Tzashima

Tzashima was a Laguna Pueblo woman born in the 1800s. She lived in present-day New Mexico, in a pueblo of which her husband She-we was governor. Her daughter Mary's husband also became Laguna governor.

As part of the cultural genocide against the Indigenous, Tzashima was sent to a Pennsylvania boarding school to learn Western ways and unlearn Pueblo ones. At least some of her children later attended the Carlisle Indian Training School, which opened in 1879, after Tzashima would have been in school. (Daughter Ki-ot-se / Mary Perry entered Carlisle in 1880.)

A photograph of Tzashima with her husband, She-we, from c. 1880 can be seen here.

Tzashima was a muse of famed American photographer Ben Wittick, who photographed her multiple times in various settings. Wittick's photos of her spread nationally, including in magazines and, later, books.

In an 1895 Cosmopolitan essay about the looks of different Native American women, R. W. Shufeldt wrote at length about Tzashima's beautiful appearance. Although the piece contains ethnoracial stereotypes and dated thinking, the segment about Tzashima is worth reproducing here:

"...A very different and far more attractive style of beauty is seen in one of the daughters of the Laguna pueblo. Tzashima is an Indian beauty in every sense of the word. She has a fine, rather tall figure, and her carriage is good; as with all Indians, however, almost without exception, her feet and hands are large. Her hair is as black and as glossy as a raven's wing, and at the dances she wears it in a rich, unbridled downfall as far as the waist behind, while in front it is cut off at the sides, so as to be on the level of the neck; it is parted in the middle in front, as seen in the illustration. The forehead is rather contracted, but not too low, and surmounts a face smooth and oval to a fault. Her brows are very broad, and support fine eyebrows of a jetty blackness. A very slight obliquity, far less than we see in the Mongolian, characterizes her eyelids, and these shield a gorgeous pair of Indian eyes that, Tzashima very well knows, are the rivals of her hair in their inky tints. For an Indian, her nose is exquisite in its proportions, and might stand almost for a perfect model of this defining feature of the face. Her lips are finely arched, though the mouth is rather large, while the elegantly rounded chin, moderately prominent in its contour, fades gently away at the lower sides of the face. The high cheek-bones scarcely mar the just balancing of the features of the face of this pueblan beauty. In tint, her skin is of a pale mahogany, much lighter than that of the Navajo women already described. Her jacket and sash become her well, as does the barbaric silver necklace and mass of beads she wears about her neck. Heavy silver bracelets surround her wrists, and nearly every finger has its one or more great silver rings. The civilization that has produced this woman is quite different from that of the Navajos. ... "

Today, a photograph of Tzashima hangs in the Whatcom County (Wash.) Courthouse, where one of her great-great-granddaughters is Washington State's first Native American judge.

Sources

• Mittendorf, Robert. "Judge draws on her roots to breed community awareness." The Bellingham Herald, published 25 September 2019, p. 1. < link > Accessed 25 November 2021.
• Montoya-Lewis, Raquel. "Tribal Law and Order Commission Testimony," given 7 September 2011. < link > Accessed 17 January 2020.
• Pacheco, Ana. Pueblos of New Mexico, p. 147. Mount Pleasant, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2018.
• Shufeldt, R. W. "Beauty from an Indian's Point of View" in The Cosmopolitan, Vol. 18. Schlicht & Field, 1895. < https://books.google.com/books?id=mFPXstCpk58C&pg=PA591#v=onepage&q... >