First Encounters: Photographs of Northwest Native Americans, 1857–1907
Projected Publication Date: Spring 2013

First Encounters will tell the story of the earliest photographic images of Oregon and Washington’s Native peoples. 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 “first encounters” with the indigenous population. The book will draw from archival collections dating from 1857, when U.S. Army lieutenant Lorenzo Lorain first photographed the Siletz Indian Reservation in the Oregon Territory, to 1907, when the initial volume of Edward S. Curtis’s seminal publication, The North American Indian, was produced.

Early Native photography in North America carries with it the inherent weight of a colonial impulse both to romanticize Native populations as specimens of the “true West” and to objectively document the ethnology of Native peoples and traditions before that West disappeared. Photographers of Northwest Natives were not immune to these impulses. Indeed, the story of the photographs in First Encounters is that of fifty watershed years in which the new medium of photography gained an increasing significance in American society, particularly in terms of its usefulness as a tool with which to shape and record American history. It is also that of a half century in which Euro-American settlements spread rapidly throughout Oregon and Washington, forever changing Native cultures and traditions. In the Pacific Northwest, as elsewhere, photographers used the camera to try to understand those who had preceded them in the region and to make sense of their vanishing cultures.

First Encounters will not attempt to document comprehensively the multitude of photographers working with Native peoples in the Northwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather, it will focus on photographers who are relatively unknown to contemporary scholarship, whose work is historically significant because of time period or locale, or who devoted all or most of their career to documenting Native peoples. Image selection for First Encounters will be based, first, on the aesthetics of the image composition; second, on the significance of the photographer; and third, on the representation of diverse tribal and regional subjects. Last, wherever possible, the book will include the work of Native photographers who documented their own people, as well as the work of women photographers.

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.