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Transcription: [00:00:00]

{SPEAKER name= "Frank Goodyear"}
Welcome again, my name is Frank Goodyear, and it's a pleasure to speak with you this evening about this portrait of Red Cloud or Mahpiua-Luta, which was his born Lakota name.
[00:00:13]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Um, this is one of 120 photographic portraits in the portrait gallery's newly opened exhibition
[00:00:21]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
"Faces of the Frontier: Photographic Portraits from the American West, 1845 to 1924,"
[00:00:28]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
that highlights the men and women who had a transformative impact on the great changes that were happening in the trans-Mississippian West
[00:00:38]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
during this critical 80-year period.
[00:00:42]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
It's very exciting to open this exhibition as it truly one of the very first exhibitions of the portrait gallery's ever done
[00:00:51]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
about the history of the American West. And the museum and other Smithsonian Museums have remarkable photographic collections, uh, literally millions and millions of historic images.
[00:01:08]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And the, and many of these images have to do with the history of the native peoples of the west and of the exploration,
[00:01:18]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
the scientific study of the American West. For indeed, the Smithsonian was an active part in that exploration, and that study of this important region.
[00:01:31]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
But while I would be happy to talk about anything in the room or in the gallery itself, our attention this evening is on this portrait
[00:01:41]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
of Red Cloud, taken by a Washington photographer named Charles Bell, in 1880.
[00:01:48]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Let me s6ep back though and tell you a little about my interest in Red Cloud and where it all sort of began.
[00:01:57]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
I was in graduate school down at the university of Texas at Austin back in the mid 1990s,
[00:02:03]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and I was in a graduate seminar on the History of the American west and you know graduate seminars you have to write a seminar paper at the end of the semester,
[00:02:14]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and I was really interested in the photographic representation of of native peoples.
[00:02:19]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And interestingly, the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archive had just photographed their entire collection
[00:02:29]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and put it on microfilm reels that were distributed to many of the major, you know, research universities around the country.
[00:02:37]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And so as I, as a graduate student interested in Native American photography,
[00:02:44]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
I started spending a little bit of time looking at these microfilm. And
[00:02:52]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
what I came to appreciate very early on in looking at these, you know, 20-30 rolls of microfilm at the University of Texas library,
[00:03:01]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
was that there kept coming up more and more pictures of Red Cloud. And I was like, who was this guy? How was he photographed? Why was he photographed so often?
[00:03:13]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Yes, certainly there were other Native American figures like Sitting Bull and Geronimo who were certainly photographed a great number of times. But nobody was photographed as often as Red Cloud.
[00:03:24]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And this prompted me, you know, a curious graduate student, to kind of investigate this question: Who was this guy, and why did he pose for his photograph as often as he did?
[00:03:34]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
At the time, during the course of the seminar, I think I found about 40 different photographs of Red Cloud,
[00:03:43]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and wrote a nice little seminar paper about it. But I continued to be kind of curious about collecting pictures of Red Cloud.
[00:03:51]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And at the end of what ended up being a 5 or 6 year period, I had collected more than 140 different photographs of this famous Lakota chief.
[00:04:03]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And I'm fairly certain that these 140 photographs make him the most photographed Native American in the 19th century.
[00:04:13]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And it begs the question: why would he have been photographed as often as he was?

[00:04:21]
{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
You know, who was taking these photographs, and how were these photographs being used?
[00:04:28]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Well, if you look a little bit further into his biography, you'll begin to understand why he posed as often as he did.
[00:04:36]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
But to step back a little bit, a little bit of his biography. Red Cloud was born in western Nebraska,
[00:04:44]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
probably around 1822, to the Oglala Band of the Lakota Indians; a plain, a northern plains tribe.
[00:04:55]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Red Cloud distinguished himself as a warrior in the years both during and after the American Civil War.
[00:05:04]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
The American gold prospectors had carved a trail in 1863 that led to southern Montana. It was known as the Bozeman Trail.
[00:05:21]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Gold had been discovered in the summer of 1862, in Bozeman, in the Bozeman, Montana area,
[00:05:28]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and it launched this kind of Gold Rush into that region.
[00:05:33]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Well, the Bozeman Trail passed directly through some of the prime Lakota traditional lands.
[00:05:43]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And warriors, chiefs like Red Cloud and others, were greatly disturbed by the increasing number of American settlers
[00:05:54]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
who were trespassing across Oglala lands.
[00:05:58]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And there were a series of small skirmishes which led the U.S. government to establish three forts along the Bozeman Trail
[00:06:08]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
to protect settlers who were moving north into Montana.
[00:06:15]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
This further increased the tension between the Lakota and American authorities.
[00:06:23]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And Red Cloud initiated what became known as Red Cloud's War from 1866 to 1868.
[00:06:33]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
It was one of the only wars in which the native side proved victorious.
[00:06:40]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
The American authorities were forced to abandon those three forts.
[00:06:48]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And a peace treaty was signed at Fort Laramie, in 1868, that ostensibly suggested that
[00:06:58]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
these traditional homelands were Lakota lands and that they should not be violated by outside settlers.
[00:07:08]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
If we move the story forward a little bit, while Red Cloud in the larger, popular imagination
[00:07:18]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
was this kind of mythic warrior figure, and indeed he did participate in many important battles.
[00:07:28]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Around the period of 1870 or so, he takes a turn in his thinking about the future relationship between Native
[00:07:38]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and non-Native peoples, and realizes that it's not military conflict that is going to settle this question
[00:07:48]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
of the Native peoples' status but rather its diplomacy.
[00:07:53]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And Red Cloud, over the course of really the next forty years of his life,
[00:07:59]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
the second half of his life, he's going to devote himself to finding a diplomatic solution to this historic conflict.
[00:08:08]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Red Cloud will come to Washington D.C. on more than a dozen different occasions. He will meet with five different presidents.
[00:08:16]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
No Native diplomat traveled as frequently to Washington as Red Cloud did.
[00:08:24]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Red Cloud just; this is kind of fun: he always liked to stay at the Hotel Washington down here on 15th Street.
[00:08:32]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Often times, Indian Bureau officials saw that he was well treated, he ate well. He often times bought himself a suit.
[00:08:44]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
He often times went to see the doctor or the dentist while he was here. He was treated very, very well.
[00:08:49]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
But also on these occasions, he was also photographed.
[00:08:53]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
He made himself available really, for photographers to take his picture.
[00:08:58]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Photographers wanted his picture because these were highly marketable images that could be sold to customers here in Washington and further afield.
[00:09:10]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
But to Red Cloud, I think making himself available to photographers helped to kind of formalize a kind of growing relationship,
[00:09:21]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
a sense of goodwill, that he was trying to nurture between Native and non-Native peoples at this particular time.
[00:09:30]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
This particular likeness was taken on Red Cloud's 5th trip to Washington D.C. in 1880, the May of 1880.
[00:09:39]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
There was a delegation of about 40 Native tribes people who travelled from Pine Ridge and Dakota Territories to Washington.
[00:09:51]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
They were known as the Indian school committee, on this particular trip,
[00:09:55]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
because their first purpose was to visit the recently established Carlisle Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
[00:10:05]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Richard Henry Pratt, whose portrait is in the next gallery here, had established this school for Native youth
[00:10:13]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
that was really going to help the acculturation process,
[00:10:21]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
to encourage Native peoples to learn a white man's trade,
[00:10:30]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
whether that be farming or some other vocation.
[00:10:33]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Pratt had established this school a year earlier and the Lakota sent more than 60 boys and girls
[00:10:44]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
to the school that first year, and really their support-- and Red Cloud was an active hand in fostering the
[00:10:54]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
initial matriculation of these 60 students. It was really important to get that kind of support to get the school up and running.
[00:11:02]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And so the Indian school committee, this delegation group, stopped in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to sort of inspect what was going on to ensure
[00:11:10]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
that the children were being well taken care of and that the education was proceeding in a positive fashion.
[00:11:19]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
From there, they went down to Hampton, Virginia, where the Hampton School had been established in 1868,
[00:11:30]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
initially for the children of African American-- African American children in the year after--
[00:11:40]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
in the years after the conclusion of the Civil War.
[00:11:46]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
But the Hampton, earlier, also started to accept Native students as well.
[00:11:54]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And so again, the Indian school committee went down there to take a look and see how things were proceeding.
[00:12:02]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And the final stop was back here to Washington D.C., where Red Cloud and other delegates met with President Rutherford B. Hayes,
[00:12:10]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
met with Indian Bureau officials, and also visited this photographic studio of Charles Milton Bell,
[00:12:19]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
who had a very prosperous studio along Pennsylvania Avenue.
[00:12:26]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Mathew Brady, perhaps the most celebrated photographer in the sort of mid-19th century; his business had really fallen on hard times.
[00:12:35]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Brady was not a good business man, he had sort of mismanaged the account
[00:12:40]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and it really was Charles Bell who was one of the most celebrated photographers of the time period.
[00:12:49]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
The bureau of Indian Affairs sent many Indian delegations to Bell's studio to have their portraits made.
[00:12:56]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And on this occasion, many of the delegates of the Indian school committee are photographed.
[00:13:03]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Now it's a particularly interesting picture, I think you will see. For one thing, just take a look at the studio setting
[00:13:12]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
in which Red Cloud situates himself. This rock doesn't seem all together real-- it's not, it's made of paper mache.
[00:13:22]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And what's going on with all of this business on the floor of the studio?
[00:13:27]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Well it's Spanish moss, which has been introduced perhaps to, I don't know, add a certain exoticism to the picture.
[00:13:37]
{
SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
I find it particularly interesting though, that the Spanish moss covers up his new leather shoes that he wears here.
[00:13:44]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
It's almost as though the photographer is trying to hide that aspect of his dress.
[00:13:50]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And then there's the painted studio backdrop, which looks more like a kind of a Scottish coastal scene
[00:13:59]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
than it does a plains landscape, for sure.
[00:14:04]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
So it's a completely kind of artificial environment. And I might mention also that the shirt that Red Cloud wears
[00:14:13]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
was not actually a shirt that Red Cloud owned himself. It was a Lakota shirt, but further research on this picture has indicated that that shirt,
[00:14:22]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
was at the time, owned by the Smithsonian Institution.
[00:14:27]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And lent to, for the occasion, so that again, Red Cloud could appear more "Native like."
[00:14:35]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Why Red Cloud was agreeable to all this, is a very interesting question,
[00:14:43]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and suggests, I think, something of the complexity of his character, that he would permit himself to be, perhaps used in this way.
[00:14:52]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Well, I would say, that Red Cloud again saw photography as part of this larger diplomatic exchange.
[00:15:01]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And that Red Cloud was willing to make himself available and to do these things in order to kind of further the good relations
[00:15:11]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
between his tribe and the American government.
[00:15:16]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
I think it is curious, that he holds this cane, which actually happens to be a gold tipped cane.
[00:15:22]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
He had been given that cane by a Bureau-- a friend that he had long had a good friendship with
[00:15:33]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
[00:15:36]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And this notion of a gift exchange, that "you give me something, I'll give you something back,"
[00:15:43]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
was part of the larger diplomatic ritual that was performed here in Washington.
[00:15:52]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
It's interesting that in many photographs after this particular image, Red Cloud carries that cane with him.
[00:16:00]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
It obviously was something that was of great significance to him.
[00:16:05]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
This is Red Cloud in 1880. It's-- He is at this time about 80 years- or excuse me, 60 years old.
[00:16:16]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
He would live another 30 years, and be photographed, as I say, on countless more occasions.
[00:16:24]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
There's interesting transformations that occur over time in his appearance.
[00:16:33]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
For about an 8 year period, he cuts his hair, and is only photographed wearing, what we might think of as, traditional white man's dress.
[00:16:43]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Why would he have cut his hair and dressed in this particular fashion?
[00:16:48]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And then why would he have, around the time of the famous Battle of Wounded Knee, abandoned this look,
[00:16:56]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
grown out his hair, and only presented himself publicly wearing traditional Native garb?
[00:17:03]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
I think that these photographs, what I'm arguing here, provides some insight into the complexity
[00:17:10]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
of this important tribal leader, for certain.
[00:17:17]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
This picture-- a final note--this picture was collected by the Smithsonian
[00:17:26]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and was housed at the-- it was known as the Bureau of American Ethnology for many years-- it's today known as the National Anthropological Archives.
[00:17:36]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
A collection that was built in order to-- An archive established to
[00:17:46]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
further the study of the Native peoples of North America. And so that this picture was originally housed
[00:17:56]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
in the context of a larger sort of ethnological study.
[00:18:01]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
But what I love about the history of this photograph too, is that in the mid-1960s, this photograph was re-discovered by Native Americans.
[00:18:10]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Not that they had long forgotten it, but that in the height of the American Indian movement, also known as the Red Power Movement,
[00:18:19]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
a civil rights movement involving Native peoples in the mid-1960s,
[00:18:26]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
this photograph became poster images for young Native activists.
[00:18:37]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And I found it very compelling when I invited the American Indian curator, Emil Her Many Horses,
[00:18:47]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
who was a, who is a member of the Oglala Lakota, that he said that he grew up with that poster in his bedroom, on his bedroom wall.
[00:18:57]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And so that this picture, though in many respects a really kind of odd, sort of hybrid, kind of image,
[00:19:06]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
had a great deal of resonance within his family and within his kind of tribal community.
[00:19:14]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
As a final kind of personal footnote, I think one of the most rewarding aspects of working on a study of Red Cloud,
[00:19:21]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
was the opportunity to actually take reproductions of these 140 photographs that I had found, back to Pine Ridge, South Dakota,
[00:19:30]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
and to meet with members of the Red Cloud family that still live there, at Pine Ridge.
[00:19:37]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And to go through the pictures with them, one by one, and to listen to the wonderful stories that were being told
[00:19:46]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
about their famous famous grandfather.
[00:19:51]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
There were insights that family members could provide me that they, that I certainly had never discovered in the course of my research.
[00:20:00]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And there was wonderful things about Red Cloud's own history that I was able to communicate to the family that they had never heard before.
[00:20:09]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
They had never known that he had been to Washington on 12 different occasions and met 5 different presidents.
[00:20:14]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And, you know, this research trip remains one of the most, sort of, memorable experiences in my sort of young scholarly life.
[00:20:24]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
And so, Red Cloud for me, is not only a seminal figure in the history of the trans-Mississippian West during the latter half of the 19th century,
[00:20:34]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
but also, I think, a touchdown for many of the most important issues that involved Native and non-Native
[00:20:44]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
relationships at the end of the 19th century.
[00:20:47]

{SPEAKER name="Frank Goodyear"}
Those are my thoughts for now. If you have questions, I'd be more than happy- or observations, comments- I'd be more than happy to answer them.
[00:20:56]