Field Notes: Rupert Nuttle

Abstract

“Go-won-go Mohawk’s Great Escape (From Photography)”

Rupert Nuttle's talk takes up the elusive and multifaceted archival presence of Go-won-go Mohawk (1859-1924), a member of the Seneca Nation and an immensely popular performer on the fin-de-sièclevaudeville circuit. A sharpshooter and trick-rider, Mohawk almost always played the male hero in her productions, doubly reversing settler-colonial identity expectations. She also posed in drag for many of her publicity portraits. Nuttle situates Mohawk’s transgressive photographic self-fashioning within the context of the illustrated periodicals of her time, where Mohawk’s beguiling presence brushed shoulders with the explicitly ethnographic visual modes that were (and are) used to relegate Indigenous survivance to a pre-colonial past.

This talk is based on a chapter of Nuttle's dissertation in progress, Vision Intervenes: Photography in the Colonial Apparatus, 1885-1925. Nuttle proposes that in this period the camera’s logic of ‘framing,’ ‘composition’ and ‘capture’ became historically synonymous with the colonial activities of containment, social reordering and land dispossession. By establishing a powerful counter-aesthetic to the hegemonic vernacular of photographic containment in a frontier image economy, Go-won-go Mohawk used the slipperiness of photographic media to set the terms for her own Indigeneity. In doing so, she forged a key precedent for subsequent generations of Indigenous artistic self-determination.