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Beyond the Reach of 

Time and Change

   No. 1130      Chief Wolf Robe      Cheyenne

The Photographs of Frank Rinehart and Adolph Muhr

American Indian Portraits

1898 - 1900

Trans-Mississippi Exposition, and Indian Congress, Omaha, Nebraska, 1898

The Trans-Mississippi Exposition and International Exposition was held in Omaha from June to October in 1898, and was the most successful world's fair ever held in this country.  As part of the Expo, Smithsonian ethnographer James Mooney designed a living ethnographic exhibition of American Indians invited as delegates to the Indian Congress.  Over 500 Indian delegates traveled to Omaha from all over the country, representing the following tribes:  Apache, Southern Arapaho, Crow, Flathead, Iowa, Kiowa, Omaha, Oto, Ponca, Potawatomi, Santa Clara Pueblo, Sauk and Fox, Lakota, Tonkawa, Wichita, and Winnebago.

James Mooney contracted with Frank A. Rinehart, the official photographer of the Expo, to take photographs of the American Indian delegates during the last week of the Indian Congress.  Rinehart made a series of several hundred pictures forming altogether one of the finest collections of Indian portraits in existence.  Rinehart and his assistant, Adolph Muhr, made over 500 glass-plate negatives and at least 1200 platinum prints in the temporary studio set up at the Expo grounds.  During the Expo, and for years afterward, copies of these portraits sold as elegant platinum prints and as colored reproductions.  The Rinehart/Muhr photographs depict one of the best photographic documentations of Indian leaders at the turn of the century.

Representations of American Indians

From the beginning of contact with other cultures, the American Indian has been depicted as exotic, as the "other".  The image of the American Indian has evolved from savage, to noble and stoic, to keeper of the earth, depending upon the needs of the dominant culture.  The construction of the "vanishing race" idea was possible because of the power relations which existed between the dominant white culture and the Indians.  The images of American Indians were used by the dominant culture to control them.  Photographs, stereotypes, postcards and photogravenres depicting the stereotype of the Plains Indian were sold by the hundreds of thousands between 1890 and 1920, and distributed not just nationally but internationally.

No.779      White Buffalo          Cheyenne

The photographs displayed in the Beyond the Reach of Time and Change exhibition are not stereotypical.  These photos are portraits which reflect individual personalities with dignity, pride and honor. "At the first break of winter, photographs of the buried and the long dead return to me, and I know there is no end to our time here even when we pass on. Even when photographs are manipulated and inauthentic, they become another story, another invention, a record of a particular longing, the way we wish things to be.  And the way we wish things to be becomes our story, our undeniable story. Photocopied and stapled, the Rinehart photographs come to me in a thick letter.  Photographs taken one hundred years ago.  I'm dazed by the blur of faces.  I look at their clothing, the way they posed for the studio, stiff faces, some impish but all of them gazing past me toward an observer who will witness their faces decades beyond me. I have seen these faces before in the faces of men and women in my tribe.  The face of Gentle Bird is the face of my cousin.  But it is Kicking Horse Charley, insistent, his mouth open, speaking to an audience that strains to hear his message one hundred years later that makes me watchful, listening.  Now captured in a sudden warm pocket of air on a windless winter day passing to dusk, I feel the breath of his story".                                                      **** Debra Earling  (Salish)

No.1435  Songlike                                Pueblo	No.1084    Mary Richards (Lipan)      Tonkawa	No.867     Chief Lone Bear