Stain
On Acknowledgement
This is Reading Photographs, a newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.
NOTE: Apologies for the late newsletter this week, adjusting to a new work schedule has been more challenging than I anticipated. There will be no new post next week as I spend time with family for the holiday. Hopefully back to a consistent schedule thereafter.
I took the film photo above roughly 15 years ago while visiting family. This is where my father bought his cigarettes. Gunsmokes, to be exact.
When I was in high school, and then visiting home during my college years, it was a regular errand for my dad to stop in at The Indian’s. Sometimes I would go with him and twiddle my thumbs as he and the proprietor, who also went by Shawnee Jim, chatted about everything and nothing at all.Â
Before moving west, this was the only real life interaction I had with Native American culture. I was in Boy Scouts, which pilfered and cobbled together aspects of various Native American cultures and lore for the purposes of instilling morality, obedience and a sense of hierarchy, but otherwise had little of the context, nuance or sincerity of its origins. There had been a village of relocated Lenni Lenape near my family’s home and my father’s parents would end up buried in its cemetery, the only remaining sign that community existed. But there is no indigenous blood in my family. At least in my family, Native Americans were portrayed as noble, admirable and wise but without acknowledging their absence and how my ancestors were among those responsible for it.
***
An attorney who is also a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde spoke to my church one recent Sunday. Specifically, she spoke about what a land acknowledgement is. And what it is not.Â
It is for people like me, a white man, to comfortably and safely acknowledge our connection to the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the land we now live on. It is empty, without commitment to genuine apology and reconciliation. It is, quite literally, the very least I and people like me can do.
It is not for indigenous peoples. It does not repair the treaties that our governments have broken. It does not benefit indigenous peoples, emotionally or materially. It does not mitigate nor replace what was taken from them. It does not give them agency within a society they were forced into.
***
I do not know if the man my father bought cigarettes from was actually Native American; he was part of a group of folks who said they were Shawnee, though they were not enrolled with the federally-recognized tribe based in Oklahoma. This small group pressed for federal recognition back in the 1990s. A federal court ultimately denied that petition. The shop is still there, at least on Google Maps. I haven’t thought about it in years.
The photo above reminds me of some of those photographs of Native Americans from the 19th century. Those images weren’t really meant to reveal or portray anything about the people in them. Instead, it was a way to document and catalog them before putting them aside and then only thought about in passing. Just like the rituals and regalia I and others wore in Scouts, just like reducing our appreciation for them in our lives to the mere financial benefit their capitalist enterprises rendered us.
And I did the same with this photo.Â
I’m sorry.