Chief James Garfield Velarde
William Henry Jackson American
Not on view
This leader of the Jicarilla Apache Nation took the name Chief James Garfield after receiving a peace medal from President Garfield, and he later adopted the surname Velarde. In this studio portrait—taken twelve years after his people were relocated to a reservation—he wears a mix of Euro-American clothing and Native regalia: a white collared shirt and a waistcoat, a fur sash decorated with conchos, shell ear ornaments, and a shell necklace. The image was published by the Detroit Photographic Company, which Jackson joined in 1897. It was widely reproduced on postcards and in albums using the Photochrom process, in which black-and-white negatives are converted to color images using photolithography.
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