Title: Kinscapes, Counter Histories, and Nineteenth-Century Tintypes
Abstract: Kinscapes, Counter Histories, and Nineteenth-Century Tintypes Heather Caverhill (bio) and Claire Thomson (bio) The picture that accompanies this essay is a twenty-first-century digital image of an early twentieth-century copy of a nineteenth-century photographic portrait (fig.1). The original portrait was likely created when the sitter, James Harkin Thomson, joined what was, at the time, Canada's newly formed paramilitary force, the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP). In [End Page 28] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. George Douglas, Portrait of James Harkin Thomson, c. 1919. Wood Mountain Historical Society, copy print. Photograph by Claire Thomson. 1879, he arrived at Fort Walsh, the headquarters of the police force, located in the Cypress Hills of present-day southern Saskatchewan. Thomson was later stationed at an NWMP post in Wood Mountain, roughly 250 kilometres east of Fort Walsh. There, he began a lifelong relationship with Iȟá Waštéwiŋ/Good Laughing Woman (Mary Thomson), a Lakota woman. The two stayed in the area for the rest of their lives; their descendants still live there today. For Claire Thomson, one of this essay's co-authors, the photograph contributes to family memory and identity, as the subject is her great-greatgrandfather. At the same time, Thomson's portrait contributes evidence to overlooked histories of Indigenous and settler encounters on the Plains and expands our understanding of nineteenth-century photography. For the Thomson family, the photograph helps to make visible what ethnohistorians refer to as a kinscape: a network of family and relationships tied to specific places and landscapes. The portrait of Thomson in his NWMP uniform clarifies how he came to reside in Wood Mountain, [End Page 29] where his family remains. It is not clear who wrote "1877" at the bottom of the image. The date is perplexing, as Thomson did not join the NWMP until 1879 ("Thomson"). He left the force in 1884 and took a land grant directly adjacent to the NWMP post at Wood Mountain, where he and Iȟá Waštéwiŋ began ranching. Sometime before 1919, a local historian named George Douglas visited their home and took a photograph of the portrait, which was displayed on a wall. Douglas interviewed many families in the area, including some of the first ranchers, some Lakota people, and members of the NWMP. Douglas's copy, now in the collection of the Wood Mountain Historical Society, is captivating, as it reveals the materiality of the original photograph; we can see the wood interior of the house, the oval shape of the portrait, and the nail that affixed it to the wall. These elements impart a feeling of familiarity, as though it could still be hanging in a relative's home. It was fortunate for Thomson's family that Douglas created his photograph of a photograph, as it preserved the image after the original was destroyed in 1919 when the Thomson house burned down. The photograph not only corroborates and enriches the Thomson family's oral histories; it also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of historical conditions on the Plains in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Often the history of the arrival of the NWMP in 1874 is told as a celebratory story of how the "Mounties" civilized and brought law to the Canadian West, paving the way for white settlers to modernize and make productive use of land and resources.1 These frontier fictions erase the histories of the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited these lands for millennia and who resisted the violence of settler-colonial processes. Such narratives also overlook the intercultural communities and trade networks that shaped life on the Plains in the nineteenth century. The Cypress Hills area, for example, was a place of interactions and relationships among members of Plains First Nations communities, Métis families, non-Indigenous traders, merchants, and drifters. In the late 1870s, the population ballooned as a steady stream of new police recruits came to the area (Hildebrandt and Hubner 20, 32). Around the same time, the depletion of buffalo herds initiated an appalling food crisis. Deer and antelope in the Cypress Hills provided an alternative game source, which attracted Indigenous people from...