In looking for an early 20th century photo of Apache girls dancing at their na'í'ees I discovered this haunting photo. I am not the only one to notice it. A reverse image search on Google reveals that it has been used many times, often without identifying the subject beyond "Apache girl" or -- tellingly -- "Apache maiden." That is a phrase that fits with a whole ugly genre of art featuring wistful Native American girls in buckskins, primarily meant for a male, white gaze... a subject for another day. But I am a white American man and, whatever my critique, I am susceptible to this stuff, too.The sources that identify the image rely on the hand-lettered captioning inscribed on the negative, which tell us that the photo is of a Chiricahua Apache named Hattie Tom. The photo is credited to a photographer named F.A. Rinehart in Omaha, Nebraska in 1899, but may have been taken by his assistant Adolph Muhr.
Frank Rinehart was a studio photographer who did a set of over 500 portraits of the Native Americans who came to the "Indian Congress," one of the attractions at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the Omaha World Fair of 1898. He (or Muhr) took them with an 8x10 format, glass-negative camera. In their time they were distinguished for being portrait work instead of distanced ethnographic pictures or soft-focus, elegiac romance like those of Edward S. Curtis.
My father-in-law passed away over twenty years ago, so it must have been sometime in the early 90's that we went together to see an exhibit of the photographs of Richard Samuel Roberts at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Roberts operated a studio in Columbia, South Carolina in the 20's and 30's so these pictures represented a rich source of insight into the African American middle class of that place and time. The curator's cards accompanying the photographs -- as I remember them -- discussed the formal composition of the work as well. So these photographs were presented in two ways: as art and as sociological documentation.But they were something very different for my father-in-law, who grew up in the area and went to high school and college in Columbia in the late twenties and early thirties. For him, these were family snapshots. He recognized people he had known, acquaintances he remembered. And he wasn't the only museum goer that day who was having that experience. People started recognizing each other in the galleries, not from their own faces, but from their shared reactions to the portraits in the exhibit.
I saw this a few years later visiting another photography exhibit at California State Fullerton. My close friend, Professor Jeffrey Brody had given cameras to Vietnamese-American students and asked them to take photos of their families and community. Once again, the images could be read at three levels: as formal art, as sociology, and as family memory. Once again I walked the gallery and heard people chuckling about Grandma and about Uncle So-and-So.
Which all conditions my view of this photo of Hattie Tom. Whose great-grandma is she? Why was she an exhibit at a World's Fair? How did she feel about it and what does her family say about it when they see that photo now?
The path to tracing her life is her identification as Chiricahua, a band that was at the time still prisoners of the United States Army. I found a book, From Fort Marion to Fort Sill by Alicia Delgadillo which documents the individuals who were imprisoned along with Geronimo after his surrender in 1886. In that book I found Hettie Tom, born in 1886. Her Apache name was Eneh, and she was the daughter of Coshey and Bedazishu, also known as "Chiricahua Tom." Here is a Frank Rinehart photo of the three of them together at the Omaha World's Fair.Bedazishu is in his US Army uniform. Yes, Chiricahua Tom was an Army scout, stationed at Fort Apache. He was one of the Chiricahua scouts who tracked Geronimo and induced him to surrender. He was one of the soldiers who was thanked for his service by a grateful nation by being imprisoned along with Geronimo for decades after the surrender, first at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama and later at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Yes, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this story, the Apache scouts who brought Geronimo in were locked up as a thank-you. And, yes, that means that Hettie Tom was a prisoner of war from approximately the time of her birth, despite the fact that her father was an honored soldier of the US Army who served again once he arrived at Fort Sill!
If you are doing your arithmetic, you will have noticed that Hettie Tom was thirteen years old when she was exhibited at the World's Fair. As to descendants, the tragedy continues. At fifteen Hettie arrived at Fort Sill and married an older Chiricahua boy, Clement Nahgodleda who had been a student at the Carlisle Indian School. But they both died at the fort in the smallpox epidemic of 1901. So did Hettie's mom. So did all her nieces and nephews, children of her brother Yahnaki (Horace Tom.) So did her brother Sago.I suppose that once we have a photograph we can repurpose it in any way we want. In June I wrote about a test shot for a zombie film that was circulating on the internet as a Trump supporter who was beaten by Trump opponents. In December of 2014 I wrote about a picture of a militia in Mali that was being touted as Nigerian women fighting back against Boko Haram... 1600 miles away!
I was tricked by that second one and only caught on because I found the photograph so engaging that I wanted to know more. I was tricked by the first one, even though it was touted by people I disagree with politically, and even though -- once you know what you are looking at -- it doesn't look anything like a photo of a woman who has just been assaulted. So I am not one to chide people about seeing what they are told to see in a photograph; I have been guilty of that too often.
In this case I remain haunted. This is a girl who could have been one of my ninth graders. She looks directly at the viewer. I don't know what to say to her.
