This series includes negatives that Frank Speck made in Dealware in Sussex and Kent counties among the Nanticoke between 1911 and 1925. There are a significant amount of photographs of members of the Rappahanock tribe of Virginia in this series since Rappahanock community members often traveled to Delaware for the annual Nanticoke Thanksgiving festival. The majority of the photographs are portraits with a small amount of landscape views. Speck first began visiting the Nanticokes in Indian River, Sussex County, Delaware in 1911 and made regular visits throughout the next ten years.
Many of the portraits include family members from the Thompson, Johnson, Street and Harmon (Harman) families. There are also a large number of portraits of Nanticoke Chief Russell R. Clark. Of note are photographs from a Nanticoke Delegation in Dover, Delaware lobbying for a "Native American School System," or a "legal" Nanticoke Indian Association. This delegation also included Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan) who worked as an assistant to Frank Speck at the time.
Many of the Nanticoke tribal members were identified by Bill Davis from the Nanticoke Indian Museum in 2003, though there are a number of photographs that are still unidentified.
Arrangement:
Because the negatives are arranged by catalog number they are not in chronological order.
Collection Restrictions:
Access to NMAI Archive Center collections is by appointment only, Monday - Friday, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm. Please contact the archives to make an appointment (phone: 301-238-1400, email: nmaiarchives@si.edu).
Collection Rights:
Permission to publish materials from the collection must be requested from National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center. Please submit a written request to nmaiphotos@si.edu. For personal or classroom use, users are invited to download, print, photocopy, and distribute the images that are available online without prior written permission, provided that the files are not modified in any way, the Smithsonian Institution copyright notice (where applicable) is included, and the source of the image is identified as the National Museum of the American Indian. For more information please see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use and NMAI Archive Center's Digital Image request website.
Collection Citation:
Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Frank Speck photograph collection, Photo Number; National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, Smithsonian Institution.
