Author’s Note

This Father’s Day, I received a truly magnificent gift from my wife and our two sons: the monumental Taschen edition of Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian. As a historian — and as someone deeply engaged with the ethics of memory, representation, and historical justice — I unwrapped it with genuine joy and a quiet sense of responsibility.

Curtis’s work is breathtaking. There’s no denying the technical mastery, the scale of the project, or the solemn beauty of the portraits themselves. But the collection also carries a complicated legacy. It sits at a crossroads of artistry and appropriation, documentation and mythmaking — reflecting not only the cultures it sought to preserve, but also the ideologies of the time in which it was created.

This essay is a personal response to that paradox. It is written with admiration for the dedication behind Curtis’s vision, but also with a historian’s eye toward what the lens reveals — and what it conceals. I believe that when we engage with cultural artifacts like this one, we have a duty to do so both with wonder and with clarity.

To inherit such a legacy is not to reject it, but to approach it honestly: with curiosity, with context, and with a deep respect for the voices that were too often muted.

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I. Curtis’s Panoramic Ambition

Edward Curtis was born in 1868 and came of age as a photographer in the American West. By the turn of the 20th century he had converted from portraiture to a grand ethnographic mission. In 1900 Curtis was famously moved by meeting a medicine man of the Sioux, Red Tomahawk, who is said to have challenged him: “If we die as you say we must, you are the one man who can say our people once lived.” Whether legendary or not, this encounter mirrored Curtis’s emerging aim: to create “a comprehensive and permanent record” of Native cultures before they vanished. With such a goal in mind, in 1906 Curtis boldly approached financier J.P. Morgan for support. Initially rebuffed, Curtis persisted and ultimately secured Morgan’s backing. As Curtis later reported, Morgan was “awed” by what he saw: “I want to see these photographs in books — the most beautiful set of books ever published”. Thus began Curtis’s thirty-year odyssey, funded by Morgan and later others. Over decades Curtis and his assistants – with interpreters and guides – crisscrossed North America. They visited scores of tribes (some estimate over eighty) across the U.S., Alaska, and Canada, sometimes living in tribal territories for months. He eventually amassed 40,000 photographs and 10,000 recordings of Native languages and music. Curtis envisioned The North American Indian as a magnum opus: 20 bulky volumes of text on ethnohistory, each accompanied by a portfolio of large photogravures on fine paper (ultimately bound in leather). Each set, sold by subscription to a few hundred patrons, would be the most lavish documentation of Native life ever attempted.

Curtis’s ambition was informed by the prevailing ideas of his era. Like many early 20th-century scholars, he believed that Native cultures were inevitably being “absorbed” into white society and might soon disappear. The mood of the times was deeply assimilationist: Indian children were being sent to boarding schools to strip them of their languages and customs, and the federal government’s policies aimed to break tribal cohesion. Curtis wrote in his introduction that Native peoples had suffered “in many cases… worse than criminal” (sparing readers the gory details). He did, however, conclude from his reading of the day that it was his duty to “record” what he could before it was too late. President Theodore Roosevelt, one of Curtis’s patrons, put it directly: Curtis’s work was “a real and great service” to scholarship. By about 1907 Curtis published volume one of his series, and by 1930 the final volumes were issued. Only a few hundred complete sets had ever been printed (Morgan bought 25 and Curtis sold others). By the 1930s the enterprise was financially ruined; Curtis had gone deeply into debt and the North American Indian corporation collapsed. Curtis even destroyed many original glass negatives later in frustration over copyright and divorce. When he died in 1952, his life’s work had largely faded from public view.

II. Romantic Primitivism and Mythic Visions

Yet fading from view is not the same as fading from memory. Curtis’s images live on, and they do so as visions of a mythic “Indian” rather than a documentary record of suffering. Curtis’s carefully composed photographs reflect the romantic ideals of the age. Whereas he knew (and even witnessed) the harsh realities of reservation life and boarding schools, he consciously chose not to document them. As one scholar observes, Curtis’s photographs were “designed to create a timeless vision of Native American culture” at a moment when modern expansion had already irrevocably altered the Indian way of life. In the field, he outfitted his subjects in traditional dress they had often long since put aside. He directed scenes so that no sign of modern life appeared — literally retouching out clocks or telegraph poles from a camp photograph. In one famous example, he carefully photoshopped an image (in a Piegan lodge) to erase the clock that had inadvertently crept into the frame. The figures in his photographs stare out with noble dignity: chiefs wearing full war bonnets, squaws clasping baskets of seeds, girls clad in intricate beadwork. Many are posed in idealized tableaux. For example, one iconic plate (of a Makah maiden, 1916, pictured below) shows a young Native woman draped in finely patterned textiles, her gaze steady and aloof. Curtis titled it simply “Makah maiden”, and it became a celebrated image of Western beauty. In these images there is an undeniable grace and power. One cannot deny their artistry. Yet they are also steeped in myth-making. Curtis catered to the White “public’s infatuation with romantic primitivism,” in the words of anthropologist Harald Prins. He depicted Native Americans exactly as the era’s archetype of a “vanishing Indian” demanded. By doing so, he helped cast generations of non-Native observers in the role of spectators for a staged ethnography. His visual narrative insists, in effect, that these are the lasts – the “last” brave hunters, the “last” tribal ceremonies – frozen in sepia for posterity.

This approach carried powerful ideological weight. By reinforcing the idea of the noble, timeless savage and the idea that Indians were doomed to vanish, Curtis in many ways obscured more complex and contemporary truths. Native communities of his time were not culturally extinct; many were adapting, resisting, or reviving traditions. But Curtis’s frame offered something simpler and more comforting to White America: Indians as guardians of a lost Eden, righteous but dying out. Even Curtis himself admitted only in passing that Native history had been full of betrayal (he wrote that “treatment of Native Americans has in many cases been worse than criminal”, then moved on). Those violent and political dimensions of history simply “do not properly find a place” in his work, he said. By contrast, portraits like “Gambling Mohave Portrait” or the Pomo woman “Gathering Seeds” (ca. 1924) celebrate cultural forms while eliding dispossession.

Embellishment and staging were therefore not artistic accidents but deliberate choices. Curtis paid and prodded his subjects to re-enact what he and his patrons imagined were authentic ceremonies or daily tasks, even when such rituals had fallen out of practice. He sometimes brought props or encouraged certain poses. In one account, he paid a dollar per photograph to Princess Angeline (the Duwamish elder in Seattle, one of his first Native sitters). Later, working in the Southwest and Plains, he would stage dances and even ask for staged ceremonies in order to capture the “picture” that he thought best conveyed tribal identity. In effect, Curtis crafted a romanticized simulation of tribes “untouched by Western society”. This has rightly drawn criticism: scholars accuse him of “photographic fakery” or of neglecting “the plight and torment of his subjects,” as a Smithsonian Library exhibition notes. The mythologizing impulse in Curtis’s work means that each beautiful image carries a double edge. We see what we want to see, but only if we are aware that something has been chosen and something else has been omitted.

III. Preservation or Appropriation: Ethical Tensions

My own ambivalence toward Curtis’s work comes down to this question: Does he preserve or appropriate? Curtis was an ardent collector of knowledge. He recorded hundreds of tribal songs, folklore, language notes, and ethnographic sketches alongside his photographs. In theory he saw himself as a champion for Native cultures. Some of those he photographed called him the “Shadow Catcher”, as if he were preserving something ethereal. Indeed, his multi-volume series would become, eventually, a cornerstone for Native American historiography. When judged by some standards of his time, even sympathetic biographers note, Curtis was unusually open and respectful of the people he encountered.

But in practice, the ethics were complicated. Curtis kept ownership of all the materials he shot, despite his evident debt and personal sacrifices. (To settle his divorce in 1919, for example, he surrendered ownership of his photographs and glass negatives to his ex-wife; Curtis and a daughter then destroyed many negatives rather than allow her to have them.) While Curtis’s sets were nominally presented as scholarly volumes, they were issued in severely limited editions and mainly circulated among White art connoisseurs and wealthy patrons. The vast majority of Native people (let alone the general public) had no access to The North American Indian. Those 272 complete sets printed in the 1920s have since become rare collectors’ items, fetching eye-popping sums. After *Curtis was “rediscovered” in the late 20th century, sets sold at auction for tens of thousands of dollars. The image that is shared, then, is largely curated by those in libraries, galleries, and private collections – predominantly outside Native communities.

Moreover, Curtis’s methods were shaped by paternalistic ideologies. As one ethicist observes, his work “stemmed from a popular tradition of ethnographic salvage” in which Westerners believed it was their duty to record “dying” cultures. This tradition was rooted in a Social Darwinist worldview: that “inferior races would inevitably succumb to superior races,” so the colonial (or anthropologist) must document them. Curtis wrote that he was building a “record of all important tribes… before they vanished”. But this assumption of inevitable disappearance ignored the agency of Native peoples. The very act of Curtis choosing what to record reflected a power imbalance: he selected what he judged “important” according to his own (and Western) criteria. In doing so, he sometimes disregarded the values of his subjects. As one contemporary commentator noted, Curtis’s fixation on romantic, noble images could “deflect attention from the true plight of American natives” in an era of boarding schools and broken treaties. The power to gaze and to publish lay firmly with Curtis and his backers, not with the tribes.

Thus Curtis’s legacy is ethically tangled. He undoubtedly saved photographic evidence of people and ceremonies that might never have been captured otherwise. When later Native scholars examine The North American Indian, they sometimes find threads of genealogy, clothing, or ritual they recognize. But these threads were placed by Curtis’s hand into a Western narrative. For instance, some tribal leaders have told modern researchers that Curtis treated their ancestors well (honoring them, speaking through interpreters, paying as promised) and that many elders liked him. Others point out that he glossed over displacement, poverty, and violence — reifying Indians as images more than people. The truth is that Curtis’s project was shot through with this tension: to preserve, yes, but sometimes by framing or transforming reality to fit a myth of honor and decline.

IV. Revival in the Long Sixties

After Curtis’s death and the liquidation of his company, his work quietly receded for decades. By the 1950s his volumes were out of print, and interest was low. That began to change in the 1960s and 1970s – an era of increased visibility for Native American issues in public life. The rediscovery of Curtis paralleled the Red Power movement and a cultural interest in pre-industrial life. Many Americans began to view his images with nostalgia: Curtis’s sepia portraits, devoid of modern debris, suddenly appealed to a generation questioning mainstream narratives. Harald Prins, a visual anthropologist, notes that since the 1960s Curtis’s photographs “had special appeal for this ‘Red Power’ movement and even helped inspire it”. In other words, the romantic yet archival nature of Curtis’s work resonated with activists seeking to reclaim Indian identity and history.

Institutions noticed. In 1971, the Morgan Library in New York held a major Curtis exhibition; the Philadelphia Museum of Art did so in 1972; and UC Irvine showed Curtis in 1976. These events, along with anthologies of his work published in the early 1970s, brought Curtis to new audiences. The Library of Congress, which had acquired many Curtis prints, also began to promote the collection, publishing essays and making images available. As a result, The North American Indian became recognized not as a failed vanity project but as an important record. Anthropologists and historians began citing Curtis’s images in their research, and exhibitions of Native American photography often centered on him. In a remarkable turn, Curtis’s surviving sets began commanding high prices: one complete set sold for $20,000 in 1972, and another for $60,500 in 1977. By the end of the century Curtis was regarded as one of the most significant early photographers of Native Americans.

Scholars also began to study Curtis as a forerunner of visual anthropology. In academic journals he was sometimes portrayed ambivalently: on one hand, as someone who appealed to “cultural archetypes” of Indians and the “ambivalent racism” of his time. On the other hand, as Mick Gidley (a British Curtis scholar) later observed, even critics came to appreciate his achievement. Gidley notes that after initial disapproval of Curtis’s “methodological assumptions,” later anthropologists “began to appreciate the value” of the project. Gidley argues that The North American Indian is not a monolith; it is “alive” and “speaks…with several voices,” including “those of otherwise silent or muted Indian individuals”. In short, the revival of Curtis prompted a re-examination: some saw him as complicit in colonial stereotypes, others as a chronicler who preserved images long unavailable. Both readings became part of Curtis’s legacy.

V. Critical Voices and Indigenous Perspectives

Curtis’s revival also spurred debate among Native people themselves. Reactions have been decidedly mixed. Some Native scholars and leaders value Curtis’s work as one of the few visual archives of early 20th-century life. Pulitzer-winning writer N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) hailed the Curtis collection as “a singular achievement,” writing that “never before have we seen the Indians of North America so close to the origins of their humanity…”. Momaday, like many admires, was struck by the immediacy and dignity in the images: they are “indispensable images of every human being at every time in every place,” he said. Similarly, biographer Laurie Lawlor notes that Native people who worked with Curtis respected him, even calling him Shadow Catcher for capturing their spirit. In Lawlor’s view, Curtis was unusually “far ahead of his contemporaries in sensitivity” toward Indigenous ways, given his era. Indeed, some descendants of Curtis’s subjects recognize their ancestors in his photos and use them as family history.

Others are more critical. Many Native commentators, especially after the 1970s, have pointed out that Curtis’s images often present an “invented Indian” that served colonial narratives. As one recent writer puts it, Curtis’s portraits are “intimate and beautifully lit” but part of a “controversial” ethnography. Critics say he left out the fact that many of those he photographed were living under reservation poverty, boarding school trauma, or active resistance to colonization. The Photoethics analysis emphasizes that Curtis omitted the “harsh reality” of his subjects’ lives (poverty, broken treaties, disease). Some tribes have pointed out that Curtis’s own captions could be misleading (calling a sunset ceremony a Sun Dance, for example) and that editing stripped context from images. In the late 20th century there was a wider critique of the “romanticized notion of Native American life” in Curtis’s work.

Academics have echoed these themes. Scholarly critiques highlight that Curtis paid his models (in silver dollars or beef) to reenact scenes, reinforcing the idea of the “noble savage” living outside history. Curtis’s embrace of the “vanishing race” myth has been seen as complicit in an “ideological construct” that was racist even if unconsciously so. In recent years, Indigenous curators and photographers have challenged museums to reinterpret Curtis’s images, adding context or pairing them with contemporary Native art. For example, a 2017 exhibition curated by Native historians contrasted Curtis’s portraits with modern photographs of the same tribal lands, inviting viewers to see both continuity and change. While not all such voices are easily quotable in print, the general sentiment is clear: Curtis’s images are historically valuable, but they carry the imprint of a colonial gaze. They belong both to the archives of museums and to the memories and rights of the peoples they depict.

VI. Curtis in Public Memory: Archives and Images

In the early 21st century, The North American Indian has taken on new roles in the public imagination. Many of Curtis’s photographs have entered the visual lexicon of how Americans picture “the Indian.” His photos are reproduced in history textbooks, websites, and calendars. The figure of a Sioux chief in full regalia or an Apache camp scene – these evoke, for many viewers, a generic idea of Native America. In popular culture the line between Curtis’s curated portrait and “reality” has blurred. People often assume these images are straightforward documentary photographs, not considering how they were staged. This shaping of historical imagination is a political act: the United States itself has long woven a narrative of manifest destiny and westward progress in which Indians are either “dying out” or vanishing, legitimizing white settlement. Curtis’s work, showing people in pre-modern roles, has sometimes been appropriated to fit that narrative.

At the same time, because many iconic Curtis prints are now in major institutions, there are ongoing debates about who “owns” these images. The principal archives – Northwestern University’s Curtis Collection, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian – are all stewarded by large organizations. These institutions make many photos accessible online, which is a public good, yet the interpretive control remains largely with archivists and curators. Some Native advocates argue that the communities Curtis photographed should have greater input on how the images are used. For example, the Hupa tribe has questioned whether certain sacred ceremonies should be widely published. Similar debates have arisen over other archival materials (like the NAGPRA process for remains and artifacts). The Curtis collection has yet to see a formal “repatriation” because photographs are not covered by the same laws as human remains or cultural objects. But there have been exhibitions co-curated by tribes, and some tribal centers now host digital galleries for their heritage. The politics of these archives is an active issue: access is easier than ever, but power still centers in non-Native hands.

Broader conversations around representation are also relevant. Curtis’s art is often discussed alongside questions of visual sovereignty. Modern Indigenous artists and scholars emphasize that Native peoples must have the right to tell their own stories and control their images. In that light, Curtis’s work is an early example of whose perspective photographs a community. Today, when an image circulates – on a tee shirt or in an Instagram post – viewers may not ask whether it belongs to a tribe’s own narrative or is a relic of someone else’s gaze. That uncertainty itself is part of Curtis’s legacy: his photographs invite us to ask whose image is shown and whose interests it served.

Conclusion: Inheriting the Legacy

Now, closing the book, I grapple with how to “inherit” this complicated legacy. On one hand, I feel grateful: I have seen, up close, the contours of faces long gone, and glimpsed moments of grace and skill that only photography could preserve. In discussing The North American Indian, no one can deny its formal beauty. There is palpable joy in discovering the craftsmanship of Curtis’s compositions. Indeed, my own children peeked over my shoulder at the Flathead Childhood or the Pomo gatherer, marveling at the clothing and posture. Those images are captivating — a gift in themselves.

But I also carry a weight of responsibility. I cannot view these pictures uncritically or present them to others as pure truth. My civic task is to hold both the image and the silence together. We must not erase the beauty — it deserves attention and appreciation — but we must also speak clearly about what is missing. Every photograph is a choice, and Curtis’s choices often left out the stories of survival, resistance, and change. If I show a plate of a Sioux warrior in a war bonnet, I should say: “This was a photograph taken in 1905 by a Seattle photographer, who asked this Cheyenne man to dress as an ‘old-time warrior.’” In other words, we must contextualize. Invite questions. Was he really in that garb daily? What happened to his tribe by the 1920s?

The civic reflection here is simple: we must be honest inheritors. Our inheritance is twofold — of beauty and of truth. We inherit a past in pictures, but we also inherit a duty to listen to the living descendants whose voices were once muted by these photographs. That means working with contemporary Native scholars, incorporating oral histories, and acknowledging the gaps. It also means sharing these images only with respect, crediting their creators — both Curtis and, more importantly, the real people in them. We remember the artistry, and we remember the agency of those who sat for the camera.

In the end, perhaps that is a fitting way to reconcile the tensions. Curtis’s volume now lies on my shelf — an object of art and history. I will use it to teach, to reflect, and to inspire deeper understanding of the United States’ complex heritage — not as an American myself, but as a historian and citizen who believes that history, wherever it unfolds, must be met with both critical attention and moral clarity. By doing both — by not letting the silences endure unanswered — we neither erase the radiance of Curtis’s photographs nor ignore the lives they only partly reflect. In this way, we give credit to the photographer’s craft and to the peoples on whose behalf he intended — and yet complicated — to speak.

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Bibliography

Curtis’s original works and extensive photographic collections remain publicly accessible. Readers can explore selections of The North American Indian and related archival material through major institutional collections hosted by the Smithsonian Institution, Northwestern University, and the Library of Congress.

• Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian: A Photographic Archive. Accessed June 2025. https://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/Curtis/.

• Northwestern University Libraries. The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis: Photographic Images. Accessed June 2025. https://dc.library.northwestern.edu/collections/55ff2504-dd53-4943-b2cb-aeea46e77bc3.

• Library of Congress. Edward S. Curtis Collection. Accessed June 2025. https://www.loc.gov/collections/edward-s-curtis/.

• Gascoigne, Ellie. “Edward Curtis and ‘The North American Indian’: An Exploration of Truth and Objectivity.” Photography Ethics Centre, 2021.

• Library of Congress. “Edward Curtis and the Background of the Collection.” The Curtis Collection, loc.gov.

• Regalado, Christine. “Edward Curtis’s Epic Project to Photograph Native Americans.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2014.

• Sharp, Sarah Rose. “A Critical Understanding of Edward Curtis’s Photos of Native American Culture.” Hyperallergic, June 23, 2017.