Poetry and Politics of Native American Resistance: The Cañón de los Embudos Photographs by Geronimo and C.S. Fly (1886)

• In Event: Arguments For (and Against) Agency and Resistance in Native America: Considering the Possibility, Conditions, and Success of Counterhegemonic Argument

Abstract

The Cañón de los Embudos photographs of Geronimo and his Apache warriors taken by C.S. Fly in 1886 are an important first record of an American Indian nation during an insurgency. The series can be considered a transitional form between 19th century American Indian photography and early Western films. The C.S. Fly collection both uses and defines some of the central conventions of the Western genre: the vast expanses of outdoor locations; the pageantry of horses; the agonic conflict between forces of good and evil; the nostalgia for a fading time. Based on the surviving prints, a pictorial narrative can be constructed that reveals Geronimo as the first actor/hero and C.S. Fly as the first great cinematographer of Western films.
This essay will analyze the Cañón de los Embudos photographs as performative images of rebellion—icons in which the subject’s performance in front of the camera becomes symbolic and politically meaningful in the context of the Indian wars of the late 19th century. The author notes a rhetorical tension in the photographs between interpretations that define Geronimo and his warriors according to general premises of Indian warfare (Apaches as savage warriors) and Geronimo’s own attempts to manipulate photographic images for his own political purposes. As a brilliant performer who traced his expertise to his office as Apache medicine man, and through a conscientious manipulation of the photographic medium, Geronimo used photographic images as statements of resistance in military negotiations with the U.S. government, and for raising the consciousness of the American public regarding the plight of the Chiricahua Apaches.
The paper argues for a more profound consideration of the aesthetic context of rhetorical manifestations in the examination of Native American myths, ceremonials and recorded performances.

Author

• Oscar Giner, Arizona State University