Prophet

I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, careful not to step on him, and then remember with a sinking heart that he is no longer here.

I jump up in the morning, ready to go, and then remember that I have no compelling reason to leave the house. 

I walk down the street, encountering other people and their dogs, and then remember that I am no longer one of them.

Prophet was so many things.

He was an extremely patient teacher, more than I was at my best. He calmly prompted me, again and again, in the ever-present faith that I would eventually learn.

He was smart. No matter that I talked to myself too much, gave ambiguous and confusing instructions, became distracted... he acquired an insanely large vocabulary to understand me. And not only me. Prophet responded to directions given by others, to other dogs, in English, Spanish, and Hebrew. If another person summoned their dog, he would dash over immediately with a smile, as if to say, "Look at me! I'm a good boy!"

He was filled with joy. In his last months he enjoyed sitting in the field laughed while he watched the puppies chase each other around. Even while struggling to walk he smiled at everyone. If we were watching TV, Prophet sat, smiling, and watched us.

He was always up for an adventure. On daily walks in the woods he pressed for us to leave the trail, check out a stream, climb a rock. We climbed Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Washington in the Whites. We hiked in the Catskills, in Harriman, in the Taconics. He swam in Long Island Sound, in the Hudson River, the Bronx River, the Mullica River in the NJ Pines, and the Mill River near Mt. Tom in Massachusetts. Prophet leaped repeatedly from the dock at Lake Kezar in Maine, and - again, repeatedly - ran down a near-vertical crag in Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx. He walked Pelham Bay Park, Crotona Park, Bronx Park, Central Park, Riverside Park, Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, Inwood Park, Fort Tryon Park, St. Nicholas Park, River Park, Prospect Park, the Coney Island Boardwalk.

He was brave. I never saw Prophet start a fight, but I never saw him back down from one, either. Bigger dogs, two at a time, even four against him. I once kept him away from a hostile Great Dane for weeks, leashing him, taking him off the trail and down an embankment while that dog's owner allowed her to run across and menace him. When I finally dropped the leash, he picked up that Dane and shook her, but without breaking the skin! Once a lost and frightened Husky who we did not know attacked him. I had heard the owners calling from a distance somewhere else in the woods and realized this must be their dog. I wasn't sure how to break up this fight between Prophet and a strange dog, but - trusting his disposition and his trust in me - I picked up the Husky's hind legs. Prophet immediately stepped back. What a relief.

He was friendly. We used to joke that he was running for office because he greeted every dog and person he encountered. They say German Shepherds are one-person dogs, but Prophet had a circle. There were people whose laps he leaped into. When some people turned up, he threw himself at their feet to demand a belly rub. He was utterly convinced that the letter carrier and the contractors and Judith's harp teacher came to the house just to visit with him. 

But most of all, Prophet was consequential. He made an impact on everyone who met him. He was a leader of dogs. He came into my life when being retired from the high school principalship was really catching up with me. If the definition of a ghost is a departed spirit who doesn't know he is gone and so keeps haunting the living... well, I felt that was me. Prophet didn't just fill the void of daily contact with hundreds of teens and dozens of teachers. He reminded me to be appreciative of what I had. Every day, walking in the woods, I would catch myself looking for the extraordinary: an eagle, a warbler, an owl. Every day I would remember that I had the most extraordinary companion walking by my side and that we had the sky, the river, the trees, and the dirt.

I miss him. But I am trying to hold onto that sense of appreciation. I really am trying.

Lozen and Hettie Tom

 Five years ago I posted in this space about an 1898 studio photo of an Apache girl in her formal sunrise dance dress. I compared it to other photos that have different meanings to family members, photographers, and scholars. And I traced her life, showing why there are no great great grandchildren to look at that photo. I promised to return “another day” and discuss it some more. Today is another day.

The artist Douglas Miles is Apache, too. He comments often about the difference between his own photography and that of non-Natives like the ever-popular E.S. Curtis. His work is highly technical, too, but he is making images of family, neighbors, and friends instead of elegies of imagined Indians. He raises the same questions, both in his visual art and in his social media commentary (which is, itself, art) about when Hollywood will start putting Natives behind the camera to tell their own stories. This week he put up another “ad” for a movie about Lozen, the holy woman and warrior who fought alongside Geronimo in the 1870’s and 1880’s. I wondered whether there actually was such a project somewhere and googled it. I shouldn’t have. 

Among the very first hits was a tweet by a magazine of speculative fiction. They were soliciting entries for a short fiction competition (very short, under a thousand words) with the prompt “Lozen.” And what photo were they using to accompany this prompt? That’s right.

I should add some facts at this point. The girl above was 12-years old at the time of this picture. Her name was Eneh, but the caption at the bottom says “Hattie Tom.” In government records he is listed as Hettie. She was part of a living exhibit at the Omaha World’s Fair (Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition) in which hundreds of Natives were brought in for the visitors to look at. That’s right, she was on display for the  edification of white tourists. The initial intent was for them to display “traditional” lifeways - cooking, crafts, sewing clothing and building shelter - but the promoters of the exposition quickly discovered that the audience wasn’t all that interested in anything other than “war dances” and sham battles, and so that is what they
were given.

The photo itself is a part of that voyeurism. The Frank A. Rinehart studio received an exclusive contract to photograph the fair. Rinehart and his  assistant, Adolf Muhr, produced hundreds of souvenir photos, in multiple formats. But this one seems to be endlessly popular. Look at the colorized 1904 post card to the left, with rouge added to her cheeks. I find versions of it in hundreds of places on the internet. It occurs to me that it is a nineteenth century thirst trap, and that this way of looking at a Native girl (a 12-year old girl!) feeds the sexualization in the white male mind that contributes - along with bizarre boundaries of law enforcement - to the catastrophe of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Ask yourself what there is in this photo that makes it so popular
120+ years after it was taken.

The Rinehart photos are considered in some circles to be much better than Edward S. Curtis’s somewhat later project, The North American Indian. Curtis photos are known for soft focus and heads turned away to create the feeling in the viewer that Indians were “vanishing.” He airbrushed out artifacts that he considered non-traditional. He carried props that his white viewers see as “authentic” to include in photos of people living thousands of miles apart, with dramatically different cultures. By contrast, the Rinehart photos are straight-ahead portraits and in sharp focus. They are, nevertheless, documents of colonial authority. In Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection, Professor Beverly Singer of Santa Clara Pueblo wrote: “It is difficult to convey and emphasize the power that even a white photographer had over Indians.” Professor Jojola of Isleta Pueblo was even more direct in his own essay in that same volume: “Dare I say (or ask), Were these photos from hell?”

Let me address that hell a little. Hettie Tom was born in 1886. Her dad, known in the records as Chiricahua Tom or Tom Chiricahua, was a US Cavalry scout. At the time of Geronimo’s surrender (also 1886) he was with a delegation of Apache scouts in Washington, D.C. Instead of being allowed to return home, their train was redirected to Florida. The scouts and their families were held as prisoners of war for the next 26 years along with Geronimo’s band whom they had been charged to capture. Reread that if you want. From about the time of her birth, Hettie Tom was a prisoner of the Army her father had served in! Actually continued to serve in, because - even as a POW - Chiricahua Tom was a uniformed US soldier, along with many of his fellow captives. I see commentary on that photo describing her as “beautiful” and “haunting” and I keep saying, “She’s twelve!” But when I see the word “captivating” all I think  of is the cruel irony.

Consider another photo, this one without a formal, single-occasion, ritual dress. Because she was born at the time of Geronimo’s surrender, Hettie Tom was too young to be taken when the Army seized most of the imprisoned the Chiricahua children from their parents and sent them to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania to be stripped of their language and culture and the love of their kin. She was educated instead at the Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. I imagine she is one of the girls in this picture. I look at the photos that retain  wide circulation and I know that this one fails to present the wistful nostalgia of those. The children are forced into the clothing of the conqueror. They are forced to speak the language of the conqueror and learn his trades. The boys’ hair is cut. Even their names are changed. (And this is another of those absolute horrors of the dystopian future imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale that has

Clement Nahgodleda, standing

already happened.) But while the photograph has the imposed name Hattie Tom (sic) right on it, those cloth dresses don’t seem to engage the white viewer in the way that Hettie’s sunrise dance dress does.

Hettie returned from Omaha to Fort Sill, Oklahoma where the captives had been moved. Some time within the next two years she married Clement Nahgodleda, another POW about nine years older than her, who had been a student at Carlisle. They both died of tuberculosis in 1901. She was about 15. The warrior woman, Lozen, had died in captivity while they were all still in Alabama 11 years earlier when Hettie was three and Lozen was about fifty.

So why is a magazine of speculative fiction posting this photo of Hettie Tom along with an invitation to write about the warrior Lozen? This is a magazine that proudly describes taking an initiative to create a more equitable community. Its submission policies encourage the work of  BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers. Why use a picture of a vulnerable-looking young girl to illustrate a grown woman whose exploits in battle were legendary?

First I will acknowledge uncertainty as to whether any photo of Lozen exists at all. After

Geronimo’s band surrendered, when they were being transported East to imprisonment, the picture to the right was taken by J.K. Hillers, a photographer with the Bureau of Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institute. According to James Kaywakla, the principal informant for Eve Ball’s In the Days of Victorio, Lozen was not in this group. According to Jasper Kanseah and Dahteste, however, she is the third from the right in the upper row. Most “portraits” of Lozen are prints made from this glass negative cropping out everybody else.

In recent years admiration of Lozen as a warrior has been complemented by discussion of her as a two-spirit woman. Most of this identifies Dahteste (next to her in the photo above, second from right in the top row) as her companion. Sherry Robinson’s Apache Voices, based on Eve Ball’s unpublished notes, reports that Dahteste mourned Lozen until her own death in 1955. 

I described the photo of Hettie Tom as a 19th century thirst trap for white men. I am stepping way out of my lane by speculating that perhaps it serves the same role for gay white women. Nevertheless, I am otherwise at a loss as to why they wouldn’t use the cropped photo to the left.

Photos, even colonizer photos, can serve more than one purpose. Lynching photos were souvenirs for participants in the mobs but were also used to publicize the horrors of lynching. That is true of the Rinehart photos from the Omaha world’s fair, too. I quoted Dr. Beverly Singer above on the power of the white photographer over the Native subject, but I truncated her words. What she actually wrote is this: 

It is difficult to convey and emphasize the power that even a white photographer had over Indians, but it is also possible for Native communities to request from photographic archives many of these old images that hold the memory and legacy of our ancestry that belongs to us.

Lozen left no descendants, perhaps because she was a two-spirit woman. But what of Hettie Tom? When she died at Fort Sill at the age of 15, she had no children. Her brother Sago died that same summer. So did seven of her nieces and nephews by her brother Yahnaki. When I describe the horror of a child growing up imprisoned that is by no means the end of it. Hettie’s nephew, Rufus Sago, who was one when she died, lived until 1970 and was active in tribal affairs at Mescalero where some of the imprisoned families settled when they were finally released in 1913(!) Perhaps his children and grandchildren are getting something positive from looking at her photo and those of her parents.