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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Frank H. Goodyear III. Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief. (The Great Plains Photography Series.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2003. Pp. 211. $35.00.
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In this important visual biography, Frank H. Goodyear III rejects lingering nineteenth-century assertions that Indian people feared photographic technology, arguing instead that some Native people embraced the camera as an opportunity for new modes of cross-cultural communication. Among a number of oft-photographed Indian people, the Lakota leader Red Cloud stands out, posing for at least forty-five camera sessions over nearly four decades. The 128 known photographs of Red Cloud originated in Washington, D.C.'s studios, on South Dakota's plains, and any number of places in between. Taken together, Goodyear argues, these images constitute a semi-autobiographical text capable of revealing something about Red Cloud's responses to the difficult situations confronting his people. Photography allowed him to become visible to colonial authority, and legitimated by it, while at the same time mediating, questioning, and even undermining that authority. Photography also led Red Cloud to his own project of self-fashioning, not only in relation to American culture but also among his own people. Reading the images Red Cloud left behind, suggests Goodyear, allows us to see strategies, compromises, mimicry, and identity performances invisible in either written or oral texts. |
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