1771 – Bloody Falls massacre: Chipewyan chief Matonabbee, traveling as the guide to Samuel Hearne on his Arctic overland journey, massacres a group of unsuspecting Inuit.
The Massacre at Bloody Falls was an incident that took place during Samuel Hearne’s exploration of the Coppermine River on the 17 July 1771. Chipewyan and “Copper Indian”[1] Dene men led by Hearne’s guide and companion Matonabbee attacked a group of Copper Inuit[2] camped by rapids approximately 15 km (9.3 mi) upstream from the mouth of the Coppermine River. Just after midnight on 17 July, the Dene set upon the Inuit camp and killed approximately 20 men, women, and children. Hearne was traumatized by the massacre, saying “…and I am confident that my features must have feelingly expressed how sincerely I was affected at the barbarous scene I then witnessed; even at this hour I cannot reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears.”[3] He named the waterfall Bloody Falls.[4]
The site of the massacre, which was the traditional home of the Kogluktogmiut, is now located in Kugluk/Bloody Falls Territorial Park near Kugluktuk, Nunavut. It was designated a National Historic Site in 1978.
In 1996, Dene and Inuit representatives participated in a healing ceremony to reconcile the centuries-old grievance.[5]
The incident is referred to in the John Newlove poem Samuel Hearne in Wintertime.
Genesis of the massacre
Towards the end of May 1771, Samuel Hearne began to notice that the Chipewyan Indians accompanying him on his expedition had motives other than his planned survey of the Coppermine River.[6]
On the party’s arrival at Peshew Lake, Matonabbee and a number of the men accompanying Hearne began to make arrangements for their wives and children to be left behind. Later on, when the party arrived at Clowey, each of the Chipewyan men crafted shields from thin boards, 60 cm (2 ft) wide and 90 cm (3 ft) long.
Hearne noted that his party was joined by a number of Indians who were solely interested in propagating a war against the Inuit.[6]
In the travel narrative describing his journey, he claimed that as the group advanced north into Inuit territories, it became evident that his companions were gradually plotting an act of “savage”, “shocking”, and “brutish” violence.[7]
Hearne began to remonstrate with the Indians, but failed in his attempt. In his account of the events that transpired, he states that “I endeavored as much as possible to persuade them from putting their inhuman design into execution; but so far were my intreaties from having the wished-for effect, that it was concluded that I was actuated by cowardice.”[6]
On 1 June 1771, the few remaining women and children, as well as the dogs and the heavy luggage, were left behind by the party and a group of about 60 men advanced north, heading towards the Coppermine River.[6]
Four weeks later, on 2 July 1771, the party came across a group of Copper Indians, who on learning the purpose of the exploration party’s journey, supplied the party with canoes and other necessities. However, 17 men abandoned the exploration party in the coming days, claiming that the difficulty of the trek outweighed the pleasure that was to be derived from killing the Inuit.[6]
The remaining members of the exploration party arrived at the Coppermine River on 14 July 1771. Immediately on arrival, as Hearne commenced his survey, three scouts were sent to locate any Inuit who may have been camping near the river. The scouts returned on 16 July 1771, and reported that five Inuit tents had been found on the west side of the river. This news brought the survey work to a complete halt, and the men began to prepare for war.[6]
1898 – Berenice Abbott, American photographer (d. 1991)
Berenice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991),[2] née Bernice Alice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her portraits of between-the-wars 20th-century cultural figures, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation in the 1940s-1960s.
Early years
Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio[3] and brought up there by her divorced mother, née Lillian Alice Bunn (m. Charles E. Abbott in Chillicothe OH, 1886). She attended Ohio State University for two semesters, but left in early 1918.[4]
Trip to Europe, photography, and poetry
Her university studies included theater and sculpture.,[5] spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin.[2] She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin.[6] During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, “Berenice,” at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes.[7] In addition to her work in the visual arts, Abbott published poetry in the experimental literary journal transition.[8] Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Later she wrote: “I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else.” Ray was impressed by her darkroom work and allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs.[9] In 1926, she exhibited her work in the gallery “Au Sacre du Printemps” and started her own studio on the rue du Bac. After a short time studying photography in Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1927 and started a second studio, on the rue Servandoni.[10]
Abbott’s subjects were people in the artistic and literary worlds, including French nationals (Jean Cocteau), expatriates (James Joyce), and others just passing through the city. According to Sylvia Beach, “To be ‘done’ by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott meant you rated as somebody”.[11] Abbott’s work was exhibited with that of Man Ray, André Kertész, and others in Paris, in the “Salon de l’Escalier” (more formally, the Premier Salon Indépendant de la Photographie), and on the staircase of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Her portraiture was unusual within exhibitions of modernist photography held in 1928–9 in Brussels and Germany.[12]
In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget’s photographs. She became interested in Atget’s work,[13] and managed to persuade him to sit for a portrait in 1927. He died shortly thereafter. While the government acquired much of Atget’s archive — Atget had sold 2,621 negatives in 1920, and his friend and executor André Calmettes sold 2,000 more immediately after his death[14] — Abbott was able to buy the remainder in June 1928, and quickly started work on its promotion. An early tangible result was the 1930 book Atget, photographe de Paris, in which she is described as photo editor. Abbott’s work on Atget’s behalf would continue until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. In addition to her book The World of Atget (1964), she provided the photographs for A Vision of Paris (1963), published a portfolio, Twenty Photographs, and wrote essays.[15] Her sustained efforts helped Atget gain international recognition.
Changing New York
In early 1929, Abbott visited New York City, ostensibly to find an American publisher for Atget’s photographs. Upon seeing the city again, however, Abbott immediately saw its photographic potential. Accordingly, she went back to Paris, closed up her studio, and returned to New York in September. Her first photographs of the city were taken with a hand-held Kurt-Bentzin camera, but soon she acquired a Century Universal camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives.[16] Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed New York City with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget. Her work has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods of Manhattan.
Abbott worked on her New York project independently for six years, unable to get financial support from organizations (such as the Museum of the City of New York), foundations (such as the Guggenheim Foundation), or individuals. She supported herself with commercial work and teaching at the New School of Social Research beginning in 1933.[17] In 1935, however, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP)[2] as a project supervisor for her “Changing New York” project. She continued to take the photographs of the city, but she had assistants to help her both in the field and in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, and exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were then deposited at the Museum of the City of New York.[16] Abbott’s project was primarily a sociological study embedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as “fantastic” contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).[18]
Abbott’s ideas about New York were highly influenced by Lewis Mumford’s historical writings from the early 1930s, which divided American history into a series of technological eras. Abbott, like Mumford, was particularly critical of America’s “paleotechnic era,” which, as he described it, emerged at end of the American Civil War, a development called by other historians the Second Industrial Revolution. Like Mumford, Abbott was hopeful that, through urban planning efforts (aided by her photographs), Americans would be able to wrest control of their cities from paleotechnic forces, and bring about what Mumford described as a more humane and human-scaled, “neotechnic era”. Abbott’s agreement with Mumford can be seen especially in the ways that she photographed buildings that had been constructed in the paleotechnic era—before the advent of urban planning. Most often, buildings from this era appear in Abbott’s photographs in compositions that made them look downright menacing.[18]
In 1935, Abbott moved into a Greenwich Village loft with the art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she lived until McCausland’s death in 1965. McCausland was an ardent supporter of Abbott, writing several articles for the Springfield Daily Republican, as well as for Trend and New Masses (the latter under the pseudonym Elizabeth Noble). In addition, McCausland contributed the captions for the book of Abbott’s photographs entitled Changing New York which was published in 1939. In 1949, her photography book Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday was published by Harper & Brothers.
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