“Group of Indians” taken by Edward Muybridge in 1868 at Fort Tongass, near Ketchikan. This was the first stop on Muybridge’s journey in Southeast Alaska.

Two weeks after the United States made its first payment to Russia for Alaska, the Tlingit people were photographed for the first time by one of the most world’s most famous photographers: Eadweard Muybridge.

If Muybridge hadn’t taken the photographs, “these early documents probably would have been lost or destroyed,” wrote Tom Sexton in 1979, who went on to become Alaska’s poet laureate. Muybridge has captivated some of the most creative minds of the last 150 years, because he was the first person to capture motion photographically, generating ‘motion pictures’ and paving the way for cinema. In her 2003 biography of Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit compared his innovations to splitting the atom, calling him “the man who split the second.”

Little has been said about Muybridge’s Alaska photographs, which helped shape a narrative of the new American territory in the mid-18th Century. In 2017, Marc Shaffer, who is completing a documentary about Muybridge, noticed this, and decided to curate an exhibit of original Muybridge photographs of Alaska. The result: 17 stereograms (double images) from Muybridge’s Alaska visit are now on display at the Haines Sheldon Museum as the exhibit “1868: Muybridge in Alaska.”

“I was trying to fill in the holes,” Shaffer said “I just felt like I needed to understand the Alaska piece.” He said that there isn’t much interest in Muybridge’s Alaska photographs for two main reasons: the photos are not as technically good as his later ones, and because of an unconscious cultural bias.

“Western scholars aren’t naturally drawn to indigenous stories,” he said.

A Californian, Shaffer said he hopes that by presenting this exhibit to an Alaskan audience, people will start to ask and answer important questions: “What do (these photographs) represent to the audience? The exotic? American expansion? The idea that we, the U.S., is spreading our reach deep into the distance? And what do you see in the pictures? What don’t you see? What’s not in the picture? What’s outside the frame?”

Muybridge came to Alaska on a commission from the U.S. War Department, which hired him to photograph military installations in Tongass, Wrangle (as Wrangell was then spelled) and Sitka.

Muybridge was sent to document “what the U.S. was purchasing from Russia,” said Jim Simard, head of the Alaska State Library Historical Collection, “Things they actually had control of.”

Harriet Brouillette, tribal administrator of the Chilkoot Indian Association and Tlingit Native, imagined that the U.S. government was “trying to sell Alaska as a good investment, and one way of doing that was showing that the Native inhabitants were docile.”

To her, what was more important was the emotional sentiment behind the photographs. “How did they feel about their photographs being taken?”

Documents do little to answer Brouillette’s question, because they fail to tell the story from the Native people’s perspective.

Major-General Henry W. Halleck led the expedition to photograph Alaska. According to Shaffer, Halleck regarded the Tlingit as uncivilized. Halleck issued orders to General Jefferson Davis of Fort Sitka that, should any Native violate the rights of a U.S. citizen, “the whole tribe and especially the chief will be held responsible,” according to a New York Times article from 1867. Muybridge expressed a view apparently more respectful of the indigenous population. The inscription on one of the post cards in the exhibition reads, “To the brave and noble chief of Tongass, with Helios’ respect.” (Muybridge signed his photographs with the name ‘Helios,’ the Greek god of the sun.) Ultimately, Muybridge took more photographs of Native people than he did of soldiers.

Muybridge’s choice of subject was partly motivated by his own commercial interests; he took photographs with an eye towards selling them. Still, the U.S. War Department was pleased with Muybridge’s work.

“(Muybridge’s images), besides being beautiful works of art, give a more correct idea of Alaska, its scenery and vegetation, than can be obtained from any written description of that country,” wrote Major-General Halleck.

On Aug. 13, 1868 Muybridge landed in Fort Tongass and during the day he took the photo, “Group of Indians,” which may be the first photograph of Tlingit people. Months later, this stereogram was reprinted on hundreds of stereocards and postcards and sold in San Fransisco.

“Certainly people just like today were interested in things that were exotic, which would explain why people were interested in Native people and the three Russian orthodox priests. (They wanted) the feeling of being transported into something that isn’t your everyday life,” said Shaffer.

“It’s how people would learn about the world,” explained Simard, “When you look at these stereocards they’re pictures of the pyramids in Egypt and the Louvre museum.”

“The world was growing larger and more complicated, and photography was both an agent of this enlargement and a device for trying to sort it all out, to own it, to make it manageable,” wrote Solnit in her biography of Muybridge.

Muybridge sold his photographs to a European-American market. White people were the primary buyers for his photographs, said Shaffer.

Brouillette sought their deeper context. “You don’t know what the people were thinking. You just look at these and think about how difficult it must have been for people. If you think about all of the racial hardships that our ancestors went through, they went through them so that my life could be a little easier,” said Brouillette.

Muybridge spent five days in Sitka, which was the longest he spent in any one place in Alaska. He photographed “The Double Decker,” in which Tlingits are anonymous figures crowding the entry of a tenement slum. In “Lincoln Street,” they are bodies sitting on the ground in front of the old Russian trading post. In “Sitka, from Japanese Island,” a few Native people are peppered across rocks.

In one of Muybridge’s photographs from Sitka, four American officers are dressed up in Tlingit regalia. Brouillette recoiled from this image, wrinkling her face in disgust. She called it “very offensive.” Shaffer said the question of why Muybridge took this photo comes up a lot. He surmised that Muybridge himself thought it was funny, or that his audience would find humor in it. The image is entitled, “Group of Distinguished Chiefs,”

Months later, on New Year’s Day 1969, an armed U.S. soldier insulted three Tlingit chiefs, accosting one of them-Chilkat clan leader Shkeedlikhaa from Haines-who had been sent to Fort Sitka for diplomatic matters.

According to historian Zachary R. Jones, as the chiefs were leaving Fort Sitka, the soldier kicked Shkeedlikhaa in the buttocks and attacked him with the end of his rifle. Shkeedlikhaa wrestled the rifle away from the sentry, and walked away with it. When Fort Sitka’s General Davis learned of the incident, he sent armed soldiers into the Indian village to bring back the Chilkat chief dead or alive. The ensuing violence resulted in several Tlingit deaths and spiraled into the destruction of several villages in Kake known as “The Kake War.”

“There’s this context of colonization going on, and power, the power dynamic. And when you look at those pictures, I have to ask myself, is that what I see? And the answer is, no, that’s not what I saw originally,” said Shaffer.

Simard said the lack of context in Muybridge’s photographs is partly because they were made by a person with no community connections and little knowledge about the places or people in the photos. “As with the bulk of early Alaskan images,” said Simard.

“I think it is fair to say that most of the early photographers were working for government, church or business interests. It is no surprise that the individuals in the images are not properly identified. Yet, these images are very important and useful to the current generation, and are more valuable with good information about the people,” said Simard.

Looking at the Muybridge photographs, but speaking to the large volume of old Alaskan photographs with unidentified Native subjects, Brouillette said that she always wonders who she’s related to. “The beauty of who (the people) were-all that’s lost now,” she said.

Of the 17 photos in the Muybridge exhibit, 16 are owned by Len Walle, a well-known collector of early Alaskan photography in Michigan. One is owned by a Native woman, Mary Everson, who has relatives in the photograph.

Shaffer spoke with Everson who said that she saw history in Muybridge’s images.

“There is a wealth of information in these images. There are houses and totems that aren’t around anymore,” said Alaska Native photographer, John Hagen. “There is a certain ephemeral nature to wood art that is shown outside in a rain forest. There are things in these photographs that just aren’t there anymore,” he said.

Hagen stressed the importance of reading between the lines in these photographs. He mentioned the photograph of the American officers dressed in “a mix of indigenous clothing, including Unungan (Aleut)” clothing.

“As an Unungan, I see the clothes of my people used as costumes. Unungan people are from the Aleutian Islands in western Alaska and did not come to Sitka voluntarily.”

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