Developing Stories: NATIVE PHOTOGRAPHERS IN THE FIELD


PHOTOGRAPHY AS MEDICINE


BY RUSSEL ALBERT DANIELS


country have the right to speak freely, to have freedom of the press, to worship, to peacefully assemble and to petition the government for grievances. Over time, I realized that with these rights and privileges come responsi- bilities and that photojournalism was a way to give a voice to those who have slipped through the cracks of our collective narrative. I began to study photojournalism at the


University of Montana in 2006 because I wished to gain reporting and storytelling skills and be around other Native journalists (Montana has 12 American Indian tribes and seven federally recognized Indian reserva- tions). During my undergraduate years,


I I


was shy and introverted when I was growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the 1990s. At the age of 16, I turned to photography, as my darkroom cre- ated a space in which I could express


myself. I was intrigued by the experimental nature of exposing, developing and printing black-and-white film because these processes enable a greater latitude for personal expres- sion than color film. Also, I feel color often dis- tracts from the image’s message. As one who is colorblind, I find it difficult to distinguish between certain colors. So I found beauty in the subtleties of the gray scale and textures of black and white, which can better reflect the soul of the photo’s content. Today, I mostly use digital tools to tone images and now can convert color images to black and white. As a youth, I also became interested in the


First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that those who live in this


12 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2020


participated in Freedom Forum journalism diversity workshops that showed, on average, less than 0.5 percent of journalists in news- rooms are American Indian. Because of this, non-Native media tend to portray American Indians as living in the past and, stereotypi- cally, as defeated people. Part of my respon- sibility as a photojournalist is to provide a space for Indigenous people to reclaim their power and tell their own narrative. I chose photography as my medium be- cause it is an ever-evolving, multidimensional mode of storytelling, where journalism, art, portraiture, text and image combine. How- ever, it also can promote healing public dis- course and positive social change. My stories from Indian Country reveal nuanced layers of humanity from contemporary Native Ameri- can communities and individuals. I believe that revealing these layers allows people to feel empathy toward their surrounding commu- nities and the rest of the world.


My work is also an act of self-discovery,


a look into my Diné (Navajo), Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Mormon settler and European heritage. I am descended from a Diné slave named Rose. In the mid-1840s, she was a young child when Ute slavers took her from her Diné homeland. They held her captive for more than a decade before eventually trading her to Aaron Daniels, a Mormon settler in Utah. Rose and Aaron had four children, and the family enrolled in the Northern Ute Tribe and was allotted a tract of land on the Uintah and Ouray reservation in northeastern Utah. My siblings and I are the first generation born off of that reservation. Rose’s story always caught my attention


because my teachers in my school and my church never mentioned the more than 300 years of Spanish imperialism or the eco- nomics of human trafficking and slavery throughout the Americas. I’ve spent many


FINDING MY VOICE AND COMMON GROUND IN BLACK-AND-WHITE WORLDS


PHOTO BY CHAD KIRKLAND


PHOTO BY IREN SCHIO


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