Most likely, many of the photographs displayed in the exhibit had been taken by Edward Curtis, a premier photographer and documenter of Native American life in the first half of the 20th century. The lodge was the centerpiece of rooms of Native American artifacts and pictures so that the original inhabitants of North America would not be forgotten.
An interactive part of museum trips that I always enjoyed was the Pawnee Earth Lodge, a full sized tipi that allowed visitors to experience what Native American life was like. As a history enthusiast from an early age, I preferred trips to the Field Museum of Natural History. One of the highlights of growing up in the Chicago area is all of the city’s museums. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever.
But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it. He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. It took tremendous perseverance - ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.Īn Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. How a lone man's epic obsession led to one of America's greatest cultural treasures: Prize-winning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history - and the driven, brilliant man who made them.Įdward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time.
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