Nowadluk Ootenna

Nowadluk, known to the photographers of Nome as Nora, was an Iñupiaq woman of Alaska's Seward Peninsula, born in the early 1880s. Her world was the reindeer country around Cape Prince of Wales, the westernmost point of the continent: in 1900 she married George Ootenna, a respected reindeer herder from Wales, and the 1910 census places her at Port Clarence, where the herds pastured. University of Washington archivists record that she was an active church member who taught Sunday school and appeared in missionary publications.

Her portraits were made in Nome, the gold-rush boomtown across the peninsula. There the Lomen brothers bought a photography studio in 1908 and gathered up the negatives of earlier Nome photographers, printing them under the Lomen name. To an outside public hungry for images of the Arctic, the studio sold Nowadluk's likeness on prints and postcards, sometimes under the promotional label “Eskimo Belle.” The most famous plates show her with her dark hair unbound and falling past her waist — a studio's romantic gesture, but also simply a young woman regarding the lens with steadiness and reserve.

Nowadluk died in 1918, when the influenza pandemic devastated the Iñupiaq communities of the Seward Peninsula. Her photographs outlived her and scattered across the continent: a glass negative at the Glenbow Archives in Calgary, prints at the Alaska State Library and the University of Washington, copies filed under captions that preserved her first name and little else. The portrait behind this painting is the face of a particular woman — wife, herding partner, teacher — not the anonymous “type” the caption writers imagined.