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to it. Like
     “dimples.” But my pimples were not annoying little flares that appeared here
     and there but rather large, erupting pustules that hurled magma and spewed lava. They
     crowded against the sides of my nose, burrowed around my lips, and spread out across my
     chin and forehead like a cluster of volcanic islands.
    Roseville was a railroad town. Until the hospital and the shopping centre
     were built on the southeast side, most everyone lived north of the tracks. Karen was
     from the south side, one of the new subdivisions, what cultural theorists in the late
     twentieth century would call “havens of homogeneity.”
    Karen’s mother was a schoolteacher. Her father was a doctor. My
     mother ran a small beauty shop out of a converted garage. Karen’s family was upper
     middle class. We weren’t. Still, there was a levelling of sorts, for Karen had a
     heart defect. It didn’t affect her so far as I could tell, but I figured that
     being well off with a heart defect was pretty much the same as being poor with pimples.
     So I asked her if she wanted to go to the prom with me, and she said yes.
    Then about a week before the big evening, Karen called me to say that she
     couldn’t go to the dance after all. I’m sorry, she told me. It’s my
     father. He doesn’t want me dating Mexicans.
    It took my brother and me four days to drive to New
     Mexico. We could have made the trip in three days, but we kept getting sidetracked by
     interesting stops. My favourite was a McDonald’s on the Will Rogers Turnpike near
     Claremore, Oklahoma. I generally avoid places like McDonald’s but this one had a
     tiny Will Rogers museum on the first floor of the restaurant, as well a statue of Rogers
     himself in the parking lot standing next to a flagpole, twirling a rope.
    Tourists pulling off the turnpike and seeing the statue for the first time
     would probably think Rogers was some kind of famous cowboy. In fact, he was a famous
     Indian, a sort of Indian/cowboy, a Cherokee to be exact.
    But most importantly, he was what the political and literary theorist
     Antonio Gramsci called an “organic” intellectual, an individual who
     articulates the understandings of a community or a nation. During the 1930s Rogers was
     probably the most famous man in North America. He performed in circuses and Wild West
     shows. He starred in the Ziegfeld Follies, and from 1933 to 1935 he was the top male
     motion-picture box-office attraction. Over forty million people read his newspaper
     columns on everything from gun control to Congress, and even more listened to his weekly
     radio show. He did just about everything with the exception of running for office.
     “I ain’t going to try that,” he said. “I’ve got some pride
     left.”
    Rogers was born near Claremore, Oklahoma, and his family was prominent in
     the Cherokee Nation. But he didn’t look Indian. Not in that constructed way.
     Certainly not in the way Curtis wanted Indians to look.And tourists
     pulling into the parking lot and seeing the statue for the first time would never know
     that this was an Indian as famous as Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse or Geronimo.
    Christopher must have read my mind. The Indians we’re going to
     photograph, he said, walking over to the statue. What if they all look like Rogers? I
     know he’s Indian, said my brother, and you know he’s Indian, but how is
     anyone else going to be able to tell?
    Curtis wasn’t the only photographer in the early twentieth
     century who was taking pictures of Indians. So was Richard Throssel. Unless you’re
     a photography buff, you won’t know the name and will therefore have no way of
     knowing that Throssel was not only a contemporary of Curtis’s, but that he was
     also Native. Cree to be exact. Adopted by the Crow. Throssel even met Curtis, when
     Curtis came to the Crow reservation.
    Throssel took many of the