Sound Bite
The belief in American exceptionalism reached its apex during the 1800s and was expressed as a God-given passport called "Manifest Destiny". Among its victims were Native Americans. The Sioux resisted, eventually in desperation resorting to Ghost Dancing and claiming that Indians, not the whites, were the chosen people.
The military, political, and legal destruction of Indian culture provided precedent and justification for the empire building that accelerated soon after Sioux resistance was crushed. Frank Fiske was a young boy who observed this confrontation firsthand at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, where Sitting Bull was held, then killed. Fiske recorded the story as he grew and also kept the glorious past of the Sioux alive with his spectacular photographs of the people and their traditions.
About the Book
This remarkable historical account traces the life and work of Frank Fiske, a frontier photographer whose decades-long residence at Standing Rock Reservation positioned him uniquely to document one of America's most turbulent periods. Through Fiske's photographs, journals, and writings, Robert V. Dodge reconstructs the collision between American expansionism and Sioux sovereignty during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The narrative opens with young Frank's childhood observations of competing claims to chosenness—white Americans invoking Manifest Destiny, Chinese laborers speaking of their Middle Kingdom, and Sioux leaders like Sitting Bull asserting their people as God's chosen. This thematic tension anchors the book's examination of how different cultures understood their place in the world and their rights to the land.
Dodge carefully chronicles the events leading to the Sioux's desperate circumstances: broken treaties, the Fort Laramie agreements, the aftermath of Little Bighorn, and the government's systematic efforts to "civilize" Native peoples through the Dawes Act. Central to this history stands Sitting Bull, who emerges as a complex figure—neither the demonized savage of newspaper accounts nor an idealized martyr, but a genuine leader attempting to preserve his nation's independence and dignity.
Fiske's photographs reveal an artist's eye combined with a documentarian's commitment to recording reality. His portraits of Sioux leaders, warriors, and families capture individuals with agency and presence, countering the dehumanizing stereotypes prevalent in his era. Yet Fiske himself embodied the contradictions of his time, harboring genuine affection for the Sioux people while accepting the inevitability and even desirability of their assimilation.
The book presents admirable personalities—Sitting Bull's principled resistance, Charles Eastman's intellectual achievements bridging two worlds, and riverboat pilot Grant Marsh's remarkable skill and integrity. Conversely, it exposes the callousness of Indian agents, the duplicity of government officials, and the casual racism embedded in American institutions and media.
Dodge demonstrates that Fiske's work serves as a historical corrective, preserving images and accounts of a proud people before their traditional way of life vanished. His photographs and writings provide irreplaceable documentation of Standing Rock Reservation during a transformative and tragic period.
This book will appeal to readers interested in Native American history, photography, frontier life, and the human dimensions of America's westward expansion. It offers both historical substance and personal narrative, showing how one man's artistic vision can illuminate an era's moral complexities.
Information
The principal Indian featured in the book is Sitting Bull, who is the subject of some 3,000 books in his own right. Although this book is inherently a critique of U.S. policies and presumptions of 'exceptionalism,' it is not a treaty-by-treaty indictment of the treatment of tribes everywhere like Dee Brown's powerful Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). Brown's book probably remains the standard, but this is more a story where the presentation allows the reader to do the criticizing.The photography that appears throughout the book and a small photo gallery at the end also differentiate this work as Fiske's view of the unfolding events and their impact on those most deeply affected. Edward Curtis left a similarly extensive and elaborate collection of Native American images from the time, and his work has received considerable attention. Amazon has nine books of Native American photography by Curtis and a number of other collections of his work by other authors. Curtis sought to buy Fiske's work and introduced him to flexible film but Fiske's collection is nearly the size of Curtis' and he has many of the famous Indians of the period; the images are spectacular. The photographs make the book special, whether or not one is interested in the thesis.
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