More than 100 years after they were taken, the photographs that Edward S. Curtis made of Native Americans across North America remain the iconic images of the race. Wearing trappings of skins and feathers, shells and beads, the subjects of the photographs look directly through Curtis’s lens and into the 21st century viewer’s soul, conveying a moment captured for all time.
Except those moments were – not outright frauds, exactly – but certainly staged depictions rather than journalistic documentation.
Curtis was a Seattle-based artist who, at the dawn of the 20th century, feared that he was witnessing the eradication of Native Americans in his lifetime. American Indians were being shuffled onto reservation lands and stripped of their traditional ways of life. Their children were being sent off to boarding schools and prohibited from speaking their native tongue.
So Curtis decided to dedicate his talents to portraying the diverse cultures of a “vanishing race” of people, even if that meant fudging a little when it came to veracity. He wanted to show his subjects in their prime, with their power and dignity intact. He wanted to create a record of the extraordinary cultures they had developed – pre-European contact.
But in framing his project in this way, Curtis shaped a narrative that in some ways lives on to this day. It freezes Natives in an idealized time capsule, and neglects to acknowledge the ways tribes have grappled with the last couple of centuries of heavy-handed government efforts to convert, remove, contain, assimilate and exterminate the American Indian.
What Curtis’s photographs fail to show is how, despite all that, the Native peoples adapted and resisted and ultimately persevered. They did not go extinct.
Now in 2018, 150 years after Curtis was born, tribes, museums and other cultural institutions throughout the Pacific Northwest will be revisiting Curtis’s works in an initiative called “Beyond the Frame – To Be Native.” This is a region-wide effort to reconsider preconceptions of Native identity, and to have conversations on race and culture and resilience.
Yet even this started out to be a conventional retrospective. A few years ago, a prominent collector of Curtis’s work contacted the Seattle Public Library, which has extensive holdings of the late photographer, including two complete sets of Curtis’s magnum opus, The North American Indian. Each 20-volume set contains over 2000 photogravure images, accompanied by some 5000 pages of narrative text.
From Seattle
Beyond the Frame:
Revisiting the Photographs of Edward S. Curtis
by Barbara Lloyd McMichael