OPENED TO THE public on Nov. 8 during Native American Heritage Month, Oakland Museum of California’s exhibition, “Born of the Bear Dance: Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California,” celebrates the renowned, Indigenous photographer’s extensive portfolio.
Drawn from the Aguilar family’s 2022 gift of 25,000 negatives, prints, and transparencies he created from 1982 to 2018, the exhibit represents a slender portion of his work. Even so, the images stand firmly, like their maker, on two legs. One “foot” is firmly and reverently rooted in the diverse heritage, people, traditions and culture of the state’s indigenous history; the other is planted with relevance and resounding vitality in the present day and reflects contemporary Native Americans’ existence and lifestyles.
OMCA curator of photography and visual culture Drew Johnson prior to the opening referred to the Aguilar archive as “the most important photographic acquisition by the museum in many years.” Asked in a phone interview several weeks later to expand on the statement, Johnson said despite the museum having a long history of collecting indigenous photographs, none had been acquired that expressed a Native California viewpoint.
“Past acquisitions are all from a non-native, anthropological perspective,” Johnson said. “Dugan’s photographs are the absolute opposite of that. Due to his indigenous ancestry (Mountain Maidu/Pit River/Walker River Paiute) and his generous personality, he had people’s trust in the Native community and was able to photograph things others were not. He didn’t take photographs, he created photographs in collaboration with people in the Native community. It was a partnership lasting over 40 years.”
A passion for portraiture
Aguilar was born in 1947 in the Sierra foothills city of Susanville. After earning a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology and design from California State University, Fresno in 1973, he studied photography at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and University of Nevada, Reno. He and his wife, Elizabeth Aguilar, moved to Elk Grove in the 1970s, after which he worked in the graphics department at the Sacramento Bee. Until his death in 2018, Aguilar invested considerable time pursuing his passion for portraiture, and to a lesser extent, buildings and landscapes in California’s indigenous communities.
While they invaluably chronicle Native life in California with insight, depth, and an intimate understanding of Native American people, culture and history, Johnson said Aguilar’s photographs are equally essential due to his artistry.
“The photographs would stand alone, even without the incredible light he sheds on that community,” Johnson said. “He had traditional chops inspired by the straightforward, 20th century style and techniques of artists like Ansel Adams and other photographers who worked mostly in black-and-white. His work is polished, but also shows his ability to connect with his subjects.”
The exhibit is “relentlessly celebratory,” according to Johnson, and equally, a substantial documentation of Aguilar’s practices, materials, syntax, and context. “Dugan said he wanted to wake people up with the photographs because most Californians and people in America aren’t aware these Native American communities are still vital, still practicing age- old traditions and arts in living communities. This is happening today.”
Most photographic collections of indigenous communities, Johnson suggested, lack intimacy and are possibly distancing in that they emphasize only tragic, antiquated narratives or are created as “photographic activism” to prompt change. “His work shows every-day Native Americans existing today, which just shines through in the images.”
Evidence of Aguilar’s deliberate focus on the beauty, strength, humor, and diversity of indigenous California people is easily found in a few images and sometimes, even in one photograph. “Cousin Fred, Truckee” (1982), shows a young Native man riding a motorcycle on a paved road. Dressed in a leather vest, jeans, and boots, strands of his long hair stream behind him in the wind. His bike is powerful; the portrait, that of a modern-day warrior, a determined, nomadic spirit in 1980s America carving a singular path.
A second photograph, “Sarah Keller, Chaw’se Roundhouse” (1995), demonstrates Aguilar’s particular blend of history and modernity. The young woman wears a traditional fur hat, beaded and feathered necklaces, and what resemble “sunglasses” made of strands of beads that descend from her headdress to partially cover her eyes. Her chin is lifted, a slight smile curls the corners of her mouth. Behind her is a roundhouse. Its cone shape is hypnotic, textured, graphic; underscoring the history behind her proud posture, but not drawing the eye away from the photograph’s primary subject. Person and place resonate with each other, as if in dialogue.
Two other images, “Adam Enos” (1999) and “Elsie Allen (Pomo)” made in 1980, arguably show more expected portrayals. The first is of a barefoot toddler wearing the traditional regalia of his tribe; the second a female elder holding in front of her body — tilting it for the viewer’s consideration of its interior — a traditional, hand-woven basket.
Collectively, the four photographs show the plurality of indigenous Californians. Without knowing their actual backstories, the images are evocative, respectful, and individual. They are invitations to linger, not seeking to satisfy cheap fascination, but allowing deep curiosity and interest to drive contemplation.
Changing the narrative
In a separate conversation and asked to comment on the photographs he is most pleased to see included in the exhibit, the photographer’s son, Dustin Aguilar, said, “He shows people free from the narratives put on them that Natives don’t exist anymore. Or, if they exist, it’s in some distant way or they’ve been fully assimilated. His work shows people free from colonization and existing in and practicing their culture in a way that’s natural to them. It could be viewed as resistance against colonization. And then, removing that narrative — that Native existence is solely resistance — in itself leaves you with indigenous culture as it exists without politics. You are left with community, family, tradition.”
The man on the motorcycle, Fred, was his father’s favorite cousin. “I was only one year old when he died. I know he was a bold and brave person who wasn’t afraid to speak up and my father loved him. I like this image being included because I sense his strong spirit. There is a rebellious Native American streak combined with rock ’n’ roll, motion, and ’80s Americana in California.”
“He shows people free from the narratives put on them that Natives don’t exist anymore. … His work shows people free from colonization and existing in and practicing their culture in a way that’s natural. …”
Dustin Aguilar, discussing his father’s work
He also appreciates an image of the Hunge Ka Pu roundhouse; unusual in that its simplicity and higher contrast stand in contrast to the gray scale found in most of Aguilar’s photographs. This one, taken from the perspective of looking up from within the roundhouse and through the smoke hole, is stark, dynamic. The structure’s wood slats point like daggers to a blank, circular, white sky. “It’s almost hard to tell what’s foreground and what’s background in many of his photographs of the roundhouse, but in this one, it is more graphic. I wonder what was going on in his mind when he captured it. It has a timelessness to it and it’s just different than others,” he said.
Johnson and the development team found Aguilar’s lesser-known landscapes especially striking. As a photographer renowned for his portraiture, the final section of the exhibition, called “Deep Time,” offers a rare opportunity to view Aguilar’s landscapes and offers more beautiful photography. “The title to us described his landscapes as images connected to the people in a deep way. There’s one photograph of someone coming back from a hunt. The person is silhouetted with their horse and is far, far in the distance. You see a person who has become part of the landscape and is doing something his ancestors did for 10,000 years.”
Celebrating people
As important as these works are for understanding Aguilar’s total vision and work, the majority of the work in the show involves people. Showing them wearing regalia and participating in ancient traditions, or gathered in front of a roundhouse dressed in modern day t-shirts and pants, baseball uniforms, and work clothing, the photographs might feature military veterans, elders, babies, dancers, young people in prayer, basket makers, and more.
In the foyer as visitors enter the exhibition, a greatly enlarged photograph of Aguilar posing with people he’s photographed is displayed. The people are holding up life-size matted prints of themselves that he’s made and gifted to them. “They’re all wearing traditional regalia in the photographs they hold, but in the photo where they’re in front of the Chaw’se roundhouse, they’re all wearing everyday, modern clothes. Right off the bat, it sets the tone of people of today celebrating together and him being a participant,” Johnson said.
Curator and writer Theresa Harlan is the author of Aguilar’s biography, “She Sang Me A Good Luck Song: The Californian Indian Photographs of Dugan Aguilar.” Published in 2016 by Berkeley-based Heyday Books, Harlan writes of Aguilar as “a man of few words,” whose use of natural light and other photographic skills are evidently the work of “a masterful artist.” With photos that refuse to romanticize or add melodrama to portrayals of Native people, the true nature and ongoing viability of Native Californians is preserved.
Harlan in an interview said people unfamiliar with the diversity and enormity of California’s Native communities will be surprised. “There is diversity and a great number of different tribal peoples. (There are more than 100 different tribal homelands in California.) There were even more tribes before colonization and the genocide that occurred before California became a state. Experts have estimated as high as a million Natives were killed when it was a territory and after it was a state, they issued the Indian Protection Act that legalized the enslavement of Native children and adults. The effort to extinguish Native people from their lands was enormous and ultimately, unsuccessful.”
Despite that reality, Harlan said many people assume the opposite and that only a few indigenous people remain. “They will be surprised at the exhibit by the communities that continue to practice traditions and pass them on to the next generation and yet, Native people live like they do; working in tech, modernity, and the same world they live in. They’ll also be surprised there are Native photographers like Aguilar documenting their own communities. We don’t need other photographers to come in: we have our own people.”
Harlan by birth is Jemez Pueblo and an enrolled member of Kewa Pueblo of New Mexico. Born in San Francisco and adopted (her mother, Coast Miwok/Támal-ko), she is the founder/director of the Alliance for Felix Cove. The indigenous advocacy and educational organization works to protect, restore and rematriate the ancestral Coast Miwok/Támal-ko homelands of the Felix Family at Point Reyes National Seashore.
Harlan suggests Aguilar’s portraits, due to his collaborative process and showing people in the ways and settings of their choice, are not overtly emotional. Nevertheless, they demonstrate his deep affection for his subjects.
“His photographs show the humanity of indigenous people and his love for them. He would just light up when he was in the community. He’d be touched by seeing babies and young men. He’s their father, son, brother, friend. A Native person once used the phrase, ‘post-assimilation grace.’ That phrase says that Native people came out of the fires of genocide and move forward while still holding onto their beliefs, cultural life, and how they were raised to understand the world. There was effort to strip us of our practices, like looking at plants and animals, not just at humans, as having a relationship with us. There’s grace in harvesting roots in a forest to weave a beautiful basket. There’s grace in a father teaching a child a (traditional) dance.”
The regalia of Native culture
If there is grace in Aguilar’s craft, there is also profound respect and rigor in his practices and language. “He would sit in his truck for hours, waiting for just the right light. He — and I — would never use the word ‘costumes’ for Native regalia,” Harlan says. “To say costume implies Halloween, something comical, a plaything. Regalia shows respect and is accepted in Native communities.”
Harlan was involved in developing the exhibition. “The images had to show the diversity of indigenous communities. Central California is different than East Bay. East Bay is different than South Bay. It had to show that he lived by indigenous principles of respect, reciprocity, gratitude, abundance. Because of his work, there are generations of young people now seeing self-representations in images made from an indigenous eye. These are not exploratory images taken for fascination. They’re not extractive; they’re images of reciprocal relationships.”
Harlan has been thinking about Dugan’s images since the 1990s. “They hold so much meaning and carry no stereotypes. Native women are not sexualized or de-feminized. They have their full humanity. Same with Native men, who have been portrayed in derogatory ways. There’s strong community and self-identity. After 40 years, I never tire of seeing these faces. They feel like relatives.”
As an actual relative, Aguilar said the design and presentation surrounding his father’s photographs are meticulous and respectful. Overseeing the archive after his mother became too ill to manage it on her own, he relied on trusted advisors who had worked with his father to select a “home” for the collection. Meeting with OMCA staff, he was attracted to their plans to eventually create a digital library and extended programming. “That felt like a wonderful resource for all types of people to access. Working on the exhibit with OMCA and their Native advisory counsel (drawn from members of indigenous California communities), was a wonderful way to move forward with identifying subjects, honing the verbiage, and interviewing people for context, insight, and information about the photographs and my father as a person.”
“They hold so much meaning and carry no stereotypes. … There’s strong community and self-identity. After 40 years, I never tire of seeing these faces. They feel like relatives.”
Theresa Harlan, curator and author
Digitizing the extensive archive and organizing it into an online library will require enormous effort and considerable time. Johnson said, “We’re moving on that, but we’re building the plane while learning to fly it. He had such a varied career and we’re still learning things about him. I just discovered a project he did when he was hired by Sesame Street in the ’90s to do a photo essay about a little kid growing up on a reservation. It’s amazing. The exhibit and publicity around it involves cultural sensitivity and not rushing. We’ve been very careful about permissions and the stories and history told.”
A month ago, OMCA opened up a brand new portal for the collection. The timing for launching it publicly will be determined by practical, technical matters, but equally, after integrating input from the advisory council, the Aguilar family, and people in local Indigenous communities. In the meantime, the exhibit is open through June 22, 2025.
During November, community programs, hands-on activities, secondary exhibits and presentations (Johnson said additions are likely to be made in coming months) provide added breadth and perspective on the state’s diverse, rich, historic, contemporary, and living Indigenous people, places, traditions and culture. The OMCA with the Aguilar archive is positioned not simply to house the marvelous work and legacy of a California indigenous artist, but to create a living, animated, ever-evolving portrait of Native life and culture.
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