JULIA E. TUELL

     In 1906 there arrived at Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, a petite, teenage bride named Julia Tuell. With her schoolmaster husband she would live among the Cheyenne's, then briefly among the Sac and Fox tribe in Oklahoma and finally (for more than a decade) with the Lakota (Sioux) on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Realizing the fleeting beauty of Plains Indian culture, a beauty fading before her eyes, Julia chose for her constant companion an 8 x 10 Kodak camera and indelibly preserved on its glass plates the treasures in this book.

     During the first three decades of the twentieth century, warriors who had fought General Custer still lived. Women who had sheltered and nourished their children among the darkest days of Plains Indian life still survived. The most sacred religious ceremonies of the tribes, the Sun Dance and the Massaum, were still regularly practiced (when reservation officials allowed it). Julia Tuell understood that all facets of Plains Indian culture were precious and endangered, so she photographed both the mundane and the magnificent, both day-to-day tasks such as food preparation and striking portraits of chiseled faces that exude character.

     Taught the Cheyenne language by the great chief American Horse, Julia became one with her subjects. Her empathy with the people she photographed and her gentle femininity opened doors barred to nearly all other whites. Thus, she was allowed to photograph some of the most sacred moments of Cheyenne and Sioux existence. Although she became known by scholars of the Plains tribes such as George Bird Grinnell, who used some of her images for his classic works on the Cheyenne people, Julia’s photographs have been largely unavailable to the public until now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

     Dan Aadland lives on a ranch in south-central Montana, a few miles west of the Absaroka (Crow) Reservation, which borders that of the Northern Cheyennes. Aadland carried his fascination with the last free-roaming days of the Cheyenne and Sioux to the University of Utah, where he earned a Ph. D. in American Studies. A close friend of Varble Tuell, Julia’s youngest child, Aadland was entrusted by the Tuell family to write a text that puts Julia Tuell’s photographs in historical and cultural context, to create the book that fulfills Varble Tuell’s dream, a book honoring his mother and allowing her work to be viewed by all.