the scene with the nurse, the boy remembers
a man in town whose face is disfigured by the boy's father: "The way that he
was broken meant that the boy's dad loved him, the boy. That he'd been mad the
kid had gone to Kalispell that day. That he was protecting the boy, just after
the fact, as best he could, the only way he knew" (130). Though the photo from
Kalispell may no longer exist, it is part of the story of the boy's trip to
Kalispell, which in itself is part of the story of how his "dad loved him." The
snapshot is not only evidence of coercive historical relationships but also a
detail in the story of how a boy understands his own identity.
V. "Posterity": native photos of
survivance
By
the end of Ledfeather, characters continue to be
affected by the forms of colonialization explored above, among others; but the
final photo in the novel reclaims
the history of photography and dis-embeds it from colonialist systems. The
novel ends back with Doby on the side of the road trying to get hit by a car, a
scene that is related by several narrators, first by Gina (43) and later by
Twice (193), who drives around with two other young men. Near the end, Twice
describes how Luther
and Dally propose that he, Twice, takes a picture next time they try to hit
Doby. Luther drives:
'Posterity,' Dally said . . ..
'His
or ours?' Luther said.
Dally
shook his head at this, smiled, and said 'A camera,
man. Twice can push the button just right before--"
He
finished with his hands, so that Doby Saxon exploded against the front of the
Caprice.
Luther
smiled, liked it, and we cut back to Browning for a camera, but never could
find one that worked, until Luther remembered Chris.
She'd bought one special for the game,
had had it in her purse all week. (195)
The
reader has already met Chris from Gina's section, when Chris ran after Doby
trying to get him out of the road. Now, when Luther, Dally, and Twice find
Chris, she rides in the back of their car, initially unaware of their
intentions. After the car almost hits Doby, Chris becomes upset. Luther is also
upset, because Twice, who holds Chris's camera, did not take a photo of this
attempt, as tasked. Luther says,
"Tim would have [taken the picture]", evoking Twice's dead brother; Twice
responds "I can take the picture" (197). For these boys, taking the photo is an
act of bravery that compels Twice to prove to the others that he is as brave as
his brother was.
Unlike
the other images in the novel, the photo that the boys desire is outside of commodification—but
not outside of violence. Their desire to record hitting Doby anticipates what
might come after they hit Doby: evidence that they hit him. Bell writes that
"Photographs . . . do not simply represent history; they are themselves
historical objects. The way we perceive the world is shaped largely by not only
personal experience but also . . . by our experience of, and our exposure to,
visual images" (102). When Dally has the idea to take a picture of this
moment, he says "Posterity"; he does not answer Luther's question "his or our
own?" (195). Their desire
for this photograph is a desire for power in the present and a power
that can inform how the future understands the past.
But
Chris will not let them have that power. After Twice assures the others that he
"can take the picture," Chris takes the camera and runs with it, "flitt[ing] away
into the night like a deer, cutting across the pasture back to Browning, maybe"
(197). Chris is soon seen by the reader again through the perspective of
Junior, who narrates the next section and drives the daughter of his former
love home from a basketball game. He and his ex's daughter see Chris running with the camera after she
has left the boys in the previous scene. Junior describes seeing
a flashing out in the pasture.
Like
somebody was taking a picture out there.
Of
us?
I
let my foot off the gas, said it: 'What the hell?'
Twenty
seconds later it was a girl, the Cut Nose girl who's a Sainte, too, and so can
run forever.
She
had a camera in her hand, was holding it ahead of her.
I
stopped and she popped the passenger door open, fell in, nodded ahead, fast.
'Get
my good side,' I told her holding my chin up for the next picture, and she
looked over to me for a long time then finally smiled, let herself start
breathing hard like she needed to. (203-4)
Chris
runs to prevent boys from taking a picture of hitting Doby and, in a sense,
from hitting Doby; Junior's joke that follows her run does not make light of
the young men's desires but responds to it. Vizenor writes, "How should we now
respond to the photographs that have violated the privacy of the natives? Cover
the eyes? Whose eyes should be covered?" (163). It is as if the novel asks a
similar question: how should we respond to the possibility of a photograph that
would record one suicide in a narrative world that is saturated with suicide
attempts? Chris refuses the history that leads Vizenor to describe
photographs as "possessory, neither cultural evidence nor the shadows of lost
traditions," and cameras as "the instruments of institutive discoveries and
predatory surveillance" (154). Chris's camera flashing through the pasture
documents not possession or lost tradition, but Doby not being hit by a car; her camera is not a tool of predatory
surveillance but of native survivance.
The
novel's final narrator is Chris's mom, recalling her conversation with
Doby's mom, who is in jail following the event at the casino. In a chain of
discourse that recalls the link of actors involved when "the boy" is taken to
Kalispell, Chris's mom describes to Doby's mom what Chris told her about the
night with Doby on the side of the road and the camera:
What
I told her was just cut and dried, pretty much the way Chris told it to me when
I picked up her film for her, asked her if that was who I thought it was?
At
first she pretended like she didn't know what I was talking about, but I used
to be fifteen too. (206)
The reader cannot be certain who Chris
did and did not photograph, though the likely candidates are the young woman
who turns out to be Claire, or Junior, as her mom might find it strange that
she was driving with Junior. Further, the reader does not know how much time
has passed (it is however much time it took for Chris to turn in her film to be
developed, plus however long it took for her mom to pick it up). At this point
in the novel, the reader is practiced in proceeding with uncertainty.
Chris's
mom then describes the last photograph on the developed roll of film, as Chris
has described it to her. Chris took the photo from the front seat of Junior's
car, looking back at Doby and Junior's ex's daughter in the backseat:
In the picture . . . the girl's sitting
close enough to Doby in the backseat that the sides of their hands are touching
like they know each other, like it was a date they were on, and what she was
saying to him about the elk right then was that he was going to shoot them all,
wasn't he? Bam, bam, bam.
Doby smiled his
dad's smile, that he was caught but didn't care either, and looked over to her,
careful not to move his hand that was touching hers, and asked how she knew
that? (210)
This scene
recalls Vizenor's argument that the stories of natives, despite appropriative
photographs, "are in the
eyes and hands" (156); Doby and Claire's hands tell a story of what will
happen. Seamlessly, Chris's mom continues to describe the scene, so that the
reader feels that they are there, in the story that the photo tells rather than
with Chris's mom describing the photo to Doby's mom in jail. The image in the
photo exceeds the photograph, spilling into the final paragraphs of the novel
with only one last reminder that Chris's mom speaks ("and what I told Malory
happened next is that when he looked at her . . .."), until Doby speaks
Claire's name for the first time and their hands touch again (211).[9]
The photos on Chris's roll of film do not document Doby's suicide attempt as
they might have; what they do document is not easily known to the reader, i.e.
"is that who I thought it was?" The photos on the roll of film are not
permanent but dynamic, not stillness but stories, not suicide but survivance.
Many of the major themes in
Ledfeather can be traced by the
photos in the narrative, but it is what surrounds and connects these
photos—writing—that employs the photos as objects that incite
movement toward native stories. Counter to tourists' written responses to indian
images on the front of archived postcards, photos in the novel are written
into survivance. It is only fitting then, that Ledfeather was inspired
by a photograph. In the Author Note following the novel, Jones shares two
source-origins for the story: first, a report about the Blackfeet Reservation;
and second, a photo pinned to the bulletin board at a Game office, an "old
yellowy snapshot of a moose skeleton and a human skeleton mixed together. And
there was no story for it. It had just shown up in some old file. But there was
a story – is a story" (214). Sontag writes that contrary to the
early expectations for "accuracy" in photographs, "photographers are always imposing standards on their
subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture
reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of
the world as paintings and drawings are" (6-7). Just as photographers interpret
their subjects, so do authors writing with, to, or from images interpret the
photographer's interpretation. In Ledfeather,
describing photos through words prevents a stopping on images: to see them
better the reader must keep moving, keep reading, stay in motion.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer
for significantly improving the structure of this chapter. I am also grateful
to Heather Hultman, Senior Photography Archivist at the Montana Historical
Society, for assisting with access to the real postcard collection that I
reference in this chapter.