Category: edward curtis

Edward S. Curtiss at Josephy!

The Josephy Library has been gifted an amazing set of books, Edward S. Curtiss’ THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN: THE COMPLETE REFERENCE EDITION.

This is a reprint of the original work done over 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century by the famous photographer. The publisher, CHRISTOPHER CARDOZO FINE ART, says it is “An affordable re-creation of Edward Curtis’ original masterpiece, the Complete Reference Edition is finished with a hardcover and printed on archival, acid-free Finch Opaque paper.”Read Rich’s Post →

Vanishing Indians and Wounded Knee

There’s a new history book that is rattling across the best seller lists. It’s a collection of essays called Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies about Our Past. There are 20 chapters on everything from “American Exceptionalism” to the “New Deal” and the “Southern Strategy.” The third chapter is “Vanishing Indians.”Read Rich’s Post →

MLK and the Indians

I remember Alvin Josephy saying many times that the white liberals who had joined the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King did not understand the Indian situation. To paraphrase him, “As the Civil Rights movement gained strength and won some victories, white liberals thought they could just transfer ideas and tactics over to Indian affairs. But there was a fundamental difference. Indians didn’t want their ‘civil’ rights, but their ‘sovereignty,’ the treaty rights and at least some of the land that had been stolen from them.”

Another constant theme of Alvin’s: “From the beginning Indians had three choices: become white—assimilation; move, across the Mississippi, further west, to reservations—removal; or extermination.” From the beginning, Euro-Americans who wanted to treat Indians fairly often thought the best way to do so was to assimilate them. Their assumption was that Indians had lost the continent, white civilization was on the march, and Indians were obliged to join the parade. Alvin’s boss at Time Magazine, Henry Luce, thought Indians who resisted this maxim were “phonies,” and should just get on with adapting. Alice Fletcher, the famous “measuring woman” among the Nez Perce who had actually written some of the Dawes, or Allotment, Act, had in mind to make every Indian a Jeffersonian farmer. She appreciated Indian cultures—some of the ethnographic work she did among the Omaha and other Plains tribes on Indian songs and dances is still available in Dover Books. But the Indian solution, in her mind, was assimilation. The culture would go to textbooks and museums.

Even photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis felt that Indian cultures were “vanishing,” and sought to keep as many of them as possible alive in words and images. To Curtis’s credit, his time of work, the years on either side of 1900, were probably the nadir for Indians. According to the US Census Bureau, there were only 237,196 Indians left in the country in 1900.
Indians have not disappeared—Fletcher and Curtis would both be happy with that. And in fact their resurgence did have something to do with the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was aware of Indian history, which he naturally interpreted in racial terms in his 1963 book, Why We Can’t Wait:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.  
King trumpeting the Indian story nationally in such graphic terms had to have had an impact. And Indians did follow what was happening with American blacks. The NCAAP, the oldest civil rights group, was formed in 1908. NCAI, the National Congress of American Indians, the first national Indian lobby, was formed in 1944, and NARF, the Native American Rights Fund, was modeled after the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the mid-sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, sovereignty and treaty rights, not always secure, not always playing out the Indian way, are acknowledged and of moment across the country—with a much greater understanding by white liberals. It’s all speculation, but one might argue that AIM, Alcatraz, the second Wounded Knee, none of it would have happened without the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. And the way King brought Alvin’s third Indian alternative—extermination, or, in 20thcentury terms, genocide—to the fore has certainly had a sobering influence on policy makers and Indians themselves over the last 50 years.
As King and Indian leaders would say, there is still much work to do, but we are a long way from 1900 and a “vanishing race.”

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The Shadow Catcher


The name came to Edward S. Curtis from Indians, who were the subject of his life work—a twenty volume study in words and pictures of The North American Indian. The title of Tim Egan’s fascinating new biography is Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: the Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.

It must have been easier for the ones with firm beliefs and intentions, the purists: the original Europeans who thought the indigenous peoples on the new continents were less than human and best used as slaves, and, if worked to death or killed, of no moral consequence; the northern Europeans who started on the Atlantic seaboard and drove Indians west with diseases and superior weapons, duplicity, and sometimes savagery; and those on all fronts who thought and said that the best Indians were dead Indians.  Col. John Milton Chivington, who engineered the Sand Creek Massacre of friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864, said it this way: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”
Another group of purists was—and is—the saviors, the biggest number Christian missionaries. The Franciscans under Father Serra, beginning in 1769, set up a string of 21 missions in California, and the good father is said to have converted over 5,000 Indians. He has been beatified for this work, but there is strong opposition to the final step of Sainthood from Indians and Indian advocates who argue that he and his missions were responsible for the enslavement, torture, and death of thousands of California Indians. Some have called what happened in California genocide—Josephy, in 500 Nations, hedged only slightly, saying that the history of the California tribes “was as close to genocide as any tribal people had faced, or would face, on the North American continent.”
Further north—almost a century later—President Grant turned over the administration of Indian reservations to Christian missionaries. Missionaries, from early French priests accompanying fur traders to the Whitmans and Spaldings at Walla Walla and Lapwai, had been active from the beginning of white settlement in converting Indians, but it was Grant who, in Josephy’s eyes, caused the biggest breach in the separation of church and state in our history in giving over the administration and control of Indians to churches. These true believers, like their earlier Spanish counterparts, believed that they knew what was best for the Indians, and outlawing music, dance, clothing, and spiritual rituals was good because it was to the Indians’ benefit.
To be fair, there were and are missionaries who saw grayer shades, who sometimes have helped to keep Indians and Indian culture alive—some few helped Curtis.
And there is another associated group—possibly for much of our nation’s history the dominant group, made up of a few dedicated Samaritans and a silent majority of the population, which has promoted assimilation as the way of survival for Indians. Their mantra: kill the Indian to save the man. Examining “assimilation”—killing the “Indianness” is what Josephy called it—is now a major part of my work at the Josephy Library.
But today I am thinking about the white men and women who engaged the Indians as equals, and the Indians on the other side who also pinned their hopes on a relationship of equals, and how they have struggled—and still struggle. Tim Egan outlines a Curtis life that runs from poverty to great success as the finest portrait photographer in the land. Curtis consorts with the rich and famous from Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt to J.P. Morgan, and sets off on a quest to present the American Indian as he and she were—still were in many places in Curtis’s time—in their own highly developed physical and spiritual cultures. 
The curve in the book—and I think maybe in Curtis’s life, came with his intense examination of Plains Indians and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. After going over and over the battlefield with Crow Indian scouts who had been there, he learned that Custer was not a hero, but when he tried to tell the true story he was rebuffed on all fronts, finally by President Roosevelt himself, who said against all evidence that Curtis presented that his account was “highly improbable.” What he meant is that the nation needed Custer as a hero—and not Curtis as a truthteller.
Curtis’s good friend and for many years chief Indian informant, Alexander Upshaw, a Crow who went to the Carlisle Indian School and married a white woman, the man who had worked the Custer battlefield and talked with Curtis and the scouts endlessly, died under questionable circumstances in a jail cell in the wake of this work.
Curtis lived to old age, but died almost destitute, his thousands of photographs and the first movie ever to feature an all-Indian cast mortgaged to the Morgans and others to keep him alive and taking pictures. Scrambling among the assimilationists and fighting against and trying to avoid the purists, Curtis, and before him his great friend, Alexander Upshaw, paid steep prices. But their work survives—and so, against all odds, do the Indian peoples they celebrated.
Alvin Josephy on Curtis: http://www.americanheritage.com/content/splendid-indians-edward-s-curtis

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The romantic side of assimilation

 

Relationships between European immigrants and indigenous people in the Americas have been complicated from the beginning.  Columbus and his henchmen squeezed the Caribbeans of gold, enslaved them, annihilated some tribes, and took the case of indigenous people’s “humanity” back to the Old World, where churchmen determined that the Americans had souls and were in need of Christian conversion.

The northern Europeans, coming out of the little ice age, started to get well on American potatoes, and the ones who made it to “New England” shores, still often scrawny and unfit, found corn and squash and beans and big strong looking Indians—the Indians who had escaped the diseases which had decimated the coast before the arrival of actual settlers.

A few of these strong good looking Indians were brought back to Europe, and they and stories of the Iroquois Confederation –the “civilized tribes”—reached philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and others to fuel a vision of “noble savages” and feed the Enlightenment. (see John White painting circa 1590 at left).

Alvin J said many times in many ways that, from the beginning, white relationships with Indians took three basic roads—all evident in my sketchy history above: 1. Indians should be killed and their lands and resources taken over by superior Europeans;  2. Indians should be converted and assimilated, should be made white. Most who espoused this view were good people who saw Indians as children in need of white parenting, and believed they could catch up with whites if properly cared for.

The third vision, what Alvin sometimes called the “romantic” vision of Indians granted the Indians a glorious “noble” past. These were the Indians brought back to Europe and paraded before royalty. Benjamin Franklin observed that Indians got on well without policemen and jails, and that the Iroquois nations had fashioned a kind of union that had lasted for generations, while a dozen European colonies were having a tough time forming any union at all.  These Indians inspired philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau to name them “noble savages.”  In the end this narrative of indigenous America also led to assimilation; you were once noble and free and part of nature, but civilization has caught up with you and now you must join it—us.  You are, in terms popular in the nineteenth century and in the title of a 1904 Edward Curtis photo, a “vanishing race.” (curtis photo below)

I think this vision is buried somehow in the collective American genome. In this view, we conquered the Indians and their lands, and are now treating them well—as “equals” really. So we grant them a noble past. They were, among other things, hard adversaries, sometimes ruthless, but in any case tough. (How else could they have defeated Custer!) We don’t want to recount the actual relationships of Indians and whites in our textbooks—scholars and amateur historians can play in that field—but we can still name things after Indian heroes and put statues of them in public places. (Indian writer James Welch told me that the Battle at the Little Big Horn is one of the top two or three American historical subjects in books and films; following the history of these histories is another way of tracking Indian-white relations.) The “Trail of Tears” is a phrase that has entered the vocabulary, though I doubt very many of us can trace its actual history. Indians are still mostly absent from our history textbooks. And the fact that Indians and tribes are still with us and are doing things other than casinos—things like restoring lands and fish and game populations, fighting diabetes and poverty, trying to integrate old ways and new ways—is not part of the current American conversation.

One could argue that the romantics have carried the day—Indians were once interesting and even noble, as are their old chiefs and stories, but Indians today, if they have not already vanished, are largely invisible to most Americans.

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