American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Ethnologists in the early twentieth century were the first to publish photographs of the Alabama-Coushatta people of Texas and the Coushatta (often written as “Koasati”) of Louisiana. Since then, authors have shaped the photographic and textual representations according to their own notions of culture and identity. In this case, Mark Raymond Harrington and John Reed Swanton went to Texas and Louisiana looking, like other salvage anthropologists, for remnants of Native cultures that were uncontaminated by European influence. These authors used photographs to authenticate “old industries” that represented, to them, an Indian past. Yet Native peoples all over the Southeast had already been subjected to considerable outside pressures to change their beliefs and practices. Early ethnologists neglected the processes of cultural hybridization and creativity in which Native peoples engaged to deal with these pressures. In spite of these weaknesses, early ethnologists pointed out elements of cultural preservation that many later authors ignored. Other writers supported the assimilation of the Alabama-Coushatta into Euro-American culture and Christianity. Through their text and photographs, such authors highlighted cultural change through tribal members’ participation in church, school, and vocational education. Yet some of these authors lamented Native culture loss at the same time that they praised the adoption of Christianity. Their difficulty in reconciling coexistent elements of cultural continuity and change surfaced in their use of photographs. As a result, certain Alabama and Coushatta practices, such as river-cane or pine-needle basket making and the preparation and cooking of the corn soup sof-ke became emblematic of tribal culture.