Yellow Eyes

Frank Bennett Fiske grew up at Fort Yates, the agency town of the Standing Rock Reservation, where his family arrived in 1888 and where, at seventeen, he took over the old post photographer's studio. From 1900 into the 1910s he made glass-plate portraits of his Lakota neighbors — the same studio that produced Victoria's painting of Rachel Standing Soldier — and sold prints as real-photo postcards captioned in his own hand. In 1906, by the date that travels with this image, an elder Hunkpapa woman sat before his camera wearing a dentalium-shell choker, and Fiske's caption named her: Yellow Eyes.

Who Yellow Eyes was is only half-recoverable. The caption may preserve her personal name or a family name — women of her generation were often entered in agency rolls under a husband's name, as 'Mrs. Yellow Eyes' — and the record does not say which. The State Historical Society of North Dakota, which holds Fiske's Standing Rock negatives, preserves the face without a biography. Even so, her age speaks where the paper is silent: a woman of her years at Fort Yates in 1906 was born in the buffalo days, decades before the reservation boundary was drawn around her people.

A story travels with the postcard. Collectors' captions describe Yellow Eyes as a woman of Sitting Bull's generation — present at the Little Bighorn in 1876, among those who crossed into Canada with his band, later returning to Standing Rock. None of this can presently be confirmed in the archives, and accounts differ; it is recorded here as the tradition it is. What needs no confirmation is the arithmetic: an elder at Standing Rock in 1906 had lived through the war summers, the surrenders, the killing of Sitting Bull on the Grand River in 1890, and into the postcard era that put her face in strangers' hands.