Film History: Preliminary Research on the Influence of J.K. Dixon
My initial inspiration for research into the polarizing figure that is Joseph Kossuth Dixon began with Caitlin McGrath’s article, “A Vanishing Race”? The Native American Films of J.K. Dixon. Though having never heard of Dixon prior to reading this article, I was struck by McGrath’s account of Dixon’s place in history, which is a contested role as both sincere Native American advocate and a misguided “Rasputin” figure who inadvertently contributed further to victimizing “the vanishing race.” Part of this intrigue came from my very own background; I grew up in Montana where one of Dixon’s films, The Last Great Indian Council, was filmed on the Crow Reservation. However, the true impetus for my desire to understand Dixon further was that I agreed with McGrath’s assessment that Dixon created his films out of a genuine mission to see Native Americans recognized not only for their unique customs and culture but their place as deserving citizens of the United States, and I wanted to understand how the scope of Dixon’s work lent itself to his other characterization as a mere manipulative romantic who exploited his Native American subjects.
Thus, I decided to begin my research from a basic question: Where else were Dixon’s films shown?
Dixon made three Native American films in total: Hiawatha, Battle of Little Bighorn, and The Last Great Indian Council. These films (and the three expeditions which made them possible) were undertaken at the behest of Rodman Wanamaker, owner of the Wanamaker department stores in Philadelphia and New York. Dixon, employed by Wanamaker, was tasked with collecting film and photographic documentation of Native Americans in order to create educational exhibits within Wanamaker department stores. According to McGrath, some historians have argued both Wanamaker and Dixon were motivated less by the uplifting of Native American personhood and more by the expansion of the Wanamaker brand.
In undertaking my research, I thus wanted to understand if Dixon’s films existed solely within the Wanamaker department stores or, in what would align with McGrath’s argument that Dixon earnestly wanted to compel others to value Native American personhood, these films were distributed and viewed in government or separate educational institutions.
So though I began with the question of where else Dixon’s films existed, my research led me to two conclusions: Yes, Dixon’s films existed and were shown outside of Wanamaker department stores, and Dixon (for better or worse) played a key role in relations between Native Americans and the U.S. government.
As preliminary research for this topic, I examined six primary sources and two secondary sources. The following list examines each source and my research process:
I decided to try to narrow my search by searching for the name of Dixon’s films, rather than Dixon himself, so I focused my search on The Last Great Indian Council. In Lantern, there are 827 results for the keywords of this phrase, but only one for “the last great indian council” as it relates to the film itself. This 1910 article comes from a periodical called The Film Index and details the showing of The Last Great Indian Council to the President of the United States (who is unnamed in the article) and other government officials at an exhibition in Washington:
“The other evening the President of the United States and other government officials were present in Washington at an exhibition called ‘The Last Great Indian Council,’ and that was planned and carried out to depict the glamour and ceremony of one of the ancient rites of a vanished race. It was not an entertainment in the strictly modern sense of the word, but was conducted under the auspices of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the films having been obtained at a pow-wow of all the Indian chiefs of the country held in Montana last summer. This is but one of the many ways in which moving pictures may serve an educational purpose that will enhance their value a hundredfold.”
Though I found no other mentions of this screening when searching for Taft (the unnamed President in this article), this viewing would be corroborated in a secondary source: Barsh’s An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American Indian Citizenship. The information provided by The Film Index article was twofold: first, that Dixon’s films were screened outside of the Wanamaker department stores, and second, The Last Great Indian Council was utilized as a specific means to provide education to the President himself. As I would soon discover, Taft would remain closely aligned with the work of Dixon and Wanamaker through his presidency.
Additionally, a Google search of “the last great indian council” led me to the Massachusetts Historical Society and a program for a presentation and lecture by Dixon at the American Museum of Natural History on Oct. 24, 1912, in New York City. The film was not shown at this presentation; rather, the name of the presentation was “The Last Great Indian Council” and photographs taken from Dixon’s first two expeditions were displayed using colored lantern slides.
Now, I was especially interested in learning more about what (if anything) came from Taft viewing The Last Great Indian Council. To start, I did a general Google search of “Taft” and “last great indian council” and stumbled upon a website called silive.com that mentioned Taft’s presence at the groundbreaking for Wanamaker’s never-completed National American Indian Memorial. To corroborate this, I searched for “Taft + indian memorial” on newspapers.com and discovered a 1913 article in Baltimore’s The Evening Sun describing Taft at the groundbreaking, where he physically broke ground and made a brief speech. Another Google search produced an actual 1913 photograph from the Library of Congress of Taft at the groundbreaking, complete with this inscription: “Taft at Indian monument dedication.” Whether or not Taft was directly compelled by viewing Dixon’s film, he remained aligned with the work of Dixon and Wanamaker over the next three years.
Taft was not the only president with a personal connection to Dixon. In a newspapers.com article from New York’s The Sun dated Dec. 10, 1913, Dixon presents a signed pledge of fidelity to President Woodrow Wilson from the Native Americans he encountered on his third expedition. This article summarizes Dixon’s expedition and the subsequent pledge of fidelity as paramount to relations between the United States government and the Native Americans, and even includes a quote from President Wilson acknowledging the yet-to-be-constructed Indian Memorial. From this and the aforementioned archival evidence, it is clear that Dixon’s film and photographic expeditions did not just exist inside the Wanamaker scope; rather, Dixon himself acted as a form of liaison between the U.S. government and his Native American subjects.
As a foil to McGrath’s article, I also examined the secondary source of Russel Lawrence Barsh’s 1993 essay in Great Plains Quarterly entitled An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American Indian Citizenship. Unlike McGrath, Barsh quantifies Dixon’s actions as highly negative to the well-being of Native Americans and characterizes Dixon as an ignorant romantic who let his fantasy of Native Americans control his understanding of their reality (and the reality he helped construct for them by his ties to the U.S. government). This essay also extensively discusses President Taft’s involvement in the Indian Memorial ceremony and groundbreaking, and Dixon’s arrangement of this situation.
Additionally, I turned to a secondary source within a primary source in order to get some idea of how Native Americans may have perceived Dixon’s influence: a new introduction by Joe D. Horse Capture in the 2015 edition of Dixon’s book of photographs, The Vanishing Race (originally printed in 1914 by Doubleday, Page & Company). Horse Capture primarily notes the lingering problems with the photographs of Native Americans from Dixon’s expeditions (namely that many of them were fabricated or staged in order to appeal to a romanticized view of the race), and quantifies “race” less as a descriptor of a people and more a competition to capture, preserve, and assimilate Native American culture. This introduction also notes Taft’s sanction of the expedition for citizenship in 1911.
As a preliminary means to study the scope of Dixon’s work outside of just the Wanamaker department store, one can use these primary and secondary resources to begin to understand where Dixon’s films were shown and his relationship with the U.S. government (and how this subsequently impacted the government’s relationship with the Native Americans at large).
Referenced Sources:
Barsh, Russel Lawrence, "An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American Indian Citizenship.” Great Plains Quarterly. 751. 1993. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/751
Dixon, Joseph K. The Vanishing Race (Calla Editions, 2015).
“Indians Take Oath of Fidelity to U.S.” The Sun, December 10, 1913. https://www.newspapers.com/image/65398793/?terms=National%2BMemorial%2Bto%2Bthe%2BNorth%2BAmerican%2BIndian.
“Sees Great Field for Pictures.” The Film Index. May 21, 1910. https://ia800800.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/15/items/filmindexjanjun105film/filmindexjanjun105film_jp2.zip&file=filmindexjanjun105film_jp2%2Ffilmindexjanjun105film_0472.jp2&ext=jpg.
“Taft and Indians Break Monument Ground.” The Evening Sun. February 22, 1913. https://www.newspapers.com/image/365465408/?terms=taft%2Bindian%2Bmonument.
Taft at Indian Monument Dedication. February 22, 1913. Photograph. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.11596/.
The Last Great Indian Council: The Farewell of the Chiefs. October 24, 1912. Program for a lecture given by Joseph K. Dixon in New York City. https://www.masshist.org/database/475