Eats No Meat

The Denver Public Library's print of this photograph carries the title “Princess Eat-No-Meat” and identifies its subject as a Cayuse or Umatilla woman. She wears braids and earrings, a print shirt under strands of necklaces and a choker, a beaded belt, and a blanket drawn over her left shoulder. The photographer was Major Lee Moorhouse of Pendleton, Oregon — a onetime agent for the Umatilla Reservation who made more than nine thousand photographs of Columbia Plateau life between 1888 and 1916, and who published this portrait in his 1906 Souvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs.

Both halves of the caption ask to be read carefully. “Princess” was a seller's word — a courtesy title the postcard trade liked to attach to Native women, with no equivalent rank in Plateau communities. “Eat-No-Meat” reads as an English rendering of a name whose own-language form the studio never recorded. The caption, in other words, preserves the woman and the marketplace at once: a real face, framed by a flourish invented to move prints off a counter in Pendleton, and a name translated halfway out of her world.

She belonged to the community now organized as the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation — Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla people whose reservation east of Pendleton dates to the treaty of 1855. Copies of her portrait are held by the Denver Public Library and the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives, and the Moorhouse images are today curated with tribal participation through the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal, where communities add their own knowledge to records like hers — including, perhaps someday, the name she actually carried.