There’s a myth in America that says Native American cultures are declining—where they haven’t disappeared outright. According to a 2015 study by Pennsylvania State University researchers, only 13 percent of U.S. public school curriculum standards included information about Natives in a post-1900 context.
It’s a myth Ryan RedCorn is trying to counter. “The state of things is not in decline,” he says.
Based in the rural town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, RedCorn is an Osage photographer and filmmaker—and also a graphic designer, a father, a comedian. Mostly, though, he’s someone who refuses to disappear.
In an ongoing project, he collaborates with fellow Native people—members of the Osage and other nations—to make their portraits, showing them as they choose to be seen. As a Native person, he’s “keenly aware of the distortion” of indigenous representation in media, public education, and policy. As a photographer, he’s frustrated by white photojournalists’ history of depicting Native peoples and places in stories that present the intimate pains of marginalization without always confronting the systemic injustice that creates it.
RedCorn’s photos tell a different story. High schoolers pose for graduation portraits, solemn and triumphant by turns. A master weaver holds up her work. Babies blink in their cradleboards. And though the pandemic has put the project temporarily on hold—“you can’t photograph people without people”—RedCorn is eager to continue when it’s safe.
“We’re supposed to be disappearing, and it’s not happening,” RedCorn says. “Those narratives come into conflict with each other.”
Documenting life
Like many indigenous communities, Osage people have a long history of their images being leveraged against them, RedCorn says.
George Catlin’s 19th-century paintings of Native Americans, including Osage people, were meant to preserve a record of a “vanishing race” erased by colonization and assimilation. This narrative of invisibility persists today. Catlin’s work has inspired tourism to the West ever since—despite the fact that its romantic, nostalgic image of Native people obscures a painful history and makes it difficult for contemporary Native artists to gain recognition.
The advent of photography brought similar challenges. “Photography has a long voyeuristic and exploitative relationship with indigenous communities,” RedCorn says. “Osages are no exception.”