Stock Histories

In 2013, two billboards appeared in Greeley, Colorado, which featured a black-and-white image of three figures, ostensibly Native American men, standing in front of a tipi. One wears a headdress and a breastplate and holds a... [ view full abstract ]

In 2013, two billboards appeared in Greeley, Colorado, which featured a black-and-white image of three figures, ostensibly Native American men, standing in front of a tipi. One wears a headdress and a breastplate and holds a shotgun, another holds a hatchet, and the third appears to be looking at something off-camera, with arms at his side and a slight smirk on his face. Framing them from above and below, the caption warns, “Turn in your arms: The government will take care of you.”

            Though I had never seen the photo before the billboard, it passed for the kind of “historical” image of Native people reproduced for memes. After many hours searching reputable archives, I found the image—with Reddit’s help—in a massive online archive of stock photography. The original is a contemporary color photograph captioned “Stock Image of Group of North American Indians about a wigwam.” The billboard’s creators apparently purchased the photograph and rendered it black-and-white. They also cropped the original to disappear a Confederate flag in the background.

             I offer this image as a discourse of in/civility, a call to white settlers to claim and suppress fantasies of indigeneity and Native histories for a contemporary political discourse of “gun rights.” The image foregrounds white settler nostalgia, and quite literally backgrounds the reciprocities of 19^th-century contexts of violence: the Dakota War and the Civil War specifically, and genocide and enslavement more generally. Using Mark Rifkin’s recent work on the emancipation sublime and backgrounding, I will ask: How does this image perform a memorial function in the same genealogy as Confederate monuments? How does the form of the editable image, as opposed to the public bronze statue, suggest key distinctions between discursive racializations of Native peoples and African Americans in the long nineteenth century?