[Detail] Painted lodges - Piegan. Edward S. Curtis 
About this image
Introduction
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian is a collection of photographs of eighty American Indian cultures from the Great Plains, Great Basin, Plateau Region, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. The digital collection presents more than 2200 sepia-toned photographs from Curtis's The North American Indian, originally published in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930. The financier John Pierpont Morgan agreed to subsidize Curtis's expeditions, provided the photographs were published in a set of books. Theodore Roosevelt endorsed the project and wrote a preface for the first volume, extolling the publication as a remarkable art collection.
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Although not a trained ethnologist, Curtis documented some aspects of the customs and lifestyles of American Indians of the trans-Mississippi West. The publication of Curtis's work, highly romanticized and most craftily staged, exerted a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture. Curtis is reported to have retouched some of the photographs in order to remove modern objects, adding to the popular illusion of Native Americans as a primitive people.
The Special Presentation, "Edward S. Curtis in Context," presents several useful tools. While consulting online reproductions of the images and captions, the user can look up facts on a Curtis timeline and view a map identifying locations of the Native Americans when they were photographed by Curtis. Accompanying essays discuss how Curtis worked, what his work has meant to Native peoples of North America, and how he promoted the view, dominant in the early twentieth century, that American Indians were a "vanishing race." These essays provide an essential context for viewing the images in the collection.
This online collection contains all of the images and caption text as originally published in The North American Indian. Curtis's captions reflect a perspective that Indians were "primitive" people whose traditional cultures and ways of life were disappearing. In his representation of Indians as the "vanishing race," Curtis echoes the prevailing view held by Euro-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Contemporary readers should interpret the captions in that context.
Curtis photographed some sacred ceremonial rituals that were not intended for viewing. These images are included in the digital collection in order to fully represent the work.
Last Updated: 06/12/2009