Paul-Émile Miot (1827-1900)
|
Paul-Émile Miot, a French naval officer and
hydrographic surveyor, was involved in many of the 1850s hydrographic
surveys by the French navy of the coast and harbours that formed the
French Shore of Newfoundland. From 1857 to 1859, Miot took
approximately eighty photographs in Newfoundland and other areas in
Atlantic Canada. Among these works are six outstanding portraits
of Newfoundland Mi'kmaw women and men, which are part of this
exhibition. There is a notable lack of ease on the part of Miot's
Mi'kmaw sitters, probally reflecting the social and cultral distance
between the French naval officer and his subjects. The cumbersome
process of photography in the 1850s, using glass plates, chemicals, a
large wooden camera and long exposure times, certainly would have
affected the sitter. |
| |
|
 |
|
Frederick Johnson (1904 - 1994)
|
In 1931, while collecting artifacts at Conne River, Frederick
Johnson photographed aspects of daily life of the Mi'kmaw community:
buildings, landscape views, activities such as smoking fish and packing
up a camp, along with a number of portraits. Since many of the
portraits are of the same people, we are left with a record of whom the
anthropologist knew rather than who lived in the community.
Johnson's portraits, like those of Speck, reflect an ease between the
photographer and his sitters, probably the result of both Speck and
Johnson having lived in the communities where they took their portraits.
His original negatives were used to print five of the portraits in this
exhibition. |
| |
|
|
Frank Speck (1880 - 1948)
|
In the summer of 1914, while Frank Speck was
collecting Mi'kmaq artifacts in Bay St. George and Badger Brook, he
took a number of photographs of Mi'kmaq people that he met and
probably stayed with. These photographs depict aspects of
turn-of-the-century Mi'kmaq life in Newfoundland. His work
includes images of Frank Joe's cabin in Bay St. George, hunters at
Badger Brook and John Paul's wife standing beside a spinning wheel,
probably in front of her frame house in Badger Brook. Speck's
photographs provide visual evidence of the changing nature of
Mi'kmaq life early in the twentieth century. |
| |
|
|
Mi'kmaw portraits at the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador
|
There are no known nineteenth-century portraits of Newfoundland
Mi'kmaw in the holdings of the Provincial archives of Newfoundland and
labrador. However, this archives does have two series of
photographs of Jim John, a Mi'kmaw guidefrom central Newfoundland.
These photographs, taken by J.P. Murphy Photos for the Newfoundland
Tourist Board in the early 1950s, show Mr. John leading parties of
hunters and fishermen. Guiding has been a tradional Mi'kmaw
occupation since the nineteeth century and these portraits depict an
occupation that continues today. Five photographs related to the
Newfoundland Mi'kmaq were produced for this exhibition from
photogravures found in the Archives' copy of J.G. Millais' 1907 book
Newfoundland and its Untrodden Ways. Millais, a big-game
hunter, employed Conne River Mi'kmaq as guides. |
| |
|
|
Mi'kmaw Artifacts
|
We would like to acknowledge the far-sightedness of what is now
the Canadian Museum of Civilization for having commissioned the
anthropologist, Frank Speck, to spend the summer of 1914 in
Newfoundland, where he collected fifty-six Mi'kmaw artifacts.
Seventeen artifacts dating from the early decades of the twentieth
century, many exhibitedfor the first time in Newfoundland and
Labrador, are used to demonstrate the continuation of the
traditional Mi'kmaw pattern of life into the twentieth century.
In 1931, the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian sent
the anthropologist, Frederick Johnson, to Conne River, Newfoundland
to acquire Mi'kmaw artifacts. His collection of twenty-two
objects are now preserved in the Smithsonian institution's National
Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. |
| |
|
|
|
