Ah-Weh-Eyu

'Pretty Flower' is one caption in this series that leads back to a name. Ah-Weh-Eyu — the Seneca name translates as 'Pretty Flower' — was also known as Goldie Jamison Conklin. Born in 1892, she lived on the Allegany Territory of the Seneca Nation around Salamanca, New York, and died in 1974. Between about 1908 and 1914 she sat repeatedly for photographer J.L. Blessing of Salamanca; the portraits circulated as studio prints and real-photo postcards, and she also modeled for the Cattaraugus Cutlery Company of Little Valley, New York, which used her image in its advertising.

Her portraits sit inside a complicated industry. Postcards of Native women sold briskly in those years, usually under flowery English captions, and a card mailed from Salamanca could carry a stranger's handwritten remark about her looks. Yet Ah-Weh-Eyu was not an invention: she was a working woman of a nation with deep and continuing presence in western New York — the Seneca, a matrilineal people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, in which women headed clans and named leaders. She carried both a Seneca name and an English one, as her generation, pressed by assimilation policy, so often did.

Most photographs behind this painting series lost their names; hers survived because she was locally known and often photographed. That makes this portrait a kind of anchor for the others — proof that every 'Apache woman' and 'Hopi girl' in the archive was equally particular, equally named at home. Painted a century later, she can be presented as she deserved from the start: Ah-Weh-Eyu, Goldie Jamison Conklin, a Seneca woman of Allegany — remembered, and said aloud.