Her Photographs and Their Power
Among the things that make Zitkála-Šá particularly vivid to contemporary audiences is the photographic record of her life.
She was photographed multiple times, by professional photographers, in ways that produced images of striking power. The most famous of these photographs were taken by the photographer Joseph T. Keiley in 1898, when she was approximately twenty-two years old. These photographs show a young woman of arresting presence — confident, serious, direct. She is dressed in a blend of traditional Dakota clothing and Anglo-American presentation that reflects, visually, the bicultural position she occupied.
The photographs have circulated widely in the century since they were taken, appearing in histories of Native American literature, in accounts of the boarding school system, and in the broader visual culture of American history. They are documents of a specific moment in the life of a specific person, and they have a quality that has made them enduring images.
Part of what makes the photographs powerful in their current context is knowing what we know about who this person was and what she did. The young woman in the 1898 photographs is someone who has already experienced the boarding school system, who has already begun to write the essays that will expose that system to a national audience, and who is at the beginning of a decades-long career as a writer, musician, and political advocate.
The photographs are not simply portraits. They are records of a moment in a life that was in the process of becoming something the world had not yet seen.