Rappahannock Woman

Susie P. Nelson, wife of Rappahannock chief Otho S. Nelson, wears a fringed cloth dress, beaded necklace, and feather and beaded headband in this outdoor portrait taken at a Nanticoke powwow in Delaware in 1927.

The photographer Frederick "Fred" Johnson (1904–1994), of Massachusetts, was a student of the famed anthropologist Frank G. Speck at the University of Pennsylvania. As an anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist, and photographer, he studied American Indians in the eastern United States and Canada.

Description courtesy of the Virginia Indian Archive.