The Photograph That Became an Icon
The 1898 photographs taken by Joseph T. Keiley have circulated so widely that they have become iconic in a specific way: they are the face of Zitkála-Šá that most people who have encountered her work have seen.
One photograph in particular — in which she appears in the foreground with a book, looking directly into the camera with an expression that reads as composed, serious, and entirely present — has appeared in countless reprints and is among the most frequently reproduced images in histories of Native American literature and the boarding school era.
The photograph was taken at a moment when she was beginning her public career, when the essays that would establish her as a major literary voice had not yet been published. But the image captures something about her that the essays confirm: a person who is intensely self-aware, who is presenting herself deliberately to the world, and who is not doing so in the apologetic or constrained manner that the boarding school system had designed to produce.
She looks directly at the camera. She is not averting her gaze or performing deference. The image is not an image of someone who has been successfully assimilated in the way the system intended. It is an image of someone who has used the opportunities the system created while refusing to be diminished by it.
The photograph has taken on a specific significance in recent years as interest in her work has grown. It appears on the cover of reprints of her writing, on websites about Native American history and literature, in museum exhibitions, and in educational materials. It has become, in the way that iconic photographs do, a kind of shorthand for the story it is connected to.