Holm, Bill Professor Emeritus, The Burke Museum, University of Washington
The Head Canoe: The Historical Record of an Archaic Vessel Recently I was told by a skilled contemporary Native canoe maker that the Head canoe was a myth and that if it ever existed there were no more than a very few odd experimental vessels. That encouraged me to reexamine the historical record in the form of 18th and early 19th century images and descriptions by European and Euro- American traders and explorers, and the many beautifully designed and crafted models of the Head canoe. I hope to deduce from this record the area of the Northwest Coast in which the Head canoe was used, the evolution of its design, the approximate date of its demise and its substitution by another design lasting, with modifications, into the twentieth century.
Old Photos Might Not Lie, But They Fib A Lot About Color Photographs of Native Peoples and their environs in the nineteenth century are often used by their descendants, ethnologists, art historians and others in research. Although these pictures are valuable resources, they also can lead to confusion and misinterpretation. One reason for this problem with images made with the photographic materials of earlier times is that the light-sensitive emulsions in the first decades of photography were limited in their sensitivity to some wave lengths of light. Early emulsions were highly sensitive to light in the blue areas of the spectrum, and conversely insensitive to wave lengths in the red and yellow range. This means that in the final image, those areas that are blue are rendered lighter than we might expect, and those in the red/yellow areas are rendered darker. Light and medium value blues can appear white in the photograph, while yellow will be dark gray and reds often are rendered as black. Some colors, for example bright yellow and dark blue, which contrast strongly in full color, may merge and be indistinguishable in a photograph made with a blue-sensitive emulsion. In the late nineteenth century advances in photographic chemistry led to some improvements, but the problems persisted to a degree into the twentieth century. This paper is intended to illustratethe problems of interpreting colors as rendered in black-and-white photographs and suggest possibilities for correctly identifying them.
