October 1-January 8, 2023 | Reading, PA

Telling Stories

A new photograph exhibition in Pennsylvania highlights images of the late 1800s.

The exhibition Indigenous Identities: Portraits of Native Americans in the Civil War Era opens at the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, October 1 and continues through January 8, 2023. The 49 photographic portraits, according to the museum, “tell the stories of Indigenous people in the American West…Indigenous reactions to white expansion ranged from staunch resistance to strategic tolerance. Some societies desired peace and consciously accepted certain elements of white society, while others used force to protect their autonomy. These differences are evident in the photographs, most notably in the way the sitter is dressed.”

Charles Milton Bell (1848-1893), Ol-Ha-The (George Harvey), 1875, photograph, 5½ x 315/16”. Gift, E.D. McCauley Esq., 1940.206.48.33. Courtesy of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.

Charles Milton Bell photographed Native American sitters in his Washington, D.C. studio. Among them was Ol-Ha-The (George Harvey) chief of the confederated tribes of Indians of the Siletz Reservation, Oregon. Harvey has been described as “a fine speaker, and has acted many years as an interpreter. This office having brought him into close and constant contact with American civilization, he long ago abandoned his aboriginal habits and religion, and adopted the customs and faith of the whites.”

Charles Milton Bell (1848-1893), Es-En-Ce (Little Shell), 1874, photograph, 6½ x 4¼”. Gift, E.D. McCauley Esq., 1940.206.48.1. Courtesy of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.

Charles Milton Bell (1848-1893), Semeo (Umatilla Jim), ca. 1875, photograph, 5½ x 315/16”. Gift, E.D. McCauley Esq., 1940.206.48.8. Courtesy of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.

Es-En-Ce (Little Shell) is depicted in another Bell photograph on a cabinet card from the Hayden Geographical Survey of the Territories. The Ojibwa chief was a signer of a treaty with the federal government in 1863 and later refused to cede any additional land because the original treaty had been a fraud.

Alexander Gardner (1821-1882), Pe-Ji (Grass), 1872, photograph, 5½ x 315/16”. Gift, E.D. McCauley Esq., 1940.206.48.13. Courtesy of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.

The museum explains, “To deal with the ‘Indian Problem,’ the federal government’s solution was to offer Indigenous communities money and promises of peace in exchange for their ancestral land. If Indigenous people refused to leave, the military would take the land by force. Indigenous people were forced onto reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and throughout the West or forcibly assimilated into white culture.”

October 1-January 8, 2023
Indigenous Identities: Portraits of Native Americans in the Civil War Era
Reading Public Museum
500 Museum Road, Reading, PA 19611
(610) 371-5850, www.readingpublicmuseum.org