Kaw-u-tz

The photograph behind this painting was captioned simply “Kaw-u-tz (Cado)” — her name and her nation, spelled as the studio heard them. It was made in 1906 by George Bancroft Cornish, a commercial photographer in Arkansas City, Kansas, just across the line from the Caddo country of Indian Territory, and copyrighted under his name that same year. A collotype print survives in the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University. She sits with long dark hair over a fringed dress, wearing a choker and strands of beads, her gaze turned a little from the lens — one of the most self-possessed portraits in the whole western photographic record.

No birth date, family, or later history was written down with the picture; her name is nearly the whole of her public record. The year, though, says a great deal. In 1906 the Caddo — whose towns and mound centers once lined the Red River in present-day Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas — had been in Indian Territory for two generations, their Washita River reservation recently broken into individual allotments, with Oklahoma statehood a year away. The nation then counted only a few hundred citizens; it now counts thousands, and photographs like this one are part of how that continuity is told.

Few portraits of Caddo women have traveled as far as hers. The image has been reproduced in library collections, in heritage projects in the old Caddo homelands of Louisiana, and in countless reprints, almost always under her recorded name. The painting's title, Kaw-tz, holds a compact form of the name the studio recorded — and the research behind this page simply gives it back in full: Kaw-u-tz, a Caddo woman, photographed in 1906, remembered by name.