My relationship with the Carter began several years ago, when I reached out to John Rohrbach, the former photography curator, to share my photographic work. At the time, I was making portraits of artists and friends in Texas—people from my community—drawing formally and conceptually from the Carter’s Richard Avedon collection. During our correspondence, I described a project I hoped to pursue: photographing Native women involved in the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. I was interested in photographing Native women in the Texas landscape—not as symbols, but as present, contemporary subjects embedded in lived environments. John encouraged me to continue the conversation with the Carter’s new curator, which ultimately led to my recent Gentling Fellowship.

My work as a photographer is rooted in visual storytelling, in questioning who has historically been allowed to be seen, and how. As an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and a Native woman raised in Texas, I am especially attentive to how Indigenous women have been framed: posed, flattened, romanticized, and rendered passive. Photography has played a central role in this process.

During this fellowship, I was drawn to the photographs of John K. Hillers and Edward Curtis to understand how early photographic practices shaped enduring visual narratives about Indigenous people, particularly women.

What became immediately clear is that Hillers was hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology. He was paid a salary—$1,800 a year—to photograph Native people as part of a federal project of documentation. His images reflect this mandate: Natives rendered as specimens, arranged for classification, removed from agency or interiority.