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CHAPTER 1
A Man and World in Between
By 1890, the end seemed very near. The Indian Wars had drawn to a close, with the US military the undisputed victor. America's Western frontier was opened to endless waves of settlers, taking land, water, forests, wildlife, minerals for their own. Native Americans, once numbering in the millions, were now less than 250,000. Confined to reservations, a fraction of their traditional homelands, Native Americans continued to lose land throughout the early twentieth century through a process called allotment, which assigned small homesteads to tribal members and sold "excess" land to non-Indians. No longer dependent on their own subsistence, Native people were forced into a labor economy that was foreign and alienating — or were left as supplicants to government handouts. Long-standing religious practices were attacked and outlawed. Many were forced into clothes and homes that were considered by their conquerors to be "civilized."
After centuries of colonialism, the extinction of Native Americans now seemed certain. This fact obliged the US government to determine how to handle the twilight of the continent's first people. With peace, the government could not so simply eradicate the Indians who remained. The only real choice left was assimilation — to force Native Americans to adopt the beliefs, attitudes, tastes, habits, and work of good Anglo-Americans.
But how?
Education.
School was quickly determined to be the avenue by which Native Americans would sojourn into an assimilated future. By transforming the next generation of Indians into good citizens, the government could swiftly sever Indians from the deep roots of their culture. Although Native Americans had long been the focus of educational efforts — Harvard University and William and Mary College began educating Indian youth in the 1600s — this strategy of advancement took on a fresh urgency. Four hundred years after Christopher Columbus made landfall, the work of American colonialism was not quite over. The resources that were used in the old war were needed for a new one — a seamless transformation, often literally, of barracks into boarding schools (figure 1.1).
The new battle required new soldiers. Schools required educators willing to run these outposts dedicated to civilizing the savages at the gates of America's future.
Jesse H. Bratley was one such man.
* * *
Born in 1867, Jesse Hastings Bratley was an unlikely candidate to become an Indian schoolteacher. The son of pioneers Joseph and Mary Hastings Bratley, Jesse spent much of his early life helping his impoverished family merely survive (figure 1.2). When he was three years old, the family moved from Wisconsin to Kansas, lured by the promise of the frontier. Kansas proved just as difficult; the family owed a large debt for its new land and constantly faced poverty, poor harvests, inclement weather, wildfires, and Indian attacks. Jesse spent his childhood laboring on the family farm and, for only three months a year, attending school. As a student, Jesse struggled. He especially loathed arithmetic and grammar.
When he was nineteen, Bratley began his peripatetic work life — by turns a farmer, janitor, accountant, homesteader, traveling salesman, teacher, postal worker, and realtor. In 1893, Bratley saw an ad for positions at federally funded Indian schools. Attracted by the possibility of steady employment, he applied. Bratley was soon headed to teach the S'Klallam at the Port Gamble Day School, northwest of Seattle, Washington. Over the next decade, he taught at four more schools across the United States.
Yet this new opportunity would become more than a job; living among Native Americans permanently changed the direction of Bratley's life. He began an ad hoc anthropological survey of Native communities, ultimately taking more than 500 glass-plate photographs and collecting nearly 1,000 artifacts — images and things that would last beyond his lifetime and form the foundation of his legacy (figure 1.3).
The Jesse H. Bratley collection, as it came to be known, however, has more to teach us than about one man's life. Because Bratley occupied a perfect gray zone — a supporter of Indian schools but not their architect, a collector with only vague aspirations to anthropological seriousness, a photographer variously motivated by entrepreneurship, documentary voyeurism, and romantic dreams — he gives us an unusual visual and material testimony of one of the most profoundly important moments in the history of contemporary Native America. Bratley's story allows us to witness Native Americans' dramatically shifting way of life — the tangled processes of civilizing, resistance, and persistence — as the nineteenth century surrendered to the modern age.
* * *
After finishing his career as an Indian schoolteacher, Bratley and his family moved to Florida in 1910. Bratley dreamed of building his own museum in Miami where he could display the hundreds of objects he had collected. Unable to marshal the time or resources, Bratley never realized his dream. Following his death in 1948, Bratley's extensive collection was divided among his four children: Homer, Hazel, Cyril, and Forrest. In 1961, Hazel sold her share of the collection, along with Homer's and Cyril's portions, to the Southeast Museum of the North American Indian, located in Marathon, Florida. In selling Bratley's collection, Hazel earnestly hoped to fulfill her father's lifelong wish to stimulate "interest in and appreciation for the North American Indian among the many visitors who will see these treasures through the years."
The Southeast Museum was owned and operated by Mary and Francis Crane. The Cranes, as wife and husband, structured their retirement around a passion for collecting Native American artifacts. They had come to believe in the educational value of Native American collections and set about acquiring thousands of ethnographic and archaeological objects over the course of a seventeen-year shopping blitz. In 1958, the Cranes used their private collections to open the Southeast Museum, advertising it as "the largest and finest collection of artifacts south of the Smithsonian." Although the Southeast Museum's holdings were sweeping, many considered the museum a tourist trap; it also remained relatively obscure among professional researchers and curators. The lack of professional attention was amplified by the museum's remote location and the public's recreation focus in the Florida Keys.
As a result of chronically low attendance, the Southeast Museum closed its doors in 1968 and the Cranes donated their extensive 12,000-piece collection to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (then the Denver Museum of Natural History). When the Denver Museum received the collection from the Cranes, it contained roughly 1,500 ethnographic and archaeological objects, documents, and photographic items that Bratley had amassed. Before the Denver Museum took control of the collection, the Cranes invited the Smithsonian Institution to duplicate Bratley's photographs. The Smithsonian made prints of 243 glass plates and copies of 200 original photos and stereopticon views.
Although the majority of the Bratley collection found its way to the Denver Museum, about a quarter of it remained with Forrest G. Bratley, the youngest of Jesse's children. In 1983, Forrest donated 47 ethnographic objects, primarily from the Plains and Southwest — including an impressive Lakota Winter Count (figure 1.4) — to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and another small portion to the Robinson Museum in Pierre, South Dakota. Forrest bequeathed the remainder of his collection to his own children, Jesse's grandchildren.
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science has long touted the Bratley collection as one of its prized possessions. Bratley's photographs have been used extensively in exhibits and programs; a number of the collected artifacts have been on permanent display at the museum. Yet despite the prestige accorded to the collection, it has never been the focus of sustained study.
In 2015, we had the chance to embark on a research project. Montgomery had joined the Denver Museum for a one-year postdoctoral fellowship, and Colwell, as a curator on staff, had long set his sights on the Bratley collection. Soon after beginning the work, we saw the Bratley collection's immense significance. The collection was widely used but little understood — images and objects more often employed as decoration than as an analytical lens. Jesse had written an autobiography, which had never been published. He left behind a paper trail in archives that could be followed. The Bratley family held more pieces, which had never been studied. For all its prominence, Bratley's life work was essentially unknown.
We considered it an imperative to document what Bratley had left behind. Even more, we saw the potential for a great and important story.
But what exactly did we see? What is the meaning of these hundreds of objects and images, which Bratley collected from 1893 to 1903? What should we make of them — and of him? Why do Bratley's collections of the S'Klallam, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole a century ago matter today?
* * *
Jesse H. Bratley's role as an educator first defined his time in Indian country. It was his job to help enact the annihilation of Indian cultures ordered by the US government — or, from another viewpoint, to ensure that Native peoples were brought into the twentieth century as dutiful citizens and moral Christians. This he would do. Bratley taught his students English, arithmetic, and history. He showed them how to farm and garden. He cut their hair. He dressed them in neat clothes and crisp uniforms. He lined them up like soldiers. Bratley was little different from the thousands of other Indian schoolteachers and government agents of his era.
Yet unlike many of his colleagues, Bratley was curious enough to attend ceremonies and enjoy local foods. He learned some Chinook and took notes on the Hopi language. He journeyed to sacred places. He amassed hundreds of objects. He took hundreds of photographs of the people he lived among. Looking back across the distance of time, Bratley does not always seem to be a perfectly devout disciple of the assimilationist creed he pledged to uphold.
Neither was Bratley an advocate for Native peoples. There is no documentary evidence that he fought for Native American rights or even acknowledged the validity of their traditional ways of life. Nor was Bratley a full student of Indian culture; he was not an avocationalist who managed to segue the unplanned opportunity to be among Indians into a reputation as a respectable near-anthropologist, like John G. Bourke, a US Army captain who published academic volumes and came to sit on the board of the Washington Anthropological Society. In some ways, Bratley was just a more earnest apprentice of the flowering market in Indian crafts at the end of the twentieth century — a man consumed by the so-called Indian craze.
Bratley did aspire to be associated with the burgeoning field of anthropology. He corresponded with the Bureau of American Ethnology — the government agency, which was then among the premier institutes for anthropological research — at times seeming eager to understand the people he now found himself among. He offered his objects for display at international expositions. He lectured on his experiences and clearly cherished his time — so unexpected, given his humble family origins — living among tribal people. Bratley perhaps saw his photographs as a method of anthropological inquiry, which the "father" of American anthropology, Franz Boas, and other scholars of this age had begun to deploy for research, publications, and the field's popularization. One reading of Bratley's efforts is that he was sincerely curious about Native Americans and held a genuine appreciation for their history and arts — a paradoxical esteem for the very traditions his work required him to eradicate.
Another view would be that his vocation and collection were not a contradiction at all. Perhaps he collected objects and took photographs precisely because the things and images were evidence — positive evidence, in Bratley's mind — of a Native America fast fading. Most of Bratley's images do not present a romantic vision but instead an everyday reality, one that does not glimpse backward but rather gazes into the future. The images do not say this is what was so much as this is how it will be. As we will discuss, the world's fairs, which were hugely transformative for turn-of-the-century America, are one way to understand what might otherwise appear to be paradoxical about Bratley: a fascination with Native Americans as caught between the old and the new, traditional and modern, "savage" and "civilized."
The juxtaposed exhibits at the world's fairs — as well as the reenacted battles in Wild West shows — provided a public stage on which Native people could act out a myth of their gradual disappearance. In one area of the fairs, Native Americans wore traditional clothing and performed demonstrations of traditional arts and crafts; in the next area were Native American school students newly steeped in Euro-American clothing, behavior, language, and learning. In the same way the world's fairs paired tradition and education side by side to illustrate both Native America's past and its future, perhaps Bratley — who visited the famous 1893 Chicago World's Fair and other expositions — hoped to embody this vision of Native Americans before and after the arrival of "civilization."
Perhaps Bratley's entire collection can be understood as an echo of George Catlin's famous 1837–1839 painting Wi-jn-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (the Light) Going to and Returning from Washington, a kind of split-screen image of the Assiniboine leader before and after his 1832 journey to the nation's capital — in traditional dress on one side of the canvas and in fancy Euro-American duds on the other.A photographic version of this genre was used to great effect by those seeking to promote the Carlisle Indian School, the first major boarding school, depicting a student's evolution from savagery to civilization. Bratley took several photographs that imitated this tableau. In one photo, a man decked out in tribal attire is standing beside another man dressed in a police uniform (figure 1.5). Another Bratley photo featured a Carlisle graduate dressed in a three-piece suit standing beside his "traditionalist" father (figure 1.6).
Bratley's ultimate aims as a photographer are just as elusive. He was generally like most of his generation even as he was precisely like none of them. Historian William E. Farr has described five categories of photographers that bridged the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s. First, there were the romantics, men like Walter McClintock and Edward Curtis who purposefully mourned the swiftly vanishing Indian (figure 1.7). Second, there were businessmen like N. F. Forsyth, J. H. Sherburne, and Thomas B. Magee who tried to make a living selling "Indian views"— images of the exotic, barbaric Indians. Third were the transformers: government officials, missionaries, and teachers trying to prove that Indians were progressing into a brighter future. Fourth were the snap shooters, Whites living near reservations and tourists who thought they were experiencing the authentic frontier and wanted to preserve the moment (figure 1.8). (This was possible because in the late 1800s, Kodak produced cheap, easy-to-use cameras. The rise of commercial photography equipment companies converged with mass tourism and the final colonization of Native Americans.) Fifth are the self-portraits, which Indians wanted to have for themselves (figure 1.9). While some of these photographers embraced multiple aims — Curtis was both a romantic and (albeit struggling) a businessman — for the most part these stances were fairly delineated.
For Bratley, all of these motivations propelled his work, but he never fully subscribed to one of them (figure 1.10). Some Bratley images do present a kind of wistful nostalgia, an effort at aesthetically capturing the cultural precipice on which Native Americans then stood. He also invested in expensive equipment to sell images, including to Indians themselves (combining Farr's types two and five). Dozens of photographs of schoolchildren lined up military style, classroom scenes, and images of agricultural and outdoor labor also point to his role as a government official. Still other shots are clearly snapshots — opportune images little different from those of other travelers, such as the Hopi Snake Dance ceremony, which tourists attended and photographed in the early 1900s (figure 1.11).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Objects of Survivance"
by .
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