Dr. Jane Simonsen (Augustana College Illinois/ Universität Regensburg) "Picturing Black Hawk: 'Indian' Portraits and Cultural Exchange."

Tuesday, 24.06.2014, 6:15 - 7:45 p.m., U5/01.18

Relationships between whites and Native Americans in the U.S. West are far more complex than the popular image of "cowboys and Indians" might suggest. Paintings and photographs also functioned - sometimes in surprising ways - as a way of negotiating relationships between cultures. Using portraits of the Sauk leader Black Hawk and his descendants as a case study, this lecture looked at the ways in which both whites and Native Americans participated in creating "Indian" identities  between 1830 and 1920.

Jane Simonsen is Associate Professor of History and Women's & Gender Studies, Augustana College, Illinois, specializing in U.S. Women's History, Native American Art & History, and Photography. Her publications include Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), "Descendants of Black Hawk: Generations of Identity in Sauk Portraits" (American Quarterly 2011), "'This Large Household': Architecture and Civic Identity at the Iowa Hospital for the Insane at Mount Pleasant" (2010), "The Cook, The Photographer, and Her Majesty, the Allotting Agent: Unsettling Domestic Spaces in E. Jane Gay's With the Nez Perces" (2002), and "Object Lessons: Domesticity and Display in American Indian Assimilation, American Studies" (2002).