For a Love of His People: At the National Museum of the American Indian

This is a long-lasting exhibition of photographs by artist Horace Poolaw, a Native-American artist himself, whose photographs depict the in-between life of native tribes, merging together with the Western American expanding culture.

The photographs are all black and white, platinum gel printed, and exquisitely detailed. This exhibition was outstanding in my opinion, because of the honesty that comes through the subjects photographed by the artist.

In these scenarios, the artist does not discriminate sex, age or status of the tribe members adopted as subjects of his work. The Natives are shown in town celebrations, wearing a mixture between Western outfits and Native ceremonial props, including jewelry, being worn by an equally mixed body of people, featuring Caucasian and Native physical attributes.

The importance of this exhibition lies on the simple fact that it becomes an obvious visual sample that speaks for the mutual, peaceful journey that Native Americans and Western white people build together, in harmony and tolerance, which contradicts the overly famous historical past, tainted with blood and massacres. The pictures do not intend to erase this historic happenings, but rather offer an alternative view that helps explain actual populations of mixed white-native communities, nonetheless absolutely relevant to American past. To see some samples, let us see some photographs from the original source, the National Museum of the American Indian: