Jessica Crabtree

It’s finished! My latest portrait, Zuni, 14×14 pastel on suede.

JESSICA CRABTREE NATIVE AMERICAN PORTRAITS & WILDLIFE: Zuni

Now I can add the signature and it will be ready for my Gallery. You can see the painting in various stages by clicking the “Latest” tag below, or “Sneak Peek” on the menu.

This portrait is based on a 1903 photograph from the Edward Curtis collection. A huge portion of this work is dedicated to images of the Southwest, particularly the Pueblo regions where this man is from. (continue reading…)

My latest portrait, Apache, 12×16 pastel on suede.

The portrait is based on a 1906 photograph by Edward Curtis entitled “Tsahizn Tseh.”

JESSICA CRABTREE NATIVE AMERICAN PORTRAITS & WILDLIFE: Apache

The Apache people, along with their close relatives the Navajo, call themselves “Dine,” meaning “the people.” These nations are part of an extended group of closely related nations and bands who once inhabited large areas of the Western Plains. When they reached the deserts of the Southwest in the 1500s, the Navajo gradually adopted a farming lifestyle similar to the region’s Pueblo peoples, while the Apache continued their traditional nomadic ways. Their fierce independence and their incredible knowledge of desert survival have made them legendary.

October 5, 1877: Surrender of Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perce

The Nez Perce, fearing military reprisals after skirmishes with white settlers, abandoned their reservation and fled 1,000 miles through four states in the blustery cold of a Northwestern fall. More than a quarter of them – mostly women and children – died before they reached the Canadian border. Their pursuit by the US army and their subsequent exile from their beloved homeland in the Wallowa Valley is among the most tragic episodes in American history.

“The name of Chief Joseph is better known than that of any other Northwestern Indian. To him popular opinion has given the credit of conducting a remarkable strategic movement from Idaho to northern Montana in the flight of the Nez Perce in 1877. The unfortunate effort to retain what was rightly their own makes an unparalleled story in the annals of the Indians’ resistance to the greed of the whites.”

Edward Curtis, “The North American Indian”

Click here to read more about the grueling trek of the Nez Perce and the events behind Chief Joseph’s legendary “I will fight no more” speech.

Chief Joseph: in Nez Perce, Hinmuuttu-yalatlat "Thunder Rolling Down the Mountains" (Photo: Edward Curtis, 1903)

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 (continue reading…)

Who was Edward Curtis?

Edward Sheriff Curtis was born in 1868 in Wisconsin. His family moved to Minnesota and later the West coast. As a teenager he became an apprentice photographer and eventually opened his own studio in Seattle. He made his first Native American photograph in 1895 – a portrait of Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle. Around the turn of the century he and his camera accompanied several research expeditions on local tribal lands and through the Plains, Southwest, and Alaska. This launched his life-long interest in documenting Native American heritage.

In 1906 J.P.Morgan commissioned Curtis to produce a 20-volume photographic series on the Native Americans of the West. The series, entitled The North American Indian, was to contain 1,500 original photographic prints, and was slated for completion in 5 years. The first volume was published the following year, with a preface by President Theodore Roosevelt – but it was to be another 25 years before the project finally saw completion.

Curtis traveled extensively throughout the country west of the Mississippi River, taking over 40,000 photographs of Native Americans, documenting biographies, cultural practices, and traditional narratives, and even making recordings of speech and songs in Native languages.

Unfortunately, Curtis lost his studio and much of his original work in a nasty divorce settlement that was drawn out for years. He ultimately sold the rights to the entire project to J.P.Morgan’s son. The final volume of The North American Indian was published in 1930, but the majority of Curtis’s work landed in obscurity and changed hands several times over the next 50 years, with much of it being lost or destroyed. Curtis died in 1952 at the age of 84.

Next: The Curtis Collection