Wanda Nanibush Notions of Land

Imagine a lonely warrior slumped over his horse, backlit by a sun setting over rolling hills, or a group of warriors riding off toward the horizon. It isn’t hard for most people to conjure because we have been raised on these romantic images of the so-called vanishing Indian. Photography, which developed hand in hand with colonialism, has largely been responsible for the continued stereotype of the noble savage. What “Indians” are admired for—the idea of being one with nature, one with the land and animals—is also seen as the source of their inferiority and inevitable demise. It is given as the main reason they are unable to survive in modern society: “Indians” are part of nature, not civilization, and, by extension of this argument, less than human.

American photographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like Edward S. Curtis and Joseph Kossuth Dixon, to name only the best-known, used photographs to link Indigenous Peoples to the idea of “nature” in order to speak about the end of Indigenous “nobility”—an end that was connected to the introduction of supposed “civilization” in the form of white-settler communities.