Old Images / New Views: Perspectives on Edward Curtis

“The Bowman” represents, for me, a photograph of intense irony. Since a major cultural theme of the Nuu-chah-nulth is the hidden world made manifest in origin stories—such as the story of Son of Raven that unveils the astonishing intimacy between the physical and metaphysical—it is natural for me to view this Curtis photograph from that cultural theme. On the surface, it is evident that the photograph is meant to illustrate a natural pristine moment that excited the imagination of Enlightenment authors like Sir Thomas More, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau imagined that the Bowman wandered in the forest, here without clothes, without laws, morals, intelligence, society or family and perchance would meet a female, then copulate and continue to wander instinctively never to know his offspring. The Indian Act of 1884 that declared aboriginals to be non-persons is one outcome of Enlightenment thinking and the Bowman photograph is another.

Consequently, as I gaze at this photograph of the Bowman, I am filled with that familiar sense of fear, oppression, helplessness and powerlessness that I felt as a small child of 7 years when I entered residential school. Like the Bowman, frozen in time, captured and imprisoned in western technology, speechless and dumb, the photographer distorts reality so that Renee Dupuis, who served on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples could say: "We should not be surprised to find ourselves, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, confronted with a wall of mutual misunderstanding when it comes to Aboriginal questions."

Umeek of Ahousaht - Dr. E. Richard Atleo
Nuu-chah-nulth
Associate Adjunct Professor, University of Victoria

Ambiguous and layered with meanings, this photograph is an aesthetic work masquerading as documentation. Like all of Curtis’s images, it is not what it appears to be.

Bound in Volume 11 (1915), it appears to reveal both an object and a cultural context: somewhere on Haida Gwaii, a Haida person (perhaps an exotic shaman) shows his rattle to the photographer. But the rattle was owned by Dr. Charles F. Newcombe, a Victoria-based artifact collector, at the time. Newcombe purchased it four years earlier: he paid Dr. C. C. Worsfold $12.50 (about $250 in today’s dollars) for it on May 8, 1911. Worsfold got it from the Charles collection, thus the rattle had not been in Haida hands for several years when this photograph was made in 1915. So, where was Curtis’s photograph taken? Who is holding the rattle? Who knows?

The rattle was shown differently in November 1917 when Newcombe photographed it, along with other rattles he owned, hanging by what looks to be kitchen string against a plain wall or panel. No attempt at aesthetic presentation is evident in this clinical-looking record shot. The placement is haphazard; lights glare; focus is poor; a large splash of emulsion obscures much of the image.

In 1961, the rattle came to the Royal BC Museum with the Newcombe Estate. It was a feature of the First Peoples exhibit until shamanic objects were removed from display at the request of the Haida Nation. It can be seen, however, in colour photographs that artistically illustrate books such as Macnair, Hoover and Neary’s The Legacy, and Wardwell’s Tangible Visions. Images taken from several angles describe the rattle in the museum’s Ethnology Database (catalogue number 9729).

I see Curtis’s picture of the rattle at home, too. In my hallway, it hangs with photographs by Canadian artists Michael Snow, Geoffrey James and Arnold Maggs. I bought the tissue print years ago in Santa Fe, where it appeared out of context in a gallery full of images of New Mexico. For me, the Curtis print has personal and paradoxical connotations. It is simultaneously a souvenir of the southwest and the northwest, a reminder of my place of work and my home, a decontextualized presentation of ethnographic inventory and a work of pictorialist photography in a modernist context.

Martha Black, Ph.D.
Curator of Ethnology
Royal British Columbia Museum

This picture evokes “bittersweet” feelings because it evokes a time before Aboriginal culture and the resources vital to our existence were impacted by colonization. Abalone in particular were so depleted by overfishing in the 1970s that none can now be taken, even for a wedding or feast. I say “bittersweet” because this is how a Tsimshian Hereditary Chief described seeing cultural objects in the exhibition Treasures of the Tsimshian from the Dundas Collection that had been “collected” by the Rev. Robert J. Dundas in 1863: bitter because they were “taken,” sweet to have a chance to see them.

The picture was taken in 1914, the first year of the Great War in which many First Nations men fought and died. Veterans’ Affairs Canada estimates that one in three able-bodied First Nations men volunteered. This woman, pictured “gathering abalones,” may have been the mother, grandmother, wife or sister of a man who died far from home. She may have been related to one of those pictured on the walls of the BC Legislature in 1930. She may have been a schoolteacher, or many other things. Like many First Nations women of the time, she is anonymous, and listed simply as “Gathering abalones – Nakoaktok.” One thing is certain: her “normal” life was not lived in a traditional blanket and hat. Not only was traditional clothing discouraged by missionaries (and regalia associated with the potlatch banned from 1884-1951), but by 1914, Native women were just as interested in modern fashion as anyone. So it’s sweet to think about the fun this woman and her friends may have had when they took part in Curtis’s staged photo shoots—the laughter they probably shared at the idea of dressing up in cedar-bark regalia to gather abalone.

Pam Brown
Heiltsuk Nation
Curator, Pacific Northwest
UBC Museum of Anthropology

Edward Curtis would have been discouraged to see the books he struggled to produce being torn apart and their photographic plates sold off one by one. He conceived of his great work, The North American Indian, as a series of books—he completed twenty—and while individual plates are striking, it’s only in the context of each volume that one begins to understand the role of each photograph. Volume X – Kwakiutl, published in 1915, contains seventy-four plates, with an additional thirty-six in the accompanying portfolio. Most of the photos, made between 1910 and 1914, are carefully framed and posed, and if some of them seem to suggest daily or ceremonial life prior to European contact, the images of contemporary house fronts in Alert Bay and other villages, built of milled planks, betray the illusion. A number of the pictures give the impression that they might also have served as production stills for Curtis’s 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters.

Curtis is best known for his iconic individual portraits of native North Americans. Many of the most dramatic and intriguing plates in Volume X, however, show Kwakwaka'wakw dancers wearing masks. It is difficult to know how one should look at these images today. Should they be seen as ethnographic or aesthetic studies? Neither category suffices. ‘Kaloqutsuis – Qagyuhl’ depicts a crouching figure in a mask, at rest, concealed by cedar bark except for one leg. Framed by a geometrical grid of shadows, this studio-like portrait seems to share the heightened self-consciousness and uncluttered minimalism of early modernist photographs. On the other hand, one is challenged by the narrative urgency of ‘Paqusilahl Emerging from the Woods – Qagyuhl’. At a glance, it’s a portrait of a dancer wearing the mask and embodying the nature of Bak’was, the Wild Man of the Woods. He’s on one knee, about to spring out of the forest. Curtis seems to have been intrigued by this dancer. There are two photographs of him, eight pages apart, the second one a close-up, so that a reader can cut to the close-up as one does in the movies.

With his unkempt hair, his fierce, sunken eyes, his bared teeth, his frighteningly large hands and his body pushing through—and screened by—yew branches, the illusion is that Bak’was has been ‘captured on film’ at the moment he emerges from the spirit world to hunt for human souls. Bak’was is a hungry ghost, unable to find peace in the world of the dead or the living, and it’s not hard to imagine Curtis collaborating with the dancer to create an image that would symbolically represent this restless and divided nature. Whether one views him as the underworld’s devouring emissary—or as an aspect of the unconscious—Bak’was, through the medium of the dancer embodying him—and the light-trapping medium of photography—is suspended on the border between forest and clearing, life and death, darkness and light, subject and object, clean and unclean.* In offering a narrative of arrested emergence, Curtis and the dancer have become co-producers of a narrative tableau, and in the symbolic topography of its single frame—it could be a motion picture still—we witness the harrowing moment one might experience immediately before being seized by Death.

Emerging from the dark forest—Curtis’s camera equates light with time—the man dancing Bak’was renders the supernatural or invisible world reassuringly visible. Photography’s appetite for ‘capturing’ what cannot be seen, and Bak’was’ appetite for ‘capturing’ human souls, meet at the border that separates and binds the visible and the invisible worlds. Perhaps the mask produces the border, which is made visible only when Bak’was, the spirit, is approached by his earthly embodiment, the dancer. It is as if each is looking into a mirror. The photograph offers the viewer a similar encounter. I observe in the image of Bak’was an aspect of myself—and a border that is my self.

We should not be surprised by the camera’s interest in a ghost. The ability of a portrait to penetrate and death has been an enduring aspect of photography from the beginning. The public, in 1915, was deeply attracted to spirit photography, perhaps in reaction to the anxieties and uncertainties of the age. Curtis’s photographs of Bak’was may reflect his own uncertainties and anxieties as well as those of his subjects, acknowledging and dramatizing a set of complex intercultural encounters between the natural and the supernatural, the wild and the cultivated, the ‘white man’ and the ‘Indian’, the Self and the Other, the photographer and his subject, the anthropologist and his subject, colonial exploitation and twentieth-century Kwakwaka'wakw survival, and, crucially, between the sacred and the profane. The ‘subject’ of the Bak’was photographs is the tightly knotted sum of these encounters. What emerges, through the mask, the dancer and the photograph on the border between two worlds, is the fear of dissolution that makes one come alive.

The function of these three technologies—the mask, the dance and the photograph—is to remind us that there’s more to the world than meets the eye; it is a porous and lethal place. It’s worth recalling that these self-conscious images were made on the eve of World War One, at a time of social and cultural devastation, when the young men working with Curtis would have been concerned about their futures, and Sigmund Freud, in faraway Vienna, was beginning a new book in which he would write, ‘Repression requires a continuous expenditure of energy.’ Freud and his colleagues might have taken a keen interest in these photographs.

* Despite the variance in orthography, Paqusilahl and Bak’wasalal refer to the same being. Both words can be translated into English as ‘Wild Man of the Woods dance.’ Thanks to Andrea Sanborn and William Wasden for this understanding.

Colin Browne
Writer and filmmaker
Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts

I chose this photo because to me it represents woman’s work, cultural maintenance, and a relationship to the natural world. From gathering the materials, to time spent making the baskets, and to teaching the expressiveness of culture from one generation to another—all are inherent in this image. The value of basket making to cultural understanding and preservation is connected to a worldview that expresses everything is related—all my relations—mother earth provides.

Dana Claxton
Lakota
www.danaclaxton.com

I have selected this photograph because it represents many of Curtis’s deep portraits. “Deep” meaning that there are layers of textures, both artistically and culturally, and that behind the pure beauty of his “subject’s” architecture, there seems to be more of a story. A hint of humour in the eye, a slight reflection of anger, a tilt of the head that reveals impatience, or a stance that is long bored. Perhaps this is where his eye is most dynamic—here we can still bear witness to the meeting between humanity and art because it is still breathing, still asking more questions than it is answering.

Having said this, I feel that his portraits are infantilized by his descriptions of them. Many times he only describes his “subject” in the most generic manner as if labelling only for his consumption. Content: man; where he took it: place; what his subject is wearing rather than their name; what “type” they are often seems more significant than who they are.  Many would say this was a product of the time, but if time can stand still when looking at great art… it can also stand still when it betrays its own good intention.

All that being said, it is reassuring to understand that romanticism is more complex than a simple meeting of eyes.

Marie Clements
Dene/Métis Playwright

This woman of great nobility sits showing her wealth and status amongst our Kwakwaka’wakw people. The abalone shell on her hat signifies her status in the social structure of our people. The photo struck me because of the continuation of our culture and my own personal experience when I was in my early teen years.

At my grandfather Arthur Dick Sr.’s potlatch I was given my great grandmother Agnes Alfred’s Coming of Age ceremony. I wore a hat covered in abalone shell like the ancestor in the photo. I stood and danced on a wooden box with two family attendants on either side wearing Peace dance headdresses. I had a dance screen behind me painted with two slaves holding up a copper. The design comes from the Starface House of the Mamalilikala.

The story tells of my grandfather’s great-grandfather, Maxwayalis, the first man that ever brought our people together after years of war amongst each other. People arrived with guns because they thought he was just trying to trick them. He brought people together in peace and got them to know each other.

This ceremony was of great significance in my early life. It shows my family lineage and recognizes my mother’s side of the family through my grandfather Arthur Dick Sr. from the Mamalilikala of Village Island.

Barbara Cranmer (T’lakwagilogwa)
‘Namgis First Nation Filmmaker

As a student, I spent the better part of a decade studying the ideology around images of Aboriginal people in the visual arts. Edward Curtis’s portraits figured largely in this experience. In classes, we would discuss these portraits in relation to salvage ethnography in art and visual anthropology, a way of thinking about Aboriginal people as a “vanishing race” that need to be documented before they become extinct due to the influence of colonial newcomers. This way of thinking couldn’t imagine Aboriginal people capable of survival, adaptation, and creative interaction with different social and cultural influences. Abstracted from a lived reality, these images document an “idea” of who First Nations people are. On the other hand, if I’ve learned anything from my education, it’s that a uniform characterization is probably a very flawed one. Here, I thought, is opportunity to look at more of his photographs, maybe to change the way that I’ve come to see and imagine his work in a particular colonial framework.

I can’t say that I’ve seen all of his portraits, but that was my introduction to his work and so I chose to look at his other photographs. I went through droves of photos before coming across one called A Fair Breeze. This photograph shows three Kwakwaka'wakw canoes at full sail moving across the water.   Not only was it not a portrait, and so not something I would have conventionally associated with Curtis, but the image of sails on canoes is something I’ve not frequently seen, and probably an image that most people don’t immediately associate with Aboriginal peoples of this area. More than that, though, it immediately called to mind conversations I’ve had with my father, where he’d talk about how Aboriginal people traveled along the water – in this photo it looks like the ocean, but my father spoke about it in relation to both the ocean and the Fraser River. He’d describe the River as a kind of highway for the First Nations people, and talk about the traffic on the water – social, economic, or otherwise. One image he described that I couldn’t get out of my head was how people would travel upriver using sails in the canoes to take advantage of the winds, the same winds that would be used to dry salmon up by Yale in the Fraser Canyon. What I was looking for, and part of what I see in this photo, is a practical reality of travel for First Nations people – how things “work” in an everyday sense. I think it strikes me because it points to the reality of a way of life based on water systems, and how people work with local conditions to live here.

Images like these are interesting to me not just because they connect to something personal, but because they show something almost colloquial that tells me more about how people lived, and not just how they have been pictured. It reminds me that it’s possible to see more of the people Curtis documented than the examples I have been shown that were intended to illustrate a mode of Western thought. For me, it connects to an impulse to continually rethink, or think more about, what we think we know about First Nations people from images, which here also involves considering Curtis’s body of work in a way that allows for this possibility.

Karrmen Crey
Sto:lo, Cheam Band

Intervention

Marcia Crosby
Tsimpshian and Haida Ancestry
Art Historian and Writer

Intervention

Marcia Crosby
Tsimpshian and Haida Ancestry
Art Historian and Writer

Intervention

Marcia Crosby
Tsimpshian and Haida Ancestry
Art Historian and Writer

Intervention

Marcia Crosby
Tsimpshian and Haida Ancestry
Art Historian and Writer

Focused on Portraiture

As a portrait photographer, the images of Edward Curtis have caught my eye and captured my curiosity and interest for more than forty years. I saw some of my first Edward Curtis images as a young girl in Seattle, Washington. My mother, who was an immigrant to the United States and also a photographer, took me to see the Curtis images and would often ask me what I saw? My eight-year-old response was, “I see into their eyes, Mommy.” As I grew up, these conversations with my mother and other artists developed, ending up shaping my attitude toward my own photographic portraiture, and continue to this day to draw me into revisiting the photography of Edward Curtis. Reflecting on his portraits, I find Edward Curtis captured an essence; there is a connection, an understanding of that individual, often placing the central figure to show that Native person’s great affection for the land that is his or her long time home.

As a response to these reflective thoughts, I have begun a project creating my own film images that have been inspired by Curtis photos. In several cases, I shared these images and asked the First Nations subject, “If you could decide how you would be portrayed and remembered on film, show me the pose of your choice.” In the Big House in Alert Bay, I spent an interesting, unusual, and very rewarding photo session with Stan Hunt (the son of Stanley Hunt, who starred in Curtis’s film). The image he and I created was his chosen pose and my eye. For me it is a reflection of Stan, and takes the early goal of Edward Curtis—preserving a culture—a step farther by presenting a requested pose designed by the subject.

With these thoughts and this project, I am drawn back again and again to books of Curtis images: the close cropped portraits of a young Lummi woman with enormous abalone earrings; a Kwakwaka’wakw man, long hair around his face and down his shoulders, wearing a wonderfully carved frontlet; the many elders, their faces lined in serious life stories; an image of a young woman wearing a cedar bark cape; a child with two braids close to her face furrowed with intensity. Each of these images speaks volumes about the subject, but also hints at the man behind the camera. Curtis spent a lifetime capturing the faces of people who were the ancestors and relatives of many Native peoples that still to this day share many parts of North America and continue much of the culturally diverse lives that Edward Curtis pictured more than one hundred years ago.

Sharon Eva Grainger
Photographer

Łiłalgamlilas (Stanley Hunt) and the Kwanu’sila Totem Pole

My personal favourite photo taken by Edward Curtis during the filming of “In the Land of the Head Hunters” is of Stanley Hunt (“Motana”) standing by one of the Kwanu’sila (“Thunderbird”)-over-the-Grizzly Bear-grasping-a-man house posts. The posts for the film were inspired by original totem poles that stood outside of head ‘Namgis Chief Tłakwudłas (Ned Harris)’s house. These poles were intended to be built into a Big House by the grandfather of Ned, who was Chief Tłakwudłas before him. The house was never finished and the poles were then given to Paul Rufus as part of a dowry when he married Ned’s oldest daughter ‘Wadzidalaga (Martha). Stanley’s father George had him arranged in marriage to Ned’s second oldest daughter Gwanti’lakw (Mary Harris). Stanley received from his ‘Namgis wife the name Łiłalgamlilas, as well as a traditional dowry from his father-in-law.

Personally, this photo shows a connection between my great-grandmother Mary and my great-grandfather Stanley, and the two families that make up who I am today. The picture captures the cultural strength and identity that both the Harris and Hunt families hold and maintain with the guidance and teachings of our ancestors.

William Wasden Jr. (Waxawidi)
‘Namgis Tribe

Artist, singer, educator

When I first became aware of Edward Curtis’s work, I spent hours looking through his plains photos, especially the Oglala ones, looking for people who resembled my relatives. Many years later, in a bin of unpublished Curtis prints in a Seattle art gallery, I came across a photo of another person I felt that I recognized, a man I knew from a tribe in Southern Oregon. I asked him about it later and he said it was his great-grandfather, who had been photographed by Curtis and later hung by the army at the end of the Modoc wars. Around that time, I also began work with a friend from that same community on an oral history project, for which I had trained myself in digital video. The other man eventually decided to join this project, and sometime later I was setting up my camera in his living room when a family member came in. “A hundred years ago we had Edward Curtis and his camera, and now we have you,” she observed. We talked for a while about our families and their histories and the project, the desires of its participants and their control of the results, but I knew at some level she was right, and would be right in some ways whether the person using the camera was Indian or not, or from that community or another. A record is a record, and though the circumstances surrounding its generation most certainly matter and can become part of its later interpretation, as a record it always captures, reveals and obscures, preserves and falsifies all at once, in spite of the intent of all of those involved in its making. Curtis, for instance, is often charged with recreating history in the arrangement of his work—a kind of practice more recently and deliberately undertaken by Zacharias Kunuk and others, and in the recollections of its participants, perhaps our oral history project has done that too. In addition to the records he has left and the controversy surrounding their interpretation, Curtis has given us the challenge of thinking about the past, about our own actions in recording and remembering, and about the ambiguities surrounding any account with which we become engaged.

Linc Kesler
First Nations Studies Program, University of British Columbia

Every photograph is a slice of time and place taken by a photographer. The decisions made creating the work may be transmitted to the viewer supportive of the intent or seen in a totally different manner. Edward Curtis’s photograph “Haida Tombs at Tian” has, as much of his work does, a romantic notion of ancient civilization now past. When I see the photograph it reminds me of two paragraphs from the book “In The Wake of the War Canoes” by Reverend W.H. Collison, the first missionary to Haida Gwaii. The first statement is Collison’s distaste at seeing dead bodies and parts falling out of the burials without an appreciation or understanding of the immense loss of Haida population; and the second, a Haida Chief’s response to the loss of their population:

…. the body was placed in a large box-like structure supported by two great posts from 10 to 15 feet above the ground. These were erected throughout each camp, and on the decay of the wood the remains were scattered around.

The smallpox which came upon us many years ago killed many of our people. It came first from the north land, from the iron people who came from the land where the sun sets (Russia, from whence it was brought to Alaska). Again it came not many years ago, when I was a young man. It came from the land of the iron people where the sun rises (Canada and the United States). Our people are brave in warfare and never turn their backs in their foes, but this foe we could not see and we could not fight. Our medicine men are wise, but they could not drive away the evil spirit; and why? because it was the sickness of the iron people. It came from them. You have visited our camps, and you have seen many of the lodges empty. In them the camp fires once burned brightly, and around them the hunters and warriors told of deeds in the past. Now the fires have gone out and the brave men have fallen before the iron man’s sickness. You have come too late for them.”

Bill McLennan
Curator, Pacific Northwest
UBC Museum of Anthropology

Many people consider Edward S. Curtis to be a great photographer and his conviction to his work is legendary, though his life-long photo essay on the North American Indian will be forever flawed by the basic premise of his work. He believed that the Native people of North America were destined to “vanish” and made it his mission to document them. This proved to be a formidable undertaking that would consume his life. Unfortunately he chose to attempt to “document” many of his subjects in the period before he lived, illustrating them in his version of a pre-contact or a less western influenced environment. This grossly oversteps the boundaries documentary photographers work within, and because of his methods the images become flawed illustrations of an idealized past that existed only in his mind.

His methods included supplying authentic-looking props and wigs, and cropping out contemporary items from photographs to achieve his vision of an “authentic” past. This was a tragic misjudgement, as it hugely undermines the value of the images in a social / historical context. Every visual fact and the message contained therein becomes suspect. If he had chosen to document the Native world as it existed at that time of turmoil and social upheaval, they would be truly great works. Such as the moving and incredible images of photographers like Jacob Riis, W. Eugene Smith, or Sabastiao Salgado. With the passing of time Curtis’s images contributed to the popular misunderstanding of Native peoples as vestiges of the past, with little or no place as a part of contemporary world: the precursor to the “stoic Hollywood Indian”. Like a character in a Shakespearean tragedy, he was a man of great talent and passion who gave up so much for his work yet was not able to fulfill his great potential and instead created a flawed body of work. This being said he remains a highly collected an influential artist whose images are as widely published as any photographer.

On a personal note, I admire Curtis for his commitment and sacrifice to his art, and he has influenced my work. His images taught me a lot about photography, as well as how not to photograph Native American people.

David Neel
Kwagiutl Nation

The authenticity of many Edward Curtis photographs is being questioned more and more often by the public. Some perceive his work among the Kwakwaka’wakw to be contrived and inaccurate. The extent of this popular opinion is reflected in a comment card written by a visitor to the Royal BC Museum after viewing a short film clip from In the Land of the War Canoes that is shown in the museum’s First Peoples Gallery. The footage was shot at the same time as this still photograph and shows dancers performing as Wasp, Thunderbird and Grizzly Bear atop wooden platforms set across or inside the gunwales of three canoes. The comment card read: “The documentary film (Dir. [Director?] Curtis) shown in the ‘Contact’ section of the first peoples exhibits is widely known to be fabricated, he himself dancing in the boat. This should have a disclaimer, something to say that the film is simply his imagination of what is [sic] was like.”

Clearly Curtis is not one of these accomplished dancers whose fluid movements communicate the comfort and expertise acquired from years of performing. “… Grizzly Bear is especially expertly portrayed. A number of people [Kwakwaka' waka] guessed that the dancer was Herbert Martin, a renowned dancer, but he told Bill Holm that he and his older brother Mungo were away at Rivers Inlet during the filming" (Holm & Quimby 1980:77). At least one of Edmund Schwinke’s still photographs taken during the making of the film shows the Kwakwaka’ wakw man who danced as Wasp with his mask removed. Edward Curtis would have been either setting up the shot for Schwinke, who also operated the motion picture camera, perhaps directing the scene with George Hunt’s assistance or possibly operating the motion picture camera himself. But he was not one of the dancers who appeared in the film.

Dan Savard
Senior Collections Manager
Audio Visual
Human History
Royal British Columbia Museum

Images distorting perspectives, perpetuating stereotypes, romanticizing peoples from nations that had been battled and diseased to near extinction, immortalizing individuals in “Last of the Mohegan”-esque fashion, capturing the Indian before there is no Indian left. Here is my great grandfather, Alfred Adams, a very well-respected Haida man. He accomplished many things in his lifetime and will be remembered as a strong leader: he was proud and intelligent, he worked hard to empower his people, restore the spirit of native communities and create a better life for future generations. Future generations. Future generations. Future generations.

Carrie Anne Vanderhoop
Masset Haida/Aquinnah Wampanoag

While attending university, my mother gave me a copy of the Edward Curtis photograph, A Haida of Massett, a portrait of her father, Alfred Adams. Alfred was a leader in Massett as a teacher, an entrepreneurial store-owner, a music teacher and band organizer, art agent for carvers and weavers, and an Anglican lay minister. He was a moving force for the establishment of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia. In his role as the first Grand President of that organization he asserted Native rights for fishing and land title with the Canadian government. My mother Delores Adams Churchill, had told me stories when I was young about her father. I could hear her affection and pride for him in her voice, He sounded like a stern yet kind man. Alfred Adams passed away when my mother was just fourteen, so I never met my grandfather. I know my mother gave me that Curtis photo to motivate me to do my best in my university studies. He had been such a great inspiration and mentor for so many.

One of the stories my mother told me was about the Curtis portrait. She said that I would never find it in any publication of Edward Curtis photographs. Alfred requested from Curtis that his image not be reproduced beyond the original portfolio. Curtis had talked him into donning a wig and Chief's robe to produce a conspicuous image of bygone days. As Curtis continued to photograph people in his work at Massett, Alfred could see that the "costume" was being used over and over by Curtis's Haida subjects. Cultural authenticity was a concern for Alfred, and Curtis's attempt to portray pre-contact Haida with a trunk of costumes was counter to his principles.

Evelyn Vanderhoop
Haida Eagle Gitans Clan

Underneath the fur robes and the clip-on nose-ring in this picture, Edward S. Curtis managed to capture something he probably didn’t expect. When I gaze at this photograph, I don’t see Princess Naida from his film In the Land of the Headhunters. Instead, I see youth and beauty and a long life still to be fulfilled. I look into this profile of my grandmother and see the wrinkles that I knew for most of my life absent. At the same time, I see the waves in her hair that she always carried with pride. I gaze into the photo and see a 17 year-old daughter of a chief whose cultural taboos restricted what she could and couldn’t do on film—so much so that Curtis was forced to hire two additional women to also portray the princess in his film. I recognize that although she is wearing a costume, she carries a sense of poise and grace that belies her age. I see in her the eyes of a woman who would live to 99 years of age and who, as a true princess amongst our people, would live up to her ancestral name U’magalis, or “Noblest over All.” I thank Curtis, not for capturing a vision of our people before European contact, but for capturing a moment in time in my grandmother’s life.

Andy Everson (Nagedzi)
K'omoks First Nation

In 1993 I had the honour of being invited to visit with George Hunt’s granddaughter Margaret, who played the heroine Naida (along with two others) in In the Land of the Head Hunters. In very old age, she still took pleasure in sharing stories about Edward Curtis’s time at Fort Rupert and, by doing so, turned my understanding of the past on its head. Curtis expected everyone to be serious, for, in his view as a white man of his time, they were living a life-and-death situation as Indians. He discovered they laughed at Fort Rupert, just as people do everywhere in the world. Once, when the canoe in a scene hit a rock, everyone laughed so much that Curtis pulled the film out of the camera in anger. Ever since then, I have sought to interpret the past from as inclusive a perspective as possible, keeping in mind that, while we are not alike, neither are we so very different from each other.

Jean Barman
Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia