Box of old photos speaks to FNUniversity professor
Stories begin to emerge as images taken on tour to Indigenous communities
In a binder from the First Nations University library, Andrew Miller located a photo dated 1916.
“Pointed Cap (108 years old) receiving treaty money,” the image is labelled.
Looking closely at the black and white photo, there is much more information to be gleaned.
“There’s a man in immaculate white shoes (who) is trying to stuff a $5 bill into this elder’s hands and the elder … seems he’d like not to even be aware of that man. He’s sitting very passively. You can read a lot into that,” said Miller.
Cheepoostatin, also known as Pointed Cap, was a File Hills elder. In 1874 — when he would have been about 66 years old — he and other elders held ceremonies while their chiefs were away meeting with treaty commissioners.
Contextualizing photos is part of Miller’s photo repatriation project, which began in September 2016 when he borrowed four big binders of photos from librarian Paula Daigle.
“An hour later he comes back into my office, he’s like, ‘We need to do something with these,’” said Daigle.
“The alternative was put them back in the box and leave them in the special collections, and it didn’t feel right,” said Miller, an assistant professor in Indigenous studies and a self-described “white guy.”
“There was clearly a lot of stories, untold and poorly recognized stories.”
Even in that first hour, the photos had inspired students to share what they knew.
In the months since digitizing the pictures and taking them to their first public outing, Treaty 4 Gathering in Fort Qu’Appelle in September 2017, many more stories have emerged.
That’s where Glenn Goforth shed some light on another photo, described as “File Hills Indian recruits, Oct. 1915.”
His grandfather Ernest Goforth and David Bird were the only two men originally identified, although there are six young men dressed in military uniforms in the picture.
Glenn Goforth told Miller that three of the others were Harry Stonechild, Leonard Creeley and Josie McNab.
One remains unknown.
In the collection of 589 photos, there are plenty of unknown people, as historic labels can be vague and, as Miller put it, “terrible.”
There’s a photo of a man alone, chest bones visible through his shirt, labelled “Cree at Maple Creek, 1880.”
It doesn’t say man, or give a name.
The photo is “making him stand for all Cree people,” said Miller. What’s more is this man was “likely starving to death.”
He may never be identified, as “many photos are beyond the reach of living memory,” said Miller.
In some cases, people have recognized two very different people in the same photo, “and the stories don’t always match up.”
But Miller isn’t sure if that matters.
“For the near term I think it’s just good to have conversations about our past,” he said.
Like, about the origin of hand games, as discussed surrounding the photo titled, “A group of Indians seated in a circle, playing a game. 1900.”
Even though there is no location attached to the photo and no one in it is identified, “Photos speak to people,” said Miller.
They spoke to him.
Miller typically works in community-based resource management and does not have a research background in history.
When he found these photos, “I feel kind of like I opened Pandora’s box. I couldn’t put it back. It’s trying to figure out how to do good things with the pictures.”
Eventually, they will be posted online to fnunivarchive.ca.
Miller discussed the photo project during a Congress 2018 event in the First Nations University atrium last week, along with three other people involved in similar projects.
Kristen Enns-Kavanagh and Danielle Bird are working on the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society ’s collections of Indigenous photos.
Writer and photographer Paul Seesequasis undertook a two-year project researching archival photos and posting them to his social media accounts.