Enduring Spirit: Photographs of Northwest Native Americans, 1857–1907
Projected Publication Date: 2013

The second volume in the Northwest Photography Series will tell the story of the first fifty years of photography of Native Americans of Oregon and Washington. Through studio and candid portraits, views of Native settlements, and photo-documentation of Native customs and practices, these images reveal the ways in which early photographers reacted to and interpreted their encounters with the indigenous populations, as well as how those interpretations changed as Euro-Americans settled throughout the Northwest. Likewise, they reveal the ways in which Native peoples adapted and survived in the face of extreme challenges forced upon them from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth.

Enduring Spirit begins in 1857, when U.S. Army lieutenant Lorenzo Lorain arrived at Fort Umpqua near the Siletz Indian Reservation in the Oregon Territory and began to photograph the Indians who had recently been removed there. These rare salt-print portraits, now in the collection of the Oregon Historical Society, are the earliest known photographs of Oregon Indians, perhaps the earliest of any Native group in the Northwest. Enduring Spirit explores the half-century following the creation of these images, during which photography gained an increasing significance in American society as a tool with which to record the “truth” of human experience. At the same time, Euro-American settlements spread rapidly throughout the West, forever changing Native cultures and traditions. 

In Oregon and Washington, as elsewhere in the western United States, Euro-American photographers used their cameras to “capture” the Native peoples, and to make sense of their otherness for white audiences. Surprisingly, however, very little scholarship has paid attention to early photography of American Indians in the Northwest. Enduring Spirit will be the first book to draw together diverse, previously unpublished, historic photographs of Pacific Northwest Native Americans from both public and private archival collections throughout Oregon and Washington. It will treat these images as a unified body of work, whose creation was dependent upon and influenced by the regional geopolitical conflicts between Euro-Americans and Indians, by locally held stereotypes of Native peoples, and by the personal relationships that developed between the photographers and their subjects.

About the Author

Megan K. Friedel is archivist and assistant professor of library science at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Previous to her position in Alaska, she was the photo archivist for the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston and, more recently, for the Oregon Historical Society in Portland. Friedel has curated several major exhibitions of historical photography, including Carleton Watkins: Stereoviews of the Columbia River Gorge (Oregon Historical Society, 2008-2009) and Francis Blake: A Photographer’s Life (Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004). In 2008 she appeared in The River They Saw, an Oregon Public Broadcasting Oregon Experience documentary on the photographers of the Columbia River Gorge, and she is also co-author, with Terry Toedtemeier, of the article “Picturing Progress: Carleton Watkins's 1867 Stereoviews of the Columbia River Gorge,” which was published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly and won the Joel Palmer Prize, Honorable Mention, in 2009. Friedel received her B.A. from Amherst College and holds an M.A. in History and an M.S. in Library and Information Science, both from Simmons College.