Many Are Called, But Few Are Curators: A Missionary, His Photographs, and the Complexities of Samoan Colonialism

“Send forth the elders of my church,” said the Lord Jesus Christ, “unto the nations which are afar off; unto the islands of the sea.”2 This verse from the Doctrine and Covenants, a scriptural text used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (otherwise known as the LDS or Mormon church), has long served as prophetic justification for the church's missionary effort in the South Pacific.3 And yet, at the very same time that the “elders of the church” were sent forth, these same “islands of the sea” were colonized and divvied up between European powers. LDS missionaries crossed paths with the effects of these colonial efforts, and by so doing, produced unique narratives worthy of study because they reveal oft-overlooked facets of imperialism.Take, for instance, the narrative produced by Harry Arnold Dean (1892–1987), a young missionary called to serve in the Samoan Islands from 1914 to 1917.4 Plucked out of his native Colorado and brought to Samoa, Dean was simultaneously an outsider in a culture different from his own and a sort of pseudo-insider who took the time to live with natives and learn their language, his mission culminating in his translation and publication of the first Samoan LDS hymnal.5 He was a foreigner, his skin the same color and his racist attitude just as strong as those of German and American colonizers, yet his journals indicate he did not consider himself an imperialist.Dean was an avid, almost obsessive journal keeper and photo collector. He documented his mission experiences by filling four diaries, each about two hundred pages, and by purchasing more than sixty large, high-quality silver gelatin prints made by New Zealander photographer Alfred Tattersall (1866–1951).6 When understood through the lens of the missionary who purchased it and curated this collection, one of these prints, entitled Solomon Islander Laborers (fig. 1), reveals a wealth of information about the racial prejudices and economic systems present in colonial Samoa.7 The microcosmic image reveals Dean's understanding, shaped by his missionary service, of slavery and global colonialism. In analyzing a period where written documents and imperial histories were published primarily by power-hungry politicians and popular writers, this article posits that perspectives like Dean's must be studied to gain a broader understanding of the consequences of South Pacific colonization. Colonial history is too often written by the victors, yet Elder Harry Dean, occupying a liminal space between imperialism and Samoan life, wrote his own history through his journals and haunting photographs, thereby capturing many of the overlooked complexities of Samoan colonialism. Put simply, as a unique resident of Samoa, Dean curated a unique historical record.Dean was not the first of his family to serve in Samoa. His father, Joseph (1855–1947), was the mission's first president, officially establishing the mission in 1888.8 The Dean family effectively bookended the LDS presence in Samoa from the 1880s to the 1910s. Harry Dean was raised on his father's mission stories and recognized the impact he had on Samoans, writing that Joseph was “certainly a father in very deed to the mission.”9 Dean envisioned his service as a continuation of Joseph's, but their missions were separated by some of the most momentous decades in Samoan history. This father and son served in remarkably different political and colonial climates. Equipped with empty journals, faith, and Joseph's preconditioned legacy, Harry Dean could never have imagined the unique political situation he entered when he began his ministry, simply because it was so drastically unlike his father's experience.On one end of the Dean family Samoan experience is Joseph. Joseph's mission corresponded with the First Samoan Civil War and a naval standoff between the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. These countries were engaged in a prideful, nationalistic fight for administrative control over the tiny island nation.10 However, by the time Harry Dean served and completed the Dean family bookend, the “Samoan conflict,” that imperial squabble that had so defined the political climate of his father's mission, had been regulated through the Tripartite Convention of 1899, the western islands of Upolu, Savai'i, and Manono given to Germany with the United States taking control of Tutuila, Aunu'u, and Manu'a.11 This Western division did not, however, put an end to imperial practices in Samoa. Rather, Harry Dean witnessed indentured servitude and slavery, the effects of the First World War, and continued political conflict during his mission. In August of 1914, for example, just a few months after Dean's arrival, New Zealand forces entered the First World War by seizing control of German-occupied Samoa.12 In response, Dean's journals mention having conversations about the war with Samoans and instances where he came across German prisoners of war while traveling.13 Entries like these make it clear that Elder Dean witnessed the ever-evolving effects of global colonialism on his mission.14The experiences of the Dean family characterize the LDS Samoan mission from 1888 to 1917. Similarly, Samoa's photographic world at this time was defined by the work of two photographers. One took over the studio established by the other, just as Harry imagined his mission as a continuation of his father's. John Davis's (ca. 1831–1903) photography studio, founded in Apia a few years before Joseph's mission, was run by Alfred Tattersall during Harry Dean's service. Thomas Andrew, another photographer, was active in Samoa during Dean's mission, but information about his practice is relatively unknown.15 Alison Nordstrom, who has written extensively on Samoan photography of the colonial era, notes that some historical evidence suggests that Andrew didn't even sell his photographs until long after Dean's mission.16 Ultimately, Dean was a customer of Tattersall, whose business was situated on Apia's main road and thus easily accessible to eager buyers like this young missionary.17Just as the Dean family's varied experiences speak to the evolving consequences of imperialism, so too can one learn much about colonialism by studying the differences between Davis's and Tattersall's respective photographic styles. For example, during Joseph's mission and Davis's career, the distinct racial separation between the “colonized” and the “colonizers” had not yet been established. Historian Leonard Bell argues that John Davis's photographs visualize this ambiguous boundary between racial identities.18 One of Davis's images features the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson surrounded by a hodgepodge mixture of his European family and Samoan friends (fig. 2). An image of diverse figures mingled together as one, Davis indicates no notion of any racial hierarchy, nor does the composition teach racist lessons about inherent differences between the colonizers and the colonized. The image instead manages to capture the faces of each of Stevenson's friends, unified and of equal value. The diverse mixture in Davis's photograph is replaced by Tattersall's photographs, which separate Islanders from Europeans. The Tripartite Convention of 1899 formalized colonial rule and defined strict racial divisions. According to Bell, Tattersall's photographs, which depict distinct ethnic groups, provide proof that the official colonization of Samoa defined and subsequently hardened racial divisions.19 No longer was Samoa simply a mélange of a diverse, imperial world. It was a group of islands, for so long at the heart of a Eurocentric tug-of-war, ripped in half by Western powers and forced into a hierarchical global economy.Joseph's mission coincided with Davis's egalitarian photography. Harry, however, was a frequent customer of Tattersall, whose work reinforced strict racial boundaries. His album contains a visual record of Tattersall imagery of such breadth and variety that it is rivaled only by the Tattersall collection in the National Library of New Zealand. Information on Tattersall himself is incredibly scarce, so one must view his work through another's curatorial lens to gain insights into these images. Missionary Harry Dean provides this lens needed to analyze his own collection of Tattersall imagery.To reiterate: Dean was a photographic curator. Yes, Alfred Tattersall created the photographs, but the choice of images was left to Dean. Nordstrom notes that several of Tattersall's most popular prints featured naked females.20 It can reasonably be said that this visual trope of exoticized, objectified nude women was as commonplace in early Samoan photography as the popular postcard images of the lush tropical landscape. And yet, although he purchased much of Tattersall's already limited body of work, Dean chose not to purchase any images of nude women.21 His is a personalized collection that breaks from the popular tropes of the time. The Dean collection thus must be interpreted through the perspective of the man who created it. Anthropologist Tobias Sperlich wrote that “photographs from this period are more revealing about Western culture than Samoa,” and indeed, Dean's individual collection, read through his curatorial lens, reveals much about his cultural identity, situated directly at the intersection of the Mormon faith and imperialism.22Furthermore, as noted by Jeffrey Cannon in his study of LDS photography in colonial Africa, because missionaries served for only a few short years, their knowledge of the locations where they served was biased and “often flawed.”23 Dean's record is not without bias or misunderstandings. It should therefore never be seen as merely an objective collection of Tattersall imagery. How Dean understood his photographs and Samoa as a whole is directly impacted by his identity as a missionary. This collection is Dean's. In addition, Dean was himself a composer, writing poetry and translating music while a missionary and later publishing multiple hymns.24 It is not unlikely that he would let this role of composer influence his approach to colonial photography. Just as Dean composed poems and songs about his mission, so too did he compose, or curate, a collection of Tattersall's photographs. With all this in mind, this essay situates Dean as the unequivocal curatorial director of his own photographic collection.One of the most powerful images in Dean's collection, the Solomon Islander Laborers, depicts a horizontal line of workers at a copra plantation, where coconut fruit was dried to produce oil. These laborers are surrounded by coconut shells and husks, the literal fruit of their arduous labor. While most of the laborers view the camera with tired, even frustrated scowls, the blurred face of one woman on the left is striking. The blurring indicates movement, an interruption and rejection of the stillness required for photographic clarity. She turns with great urgency towards a crying child with outstretched arms, asking viewers to consider what it was like to raise a child in this violent, colonial world.25 This young mother likely had no understanding of how this photograph would be used, yet was posed anyway, forced to put her parenthood on pause for a biased, Eurocentric audience. With his purchase, Dean became part of this audience and thereby participated in the creation and documentation of this mother's story.Dean's frequent, even routine mention of parenthood in his journals is worthy of note in regard to this particular photograph, an image in which a sea of frontal, angry stares is interrupted only by a mother's love. Mentions of his homesickness or letters from home are so common that they form a metronomic beat to Dean's journals. Included within his journals is a poem, possibly written by Dean, where the phrase “one thought of mother at home alone” is repeated seven times.26 In leaving Samoa, Dean discusses the profound pain felt when he had to say goodbye to his “Samoan mother.”27 Entries like these make it clear that parenthood was a central theme to Dean's mission. As the son of Samoa's former mission president as well as a young man far away from the comforts of his parents’ home, Dean cherished the familial connections he developed in Samoa. After all, because Dean believed that Joseph was a “father in very deed” to the mission and because he viewed his service as a continuation of Joseph's, perhaps Dean saw himself as a sort of father or son to Samoa. Whatever the case, equipped with a parental lens, Dean was uniquely positioned to notice this blurred mother.Other photographs of the same laborers, wearing the same clothing, probably taken on that very same day, were in Tattersall's collection and available for purchase (fig. 3). These other images are in perfect clarity.28 Each figure stares resolutely towards Tattersall and does not disturb the staged balance he so carefully created. However, despite the perfection of other copra plantation photographs, Dean chose to purchase Solomon Islander Laborers, an imperfect, blurry In Dean chose a photograph in which the of were brought to the an image where staged colonial Dean a liminal space as a missionary. He felt and to the he served yet was an outsider in a he only as a missionary. The photograph of copra laborers the of a American in Samoa to purchase such biased imagery a of the intersection of Samoan plantation and Dean at the boundary colonialism from Samoan of the historical on Samoa about this time period the into of “colonizers” and yet Dean was Similarly, his photograph features no Samoans, but instead a group of Solomon Islanders brought to Samoa. Dean, these were nor native the a German and often to work on Samoan that were more often than not these laborers to no and in even were The angry stares in Dean's photo the they felt towards and forced labor. The mother's face blurred from but what this face what and this mother to raise her child in Dean chose to purchase this blurred image instead of Tattersall's other more perfect prints of Solomon a choice when viewed through the lens of Dean's parental Dean racial bias towards Solomon For example, on Dean is the of the from the Solomon Islands who work on this plantation, the coconut plantation in Samoa. are over are and have been brought by from their own are a of much more so than the and not to be with in just a few months before Dean his mission, it can be from this that he never Solomon He later wrote that he would have these However, he Solomon Islanders in Samoa and viewed with While the image was possibly for Dean's album for of perhaps Dean the in which the the of the laborers, the color of their to Dean the between the of the their an in Tattersall's other photograph of these same the other a and skin thus Dean's album photograph is with of and skin these the of Solomon Islanders while simultaneously color Dean after all, an composer, and with this the of this image and the skin merely to a for a colonial to his Dean to Solomon Islanders language, although most laborers were probably his or His attitude towards Solomon Islanders the inherent in colonial missionary According to work a in a far more than any other colonial the LDS to mission used colonial to multiple where Dean the of his mission he to as although their is never made of were to to the of very young about himself as an but of of other as or Dean's journal a that is the most towards Solomon For example, Dean in one that Samoa's and were and but he never saw Solomon Islanders as but of a in other South Pacific colonial This is through photo that make it like Solomon Islanders are much than This choice Dean's attitude towards these and his as a missionary. In one image in Dean's collection (fig. for instance, a line of copra laborers a plantation This plantation is on and over the Solomon In the laborers or into the of the even to their plantation In a photographic of the of Tattersall's of the man on and the laborers on the to colonizers and to those forced into This hierarchical composition is in Dean's own journals, where a plantation is while the laborers are never Dean's Solomon Islanders photograph a racial by the composition into distinct horizontal the laborers on into the central horizontal No figure the established by these are instead in this visual into a the laborers and used as and coconut a between Tattersall and the Each the a division that from the and photographic of the and these laborers are photographic composition the while simultaneously on the angry The faces of the of laborers are a blurry this blurry the clear scowls, and all While an these as evidence of Dean believed Solomon Islanders to be faces are in but Dean's his a by the the is made clear through Dean's and journals, this young missionary believed these angry workers to be and In one journal Dean This is of the are and they are their no to but just a of and can about to be up by as they are in the Solomon Islands where they were brought of Samoans just and the as it is the the was Solomon Islanders through a to Samoans and an to Dean's Samoans to the the Solomon to Dean, are of and towards the of Elder Dean, who came to Samoa with the mission to the of saw these as who directly the and of a by With journal like this filling his pages, it is not that Dean, even for would a to purchase a photo that angry this Samoans are for their to the This perspective is of Mormon understanding of the South Mormon that were of the of Mormon This from that believed to be the of the were to of the of with an early missionary to that the were the of the an of a in the of to to in and the In this a and away to a never to be from of this scriptural many early of the believed that to the South wrote of of the of that their the church's of and establishing these scriptural missionaries to that were to their In the Mormon the of was a mission with a in by a father who served in Samoa and in a that believed were central to his church's mission, Dean Samoans in his purchased many Tattersall studio (fig. that this view of In the camera with the frustrated so present in the Solomon Islander Laborers Dean wrote of Samoans a This is in the and of the studio half of Dean's Samoan studio wearing European his that Samoans, as a to the LDS missionary could learn to be and to his He did not this of Solomon who in his album only on and never in a LDS missionaries were in the islands as early as and in Samoa by a mission was not established in the Solomon Islands until Just as early used scriptural to to the many believed to be the of and to this were to servitude and with a of during Dean's mission, were not to the their of from leaving in to this racist was not a of the LDS faith, but instead a of imperial were unique in the of Mormon to those with of from the their towards is of Western After all, of and the of had the and slavery of long before the of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day in writing that Solomon Islanders were than the in and were that they Dean was more than the of his he was with global German colonizers, for instance, believed to be and than Samoans with their or This with the between Samoans and Solomon Islanders in Dean's journals, and situates early Mormon within Western imperial The notion of Samoans even and Solomon Islanders for plantation and servitude missionary work and colonialism. Elder Harry Dean at the intersection of these and in his mission, he complexities of colonialism. Dean's can be in an article published just a few years before his mission in the LDS journal all, the and of the were not so very far from some of the and in and of their and Solomon Islander laborers were forced by Alfred Tattersall to for a they had no control could not have imagined that their image would be in the visual record of one young LDS missionary. Tattersall's buyers to those across the (fig. through photographic Dean Dean those across the by purchasing photographs that the strict racial differences between Solomon and one Dean's of his of the of in a colonial However, even he was by parental what Dean's as a photographic and is his racist attitude towards Solomon Yes, Dean did those across the but he did so in a that a racist imperial and that Solomon of a text Dean read his mission, that are unto and and However, of any within the of Mormon that Dean racist in line with colonial that are in to this only a few were worthy of and the man and the but not the Solomon the but not the He this perspective through his purchase of images by Alfred These in particular one entitled Solomon Islander Laborers, workers from the Solomon Islands and present a strict racial Samoa's colonial Dean's viewed in with his journals, reveal of colonialism in other on the and racist Solomon Islanders were forced to and revealing the LDS missionaries provide to colonial in a liminal space as an LDS missionary in Samoa, an American but not a Dean those across the by a photographic narrative that that all were for those laborers whose stares Tattersall's Harry Arnold Dean's mission record two Mormon and global colonialism. An of such a record that LDS missionaries should not be from colonial missionaries like Dean from imperial practices in their they witnessed colonial forces and curated documentation of This essay on one one photograph, and one mission, yet within Mormon are of other imperial missionary stories worthy of