Collection P 003:
Theodore Hetzel photographs of Native America
inventory

©1999 by Fort Lewis College Foundation, Center of Southwest Studies account.   Last revised 2008.   (This currently prints out onto approx. 66 pages.)

Links to contents

Introduction/ Scope and contents

This collection relates to Theodore B. Hetzel's hobby as a photographer and his work as a member and director of the Indian Rights Association, a humanitarian group dedicated to influencing federal Indian policy.  A prominent Indian rights activist, Hetzel also served as chair of The American Friends Service Committee's committee on the American Indian.  He testified before Congress on such issues as the return of sacred Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo.  Dr. Hetzel died in Pennsylvania in 1990 at the age of 83.

Each summer during the middle decades of the 20th century Theodore Hetzel visited Native American communities around the United States, as a representative of the Indian Rights Association and other groups advocating for Native American rights.  All the while, he was taking pictures, along with writing field reports.  His photos were used in issues of the IRA's periodical, Indian Truth, for more than 20 years.  Professor Hetzel developed the photoprints himself, and thus he often made several copies of the same image.  Many of those photographs are now preserved and made accessible in this collection at the Center of Southwest Studies.

This collection is useful for anyone researching the history of Native American federal policies, professors seeking visual materials for classroom instruction, and persons seeking the oft-elusive depictions of everyday scenes of Native American life, identified photo portraits of Native Americans, and documentation of Native American issues of the mid-twentieth century.  The Hetzel Collection is important because much of this sort of material is scarce in many research institutions of the United States.

At least half of the images are identified.  We believe that Theodore Hetzel himself took nearly all of these photographs, and he also apparently produced the prints himself.  He stamped the vast majority of his photos with his name and address (or wrote it in), and stamped most of them with a date – which in most cases seems to be the date (or soon after it) that he took the photograph, though in some cases it seems to be the date on which he produced the print.  Most were taken between 1959 and 1978.

In general, these photos are of good quality: the images are sharp, contrast is good, and the subject matter is of broad usefulness for researchers, depicting as it does everyday scenes of Native American life and many identified portraits of Native Americans.  Nearly all are black and white prints.  None of these photoprints have matching negatives.

Many of the photos, especially the 8x10" prints, were curled and required the application of in-house conservation measures to relax the fibers and flatten the paper (the emulsion had pulled the edges of the prints inward).  All have now been housed in archival enclosures.  There are a number of duplicate prints; some images have been printed in several sizes.  When sleeving these prints, the Center has placed any duplicates in the same sleeve, one behind another.  An estimated 5 percent of the prints are duplicates of the same image.

Placement of the Hetzel materials at the Center of Southwest Studies is appropriate because of Hetzel's lifelong interest in liberal arts education (he taught mechanical engineering at Haverford College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and because of the Native American focus of the collection.  Fort Lewis College is one of two institutions of higher education in the U.S. which qualified Native Americans can attend tuition-free.  Fort Lewis College emphasizes undergraduate use of primary materials, and a significant volume of student research projects focus on Native American topics.

Digital images
Click here for a sampling of images from the thousands of pictures in this collection.  Following are the categories of photos of Indians of North America that the Archivist has scanned and presented digitally at this point:

Biographical note by Stefanie Hetzel Johnston, October 20, 2007

THEODORE BRINTON HETZEL

Ted Hetzel was born on September 28, 1906, of Quaker parents, Frederick V. and Grace (Brinton) Hetzel, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended Quaker schools, except for the three-year period when the family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. At Westtown (PA) Friends Boarding School, he graduated as president of his class in 1924, and went on to Haverford College, also in Pennsylvania. There, Ted majored in German, with a minor in Engineering, and received a B.S. degree in 1928, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. A year later, he earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

In June of 1929, Ted married Rebecca Wills, a classmate at Westtown School, from Haddonfield, New Jersey. His first job was teaching German and Mechanical Drawing at Haverford College. Ted then completed graduate studies in Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and Pennsylvania State College, where he earned a Masters degree and a Ph.D.  During these years, a son was born in Bryn Mawr, PA, a daughter in Munich, and twin daughters in State College, PA.

Returning to Haverford College in 1936, Ted again taught in the Engineering Department, where he was named a professor and chairman of the department, in 1966.  Two more sons had been born to the Hetzels by 1942, and the family remained in Haverford until Ted’s retirement in 1972.  That year, he was presented the “Haverford Award” for his teaching and humanitarian service.

An active member of Haverford Friends Meeting, Ted also devoted many years to the American Friends Service Committee, becoming chairman of its Work Camp Program and spending many summers touring AFSC work camps across the country. Ted was also a founding member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science and active in numerous professional organizations.

It was in 1952, when Ted and Becky were leading a work camp at Cuba, New Mexico, and son Fred was teaching at an Indian school on the Crown Point (NM) reservation, that they first developed an interest in Native Americans - a fascination which deepened into a life-changing crusade for Indian rights.  For nearly forty years, Ted used his hobby of photography as a means of documenting and publicizing the plight and progress of Native American life from Florida to Alaska, New York to New Mexico, and most of the reservations in between.

Ted served as Executive Director (1969), Executive Secretary, and Secretary General (1971) of the Indian Rights Association and was Editor of the publication, Indian Truth.  This association is a non-sectarian, non-partisan organization which, since 1882, has helped Indians defend their constitutional, legal, citizenship, and treaty rights, as well as their right to manage their own affairs and maintain their unique identity.

On numerous occasions, Ted gave testimony in Congress on behalf of Native Americans: to restore the sacred Blue Lake area to the Taos Indians in 1966; to secure subsurface mineral rights for the Papago Indian reservation; and to prevent the flooding of Seneca tribal lands by the Kinzua Dam project. When unsuccessful in the latter effort, Ted helped obtain funding for the relocation of the reservation. Ted testified at Congressional hearings in 1964 and 1966 to support budgets for Indian programs, and used his photos to obtain better health and sanitation facilities for their reservations. In 1961, during a trip throughout Alaska, Ted urged tribal leaders to seek title to their aboriginal lands. Ted also advocated for Indian causes on television and radio interview programs, as well as giving countless talks to groups at schools, churches and conferences with observations about Indian life and philosophy. And always, there were color slides, black and white photographs, and often Indian art or artifacts to illustrate the points of his message.

Frequently, Ted would quote a Canadian woman who had said to him, “We need to learn from you, and you had better learn from us!”  In an article Ted wrote for the Friends Journal in January 1963, he said, “We may help them to a higher standard of living and to a longer life expectancy, while they may help us to ‘learn at last to shape a civilization in harmony with the earth.’” At the 45^th annual Niagara Falls Border Crossing Celebration of the Indian Defense League of America in the 1970s, Ted gave a talk called, “Indian Medicine for a Healthier America.” He stated, “The very survival of our society depends on a changed attitude toward our environment and resources.” “Indians…have set us a good example.”

Ted lived his life in accord with the principles he advocated for others: “reduce your requirements, simplify your lives, find joy in the present, live in harmony with your surroundings, and respect the other man’s vision - like an Indian.”

In 1964, to honor Philadelphia Quakers for their more than 300 years of concern for the welfare of Native Americans, The New York Seneca Wolf Clan adopted Ted, naming him “Ongwadaoh,” (Our Friend). The Tuscarora tribe of the State of New York awarded Ted the same honor in 1972.

At the age of seventy-one, Ted and Becky (whose birthdays were one day apart) moved to a Quaker retirement community, Crosslands, in Kennett Square, PA. Their rather small apartment was filled with books and photos on Native American life, and artifacts from their extensive travels visiting Indian centers and reservations.  After Ted’s death from cancer at age eighty-three, May 27, 1990, Becky gave most of his Native American collections to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Ted had chosen their Center of Southwest Studies to receive his 800 books and 10,000 photos because Fort Lewis enrolls about 600 Native American students each year who could benefit from these materials. It is one of two institutions of higher education in the U. S. which Native Americans can attend tuition-free; the other is Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The family of Theodore B. Hetzel included his wife of 60 years, Rebecca (who passed away April 18, 2003)), and six children: Frederick V. Hetzel II. (deceased) of Olney, MD; Helen H. Bair of Durango, CO;  Janet H. Henderson of North Wales, PA; Stefanie H. Johnston of Strafford, VT; Henry T. Hetzel of Loveland, CO; and Jonathan K. Hetzel of Exton, PA. Ted and Becky had fourteen grandchildren, and there are now twenty-four great-grandchildren.

Administrative information

Acquisition information: Over a period from 1990 to 1992, the Hetzel Collection was donated by Hetzel's widow, Rebecca Wills Hetzel, a resident of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, with the gracious assistance and cooperation of her children, one of whom lives close to the Fort Lewis College campus.  The Center has purchased a microfilm copy of the Indian Rights Association Papers and also has many selected U.S. Indian Affairs federal records on microfilm which complement the Hetzel materials.

Related collections:

Collection number	Collection title
U 005	Theodore Hetzel audio recordings
B 002	Theodore Hetzel books
M 121	Theodore Hetzel papers
P 023	Theodore Hetzel slide transparencies

Click here for a descriptive list of the contents of the field notebooks in the Theodore Hetzel papers (M 121).  These are useful in tracking where Dr. Hetzel was  when he was in the field or attending meetings where he was photographing and/or recording on Native American topics.

Processing information:  The collection was arranged and described under the supervision of Todd Ellison, largely by archival student workers and (for the bulk of the work over a number of years) volunteers at the Center of Southwest Studies.  Fort Lewis College student archival assistant Sharon Sage completed the rough organization of these photos into categories in 1996 (approximately 30 hours).  Fort Lewis College Getaway service project volunteers assisted Todd Ellison in placing the photos into labeled folders in July of 2002.  From 2004 until they finished their work on September 28, 2006, three long-term Center of Southwest Studies volunteers (Bud Davis and Paula Wiseman [pictured at left with Helen Hetzel Bair to their right an Ellison to their left] and Ruth Cross [pictured below/right] until she moved away in 2005) contributed many hundreds of hours at the Center of Southwest Studies, identifying the photos, refining their organization and arranging them into the categories we established (we call these Series, and there are approximately 50 of them) to facilitate access to this large collection, and placing them into hundreds of protective polyethylene clear plastic sleeves and pH-neutral folders for orderly arrangement to facilitate the management of the images, including the numbering of digital image files as the Center begins to provide selective digital online access to the collection.  Todd Ellison prepared the first draft of this inventory in January of 1999; last revised in November of 2006.

Digital access: Consultant Nik Kendzioski scanned 101 of the images in October-December 2005 and created metadata from them, as part of the Center of Southwest Studies' Sound Model grant through the Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP) to accompany the digitization of various audiotapes in the Theodore Hetzel collection.  Through its partnership with the CDP, the Center has digitized more than five thousand images selected from a number of collections, for viewing on the Web for educational purposes and research.  To search for digital images at the Center of Southwest Studies and elsewhere, go to Heritage West.

The Colorado Digitization Program is supported through a National Leadership Grant to the University of Denver Penrose Library from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (a federal grant-making agency in Washington, D.C., which fosters innovation, leadership and a lifetime of learning, by supporting museums and libraries) with additional assistance from the Colorado State Library, and the Colorado Regional Library Systems.

Arrangement scheme/ About the organization of this collection:  The Center has arranged these photographic prints into three broad groups:

Group A:  Photos of topics pertaining to Indians
1.      Arts and crafts
2.      Family life, education and youth
3.     Historical/ cultural/ general, and museums
4.      Legal, legislative and administrative
5.      Social and economic
6.      Spiritual and ceremonial

Group B:  Photos of Indians
1.      Alaska
2.      Canada
3.      West Coast and Pacific Northwest (arrangement is by state)
4.      High Plains, Rocky Mountain Region, and the Plains (arrangement is by name of tribe)
5.      Southwest (arrangement is alphabetical by name of tribe or pueblo)
      a.  Apache (digital images online)
      g.  Tohono O'odham (digital images online)
      h.  Ute (digital images online)
6.      Midwest and East (arrangement is alphabetical by tribal name)

Group C:  Photos pertaining to the Indian Rights Association and related organizations
1.    Indian Defence League
2.    Indian Rights Association
3.    National Congress of American Indians
4.    Friends Committee on National Legislation
5.    American Indian Movement
6.    American Friends Service Committee
7.    Association on American Indian Affairs

Headings for topical and geographical subjects categories within these groups are taken from Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) for the most part.  Additional local headings are used when no appropriate heading can be found in LCSH.  Local headings are formed parallel to existing LCSH headings, when possible.

The arrangement of folders within each category or sub-category is chronological, to the extent that the image dates could be established.

Folder numbers begin with the number 1 within each category or (if it exists) sub-category, regardless of the box number.  For example, photos of Theodore Hetzel are in Subcategory C2, Folder 1.  The first photo in that folder of photos of Dr. Hetzel has been numbered P003C2Fol101.

Numbering of the individual images: (Note: if you are a researcher, you may disregard this section -- this information is presented as a service to colleagues and peers because this is a pilot project for the generation of web pages that merge digital images with their corresponding metadata.)

• The following is the format for numbering the images in this collection (which is a typical example of a collection where the photos are in numbered folders):

• "Volume" is the 4-digit number for the group (a letter, converted to its 1-digit equivalent: A = 1, B = 2, C - 3), the category (1 digit), and the sub-category  (a letter, converted to its 1-digit equivalent: A = 1, B = 2, C - 3) (if there is no sub-category, enter two zeroes)

• "Page" is the 2-digit item number (or, 3-digit if we think this series will include more than 99 distinct photo images).  We use a film marking pen to write this number on the plastic sleeve right on top of the corresponding photoprint.  (Note: we do write the folder and sleeve numbers on the top edge of the sleeve (so as to keep those in physical order), but we do not use those numbers as part of the image file number.)

• To facilitate use of the Web page generator software, we follow these rules in formulating a special additional unique number (PicNo) of each image:

1. We begin with a volume number, that is derived from the group (higher hierarchical division of the photos in this collection).

2. We decide what constitutes the lowest hierarchical level of grouping of types of photos (i.e., a series) within this collection; for instance, photos of persons of a certain tribal affiliation, or photos of costume in dress.  Photos within that series may be broken down further into their various and several photos (e.g., photos of Apache women working on domestic tasks, or photos of wampum belts).  We number the images within a given series sequentially (i.e., for a set of web pages that all describe Theodore Hetzel's photos of Apache Indians we start with 001 and carry on through the last image of Apache within that series in this collection -- regardless of how many folders these photos are in).

3. We have to check the images database to make sure that the number we assign is unique and does not replicate the PicNo of any other image in our database (including any image from any collection, not just the Hetzel collection) (numbers in the General Photo Collection are distinguished by being 5-digit numbers).

• For example, this is the image number for the first photo in the first folder of photos about the Jemez Pueblo:

Group A:  Photos of topics pertaining to Indians
Note: This section includes images that are identified by tribe, as well as those that have not yet been associated with a tribe, but it does not include photos that are essentially portraits of Native American person(s) -- those are filed in section B under the particular geographic region.  The text of these descriptions comes from the photoprints themselves and/or from labeling on the reverse of the prints, most of which was in the handwriting of Theodore Hetzel himself.

1.      Arts and crafts

a.      costume and dress

b.      handicrafts

c.      visual artwork and artists (includes artifacts, artists, cartoons and caricatures, drawings, paintings, petroglyphs, and sculptures and statues) (see also schools, such as Santa Fe Indian Art School, under education)

d.      performers (includes beauty queens, dancers, drummers [note: ceremonial or spiritual dance/drumming photos are in Series A.6], lecturers, musicians,
singers, theatrical productions, and parades)

e.    authors