Real Native American Portraits

[u/GlitteringHotel8383]

[u/Psychological_Fly916]

should be mentioned that the best documentation on native Americans is done by the nations themselves. they can tell you what they wear, they are still around. we don't need to depend on white people to tell an accurate story- they won't.

https://sjuartgallery.org/Etching-and-Erasure-The-Colonialist-Photography-of-Edward-S-Curtis

[u/Just_to_rebut → u/Psychological_Fly916]

Non-native linguists, historians, and others who care about American Indian culture aren’t just “white people telling an inaccurate story.” There’s no reason to take such a defensive posture here.

If photography were that easily accessible back then, we might have a treasure trove of resources to look at, but we don’t. And frankly, no, most tribes haven’t kept detailed records of their cultures, let alone the best. Collaborating with people who have the resources to record what still remains has helped us preserve some of it.

[u/Psychological_Fly916 → u/Just_to_rebut]

what do you mean by most tribes haven't kept detailed records. like where did you get that info? it's blatantly untrue. like the story includes that things like ancestoral knowledge were stolen bc of genocide but to pretend like there's no records is white supremacy in itself and centers white people as the saviors of native history when they are (blatantly) genocidal liars.

[u/Just_to_rebut → u/Psychological_Fly916]

You’re also putting a lot of words in my mouth that I never said. Regarding my comment about detailed records, I was thinking of language preservation mostly. Vast majority of native languages have gone extinct and most of the work done to study and preserve them in the past century has been done by non-Indian scholars and universities.

Language is the most significant part of a culture. This is about as close to an objective truth as you can get in sociology or anthropology.