Gallery
The following four pages are galleries of all the sources that were found in the course of my research, and are subdivided according to the date of creation. Throughout my research process, I accessed and used numerous archival databases. In terms of the Canadian context, my starting point was Library and Archives Canada and the Virtual Musem of Métis History and Culture available through the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research. For Australia, the most useful archives were the National Archives of Australia, the Searcy and Lavar Collections at the State Library of South Australia, the Baldwin Spencer Collection through the Museums Victoria Collections, and the Peter Spillet Collection at Library and Archives Northern Territory.
This exhibit includes a vast array of primary sources that are roughly divided into three main categories: photographs, newspaper articles, and legislation. The majority of the sources are indeed photographs and are analyzed according to three factors: the Who, Where and What. The exhibit also features newspaper articles that are used primarily to establish a timeline of important events and convey settler perceptions of mixed peoples, such as the article on the left. Additionally, the numerous pieces of legislation are very important when it comes to thinking about the attitudes toward Metis or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and the visual expressions of those contemporary feelings.
Why this topic?
Images are so popular and one of the most convenient ways of conveying messages in our society, and yet when do we ever stop and consider what photographs from the past actually reveal?
Most of the time, historic photographs are trinketized and not treated with the same level of reverence as textual sources or materials from a bygone era. Essentially, photographs allow us to look into the past and consider what a particular historical moment may have looked like from the perspective of contemporaries. Upon first glance, these photographs are relatively unremarkable, depicting individuals and landscapes which make them alike to many other photographs in the archives of history; however, the truly unique or special aspect of this particular photography lays in what the images themselves represent or reflect about the contemporary society at the time of creation as opposed to the actual subject matter within the photographer’s frame. In that sense, it is important to keep in mind that these photographs were captured from a particular perspective, and then disseminated to a wider audience that, by and large, held a similar view. That is to say, these photographs were inherently colonialist in terms of their creation, from the mere fact that they came into being through the work and photographic perspective of settler-colonials at a time in the early twentieth century when both Canada and Australia were actively carrying out their assimilationist aspirations or objectives that were directed towards Indigenous populations. Therein, we can learn some information about the photographed subjects by looking at certain aspects of their appearance, clothing, activity, hairstyles, or location but must bear in mind that these elements were also susceptible to manipulation from the photographer potentially. Therefore, it is perhaps a more feasible undertaking to comparatively analyze the photographs in terms of what they reveal about the photographed subjects, and how in turn that speaks to or reflects the status quo within contemporary Canada or Australia throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century.
I had initially wanted to interrogate the photographs to arrive at an eventual conclusion as to what these visual sources reveal about how such things as culture and identity are acted out amongst individuals of mixed-race, specifically those of Indigenous and European lineage. Though over the course of my extensive research, it was apparent that while mixed peoples may have been the subjects of photographs, they were not behind the creation which was a job that remained in the hands of settler-colonials. In the discussion of Jacob Riis’s willingness to pay young boys to pose in certain forms to make his photographs more dramatic and engaging, Curtis demonstrates how the power of the creator must always be a matter of consideration. [1] Therefore, it is impossible to speak of the visualization of cultural identity amongst either Metis or 'Half-Caste' persons without equally considering the prevailing sentiments within the respective colonial states in the early twentieth century and the degree to which those cultural representations were permissible in the eyes of the white society.
Footnotes
[1] James Curtis, “Making Sense of Documentary Photography,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web, n.d., 6.