Jessica Crabtree

Caught on Camera

Edward Curtis’s photographic collection The North American Indian has been arguably the most comprehensive and influential Native-themed work of the last century. If you can recall seeing old black and white or sepia-toned photos of Indians, chances are they were part of the Curtis collection.

The enormous scope of his thirty-year project attempted to document the lives of Native Americans all over the western half of the continent at a time when these Indian nations were in transition to the restrictions of life on reservation. In the eyes of most people living around the turn of the 20th century, Native Americans were considered a vanishing race and their ways of life a lost cause. The cultures of the West, and especially of the Great Plains, came to typify all Native American heritage, largely because the final period of their traditional lifestyle coincided with the advent of mass media.

It can be easy to forget that there were no cameras in the days when Europeans began their advance of colonization across the Eastern part of the American continent. We have photos of many of the individuals who participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn, but not of the Wampanoag of Massasoit’s day; we know what Geronimo looked like, but there is no newsreel footage of the Indian Removals of the 1820′s and 30′s. This is largely why the Indian stereotype of today is usually a Plains Indian in war regalia, while so few of us can easily conjure up an image of an Iroquois or a Pequot – not because these nations were small or played an insignificant role in American history – but because of the comparative lack of documentation. By the time the modern communications infrastructure had been established, these peoples were easily and conveniently relegated to the recesses of the distant past.

With the exception of painters such as George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, whose travels through the Midwest in the early 1800′s foreshadowed Edward Curtis’s careers more than a century later, there was little effort – and perhaps little incentive – to express respectful interest in Native communities on behalf of the general public – a public that gladly would have ignored their very existence. After the Civil War, when the camera had firmly established itself as a primary method of communication, America turned its attention to the development of the West, and the camera was there to record it. Nearly all of the period of encounter and conflict between white settlers and the Native Americans of the Great Plains, Southwest, Great Basin, and Pacific Northwest is well-documented, and particularly rich in photographs. Ironically much of this documentation did not represent an attempt to preserve Native culture so much as it revealed the skewed mentality that the same process of assimilation and removal would take place exactly as it had in the East.

The shocking brutality involved in the conquest of the Western United States was unparalleled in our modern culture and helped to galvanize the people, places, and events of the “Indian Wars” into the American mythology. People of Edward Curtis’s generation – as far away as Europe – watched via photo reporting as the Western Indian resistance was crushed and their “exotic” nomadic lifestyle drastically transformed into the inglorious life on reservation. This transition was misconceived as a death blow, and mass attractions such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show traveled the world proliferating the mistaken idea that “real Indians” were a thing of the past.

Many scholars today criticize Curtis’s work because it reflects much of the ideology of that era. They point out that he occasionally costumed his Indian subjects to fit the popular stereotypes, and often perpetuated in his research the same kind of misperceptions that persist even into this century. But it is important to take into account that no artist is completely immune from the ideas of his time, and it is often those individuals we accuse most for monopolizing on the ignorance of their surroundings who leave behind the most valuable legacies. The enormous contribution Curtis made as an artist, in recording and transmitting a first-hand view of Native culture, bespeaks a dedication and sensitivity that were well beyond both the political climate and the social consciousness of his day.

Edward Curtis and the Myth of the Vanishing Race