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same sort of romantic photographs as Curtis,
     photographs such as “The Sentinel,” which shows an Indian in a feathered
     headdress, holding a lance, and sitting on a horse, all in silhouette, set against a
     dramatic sky, or “The Feathered Horsemen,” which records a party of Indians
     on horses coming through a stand of tipis, the men wearing feathered headdresses and
     carrying bows and arrows and lances.
    But he also took other photographs, photographs that moved away from
     romance toward environmental and social comment, photographs that did not imagine the
     Indian as dying or particularly noble, photographs thatsuggested
     that Indians were contemporary as well as historical figures. His photograph of Bull
     Over the Hill’s home titled “The Old and the New,” which shows a log
     house with a tipi in the background, and his 1910 photograph “Interior of the Best
     Indian Kitchen on the Crow Reservation,” which shows an Indian family dressed in
     “traditional” clothing sitting at an elegantly set table in their very
     contemporary house having tea, suggest that Native people could negotiate the past and
     the present with relative ease. His untitled camp scene that juxtaposes traditional
     tipis with contemporary buggies and a family of pigs, rather than with unshod ponies and
     the prerequisite herd of buffalo, suggests, at least to my contemporary sensibilities,
     that Throssel had a penchant for satiric play.
    But I’m probably imagining the humour. Throssel was, after all, a
     serious photographer trying to capture a moment, perhaps not realizing that tripping the
     shutter captures nothing, that everything on the ground glass changes before the light
     hits the film plane. What the camera allows you to do is to invent, to create.
     That’s really what photographs are. Not records of moments, but rather imaginative
     acts.
    Still, neither Curtis nor Throssel had to deal with the Rogers conundrum.
     Or perhaps neither chose to. Throssel’s Indians, even the ones set against
     contemporary backdrops, were, like Curtis’s Indians, all visually Indian. And when
     we look at his photographs, we see what we expect to see.
    The Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens, inhis
     memoir
I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions
, deals with the
     issue of photographs and expectations. Looking through a collection of old photographs
     of his mixed-blood family, Owens can find no “Indians.” “This family
     from whom I am descended,” he says, “wears no recognizably Indian cultural
     artifacts; nor are they surrounded by any such signifiers. (Though there is possibility
     in the blanket nailed across the cabin door: what if my great-grandfather had perversely
     wrapped the blanket around himself for this picture?) . . . To find the Indian in the
     photographic cupboard, I must narratively construct him out of his missing presence, for
     my great-grandfather was Indian but not
an Indian
.” 2
    Of course, all this — my expedition, Throssel’s images,
     Owens’s family portraits — are reminders of how hard it is to break free
     from the parochial and paradoxical considerations of identity and authenticity. Owens,
     in a particularly wry moment, notes that “few looking at [these] photos of
     mixedbloods would be likely to say, ‘But they don’t look like
     Irishmen,’ but everyone seems obligated to offer an opinion regarding the degree
     of Indianness represented.” 3
    In Curtis’s magnum opus,
Portraits from North American Indian
     Life
, we don’t see a collection of photographs of Indian people. We see
     race. Never mind that race is a construction and an illusion. Never mind that it does
     not exist in either biology or theology, though both have, from time to time, been
     enlisted in the cause of racism. Never mind that we can’t hear it or smell it or
     taste it or feel