Skip to Main Content

Native American and Indigenous Peoples: Photography Collections

A guide to collections that depict Native American and Indigenous peoples from the late 19th-century to mid-20th century.

Images from the Collections

Midwest and East

William Henry Holmes Photograph Album of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories and Washington D.C., approximately 1868-1877
Photographs of the American West including views by John K. Hillers of Paiute Indians (1873), made in Nevada and Utah during the United States Survey under John Wesley Powell. There is also one view of Nez Perce Indians in front of a tepee.
Call number: photCL 96

Florence Barclay Hyatt Photograph Collection
Photographs collected by Florence Barclay Hyatt including card photographs chronicling the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre in southwestern South Dakota from 1890 to 1891, with images of Buffalo Bill, Captain Frank Dwight Baldwin, General Nelson Appleton Miles, and Chief Kicking Bear.
Call number: photCL 178, photDAG 94

Philip Reade Collection of Native American Photographs by William S. Soule
Studio portraits of Native Americans from the Midwestern and Southwestern United States taken during the American Indian Wars, as well as views of their homes and camps on reservations.  Call number: photCL 189 

George W. Ingalls Photograph Collection
Glass plate negatives and prints collected by Major George W. Ingalls, a United States Indian agent, 1872-1875, who worked among Paiute and other tribes in the American West, as well as among Great Plains, Great Basin and Eastern tribes relegated to Indian Territory.
Call number: photCL 275

Peaux rouges.
Call number: photCL 440

Henry G. Peabody Collection of Photographs and Negatives
Peabody and his family; landscape views in New England, Canada, the western United States, California, and Mexico; Native Americans.
Call number: photCL 478

The spirit of the past - Apsaroke, 1908, approximately 1916 printing by Edward Curtis
Call number: photOV 11401