The Postapocalyptic Imaginary

A-visuality and the Apocalyptic Imaginary

To understand this problem of visuality requires understanding the dynamics of a colonial apocalyptic imaginary that undergirds both the salvage snapshot and the anthropometric photograph. The apocalypse is a light that destroys, opening the images and the critical positions that have been developed through and against the images onto the Destruction (in this case, as anthropologist and archivist Robert Heizer defines it, The Destruction of California Indians, a theme that ironically describes his own archival project, a recursive destruction that I discuss in chapters 3 and 4 of this book). Queer Kumeeyay poet Tommy Pico engages this imaginary in their epic poem IRL, in the context of the perpetual (doom) scrolling of social media and internet hookups, in the conditions of socializing in a settler colonial context and having sex in the aftermath of genocide. He writes:

I

don’t have the option

of keeping my God

alive by keeping her name secret

The word for her

is gone Keeping secrets is not possible So I give

everything away

and

I’m saying my land was jam-

med with brawny English,

and I’m still single.23

In relation to the destruction of protocols, in the absence of secrets (the structuring device of Indigeneity, as I establish in the introduction), there’s an ambiguity between having been revealed and having been destroyed, which leads to a kind of ecstatic openness and vulnerability. It’s an ambiguity that queer Chickasaw theorist Jodi Byrd describes in the conclusion to their book Transit of Empire, beginning with an epigraph from French theorist (and white savage philosopher!) Jean Baudrillard: “The apocalypse is the end of secrecy. Literally, it is the discovery, the revelation when everything is said. It is the end of metaphors and secrets. The nuclear bomb is the Sun cast on the Earth, of the end of the Sun as a metaphor, as distance. It is the Sun materialized on Earth: the end.”24 Pico sets their poem in a postapocalyptic space after this end in which things begin anew—but under the most horrific circumstances and intimately entangled with other times:

And I know I’m not supposed to use real

Names—Where I’m from, in the valley I lived in

for thousands of years,

once someone has passed

or pushed or pressed

into the next life that I don’t

believe in, their name

is forbidden. Reference them,

but don’t use the name bc

it distracts them from

heaven Sullies the peace

they rest in. I don’t want to be

a sullier. I’m terrible

in trouble.25

And yet, in whose company do California Indians find themselves? In the aftermath of genocide, in the throes of an ongoing demographic war,

It can’t always just

be me, stumbling alone

head first into these bright

things—Lead me back

to the water

Mina, Guadalupe, Geo and Beam,

Stoney, Ricky, Berto,

Dessy, Woody, George,

Lula, Reya, Robin, Bunty

Beebee, Tina, Lucky

Why am I the one left?

Why do I have to know

so many dead?26

This turning to the dead for sociality echoes the Ghost Dance in directly undermining protocols, and is shattering. It is also an everyday occurrence in this new metaphysics. The easy accessibility of information, the data-driven settler society in which Pico finds themself, is uncannily similar to the apocalyptic imaginary that sought to destroy/reveal Indigenous lives:

So

much info is disclosed from

the jump—profile pages,

light Googling . . . It’s kind of exciting,

having a thing

to hide in the age of knowin

everything all the time.27

This space of revelation opens up a new/old economics of abundance, one that destabilizes any relation to the individual:

for fifteen

years I give all of myself to every

man I meet, mostly bc

I have nothing Worth holding. I want

to get lost, to merge and b

someone else . . .

Kumeeyays knew

a rounded Earth based

on the curve of stars

or didn’t, I’ll never know.

It’s a dark part inside me.28

This last phrase about the dark part inside touches on a more profound sense of disappearance, of the invisible, and negative feelings produced by the intensity of light, including “the English fucking/language with its high/beams in my face.”29 Force-fed a language, tongue cut out and tied, light shining in one’s eyes all the time, the dark part is made by the ambiguity between revelation and destruction, enlightenment and the savage (and its shadow), the light that marks the body and the Indigenous subject as known and yet always a secret revealed and thereby destroyed. In this way, darkness is both absence and refuge. It is exciting to have a thing to hide. It is disorienting to get lost, to merge and “b someone else”; devastating and disorienting to not know if one’s ancestors knew the curve of stars. Moving erratically from muse/lover to muse throughout IRL, desire pulsing like light, Pico describes precisely the conditions of what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls a-visuality, the unseen that conditions what is visible and what is invisible, which marks and creates relations between an inside and an outside, the racially and culturally marked and the unmarked.30 The intense light of culture made clear and imposed creates a new surface on which the image of the Indian gets projected, forming a dark part inside. The apocalypse, the Destruction, is the unseen structure that a-visually conditions these signified relations of visible and invisible, inside and outside. The rest of this chapter is devoted to trying to understand how the two images described above, the salvage snapshot and the anthropometric photograph, are conditioned by the apocalyptic imaginary and condition, in turn, its continuation in the political imaginary of visibility. At stake is the question of what Pico’s postapocalyptic project of giving everything away means for the image and what it would look like to follow them into it.

The Salvage Snapshot

It has been noted many times how contradictory the ethnographic image is, collected from “informants” who usually had no direct experience of a time before the coming of the white man. Drawn from second- or thirdhand memory, collected, organized, and edited, this image was constituted by such a profusion of materials that it required slow, painstaking labor to gather, document, and sift. And today much of it still feels like an arbitrary, baroque jumble of things. The reconstruction of an image of peoples who were supposedly poised on the threshold of disappearance was a monumental effort destined to fail, but it carried within it the essence of the snapshot, with its mediated immediacy, its hurried temporality and ability to capture an instant before it is lost forever. This essence constitutes the foreboding image of an arrested moment before apocalypse, taken (paradoxically) after the event has already occurred. An image of memory and fantasy illuminated by apocalyptic light, this project of producing such an image delineates the destruction. In the delay, caused by the unwieldiness and misbehavior of beings, having always missed the event (strung out by structure), this mediated immediacy captures something of the form of the apocalypse. Poised on the threshold of destruction, it removes from the series of moments, from causality and history, from the flow of time, an image of a world as a fiction cloaked in fact. And it makes of the entire time of “prehistory” (Indian time) this impending scene gathered in a flash.

Beginning in the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, amateur and professional anthropologists in California embarked on a project to document and collect as much cultural information as possible from California Indians. This project resulted in private and public collections and archives of untold size, an immensity of materials that is truly hard to comprehend. (UC Berkeley’s warehouses alone hold upward of a million objects, not including documents and audio and visual recordings.) Simultaneous to this attempt to salvage an image of the “Indigenous past” (the temporal formation of the image conveniently cast Indigenous peoples as permanently of the past), government-sponsored assimilation projects sought to humanize the “savage” by removing everything Indian about them. The recordings of languages, stories, and songs, the documentation of cultural and spiritual practices, the collections of baskets, deer toe and cocoon rattles, and hunting and fishing tools constituted precisely the figure of the Indian that was being disciplined out of children in federally run boarding schools.

The frenzy of salvage collection—because it certainly was that—coincided with what Patrick Wolfe refers to as “absorption,” whereby Native Americans were subjected to biopolitical and humanizing institutions and legislation (boarding schools, health and wellness policies, adoption, prohibitions on ceremonial practices, legalized slavery/indenture cast as apprenticeship, as well as legal and political subjecthood).31 In this light, Richard Henry Pratt’s infamous imperative to “kill the Indian to save the man” was also carried out by the ethnographic snapshot as a form of preservation that activated the murderous capacity of the image as knowledge-about-the-Indian—preservation as destruction. Separating out the Indian as by-product through the creation of an ethnographic image, killing the Indian through preservation in imagistic form, was a necessary condition for rehabilitating the savage into a liberal human subject aligned with a (expressed but failed) multicultural state imperative. The project of separating the Indian from the human is also a premise of western neoliberal-multicultural-settler colonial subjectification. As seen in the image of the “Improved Order of Red Men,” Indigenous subjectivity is evacuated to allow a white gaze, and indeed white bodies, to fill and intermingle with the subjective space of Indigenous culture. This approach to the image creates the conditions for multicultural forms of subjectivity through proposed mutual recognition, a framework rigorously critiqued by Glen Coulthard in his book Red Skin, White Masks.32

Though the “era” of salvage ethnography is generally understood to have ended after World War II, like settler colonialism and its genocidal actions the salvage survey was never purely institutional, orderly, or representative of a consensus in its methodologies and goals. California, for instance, on top of being an epicenter of the project, led by the famed anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, was also flooded with amateur ethnographers, with anthropologists and archaeologists working outside the academic mainstream and in regional educational institutions, with private collectors, and with a number of niche publishers who blurred the line between academic and popular markets, many of whom were interested precisely in creating a salvage ethnographic image. This vascularized representational power became as much a part of California settler identity as that of California Indians’ and continued the active processes of salvage at least up until the 1970s. Such a more flexible sense of the ethnographic snapshot also shows the ways that the California landscape was encrypted by an archival sensibility in conjunction with the settlement of the land.

The type of image most closely, if metaphorically, associated with this form of representation is the photograph. Its importance is evident by the amount of critical energy that has been expended analyzing this relationship. Associated with mourning, death, the uncanny double, technological and spiritual inhumanity, and the crime scene, the photograph has come both to emblematize and to materialize an itinerary of thought (distinctly progressivist and civilizationist) concerned with the destructive power of the image, summed up by Jean Baudrillard as “the murderous capacity of signs.”33 The image kills that which it represents by replacing it, being better than it, fixing it in a moment out of time and place, appearing as “more beautiful, more imposing” than it, thus exposing the absence subtending what is present.34 Like a cadaver, the photograph undoes identity by showing what self-resembling looks like: it is what it is and it also isn’t. “It is as if the photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures.”35

The image became a document. Salvage ethnography, which attempted to capture a totalizing view of a people who were understood to be poised on the threshold of disappearance, and photography, which captured a moment out of time with so realistic an image that the referent and the sign were glued together in a pure document, came together in the ethnographic imagination of the salvage snapshot. This photographic imagination took the form of a reconstruction. The California Indian world and its peoples, according to this view, were disappearing, and the image of that world was now stored in the material culture, languages, performances, and memories of survivors. The salvage operation sought to extract this image from catastrophic ruins through what we can anachronistically describe as data mining or, from the ethnographer’s salvational view, a rescue mission.

Aesthetic Critique

But Native Americans have had a long love affair with their self-images. Despite rumors of the fear of photography’s soul-stealing abilities, the accurate depiction and externalization of one’s image was readily accepted and appropriated by many Native peoples. Describing a dialectical relationship between Indians and the proliferation of externalized photographic images, “from the Curtis stills to our own Kodachrome slides and Polaroid prints and Camcorder tapes,” Paul Chaat Smith states that “the question isn’t whether we love photography, but instead why we love it so much.”36 His answer is that the camera helped shape who Indians are today (post-1890, according to Smith); in fact, “everything about being Indian has been shaped by the camera.”37 Gerald Vizenor personalizes and develops this notion further by describing the introduction of the Kodak Brownie, an inexpensive cardboard box camera, to Native uses in 1900. He writes, “the spare meniscus lens captured natives in ordinary scenes and in common, untouched poses at home and at work, gathering wild rice and berries, curing hides, and preparing maple sugar. The Brownie scenes of friends and family were almost always casual; at times they were fortuitous in contrast to the studio photographs a generation earlier.”38 Documenting the shift from the expensive, mounted studio camera (in which Natives were predominately objects) to a cheap, mobile one (in which Natives were also photographers), he notes its effects on Native community, particularly regarding the vitality of the image. “The box camera . . . inspired a new perception and consciousness of the real, of humans and nature, a new expressive, wondrous world of black, white, and gray eyes and hands in distinctive, arrested motion.”39 Vizenor draws a hard line between images produced by non-Native photographers, which he links to the pose, and those produced by Natives, which he associates with the snapshot. In both, however, it is precisely such a mirror-stage type of relation to the image, a narcissism that Smith attributes to Natives and non-Natives alike, that makes the uses of evidentiary technology and their produced images for the reproduction of cultural knowledge and practices so important. “They’re fables told to shape the future”—fables with exactitude and precision.40

Vizenor produces a semiotics of the photograph that squarely puts the ethnographic imagination on the side of the pose. These ethnographic photos, for him, are frozen, static images that capture their subjects “dead in camera time,” bringing about their “extinction.”41 Interrupting relationships with the past, they are “discontinuous artifacts in a colonial roadshow” that allow the past to be consumed, rendering it unreal.42 “This obsession with the tribal past is not an innocent collection of arrowheads, not a crude map of public camp sites in sacred places, but rather a statement of academic power and control over tribal images, an excess of facts, data, narrative interviews, template discoveries.”43 The photograph as document and evidence becomes one of the means of colonization, rendering the Native (the real) into a meta-savage (the Indian as simulation of the Native).

The emblematic creator of the ethnographic pose, for Vizenor, is Edward Curtis, who famously employed a pictorialist aesthetic for the purposes of documenting a “vanishing race.” For Vizenor, Curtis’s manipulations of the images he produced, both in terms of his construction of dramatic scenes to be photographed and his post-production techniques, editing out signs of contemporaneity, indicate clearly Curtis’s ideological project, which led to distortion and, ultimately, the “invention of tribes.” Pauline Wakeham in Taxidermic Signs further elaborates on the complexity of Curtis’s images, which, like taxidermy, present a certain semiotics and appearance of liveness through practices of preservation that ultimately signify death: “Curtis’s photographic salvaging perpetuated the nostalgic pathos of American imperialist discourse by aestheticizing the death of the native other via the project of photographic preservation.”44 Locating Curtis’s project in the history of museum display, particularly those of natural history, Wakeham argues that the process of taxidermizing animal corpses, within the evolutionary displays of “species,” transfers certain signs to the racialized body of Natives. This transference indicates the attempt to master nature that continues in Curtis’s vast survey of Indigenous peoples, one that spanned forty years and produced over forty thousand images. In fact, Curtis began his career as a self-taught nature photographer, taking the aesthetics of presenting the settler landscape, one created as “natural” and untouched despite thousands of years of Indigenous presence and relationality, and turning it toward Indigenous peoples.

Describing the material and imperial foundations of Curtis’s project, Wakeham notes his governmental work with the BIA and the funding he received from railroad tycoon J. P. Morgan, who established the corporation The Native American Indian Inc.: “by working in conjunction with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the one hand, and by forming alliances with the railroad industries of Morgan on the other, Edward Curtis developed his salvaging project within a powerful matrix of white imperial interests in turn-of-the-century America.”45 Curtis’s project relies on an oscillating sense of life and death, as Wakeham’s use of the imaginary of the taxidermic makes clear. This shifting movement and ambiguity extends to the interpretation and continuing popularity of Curtis’s images. Wakeham quotes Chris Lyman: “If pictorial photographs go out of vogue, Curtis’s images sell as anthropological documents. If anthropological documents are not in fashion, his images still appeal to fans of pictorialism and devotees of popular imagery of American Indians. Even those who cannot afford to buy original photographs and photogravures can choose from a remarkable array of reproductions of Curtis’s work; in posters, books, portfolios, slides, and magazines.”46 Between the imperial ambitions Curtis advanced with his photographic survey, his conflation of Native people with nature through aesthetics, the ideological projection of the images into a future tense “what will have been,” and, particularly, the ambiguity of Curtis’s images between art and document, Curtis created a powerful, flexible, and durable node in the humanizing project using images of Indigenous people.

Curtis produced a hybrid image in the form of ethnographic portraiture. In this sense, Curtis wasn’t simply attempting to photograph a people before they disappeared in order to create a lasting record in memoriam. He was, rather, enabling the process described by Patrick Wolfe as “the elimination of the native” through the production of a material imaginary.47 But, unlike the apparatuses of absorption described by Wolfe that sought to separate the native as biopolitical excess from the becoming-human potential citizen of the state, Curtis was—more like John Collier and his promotion of Native self-governance through economic development during his time as Commissioner of the BIA—intent on humanizing the Native as native, through celebration and memorialization of the Native subject, a form of elimination through positive reinforcement. This is a much more nefarious project. Understanding it requires careful attention to our work within the ruins of representation, the figures of life and death at play, and, in particular, our relationships to images.

The question of the image draws us right into the dilemma of ideological critique. Vizenor’s reading of Curtis’s pose seeks to expose a false or produced truth, but in order to do this Vizenor creates several strong dichotomies: ethnography and aesthetics, simulation and the real, the Native and the indian, representation and creativity, camera time and mythic time, motion and stasis, modernity and the past, facts and “imagic moments.” The invention of the indian, in this sense, becomes something like what Roland Barthes refers to as a mythology, a parasitic meaning that feeds vampirically on the vitality of the sign, freezing it into place, a distinct effect of the power of the image.48 Ideological critique is, then, about recuperating or reviving what is left of that originary vitality by exposing the frozen image that conceals it, feeding off its energies and distorting it. “Today, the natives in [Curtis’s] pictures, but not the simulated indians of his photographic missions, await the recuperation of visual analogy.”49

As many have already noted, such a notion of critique relies upon western figurations of life that are problematic, something I address more directly in chapter 5.50 The complications of critique can be seen in the “striptease” performed in a number of his texts by a fictional character, Tune Browne, as a form of what Vizenor calls socioacupuncture. Like acupuncture, it is the piercing that releases blocked energies, flows, in order to restore balance. Tune Browne enacts such a drama by first becoming the photographic pose: “in search of our past and common memories we walk right back into these photographs, we become the invented images.”51 Running for political office, Tune Browne goes out of his way to become an indian to garner votes, “a dreamer who lost his soul for a time and found his families in still photographs.”52 Piercing through to reality, past the dead images, he strips off cultural attire, all that is indian, in order to reach the Native beneath. This unveiling isn’t, however, to achieve identity, as there is no bedrock there. The Native, for Vizenor, is embodied, temporally mythic, storied, visionary, and constitutes an “ontic sense of presence.”53 Vizenor’s conception of the Native is in direct contrast to the “simulations by separation” that “modernist constructions of culture” produce by excluding the Native as an absence and replacing it with the strange presence of simulation that is an indian, the tragic victim, the savage who becomes present only by disappearing.

As a “release from captured images,” the striptease is an ambiguous metaphor, especially as Vizenor relates it to Roland Barthes’s description of the “myth” of mid-twentieth-century Parisian striptease by women and its heteropatriarchal nationalization. Barthes, in his piece, reads the semiotics of the movements, gestures, and costumes, claiming that the moment the dancer is naked, she is desexualized, returned to a natural state of “perfectly chaste” flesh. There are many things to take issue with in Barthes’s text, not least of which is the decision to perform a semiotic analysis of sex work without any discussion of gender, sexuality (really), or capitalism (beyond references to the petit bourgeois), but in order to understand Vizenor’s use of Barthes’s analysis, it is necessary to follow the line of Barthes’s (and Vizenor’s) argument while marking the deficiencies of the text. It is an odd choice to transpose onto the semiotics of simulation of the indian. But it is central to Vizenor’s analysis of the image, as it is in the final moments of Tune Browne’s striptease—transposed also in terms of gender—when the ambiguity of the metaphor occurs and we get a sense of Vizenor’s performative notion of the Native. His celebratory description of the striptease as a “release,” as liberation from the fixture of the indian, is a reversal of Barthes’s more critical reading of the dance as a national myth. Vizenor’s transversal could be read as an appropriation, which would be in keeping with Vizenor’s use of a “trickster hermeneutics,” which also includes the fluidity of gender embodied in many of Vizenor’s characters, but the impulse to recuperate Vizenor’s reading as a queer Indigenous strategy passes over some of the more sticky aspects of such a liberatory narrative.

One of the more important facets of Barthes’s analysis is the idea that the “petrified eroticism,” the cliché embodied in props, costumes, and gestures, acts as an inoculation of the public in order to “plunge it afterwards into a permanently immune Moral Good.”54 Moving from separation through spectacle (a male-dominated sphere of seeming sexual transgression through the gaze, which is, of course, depressingly normative) to liberal humanist progressive incorporation of striptease as a way of life (a career), Barthes documents the shift from magic show-esque spectacle to an everyday household property of the bourgeois, thereby becoming part of the national myth. This becoming myth is effected through the art of technique, the props, the costumes, which all contribute to the “meticulous exorcism of sex,” so that the dance, and those who dance, can reenter the public sphere, reassuring it of its inherent goodness.55

Vizenor cites the first line of Barthes’s text, which lays out the problem of the striptease as a dialectical contradiction in which what the dance seems to be doing (offering up sex to the male gaze) is not what it is really doing, conjuring the idea of sex like a magic trick. The ideological structure is apparent. Which is why, when the revelation occurs, Barthes makes the problematic claim that the dancer’s body is desexualized as it is caught in an act of disappearance of both the props that hold up sex and the body itself, which disappears through naturalization. It is an act of revelation that is in some ways the inverse of the exposure enacted by ideological critique. The question becomes: What is the real for Barthes in this context? Is it sex outside the gaze, liberated from this false liberation? But this answer still centers the male gaze in opposition, hence the dialectical problem of a semiotics of the real. The answer, for Barthes, must be, in the end, the sign sex. Ideological critique of myths must pierce the fictional real to find the source of their meanings in a first-order semiotics. Following Marx, this piercing through is the recuperation of a language of action that eludes the second order of myth by recourse to a notion of the performative, like a woodcutter’s use of the word tree.56 But its recuperation also draws the sign sex into an economy of action that is distinctly vitalist. The vitality of signs here is akin to Friedrich Nietzsche’s description of first-order metaphors as a “hot magma” of images, vital and creative metaphors which slowly individualize and deaden over time with repeated usage and become concepts that take on the stability of truth and fact and contribute to the construction of massive edifices of knowledge.57 This knowledge is an imposition of human mental constructs onto the world, through which the world gets assimilated. The critical answer for many who ascribe to such a notion is a return to the aesthetic, the originary metaphors, or signs, in Barthes’s case.

Gerald Vizenor’s emphasis on the snapshot (which is Native) as contradicting the pose (of the indian) uses this strategy, but in relation to the moment of revelation when Tune Browne strips, the snapshot takes on a different valence. With the removal of his “tribal vestments,” the images disappear, “the inventors and the colonialists vanished,” the separation of the past from the present dissolves, and, in a dim light, naked, Tune Browne tells a story about how he and Ishi (the so-called “last of the Yahi”58) received honorary degrees from the University of California Berkeley as “intuitive scholars.” The audience has become populated with ghosts, animals (totemic and otherwise), dream beasts, and trees, and Tune Browne addresses them in a vision, telling a story about the ceremony in the Redwoods where “morning ghosts ride with our dreams over the tribal stories from the past, dark waves, slow waves, water demons under our ocean skin waves, trickeries and turtle memories under the stone waves, under the word gates, through the earth where we hold our origins with the trees and the wind, creation myths with ocean roots. . . . The ghosts dance roundabout in our dreams, clouds dance and burn free in the rituals of the morning sun.”59 Vizenor links the story to a transvaluation in which “the despised and oppressed” are turned into “symbols of salvation and rebirth.”60 The ceremony ends with Tune Browne and Ishi both dancing in a round dance, echoing the prophetic Ghost Dance, in breechcloths and academic sashes, “a striptease, deep in cultural revolution.”61 A final call from the crowd to “take it off” brings the ceremony and the text to a close with a “word striptease. Silence . . .” followed by what can only be a postscript: N. Scott Momaday’s most quoted phrase, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves . . . The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.”62 To which Tune Browne, in a perhaps tongue-in-cheek way, responds ambiguously, echoing Ishi, “Evelybody hoppy?”

The striptease performed by Tune Browne was an entry into “mythic time,” represented by the visionary quality of the images and the playfulness of the turns and various resistances enacted. The ambiguity of Tune Browne/Ishi’s final phrase, whether it is an entreaty in the form of a question or a stinging, sarcasm-laced jab—“evelybody hoppy?”—echoes its complexity. Are these representations romantic images of indians performed for a non-Native audience? But who is the audience, overlaid as it is by the denizens of mythic time? Is this the Native real beneath the fictions of representational truths? But what is to be made of the reference to transvaluation and for whom is the Native a symbol of salvation and rebirth? Are all of these just feints to draw us in? Lures promising a new turn in the obsession with the mysteries of the Native (theorist, in this case, offering a resuscitation of theory)? Yes, because it references the end of the world in the form of the Ghost Dance that promises the disappearance of the colonizers. And Tune Browne understands the desire that the colonizer also has for this end by accepting the spurious honorary degree (the colonizer, after all, came up with the concept of their own death drive, engaged manifest destiny as part of an apocalyptic strategy of revelation, and continues to push global environmental collapse). The text/ceremony, at the same time, performs this disappearance of the colonizers through the return of the dead as told in prophecy, syncing with an Indigenous intellectual tradition and response to destruction.

Photography and the Image

Photography has been both disparaged and admired for its lack of critical power, its own and what it calls for. In either case, this lack lies in the ambiguity of the photograph in terms of its identity as either a scientific tool or an aesthetic object, as well as its resistance to discourse or meaning making, its flatness or matteness as a document that simply asserts the referent was there. In terms of its aesthetics, while there are certainly powerful and/or beautiful photographic images as well as masters of the art, the photograph always implies something of an accident, a fortuitous moment caught as part of a series of less compelling images that end up not being developed or thrown away. The most amazing image still implies that the photographer was lucky they were there to catch it: among the proliferation of any-instant-whatevers, the photograph was simply the one that stood out. In this sense, photography is more a practice of proliferation and art of curation. The photographic image, because of its mechanical nature and documentary quality, also resists in-depth critical analysis, offering not much in the way of intervention into the image. This is to say that the photographer, subject, and viewer are connected through their respective limited agencies. Roland Barthes, for these reasons, famously lauded the passivity of the medium, finding in this passivity something of its phenomenological essence.63

And yet, the image is also connected to the increasingly powerful agency associated with the technomediation of the human sense of sight and power to know. Rey Chow has detailed how a totalized image of “the world,” as made possible by certain imaging technologies, syncs up with Paul Virilio’s insight that vision and war are intimately linked: “For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye,” an expansion of the familiar analogy between the gun and the camera through the homonym shoot.64 Chow notes how the same technologies are used both to extend the powers of human sight and to increase the accuracy of targeting. In this sense, the world itself, grasped as a picture/target, is no longer simply an object of knowledge but a condition for sight: “the process of (visual) objectification has become so indispensable in the age of modern scientific research that understanding—‘conceiving’ and ‘grasping’ the world—is now an act inseparable from the act of seeing—from a certain form of ‘picturing.’”65 This world picture is also a maximal target, the object to be destroyed. According to Chow, this total image with its conditioning of sight is a co-constitutive subjectivation that brings the world picture before “men” who struggle to conquer it, activating an “unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things,” in their image, a clear process of humanization.66 Such an apocalyptic vision of unveiling, through the wedding of image and material constitution (unveiling as making a permanently unveiled world), takes the form of scientific and technological mediation, which become necessary conditions for establishing a self in a world that has become a picture/target.

To speak of the photograph in relation to the current conditions of the image makes photography seem quaint. The new total-image is understood to be embodied, dialogic, multimediated, reflexive, more supple and live, often based on acts of critique and resuscitation of the supposedly fixed and dead images of the past by perpetually self-correcting colonial forces in their updated technological, scientific, and aesthetic modes. In fact, this new image isn’t an image at all but rather seeks a step beyond the regime of representation through the intricate wedding of image and materiality. As Jean Baudrillard succinctly put it (during a time when this seemed less true than today), “we have swallowed the mirror.”67 Representation has been consumed and assimilated by the forces of production. “What characterizes the so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images.”68 Multiple and with new powers drawn from its mutation, the image now functions at a cellular level, locally, and dispersed uniquely into each and every identity as an internalized and thereby erased caesura. The well-known mirror-stage dialectic between one’s identity and externalized images, discussed earlier in relation to Native photography, has become a general condition of life with social media such that the effect is largely invisible. The very darkness of matter now shimmers with an infinity of opaque reflections. Almost seen. Almost there. Going a step further, as I noted, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro recently declared the age of anti-Narcissus, ushering in various forms of posthumanism that have left both the image and signification behind.69

In the proliferation of small screens, a genuinely atmospheric swarming of any-instant-whatevers, in the further eroding of the difference between still and moving images (digital), and the democratizing (?) of the aerial view, in the expansion of simulation through artificial intelligence and the deepfake, the outsourcing of memory to databases, and reliance upon real-time mapping from a global perspective using the same technology as missile guidance systems, in the materialization of the “copy” through cloning technology, we are reaching a point where the image hasn’t simply replaced the real but the image itself has disappeared. The image no longer holds any fascination as it has become coterminous with reality; the two have become confused and their lack of distinction spells their end. The idea that there was a sense of unmediated reality now seems distant and certainly irrelevant to many contemporary experiences. This is the event that Baudrillard placed as the culmination of the drama of western metaphysics, the completion of a puzzle created twenty-five hundred years ago near the Mediterranean Sea, one materially carried out by the turns of progressive technomediation: the apocalypse.

In the Baudrillard quote about the apocalypse being the end of secrecy and the sun manifested on earth, cited by Byrd, the material conditions of this apocalypse, whether in the form of atomic destruction or the indiscernibility between screens and nerves, is mirrored by the conditions of knowledge. Just as the image has disappeared through its oversaturation and the murder of its own referent, knowledge has disappeared into various forms of telecommunication, intelligence, and data, which, thanks to increasingly complex computations carried out by machines, have become largely inaccessible to humans, even while humans still operate them.70 And yet the database and artificial intelligence are, for Baudrillard, the end of mystery, the unveiling. Positivism has prevailed. The world has been en/decoded, or so they say.

In relation to the anticolonial project of revitalizing Native ways of being, this should give pause. While practices of representation have moved in directions that seek to disavow their own pasts—dematerializing in some cases (moving away from collections as sources of knowledge), textualizing, performing, and seeking new, sometimes experimental, but more flexible and reflexive forms of representation, even moving beyond the regime of representation entirely to the agency of things—Native peoples have become the inheritors of the dangerous, abandoned images and objects of past knowledge-production: the collections and archives. Considering these conditions, what does research in the colonial archive, a.k.a. the ruins of representation, look like for California Indian people? Through an uneasy habitus of visual and political ambiguity, California Indian communities have been engaged in such research as part of cultural revitalization efforts, which have their source in earlier prophetic movements such as the Ghost Dance and the Bole Maru. These range across language reclamation,71 revitalization of women’s coming of age and other ceremonies,72 renewal of traditional burning practices and other forms of care for the land,73 destruction of dams and protection of and reconnection to salmon and other nonhuman relatives,74 resurgence of boating and other societies, and an increase in basket weavers in relation to the LandBack movement,75 land stewardship relationships, and the development of Native gardens, among many other things. These practices often have complex relationships to the archive and the colonial visual regime.

The complex relationship is in part because the ruins of representation take many forms thanks to the multimedia approach of anthropologists—which created the salvage snapshot image, “including texts (primarily in Native languages), ethnographic observations, sound recordings, artifacts, as well as photographs. All were discrete objects in some way, and all could ultimately be preserved in a museum or archives.”76 Such a separation of the senses and bodily imaginary into differentiated media—and thereby disciplines, fields, and knowledge products—locates and materializes colonial discourses of separation into discrete objects. In order to hear a recorded song, see the instruments with which it was played, read the ethnographic notes, make sense of the words or vocables, or view a video recording of the performance requires one to move through multiple partitions, visiting different archives and collections, organized and governed by different disciplinary and institutional forms, with different rules of access and rationalized through different intellectual discourses and systems of notation. It also places the location of culture squarely within the realm of the human separated from relations with other beings, the Indigenous world translated into belief, an image, captured in archived stories. In the western sense, both ethnographically and aesthetically, culture functions to separate humans from nature—two concepts that either don’t exist or don’t mean the same thing in Indigenous frameworks. The work of humanization has sought to disturb what Coulthard calls grounded normativity (an interrelational sense of governance, connection, and reciprocity, what Indigenous peoples generally mean by culture), through both representation and, materially, through removals, terraforming the land through private and public development (including public works projects such as dams, national parks, and creation of agricultural spaces), replacing Indigenous species and food sources with large-scale agribusiness and landscaping, a settler population explosion, and destroying species through environmental devastation.77 These colonial ruins have become a solely human imaginary, projected onto and realized through the disrupted Indigenous world.

So what does photography offer to this situation of the image for California Indian people? Speaking about the ethnophotographic collections at the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum on the UC Berkeley campus, Ira Jacknis, former curator of the Hearst Museum, states, “Native people are now the most interested and dedicated users of these ethnographic collections.”78 Add to this the work of California Indian photographers such as Cara Romero and Dugan Aguilar; photography collections such as First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians, edited by Tongva-Ajachamem artist L. Frank and Kim Hogeland, as well as the role photography has played in California Indian–centric news publications, such as News from Native California, and one begins to get a sense of the significance of this question. The colonial disturbance of the Indigenous world is, as I have been arguing throughout this chapter, a struggle over land and territory, including the territory or space of the image. Both paintings and photographs, from the inception of California as a settler geopolitical construct, have sought to create an image of inhabitable space for settlers. This progressive and then seemingly inexorable imaginary operates in line with the changes in the California landscape.

Barthes has also noted that photography is related to death; for him, it is the eidos, the distinctive expression, of the photograph.79 Calling it a “microversion of death,” like the taxidermic for Wakeham, Barthes understands that it is precisely the production of a sense of the lifelike that associates photography with death. But, as I discuss earlier, this liveliness will open up a certain power of passivity that allows photography to slip outside of discourses that seek to capture and make meaning from its images, to turn its referents into objects. Further, its elusiveness aligns the photograph with the prolixity of materiality through its very mediatory quality and materials (light, paper, chemicals), which allows for an immediate connection between viewer and viewed across time and space. Photography’s destructive power has possibility for depleting the vital energy reserves upon which colonialism feeds.

Before I can begin to discuss the significance of this insight about the passivity of the image and its possibilities for California Indian people, anticolonial work, and the relation to the archive, though, I need to address Barthes’s explicit proclamations of his desire to become “a primitive” as a way to evade the trap of culture.80 A thread that runs throughout his book Camera Lucida, and indeed throughout the rest of his body of work, this impulse depends on the problematic separation of anthropology and history and the assumption that Indigenous people are absorbed into knowledge immediately without the possibility of critical reflection, part of nature in fact, and therefore a resource for the thoughtful critic to see, experience, and know otherwise. Barthes variously desires to be “a primitive, without culture” while looking at the photographs he loves, senses that photography is a “primitive theater” offering an opportunity to meditate on masks and death, proclaims that he is “a primitive, a child—a maniac” in order to assert his irreducible and intractable individuality, and draws on the figure of the primitive philosopher (discussed in the introduction).81 In all these gestures, he asserts that, materially speaking, photography is a form of magic and not an art; he is, like the salvage ethnographers, using culture to adapt Indigenous ways for western critical projects. He takes these positions in order to develop his “subjective science” in the name of a universal truth as opposed to the general. What Barthes perhaps does differently, by drawing on a more difficult aspect of Indigenous conceptions of the image and reality and emphasizing their ambiguity, is offer a possible way to repatriate stolen Indigenous ideas and begin to grind the colonial project to a halt. This is in part because he does so with an explicit adisciplinary orientation: he is not trying to salvage a colonial mode of knowledge production; in fact he is attempting to neutralize the role of the professional critic.

The Ethnophotographic (Re)Turn

In 1993, my mother, a basket weaver, was awarded a Native arts grant to study the vast collection of California Indian baskets housed in the UC Berkeley warehouses. While there, she was informed by the curator that many of their archived ethnographic photos had recently been digitized and uploaded to the Online Archive of California. The curator offered to use the search engine to see if any of my mother’s family members had their photos there, and, in the collection titled “Guide to the California Ethnographic Field Photographs, 1900–1960,” in the subsection “Northeast California Achumawi,” there were two images of my mother’s grandmother: a slightly blurry facing head shot and a more focused profile.

When I arrived on campus for graduate school in 2006, I had heard of the existence of these images. I had never seen them, and, to be honest, I had half-forgotten them. But it had become part of the family narrative, a complicated mixture of colonial encounters in itself. While doing research (really just drifting) in the online ethnographic collections of the curator and anthropologist Edward W. Gifford, I came across the images of my great-grandmother. Taken by Gifford, they were entitled, “Edna Lowry August, 1922” and “Edna Lowry (profile) August, 1922.” Having been made aware of them, I was only half-surprised. In many ways, I was confirmed. The “oh, there you are” confirmation of family story mingled, uncomfortably, with the ethnographic and racialized evidence of one branch of my Native descent—a question of authenticity that gets raised for many mixed Native people, especially in California due to its violent past.

Part of the salvage ethnographic survey of California Indian cultures, these images were contained in a subsection of that project, as Gifford was interested in the racial science of anthropometry—the measurement of the body to try to understand and make arguments about social and racial essences. Of the 2,500 photographic negatives that have been digitized in the guide, 565 were taken by Gifford. The rest were portrait-style images, people posing in regalia, images of dwellings, ceremonial houses as well as ceremonies, certain features of the land (some sacred), and different implements. Taken by a number of other anthropologists, they represented forty-four tribes across California, organized geographically: Northeast California, Northwest California, Southern California, South Central California, and North Central California. What marks Gifford’s images as anthropometric is the pairing of the facing head shot and the profile (echoing the mugshot). It is this turn away from the camera in two stilled moments that unequivocally racializes them. Resonant with Wakeham’s argument about the role of taxidermic signifiers in ethnographic images, Gifford began his career as an assistant curator of ornithology at the California Academy of Sciences—a connection that is both consistent with the colonial archive and oddly echoes the complex relation of many California Indian ceremonial practices to birds; this relation to birds is at least a reprieve from the animalized language of genocidal discourse that generally used the nomenclature for deer to reference California Indians, a reference directly linked to hunting, the fur trade, and the intentional decimation of Indigenous animal species. Gifford’s work as a museum curator propelled his career and informed his practice of salvage ethnography, placing his anthropometric work clearly within the logic of racial types.

The coincidence of anthropometry with salvage ethnography is, of course, not an accident. Boasian anthropology supposedly sought a distinctly pluralist and nonhierarchical understanding of cultures (in opposition to the more clearly racial and Eurocentric civilizationist discourses that he sought to critique); his notion of culture created a racialized conception of knowledge that extracted from but didn’t formally address Indigenous forms of knowledge. Through this racialized conception of culture a distinction is made between the development of westernized “American” culture, founded in a modern aesthetic feeling, often adopted from Indigenous people, and that of Indigenous people themselves, an attitude which one of Boas’s other students, Clark Wissler, crystallizes by calling Indigenous peoples “slackers in culture.”82 As Bennett notes, “Boasian anthropology played a key role in detaching Native Americans from the realms of American history and assigning them to a timeless anthropological present that was in America, but not of it.”83

Boas’s own interest in anthropometry makes most clear how Native cultures functioned as defamiliarizing devices for a white settler nationalizing project. Alongside his work in salvage ethnography, Boas was also engaged in studying the bodies of immigrants in U.S. public schools, which provided him with anthropometric data about the effects immigration had on the bodies of children.84 Seemingly indicating an interest in culture’s impact on the plasticity of the body, with odd resonances to the implicit hierarchization of culture and the racialization of non-white bodies, highlighting the dialectical tension between the two, Boas relied upon the racial scientific categories that generally inform anthropometry: biologically differentiated stocks of humanity named Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear, in their article, “‘Your DNA Is Our History,’” note how “in the interest of promoting ‘European’ knowledge, moral claims to access indigenous lands and bodies get made.”85 This construction of race, particularly whiteness as property, proceeds through genetic sciences and genographic projects that seek to map racialized populations globally in their origins and movements, an undercurrent of the culture concept. This mapping project both asserts a singular humanity and simultaneously sediments essentialized differences, making other races the property of European knowledge and yet differentiating them according to complex historical, scientific, and evolutionary calculi and narratives.

Boas conveniently left African Americans and Native Americans outside of his anthropometric science of assimilation, arguing that both groups physioanatomically would eventually disappear through interracial mixing or, in the case of Native Americans on reservations, being too distant from the centers of “culture” to become part of “American” stock (with the usual exclusion of any discussion of genocide).86 For Bennett, this exclusion was an analogous project to and part and parcel with Boas’s larger vision for anthropology to provide the guiding frameworks for white settler nationalization: “the plasticity and conjunctural mutability of inherited cultures was translated into the enculturation of [people of color] into white culture.”87 Boasian anthropology was part of the assimilative energies of the development of a national identity that was at one and the same time flexibly inclusive while centralized around whiteness. Bennett notes the historical conjuncture of a 1790 Act of Congress that limited citizenship to white land-owning persons and the immigration and citizenship laws passed between 1840 and 1924 (the year that Native Americans became citizens) as together making a laboratory for redefining whiteness. Undergirding Boas’s anthropometric project was a dialectic of installing national myths and memories into descendants of Europeans—to help them forget their European ancestry—through purposeful population sciences linked to the subsidized settlement of small towns throughout the United States, a force of absorption into white nationalism using Indigenous land.

The above is one context for understanding the images of my grandmother. It is buoyed by a textual and metric supplement to the images (or vice versa, depending on how one looks at it). “Grouped under the respective California groups to which one parent belongs,” the archive locates my great-grandmother under the titles “Hybrids” and “Achomawi”; alongside her images is a list of numbers and code:

Edna Lowry. F 37 St 1710 Hsh 1405 HMF 640 Str 1760 HS 900 WSh 360 LF 450 LH 190 BH 144 LFH 186 LFN 123 BF 135 LN 52 BN 35 LE 66 BE 32——RI 102.9 CI 75.7 FI 91.1 NI 67.3 EI 48.5 (half white)——U (lighter than) 24 E 25 (ruddy on cheek bones).88

Measurements of her age, body (primarily), and skin tone (Gifford attempted to document the racial disappearance of California Indians in shades), these numbers insert themselves into the metrical space between the two photographs. Like all metrical units, they both facilitate connections and infinitely separate. Simply facing the camera, the image could be read as a pared-down document of humanity exposed, similar to Dorothea Lange’s or Walker Evans’s work (though, significantly, not Edward Curtis’s), minus the aesthetic composition or even steady hand. (The images are a bit blurry, a testament to the frantic nature of the survey as a snapshot of supposedly quickly disappearing peoples.) But adding the complement of the profile, the turn away from the direct gaze of the camera with its capture of the soul in the subject’s eyes, turns the affect away from humanism toward scientific meter. The turn here is both a metrical step and a step into meter. The anthropometric form connects her images to the use of anthropometry and statistics for the development of criminology, as Sekula describes, as well as the colonial and imperial use of the form to control colonized subjects around the world, especially the medicalized images of indentured workers by medical doctors on colonial plantations.89 Different uses, perhaps, but the same form illuminates the figure of the human organizing these images.

Another more complicated context is the series of images of Edna Lowry and her family—my family. Many of these are part of private collections, including the photograph of her with her husband, Robert Lowry, that hangs on the wall in my parents’ home. These images fulfill the typical sociological function of family rite. They are forms of remembrance and record family ties. Copies exist in multiple households, connecting us across these images. What is complicated about these connections is that they operate within a reformed notion of the extended nuclear family imposed by colonial conceptions of kinship. This imposition of family form is part of the “straightening” of the Native family in line with the development of private property and the destruction of collective forms of ownership, as detailed by Mark Rifkin, Scott Lauria Morgensen, and others.90 While I have a sense of what social and familial relationships looked like for California Indians prior to contact, like Pico, it is a dark part inside of me.

The family as a unit has come to define my Indianness in many ways (as connection to community and ceremony, through the ubiquitous genealogical chart and ancestral ties, in the extended narrative of my family that has spilled into the public realm due to the important work many of my family members are doing),91 and yet the blurring between family and tribe has significant historical and social complications. The federally recognized rancheria I belong to (Susanville Indian Rancheria)—because Edna and Robert Lowry became early members—is made up of four distinct “anthropologically defined” tribes—Paiute, Mountain Maidu, Pit River, and Washoe—but it was initially solely a federally recognized Paiute tribe. During reorganization, in order to not lose status, the tribe was forced to open their rolls to Native people from other tribes living in the nearby community because the Paiute were considered to be a family and, according to the federal government, a family could not be recognized as a tribe. This is how Edna and Robert became members. (Some unrecognized California Indian tribes have unrecognized status because they refused this model of reorganization.)

And yet the family form materially supports the tribal and has been an important part of survival for communities who have undergone relentless devastation and direct attempts of genocidal extermination, outside the terms of federal recognition. Speaking about the photographs of my mother’s cousin, Dugan Aguilar, in the foreword to a collection of his work edited by Theresa Harlan that presents Dugan’s decades-long project of documenting the endurance and resurgence of California Indian communities, founder of Heyday Books Malcolm Margolin notes:

These are portraits of our friends and neighbors, of people we know or think we know, people glowing with the fullness of being, people whose survival in this world is nothing short of amazing. . . . Look closely at the people here. Think about who they might be, about what their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents experienced. Imagine who their children and grandchildren might be. Look with your eyes and with your heart. She Sang Me a Good Luck Song is a record of a people who, against all odds, have survived. The volume you are holding in your hands is, in essence, nothing less than a Book of Miracles.92

Recoiling a bit from the romanticized notion of Indigenous people as “miraculous” (I prefer something more hard-edged; see chapter 4), I am nonetheless in agreement with Margolin’s insight that Dugan’s photography captures something of the force of survival and, I would argue, thereby necessarily something of the Destruction, of luck, both in its form of documentation and in the subjects he documented, including his own family members, my family members.

In the introduction, Harlan expands on this idea by noting the ethical and processual aspect of Dugan’s work:

There are no “stolen” moments in Dugan’s photographs: he doesn’t use photojournalist tricks to photograph a person without his or her knowledge, and his approach is not intrusive. Instead, through Dugan’s photography, we become witnesses to intimate moments between friends and family who knowingly share their presence with him. In turn, Dugan presents each person in the light of their accomplishments and contributions. He solidifies his relationships with his subjects by presenting them with large, high-quality prints of the images. His photographs are an extension of the relationships that hold a community of individuals together; relationships that are familial, tribal, and contemporary.93

This last point emphasizes the significance of family and community in the photograph and of photography in the family and community. It also emphasizes the role of the photographer in offering a relational and reciprocal method. Dugan presents Indianness as part of the family form and extends it through community beyond the connections between humans. “Living in an Indigenous Light,” the title of one chapter, atmospherically and materially makes communal and familial connections through the medium of photography and sight, while the chapter “In Song and Dance, We Embody the Dreams of Our Ancestors” challenges the purely visual aspect of photography. The chapter “Wa’tu Ah’lo: We Are Connected to the Earth Through Our Umbilical Cord” interrelationally connects the family to the more-than-human world and an Indigenous sense of place and land. There is no figure of the western “human” to be found here. There is no composite image but rather a collective and collectivizing one by, with, and for California Indian peoples. It is an angle of perception from gathering spaces and ceremony, a light touch that upholds and makes connections. And this perception reflects back onto the form of the family. Dugan was, after all, the one who took the family photograph every year at our family reunion, standing on a ladder to capture us all. This took place on our family’s land, an allotment where the tribe of my great-great-grandmother, Julia Lowry (Mountain Maidu), Robert’s mother, had a village site.

Edna Lowry’s anthropometric photographs need to similarly be put into relation not only with the method of making images but also with the realm of research. In First Families, Two Spirit Tongva-Ajachamem artist and activist L. Frank and Kim Hogeland also emphasize an Indigenous approach to the family and photography.94 Constituting a massive research project to present and contextualize family photographs of California Indian people across the state, Frank lays out a method that is the inverse, or perhaps shadow, of the photographic survey project of salvage ethnography:

At the beginning of this wonderful immersion in our California Native lives, we asked if we could enter Indian homes and meeting places to look at people’s personal family photo albums and record them talking about their pictures. My job was simply to look and listen. . . . People opened their lives to us. Many times they thanked us for listening instead of telling them what was important. Most of the people we listened to were elders. The images were chosen by the interviewees with no direction from me other than “Choose what is important to you and your family for whatever reason. Define yourself for yourself.” What emerged was no less than incredible.95

The images people shared range across historical portraits (individual and family), a contemporary picture of a Tongva grindcore band, images of significant and sometimes devastating historical moments (such as “the last photo taken at Warner Springs before the Cupeño removal to Pala, May 1903”), babies in baby baskets, Native people in regalia (both traditional and powwow style), photos representing different eras of clothing, people at work, images of revitalized cultural practices such as ti’at societies, and a prison photo.96

For Frank, this research is a work of exhaustion, thoughtful suspension, and reticence, even failure:

I’ve talked about my journey into the real California to my friends and a few strangers, and I have tried to write about it, but only drawings came out until now. And even now, the shared emotions of more than one hundred elders’ voices are really to be absorbed and pondered more than written about. Marina said to me one day something about how exhausted we were after interviewing only two families in one day (we would spend about three hours with each person). When I heard her say this, I realized I was exhausted not because three hours is a long time, but because these generous people took us down a very long path, paved deeply with timeless emotions connected to some creator or some act of magic or one particular spot on earth.97

The photographs become an occasion for storytelling, for beginning a journey “down a very long path” (Frank covered more than just the fifty-five thousand miles physically). The collective feelings of elders open up a certain passivity before them, perhaps onto the interminable, translated here as timeless, magic, a particular spot on earth. What accumulates are not just the fifteen hundred images collected or even the hours and hours of stories told, but the exhaustion itself, a passive action that connects the project to the exhaustion of ghost dancers in their collectively felt emotions.

Unlike Dugan’s book, which emphasizes the images and spares explanation, Frank and Hogeland’s tightly weaves words and images, echoing at times the ethnographic in drawing abstract geographic boundaries (for organizational purposes), explaining the images with cultural and historical contexts presented as information, flat facts. There are also profound moments of analysis in the stories of the people who offered the photographs, such as Richard Stewart’s description of his grandfather, Louie Stewart, buying the camera in 1919 that produced the images present in the book as well as a compact recorder to tape himself telling stories and explaining the Paiute language shortly before he died. “He carried on with himself because there was no one else around. And he kind of like fell in love with the machine. . . . So you’re kind of moving with the time and staying with it. . . . And the interesting thing was, when he died is when I found out he couldn’t read or write.”98 Moving with the time and staying with it, using the recording device to archive what can’t be read or written. I discuss this art of preservation in the last chapter of this book because it resonates with Maidu painter Frank Day’s similar project. It is a project that was seemingly widespread, a generalized singular response to the destruction. The self-recording of stories, songs, and language is part of the deep personal archives of California Indian families, mapping what Frank calls “the real California.”99 This auditory map obliquely is the soundtrack for the family photographs.

First Families is another place where I ran across images of my great-grandmother, this time intentionally; I went looking for them. Frank interviewed Dugan and his mother, Virginia Aguilar, and they provided two images of Edna Lowry, Virginia’s mother. The first was taken sometime in the 1890s and shows her as a very young woman or an older girl. The photo is cropped, as elbows of seemingly two men seated and wearing jackets are visible resting on a table on either side of her. Edna stands, staring directly into the camera, her right hand resting palm down on the table. She is wearing a white dress, wrinkled with poofy shoulders and a sash for a belt. A shawl of some sort made of a darker material is clasped tightly at her neck and drapes unevenly down her torso. Her expression, to me, is inscrutable. I don’t know if this is the oldest image of her, but her youth renders her nearly unrecognizable to me in relation to the other images of her I know. I have seen this image before, in my mother’s collection. I have also seen the second one, taken in 1910, of my great-grandmother seated with three of her young children and a small dog, the youngest child on her lap. Here to me she looks much more like her. Her features, ones that I see in certain members of my family, are much more defined. What is perhaps striking about this image is that my great-grandmother is the only one, including the dog, who isn’t looking directly into the camera; she looks slightly off-center/out of frame.

In Frank and Hogeland’s book, the images of Edna Lowry are surrounded by images of her family, her daughter Virginia and son-in-law Robert Aguilar, her grandson Dugan and granddaughter Judith Lowry, her husband Robert and his brother Wyatt Lowry, her son Leonard Lowry, and her mother Susie Evans. These are the images one finds in a family photo album; many of them are in my mother’s album. What aren’t included in these or any other albums are anthropometric photographs. They are left in the museum and under the sign of a now-outdated racialized science. What would it take to bring them home?

Edna Lowry’s anthropometric images are caught between the form of the images, the context of anthropometry, and the content, in this case, my great-grandmother, the context of family photographs. Her images are also caught between the cultural image of the salvage snapshot and the racialized image of a disappearing Indianness. Perhaps the approach shouldn’t be one of trying to critically analyze all these contexts, using them to explain the images, causing the images themselves to in a sense become more real, to take or develop, becoming more ensnared in the various discourses and their attempts to make the images mean something. Returning to the point about the lack of photography’s critical power, perhaps the answer is to lean more heavily into the ambiguity of the images themselves, an ambiguity that coincides with the ambiguity of the medium, offering a different sense of what is real. The power of the photograph as a mechanically produced document is, after all, to say that Edna Lowry was there, a proof without meaning. In a very real way, these documents are my great-grandmother. Despite the violence of the image, what I know is that my grandmother was there when these images were taken and a photographer, seemingly Gifford, was there taking them. I also know that the light that emanated from her and into the lens, captured on celluloid and then developed through a chemical process then digitized, also emanates from the screen into my eyes. Her eyes emanate directly into my eyes, connecting us materially through the medium of light. This is a profound suspension of time. Having been there to the question of her return home, raised by the violence of these images, is truly a question about the return of the ancestor, the return of the dead.

A different real, the real California, is realized in the image in the way it awakens the passive in me. This real lies somewhere between the generality of the composite image (the mean) and the universal that Barthes seeks in his subjective science and is neither of them, being far too antihuman. The images as indexicals point to Edna Lowry without pulling her into the powerful whirlpool of meaning making, without making her work for us today (absorbed into culture, aesthetics, or politics and our everyday affairs). She is here before me, one hundred years later as I write this, and she is there in the past. She is also, of course, not here as it is her image I see, and not there any longer. Photography was already, as an obsolete medium, suspended between the referent that is there and the return. It is a medium made for a postapocalyptic imaginary. But the complications of genocide, colonialism, and scientific racism and its images heighten the force of revelation and its destruction, the light of camera lucida, creating a conundrum for California Indian people: What is the postapocalyptic relation to death? Does it have something to do with the complicated Indianness that passages (camera obscura) through all these images?

Wiyot painter Rick Bartow has created an image with paper, paint, and graphite that, to my mind, captures the essence of this real, between mean and universal and neither of these, as it relates to resemblance, ancestral relations across time, and the ambiguity of the image awakening the passive within it. CS Indian in its resemblance to a face and head, seemingly morphing into one of the bird people that Bartow is known for painting without actually taking shape (a whiff of a suggestion), the two-dimensional fracturing of features without distinct breaks (even smeared), the multiplication and absence of perspective, recognizable eyes (too many) and a partial mouth, in the disorientation of the face with merely implied coordinates such as ears, the resonance with his proliferation of self-portraits in the form of animal-humans and other inhuman things, smudging of bright colors jarringly juxtaposed, and the hues of grayscale that seem to stretch the mind, has collapsed the postapocalyptic structure of time, of before and after destruction, of the sense of the apocalypse as light and destruction, of the there of ancestors before the creation of photography with the here and there, the nowhere and nowhen after it, into a density of an interminable moment. If there is a composite image of an Indian, I wager this is it. This is an other generality that opens onto the avisual conditions of the image. Bartow has said that the eyes in this painting are the eyes of ancestors that have moved across time (CS is a reference to one of Bartow’s ancestors). I say these eyes have destroyed time and also move across it, changing the relationships to the face that here seeks to hold, but cannot, all that is specific and general, resembling and distinct. It asks what is Indian about the face? Indianness in an image. The ethnophotographic turn is here turning in the partial and suggested angles, profile and forward-facing head shot collapsed in the same image/face. It says, we were always here.

When my mother first saw the anthropometric images of Edna Lowry, she saw sickness. My mother had told us that Edna Lowry must have been dying when the images were made due to her drawn-in face, accentuated by her protruding, crooked teeth and large, glossy, and etherealized eyes. She did die of tuberculosis but not until 1938, sixteen years after the photo was taken. Yet my mother was not wrong: she was searching for a language to respond to the destruction evident in the medium and the images. In the image of sickness lies the resistance to language caused by the colonial disturbance. It is a story that was made in a moment or made on the drive home. The image lingers, it comes forward with a certain truth when one actually looks away from it and drops the scrutiny. My great-grandmother is caught in a moment of dying by the very technology that makes the image both a death and the deferral of death, a mourning and the deferral of mourning. As Sontag observes, “These early technologies stage the vanishing ‘now’ to construct a past that can be accessed (and mourned) at some later time.”100 When do we get to mourn her? “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”101 Barthes was inspired to write this statement by a photograph of a young man, Lewis Payne, waiting in his cell to be hanged, in relation to a photograph of Barthes’s recently deceased mother as a child, whom Barthes was still mourning when he wrote Camera Lucida. But in the photograph of my great-grandmother, the apocalypse is ongoing in a different way. It’s not simply a moment or an individual is risked and lost by technologically produced nostalgia, but the world itself for entire peoples.

What the colonial disturbance caught/caused in the photograph is the disturbance of the relation to death. This direct disturbance takes shape as suppressing and outlawing ceremonies, lessening of the use of burnings to mediate death due to assimilation, targeting gendercide of third-gendered people who often were the caretakers of the dead (chapter 4), digging up and absconding of the bodies of ancestors (chapter 1), and destroying and replacing the world of the dead and our forms of relationality with a humanist theology (both secular and religious). In this postapocalyptic relation to death, the archive and the images of our ancestors stand in for the relation to death, with the form of destruction, and research has become a sort of ceremony. In the interdiction on mourning produced by the colonial disturbance is found a grief deferred, one that cannot transform into mourning and be thereby resolved. It is an infinite grief that finds no direct expression. The ethnographic image produces death while trying to preserve life, an asymbolic death outside of mourning, outside of the usual rhythms of life, of ceremony usually conceived. In this sense, perhaps the project of turning to our ancestors and of their returning to us is one not of giving back their humanity but their ambiguity, before us.

I close my eyes and see Edna Lowry’s teeth, chin tattoos, and eyes. What I see is the destruction captured in those eyes. In the frontal image, the process of becoming death through objectification itself gets objectified in the distinct reflection in her eyes of the light source. The absolute inseparability of the referent from the medium exposes the violence that the medium enacts on the referent through its very act of preservation. “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both.”102 One cannot separate the referent from the medium, my great-grandmother from the anthropometric image of her, without destroying both. The photograph sticks, like a flypaper made of light. The gluing together itself, as act, has been captured in this image. In the moment of encounter between a technology that perhaps lay outside of my great-grandmother’s image-repertoire and her image-repertoire proper—the object of ethnography—which gets eclipsed in the articulation caused by the light source, by the two lines of reflected light slicing across the irises of her eyes, objectification gets objectified, opening onto the disorientation of the destruction itself. The reflected light is the invisible glue holding together the seemingly inseparable referent and medium, a seam in the otherwise translucent lamina. It is also an image of what connects us materially across time. Appropriately, the reflection interrupts her gaze, obscuring the pupils, a gaze that, if left uninterrupted, would be, like the technologically limited early ethnomusicological recordings of songs of mourning, unbearable. The glossy eyes show the effects of lamination. This irruption of the medium into the flattened distance between lens and eyes raises questions: What did she see when asked to pose before the camera? What infinity did she stare into, knowing that the condition of her being photographed was her and her people’s assumed disappearance?

In the beginning it was always dark. Darkness was a woman, who had two daughters, and came from the eastward to gamble with Wildcat. She reached Wildcat’s house at night, and after supper began to talk about gambling, saying, “I never came here before. I came to gamble.” The others present advised Wildcat to play: so all the preparations were made, and, sitting on either side of the fire, they began to play. Darkness bet her two daughters against all the people which Wildcat had. Darkness wanted Wildcat to bet her husband, Chicken-Hawk, but she did not wish to. Finally, on Coyote’s advice, she bet him as chief first. Then they began to play, Coyote helping to sing. He thought the game was going favorably, and that Wildcat would win the two girls, and that he would get them for wives. But just as she almost won, Darkness beat her, and, taking Coyote, broke him in two and threw him outside. Darkness then threatened to “stay dark all the time” unless Wildcat would bet her husband, as Darkness wanted him for a husband for her daughters. Wildcat refused, and bet other people in the house. All but three offered themselves to be bet. These were Rabbit, Lizard, and Caterpillar. Finally all were lost to Darkness but these . . .103