Dustin Aguilar calls the exhibition of his father’s work Born of the Bear Dance: Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California at the Oakland Museum (runs through June 22) a sort of “Dugan Aguilar 101.”
“If you wanted to acquaint yourself with my father and his archive,” he told 48hills on the phone. “I think this show does that extremely well, in a comprehensive way.”
The elder Aguilar’s work has been published in numerous books, including Deeper Than Gold: Indian Life in the Sierra Foothills, Yosemite: Art of an American Icon, and The Fine Art of California Indian Basketry. It’s also been shown at the Crocker Art Museum, the Ansel Adams Center for Photography, the De Saisset Museum, and the Autry National Center.
Born in Susanville in 1947, Aguilar joined the Marines, fought in the Vietnam War, and worked at the Sacramento Bee as a graphic artist. He studied at photography at a graduate level at both UC Santa Cruz and Davis, as well as at the University of Nevada.
Born of the Bear Dance is full of portraits—those showing ceremony participants, veterans at gatherings in Susanville (Aguilar’s father and uncle fought in World War II, and his uncle was one of the most decorated Indigenous people to fight in the U.S. military) and of basket weavers (Aguilar was the official photographer for the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association). Here too are landscapes, which he saw as another type of portrait.
Aguilar died in 2018. Malcolm Margolin, the former executive director of Heyday Books, (which also published the magazines News from Native California and Bay Nature) worked with Aguilar. In 2021, when the Aguilar family was selling his house, Margolin got in touch with officials at the Oakland Museum, saying Aguilar’s archive belonged there.
Drew Johnson, the curator of photography and visual culture at the Oakland Museum, says the museum’s team was thrilled by the idea of housing the collection, but wanted to make sure it could be seen. They applied for a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to catalogue the collection, with Native voices leading the effort. Five collaborators worked on the exhibition: Dustin Aguilar, who is Mountain Maidu, Pit River, and Walker River Paiute like his father; Jennifer Bates, Northern Sierra Mewuk; Theresa Harlan, Kewa Pueblo and Jemez Pueblo; Chag Lowry, Yurok, Maidu, and Achumawi; and Rico Miranda, Rumsen Ohlone.
On a tour of the exhibition, Johnson said Aguilar had a unique practice in which he thought of himself as a collaborator of the people he photographed, gifting photos rather than taking them. Johnson pointed out some beaded feathers in the show, tokens Aguilar was given in return for his photographs.
“Many people would not have been allowed to photograph the things he did, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have the comfort and trust and rapport that he had, just because of who he was as a person,” Johnson said. “The thing to know about him is that he worked with this incredible spirit of reciprocity, respect, and generosity with the people he photographed.”
Johnson said he likes the artist’s voice to be louder than the curator’s in shows, and to that end, included quotations from Aguilar in the exhibition. “As a Native American, I really respond to Native American faces. I see the beauty in people,” goes one inscription. “This is a contemporary culture. It’s today,” can be read on another wall.
The title of the show, Johnson says, came from Harlan, who wrote a biography of Aguilar and said at a meeting, “Dugan was really born of the Bear Dance,” referring to a traditional renewal ceremony.
Initially, Johnson said, Aguilar thought he might attempt a comprehensive project akin to Edward Curtis’ 20-volume The North American Indian from the 1920s. Instead, Aguilar narrowed his focus on the Native people of the lands known as California.
Aguilar was influenced by Ansel Adams, having taken a class with him in 1978, but his style was his own, Johnson says. That independence is most visible in the exhibition’s closing section that focuses on landscapes, entitled “Deep Time.”
“It’s like he says here, ‘To me, the people in my photographs are really a grounded part of the earth,’” Johnson read, pointing out another quotation on the wall. “So, it’s not an Ansel Adams type of landscape where it’s just beautiful. It’s much more about recognizing the human place of the Native presence on the land for thousands of years in California. You get that the people in his portraits are part of the land, part of the earth, and that vestiges of landscapes are portraits of his people.”
Dustin Aguilar says he’s happy that people can see the humanity in his father’s photos and how connected he was to the communities he photographed, in addition to his technical skill.
“It’s a kind of a simple thing, but I just hope they see the quality of his actual photographic work,” he said. “Today, we all have devices that can take really amazing photos. But this was something he was coming at from a very manual and analog perspective. I want people to see the actual technical mastery of photography.”
“I think the museum did and is continuing to do a wonderful job of really valuing the voice of the collaborators, the Native side, and trying to figure out what can be shown, and how it should be shared,” Aguilar continued. “For me, it’s really created a renewed sense of community with the other collaborators. They all knew my father, but I didn’t necessarily know them super well, and so after his loss, it’s been nice to feel so much love and respect for him.”
Both Johnson and Aguilar said the real triumph of the show lies in how it depicts present day Indigenous Californians.
“I’m glad that visitors to the exhibition will see California Natives engaging in their culture, in contemporary times. I’m only speaking for myself, but for me, I view it as an act of resistance to assimilation and colonization,” Dustin Aguilar said. “But at the same time, it’s also not an act of resistance, right? I want people to see that, despite a lot of historical pressures and injustices and a lot of the heavier stuff that comes out of imperialism and colonization, this has continued and has never stopped and is not going to.”
BORN OF THE BEAR DANCE: DUGAN AGUILAR’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF NATIVE CALIFORNIA runs through June 22. Oakland Museum. Tickets and more info here.
