As a Native American photographer, the late Dugan Aguilar loved nothing more than to show Native American faces. “I see beauty in people,” he once said.
And for Aguilar, who devoted more than 40 years to photographing Native Americans in his home state of California, it was especially important for those he portrayed to feel like collaborators.
This generosity of spirit is evident in his many stunning black-and-white portraits on display in “Born of the Bear Dance: Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California.” The retrospective, currently on display at the Oakland Museum of California, continues through June 22.
As the exhibit emphasizes, Aguilar’s collaborative approach has significant cultural implications, given that Native Americans have a long, painful history of being exploited by white people’s cameras. Aguilar, who died in 2018 at age 71, never saw himself as “taking” photos, the exhibit explains. He was “receiving” a gift from those participating in his images.
And in one notable case, his approach proved crucial to creating some of the more striking portraits in the show. In 1995, he found himself in a technical bind while documenting the Big Time Celebration at Chaw’se, otherwise known as Indian Grinding Rock Historic Park, near Jackson in the Sierra foothills. He wanted to do a series of portraits of women and men in front of the roundhouse, with most of the seven wearing ceremonial clothing adorned with intricate traditional beading and feathers.
But Aguilar was down to his last roll of film. In a pre-digital age that meant that pretty much every shot had to be perfect, a feat that many professional photographers would find pretty daunting.
The exhibit’s signage has Aguilar’s explanation of how he dealt with the challenge: He approached the seven, including a woman with her baby, and told them he had an upcoming show at UC Davis, one of the schools where he studied photography after serving in Vietnam.
“If you guys are willing to help me, I would like to see if I can get an image or two for the show,’” he said. “What surprised me is that out of one roll of film, all of the photographs were good. I am happy if I can get one image from a roll.”
Drew Johnson, the Oakland museum’s curator of photography and visual culture, marvels at the artistry visible in the nearly 30-year-old images, saying that Aguilar couldn’t have created them unless each person felt totally comfortable with him.
In each photo, the person looks straight into his camera with a sense of peace, pride and self-possession. In “Sarah Keller, Chaw’se Roundhouse,” a young woman, with a fur headpiece and beads partially covering her eyes, stands with her chin raised and her mouth curved into a smile, as if she and Aguilar are sharing a moment of recognition and joy.
Aguilar’s son, Dustin Aguilar, agreed that his father had a unique ability to make anyone feel at ease – “like in a minute.” He loves how the photos are imbued with his father’s “quiet energy.” Aguilar himself said each photograph takes on a “spirit or feeling,” and he liked his to be “quiet and peaceful.”
The photos from the Chaw’se celebration are just a sliver of the Oakland museum show, which itself is drawn from a vast trove of 25,000 negatives, prints and transparencies that Aguilar produced from 1982 until his death.
When Aguilar’s family donated his archive to the Oakland museum in 2022, their gift became “one of most important photographic acquisitions by the museum in many years,” Johnson said.
The photos document a variety of contemporary Native American experiences throughout California from a Native American point of view. They show individuals and families participating in ceremonies, sharing their pride in basket weaving and other arts, interacting with their natural landscapes or otherwise going about their lives.
“It’s like the Indians of California don’t exist in the minds of most people, and I want to set the record straight,” the exhibit quotes Aguilar as having said.
In certain ways, Aguilar was at the forefront of a growing movement among Native American visual artists, writers and filmmakers, who are creating opportunities to tell their own stories. From the 19th century on, white academics, documentarians and Hollywood filmmakers usually recorded images of real or fictional Indians in order to hold them up as exotic others or people to be studied, feared or pitied in some “tragic, antiquated narrative,” Johnson added.
Aguilar’s own background afforded him unique access. Born in Susanville, east of Mount Lassen, Aguilar was of Mountain Maidu, Pit River and Walker River ancestry. He grew up attending Native American ceremonies, including the annual Bear Dance, a spring ceremony celebrating renewal which inspired the name of this exhibition.
But Aguilar also felt the weight of Native people’s history in America, carrying “the general traumas of genocide and cultural loss,” his cousin Chag Lowry wrote in the Smithsonian’s American Indian Magazine. Among other things, Aguilar’s parents survived Indian boarding schools, one of the systems used by the federal and state governments to push for Native people to be displaced, exterminated or culturally assimilated in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Aguilar’s other pain came from his service in Vietnam, which left him suffering from the lifelong complications of PTSD and exposure to Agent Orange, his family said. In the final years of his life, he struggled with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
Before Aguilar thought about becoming a photographer, he followed a family tradition. His father and uncles were highly decorated veterans from World War II and the Korean War. But Aguilar’s war was in Vietnam, and Dustin Aguilar believes his father enlisted in the Marines in 1968 because he expected to be drafted anyway.
While Aguilar remained proud of his connections to other veterans, he rarely spoke about his wartime experiences. Dustin Aguilar speculates that his father coped with his trauma by trying to maintain a serene exterior. Lowry believes he found healing through photography.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in industrial technology and design from CSU Fresno, Aguilar discovered his talent with cameras while taking a class at the University of Nevada in Reno, taught by a former assistant of celebrated California landscape photographer Ansel Adams.
Like many artists, Aguilar had to get a day job; his was working in the graphics department at the Sacramento Bee. As he and his wife, Liz, raised a family in Elk Grove, he took pride in being a hands-on father.
But every chance he got, Aguilar pursued what became his life’s work — documenting the contemporary lives of his fellow Native Californians – a rich subject, given that the state encompasses the traditional homelands of more than 100 different tribes.
Dustin Aguilar said that family vacations often involved road trips to places where his father could do some photography. Aguilar became a familiar figure at Native American events around the state. He photographed Maidu, Yurok and Karuk ceremonies and the annual reunion of Indian veterans from Susanville, his hometown. Sometimes he was the only photographer permitted into sacred spaces. He also became the official photographer for the California Indian Basketweavers Association, and spoke about a spiritual link between the patience of basket making and his work in the darkroom, coaxing an image out of film.
Some of his images show Native people with one foot in their traditions and another in mainstream American culture. In “Cousin Fred, Truckee,” a young, leather-clad Native man rides a motorcycle like a modern-day warrior, with his long hair blowing behind him. In another, a female member of the Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians poses in front of highrises along the Sacramento River while dressed in ceremonial regalia.
As Aguilar developed his photos, he also prepared large, matted versions that he presented to people he photographed, including those at the 1995 Chaw’se celebration. The gesture was in keeping with traditional Indigenous systems of mutual respect and reciprocity.
“I’m honored to have gained the trust of the Indian community,” he said. “Every day, I learn something new about my culture and my people. It’s a gift.”