Rethinking Photographic Histories: Indigenous Representation in the Byron Harmon Collection

Collections of archival photographs have the capacity to provide multiple or alternative histories. In their photographic representations of Indigenous peoples, settler archives can provide a site for revealing the multilayered, fluid meanings. My case study is a group of early twentieth-century photographs (1903 – 1929) depicting members of the Ĩyãħé Nakoda First Nation from the Byron Harmon Photographic collection at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. By employing interdisciplinary methodologies with an overarching focus on writing the cultural biography of historical photographs, I perform a self-reflexive interrogation of this collection. I argue for a pluralized examination of historical photographs and photographic archives as a way to create new understandings of the past.