Characteristic of archival collections, in October the National
Museum of the American Indian Archive Center acquired a family photograph
album. The gift of NMAI members Don Kritsch and Barbara Baker, the album was
compiled by Mr. Kritsch’s great aunt Lizzie (1882-1977), formerly of Indianapolis,
and contains photographs made from about 1918 to 1929 by her and various
members of her immediate and extended family. The content of NMAI’s new album
is in many ways typical of the genre—it includes depictions of men and women
hard at work, enjoying their leisure, or fashionably appointed in a matching
coat and hat and posed in the front gardens of their homes, and of their robust
and (presumably) rosy cheeked children. In short, the photographs document a
burgeoning German-American family. Why would NMAI accept an album of a German-American family into its
collections? Simply stated, the Canisius family photograph album is as exceptional
as it is typical.
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| Dolly's Students at Standing Rock Agency, Fort Yates, North Dakota. NMAI.AC.026. |
A good number of the photographs naturally document the young
adulthood of Aunt Lizzie and her husband Gus’s only child, Kathryn “Dolly”
Canisius (1906-1943). Around 1926, Dolly apparently left her comfortable urban
home to serve as an itinerant teacher-in-training in, what must have been for
her, remote and distant places. Most significantly for NMAI, Standing Rock
Agency in Fort Yates, North Dakota, was one of her posts. Dolly made photographs
of her female and male Native students, both posed in groups and on picnics,
non-student Natives congregated in town, street scenes, landscape views
presumably made just outside of Fort Yates, Agency buildings, and the campus of
the newly established Saint Bernard Mission School. On the versos of more than
one hundred of the photographs she made, she conscientiously jotted down the
names of her pupils or noted a place or building name. These she mailed home to
Indianapolis, where her mother dutifully pasted them down onto eleven leaves of
the family album. With this, Aunt Lizzie unconsciously but powerfully interleaved
into her family’s history what was and remains for many Native Americans the
trauma of U.S. Indian education policy.
Photo Archivist
NMAI Archive Center
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