Russel Albert Daniels
— Wild Roses

By chasing my Indigenous and Mormon settler heritage, these works, both ink drawings and photographic, are an attempt to step into a realm beyond the one we live in, in an endeavor to illustrate particular colonial circumstances. This selection of work is a peek at my process to interpret my bigger, long-term project about colonial era Indigenous enslavement in the American West. The obvious thesis is absent for now as is the portraits of the descendants of the enslaved. The process leads to heartbreak and pain but it’s also full of love, connection, and healing as it scratches away at generational trauma. This has become a lifelong, soul-filling, allegorical odyssey to understand my own identity, intuition, and sense of place. I ask my ancestors questions that I know have no answer.

They tell me to breathe, and that the journey is the answer and reward. I follow my intuition and curiosity and it sounds like a gust of wind in the bosque and the heavy hoof of horses and some how my car ends up in the arroyo.

Russel Albert Daniels is a multidisciplinary photographer and artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. His craft places storytelling at the forefront of a documentary photography practice which aims to bring visibility to Native American communities throughout the American West. His projects explore the ways in which identity, place, and history illuminate buried narratives of western expansion. Russel’s stories about Bears Ears, Standing Rock, Two Spirit, the climate crisis on Indigenous lands, and the legacy of colonial-era Indigenous captivity and enslavement in the Southwest have helped to inform, educate, and prompt conversation about these complex hidden narratives. Russel is also a freelance photojournalist and editorial photographer. 

Russel has a deep connection to this work due to his ancestral Native American and Mormon European settler heritage. On his paternal side, his Diné ancestor Rose was taken captive as a child in the mid-1800s, in a slave raid by White River Ute. Rose was trafficked north into what became Utah Territory and legally sold to polygamist Mormon settler Aaron Daniels. After marrying Aaron and having four children, Rose enrolled with the Uintah & Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah in 1889. Russel and his siblings are Ho-Chunk on their maternal side and are the first of five generations to be born off of the Ute reservation. 

Russel’s photos are included in the permenant collections at The Library of Congress, Utah Museum of Fine Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Salt Lake County Visual Art Collection, The State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection, Amon Carter Museum of Art, and J. Willard Marriott Library. His photographs have been exhibited nationally and locally at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Utah Valley University Museum and Utah Museum of Fine Art. His photos have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Mother Jones, High Country News, ProPublica, Emergence Magazine, and Sierra Magazine. 

La Cautiva is Russel’s long-term, ongoing photo project that illuminates centuries of Spanish colonial and Mormon Settler Indigenous captivity and enslavement in the American Southwest. Through portraiture, landscape photography, and documentation of cultural performance, La Cautiva brings forward this haunting, buried narrative by giving a voice to and observing the history and identity of the living descendants and communities of enslaved Native Americans. Chapter one of La Cautiva – The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú – is finished and was presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and exhibited in NYC from 2022-2023. (View the chapter online.)

In May 2024, Russel and Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby’s (the first Indigenous curator at the MET) collaboration and exhibition, The Abiquieños and The Artist, will open at the Tacoma Art Museum, the collaboration creates a conversation between original Georgia O’Keeffe paintings from New Mexico and Russel’s La Cautiva photographs from Abiquiu.

I am lucky. I’ve forged a way to research, explore, and create work that aligns with my interest in my own Indigenous and Mormon settler heritage. Outside of my own connection to my work, the history of it all is fascinating and relevant to the modern world. But this history has been intentionally buried and I have taken the responsibility to illuminate the colonial hegemony and white supremacist collisions that created my family bloodline and pave the way for what is referred to as Manifest Destiny. My grandparents archived and shared the many family stories, government documents, interviews, and black and white photographs of our ancestors, revealing an Indigenous brilliance and will to survival the harrowing colonial era conditions. It’s a story I need to share.

russeldaniels.com

Instagram: @russelalbertdaniels