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Curtis has been accused of dressing up Indian people in regalia and
outfits they no longer wore, presenting false and stereotyped images of a
vanishing race. Why did he choose to photograph only traditional Indian
life, and how much did American Indians participate in the way they were
represented in his pictures?
Curtis wanted to capture the beauty in Indian life in his photographs. For
him, that did not mean showing the desperate conditions in which many Indian
people found themselves. It meant capturing traditional ways as they had been
before all the changes white people had brought with them. Curtis often
asked Indian people to change from modern clothes into their best regalia or
to dress the way their ancestors had, and in some cases, to re-enact
ceremonies. In making his 1914 full-length film IN THE LAND OF THE
HEADHUNTERS, Curtis had the Kwakiutl actors wear wigs, nose-rings, and
cedar-bark costumes so they would look like their ancestors, when in their
normal lives they wore blue jeans, calicos, and cotton shirts. Curtis wanted
to preserve a record of what he believed was a vanishing way of life while
people still remembered the old ways.
 Indian people were very aware that their traditions were in danger of
disappearing. Warriors were no longer allowed to fight, ceremonies were
outlawed, and Indian children were being taken away to boarding schools where
they were forced to forget their languages and traditions. When American
Indians on reservations re-enacted battle scenes on horseback, or donned
masks to perform potlatch dances for Curtis' camera, they were participating
in making a record of traditions that had been outlawed, a record that would
be of value to their children and grandchildren. When they entered Curtis'
photographic tent, they would usually put on their best regalia in the same
way Victorian ladies put on their best lace for portraits, and Victorian men
their best suits. They wanted to be remembered as people of dignity who were
still connected to their ancestors and to their traditions.
During the filming, I found ten people still living whom Curtis had
photographed in their younger days, and they laughed to remember him asking
them to put on formal traditional dress to grind corn or get water from the
spring. They still wore these traditional clothes for important occasions,
but not for the grimy tasks of grinding corn or fetching water. From their
responses to the pictures, it seems that they and their ancestors had fun
recreating traditional life for Curtis' camera.
At times, Curtis did impose his own preconceptions or narrative needs on his
photographs in ways that did not accurately represent the culture. Gloria
Cranmer Webster (Kwakiutl) pointed out that all the masked dancers shown in a
Curtis photograph would never appear together at the same time, and that
Kwakiutl people never hunted whales as they are seen doing in Curtis' 1914
film. Other Indian people protested that the pictures are romantic images
that stereotype and dehumanize the people in them. A few pointed out that if
Curtis had shown the real plight of people on reservations, his images might
have led to government reforms that could have helped their ancestors.
-- Anne Makepeace
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