A rare insider's view of Native American life in mid-20th century Oklahoma

Horace Poolaw never wanted his photographs in a museum, or even printed large enough to be framed.

A member of the Kiowa tribe, Poolaw had only one exhibit in his lifetime, at the Southern Plains Indian Museum in his hometown of Anadarko, Okla.

He printed postcards to sell to visitors, sometimes with the words "Poolaw Photo, Pictures by an Indian" on the back - but it was never clear whether his intention was simply to depict his people or to publicize their traditions.

Indeed, most of the photographs in the exhibition For the Love of His People: The Photographs of Horace Poolaw at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., were taken more than 50 years ago and are on display now. , were not published until after his death in 1984. The exhibit was co-curated by local scholars Nancy Marie Mitro (Chiricahua Apache) and Tom Jones***. Mitro also served as the general editor of the exhibition catalog, and Jones wrote an essay.

The critical endorsement came only after his daughter Linda Poole began organizing exhibitions at Stanford University in 1989. Experts began scrutinizing the negatives he left behind. It was only then that Pullau, who documented the lives of indigenous people in rural Oklahoma, became the leading and most important Native American photojournalist of the 20th century.

According to Alexandra Harris, the editor of the project, his work is considered more noteworthy because it was a time when "Indians became invisible in the nation's visual culture. We believe that Pulau's photography really fills that void."

It was to show love for his people: the photography of Horace Pulloo (Henry Roy Cloud series on American Indians and Indian modernity

For more than 50 years in the 20th century, one of America's earliest professional photographers of Indians gave an insider's view of his Oklahoma community, a community rooted in traditional culture, but at the same time wholly modern and typical of American culture.

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Although photography was only a hobby for Pullau, he used a secondhand high-speed image camera - the kind used by journalists for much of the 20th century - to capture daily life on the reservation in a journalistic way! scenes. His work ranges from ordinary birthday parties and family gatherings to stunning portraits of veterans, tribal celebrations, and especially the annual American Indian Expo, which still continues in Anadarko.

It's important, Harris said, that Poolau is not a bystander, but as part of the community.

"In the early to mid-20th century, there were very few Native photographers who acted as an insider, bearing witness to their community and the diversity he saw," she said.

That's how he captured a period of time when Native cultures were in transition, when people were assimilating their languages rather than being forced to, as they had been. At the same time, tribes were changing, bringing back and incorporating elements of local customs and languages that they had been banned from on the reservation.

The Horace Plouffe exhibition, first shown at the Gustav Heye Center, National Museum of the American Indian, in New York City in 2014-2015, reflects this combination of cultural influences, such as Instead of horses, three women from the Kiowa Palace ride shiny Chevrolets in a *** scene from the opening of the 1941 American Indian Exposition.

The contrast is even starker in the portrait of a smiling Radio Oklahoma Danny Williams, standing next to champion Indian dancer and painter George "Woogie" Woogie, dressed in Comanche regalia and headdress, a tipi standing behind him, and a parking lot with an outdated car parked in the lot.

The "KDSP" ceremony, unrelated to the World's Fair, was also documented, from a 1945 powwow in rural Carnegie, Oklahoma, along with a number of people who wore cowboy hats and other traditional shawls in the WestAmerican flags fluttered in the cloudy skies, and a couple of limousines cut across the arc.1947. The more informal funeral of Agnes Big Bow, a member of the Kiowa tribe of Hog Creek, Oklahoma, exemplified this more directly. At the funeral, the casket bearers, many dressed in Western-style clothing and hats, were lowering the Western-style casket into the stone cemetery ground.

The intersection of the tribe and the U.S. military was an important crossroads for Pulloo, whose son Jerry was on leave from the Navy in 1944, wearing a uniform and a feathered headdress, the main image of the exhibit.

That same year, in front of a B-17 flying fortress at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Pullau was photographed with another Kiowa, Gus Palmer. There, he trained as an aerial photographer, whose traditional headgear contrasted with their uniforms.

Nonetheless, the war bonnet as it is sometimes known is more than just an ostentatious piece of equipment, but there is one that was earned by traditional valor, and those who served in the military were certainly valued.

"Three hundred Kiowas served in World War II, and when they came back after battles where they could have earned valor, they could have earned the honors that the old *** would have given them," Harris said. "So they redescribed some of those societies and brought back a lot of the material royal culture that came with it."

Children are a poignant subject in his photos, whether they're wearing 20th-century tweed jackets and ties, cowboy attire or native royalty.

The incorporation of Native culture into the broader entertainment scene can be seen in the career of Plough's brother Bruce, who was head of the vaudeville circuit as Bruce Plough and married the actress Lucy Nichols, a Penobscot soprano and mezzo-soprano known as Princess Wattawaso. mezzo-soprano. Naturally, they also posed dramatically for Plau.

Another striking example of the collision of modern Western tastes with traditional Native culture is the photograph of Hannah Keahbone, who wore make-up and short, stylish hair in the 1920s and 1930s, along with her mother, Sandy Libby Keahbone, in more traditional braids and no make-up.

Laura E. Smith, an assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Michigan State University who specializes in Native American art and photography, wrote in the exhibition's catalog that while both wore traditional Kiowa crowns, it demonstrates how women in the tribe "negotiated between themselves the feminine conditions,"

Capturing moments like these, Pourrau was inspired more by lifestyle magazine photojournalism than by the native portraits meant for museums. Pourlau doesn't intend to make deep sociological points about the people he depicts, though his photographs often end up that way.

"He never really wrote down why he did what he did. So we really have to guess," Harris said. "In talking to his daughter, she talked about his love for these people. It could also be as simple as him being a witness at the time.

"For the Love of His People: the Photographs of Horace Poolaw" runs through June 7, 2017, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The exhibit is co-curated by local scholars Nancy Marie Mitro (Chiricahua Apache) and Tom Jones***. Director of American Indian Studies at the Autry National Center Institute and associate professor of art history and visual arts at Occidental College, Mitro also served as general editor of the exhibition catalog. Jones, associate professor of photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also wrote an essay for the catalog.

UPDATE 11/30/16: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed the quote to another curator of the exhibition. To quote Alexandra Harris. We regret the error