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Edward Curtis (1868-1952) was a complicated, passionate, self-educated
pioneer and visionary artist who rose from poverty and obscurity to become
the most famous photographer of his time. Between 1900 and 1930 he traveled
from Mexico to the Arctic, from the Rockies to the Pacific, photographing and
recording more than eighty different tribes. He became friends with Teddy
Roosevelt, got funding from J. P. Morgan, and set out in 1900 to photograph
traditional Indian ways that he thought were vanishing. Curtis abandoned his
career as a successful portrait photographer, and sacrificed his health, his
marriage, and all of his assets to create an astonishing body of work: 10,000
recordings, 40,000 photographs, twenty volumes of text, a full-length motion
picture with Kwakiutl people in 1914, and several books of Indian stories.
Curtis had grown up on a poor hardscrabble farm in Minnesota. As a boy,
he developed a passionate interest in photography. He built himself a camera
at the age of twelve with a lens his father had brought back from the Civil
War. At nineteen he moved West with his family to homestead on Puget Sound.
When his father died a year later (1888), he moved across the Sound to
Seattle, and within ten years, he had become the most sought-after
photographer in the city. Ten years after that, he was the most famous
photographer in the country, and had set himself the goal of photographing
and recording information about every tribe in the American West still
practicing traditional ways. Officials at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington told Curtis that his goal was impossible, that it would take fifty
men fifty years to accomplish it.
 Why did Curtis set this impossible goal, and what drove him to keep going
for thirty years? He believed that this was the moment when traditional
Indian life could still be captured for posterity. He felt a sense of urgency
to complete his work before it was too late. He wrote that every time an
elder dies, irreplaceable knowledge is lost. He was determined to go out and
find those elders, to talk to them and record information about their
cultures before it was too late. His sincere interest won the trust of many
important people on reservations at a time when they had little reason to
trust any white man.
Curtis was a man of many contradictions. He was deeply interested in the
religious rituals of every tribe he met, yet he sometimes manipulated people
into giving him information they did not want to reveal. He wanted to make a
scientific record, yet sometimes he invented or elaborated on customs with
dubious accuracy. The most powerful and transforming moments for him were
watching the Blackfeet Sundance in 1900, and being initiated into the Hopi
Snake Society in 1906; yet he sometimes referred to Indian religious beliefs
as superstition. While he saw the beauty of Indian life in their traditions,
he believed that their only hope of survival was to leave those traditions
behind and assimilate into mainstream American life. Curtis sacrificed his
finances, his marriage, his homelife, his time with his children, and eventually
his studio and his home to complete his giant opus, THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN.
Did the legacy he left behind justify these sacrifices?
-- Anne Makepeace
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