Breaking the Frame: How Photographs of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862 Influence Historical Memory

Abstract

This dissertation examines photographs of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862, and seeks to highlight how photographs have shaped contemporary and persistent ideas about the War and the Dakota people. This work utilizes photographs of Dakota Indians as a primary tool to reconstruct and refract the historical narrative of the Dakota-U.S. War. The convergence of photography and mass consumerism resulted in a plethora of Dakota photographs beginning in 1858. This work looks at three specific groups of photographs between 1858 and 1865. The first photographs of Dakota Indians documented groups of Dakota delegates after negotiating treaties to sell their land in exchange for money and annuity payments. The next group of photographs were taken by photographers in St. Paul, Minnesota, and resulted in an explosion of mass production spurred on by high consumer demand. Photographers, like Adrian Ebell, traveled great distances in hopes of documenting life on the Dakota reservations in order to capitalize on the financial success of other indigenous photography.

Focusing on the motivations and manipulative aspects of the subjects, the photographers, and the viewers of these photographs, this dissertation examines how images of the Dakota directly contributed to the persistent ideologies of settler innocence, which justified retaliatory violence and Dakota removal from Minnesota. The pervasive ideologies rooted in settler-colonial contexts have shaped historical memory, excluding Dakota peoples from engaging in public memory, and perpetuating the tension between Dakota and non-native in the re-telling of the past. Primary source material analyzed for this dissertation include photographs, Dakota prisoner of war letters, Dakota oral histories, published and unpublished Dakota narratives of the war and their life in Minnesota, Minnesota Historical Society Manuscripts Collections, the Gilcrease Museum's panorama of the war, Newspapers, and captivity narratives.