Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacific Northwest

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

Perhaps one of the most useful legacies of the recent scholarly fad of
postmodernism is the concept of deconstruction. Our institutions and the
objects and patterns of everyday life should not be taken for granted,
but should be examined critically to discover their hidden meaning and
power. The photograph is one example that has attracted a good deal of
scholarly interest. Once accepted as an unbiased record of the past,
photographs are now recognized as reflecting what photographers,
consumers, or societies believed as much as what they saw.

Framing the West is an interesting contribution to this literature.
Williams examines a collection of images from mostly 19th-century
British Columbia for what she believes they tell us about the colonizing
process and attitudes. She classifies the images into three
“genres”—landscape, studio portraiture, and ethnographic
portraiture—and discusses the uses of these images for political,
economic, and cultural purposes. Of primary interest in her analysis are
women and Aboriginal people. She concludes that photography was one of
the tools by which Europeans surveyed, mapped, and ultimately claimed
ownership of the northwest.

Williams has uncovered a fascinating array of photographs and has done
some excellent work in the documentary archives to provide context for
the images. The photographs are well integrated with the text (so often
not the case in historical monographs), while most of the interpretive
discussion is sensible and grounded in the evidence.

There are a few rough spots where the author reads something into a
photograph that could easily be interpreted another way (the old problem
of whether the glass is half empty or half full). There are also minor
errors such as the misnaming of the Church Missionary Society as the
“Christian” Missionary Society and the misspelling of Sir John A.
Macdonald’s name. Perhaps also the project is simply too ambitious, as
the author tries to provide historical context and interpretive analysis
for so many individual threads that the emphasis is often wrong and we
lose sight of the overall tapestry. Nevertheless, it is an interesting
foray into a valuable topic. The book will be of interest primarily to a
scholarly audience.