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1. 1 2018-03-16T21:12:57-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637 "Primitive" Erik Loyer 1 plain 2018-03-16T21:12:57-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637
2. 1 2018-03-16T21:13:00-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637 Navaho Erik Loyer 1 structured_gallery 2018-03-16T21:13:00-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637
3. 1 2018-03-16T21:13:02-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637 List of Large Plates Supplementing Volume One Erik Loyer 1 Media Gallery structured_gallery 2018-03-16T21:13:02-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637
4. 1 2018-03-16T21:13:10-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637 Test path Erik Loyer 1 plain 2018-03-16T21:13:10-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637
5. 1 2018-03-16T21:13:15-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637 Vanishing Erik Loyer 1 vanishing, lost, absent media 2018-03-16T21:13:15-07:00 Erik Loyer f862727c4b34febd6a0341bffd27f168a35aa637

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• 1 2018-03-16T21:11:03-07:00 Vanishing Race and Cañon de Chelly 1 Page 3 of Visualizing the "Vanishing Race" plain 2018-03-16T21:11:03-07:00
  Ken Gonzales-Day, Scripps College
  In 1904, Curtis (or rather his wife Clara) submits and wins a Ladies’ Home Journal photography contest for “the prettiest children in America” and it turns into a break for his new project. He is invited by President Theodore Roosevelt to photograph his children. Curtis had yet to secure funding for what he had already begun to envision as a series of photographic books on Native Americans and had pitched the idea to the Smithsonian Institution and a number of other publishers without success. Some questioned his qualifications; others questioned the feasibility of the project. His friendship with President Roosevelt would greatly boost his professional standing and further contributed to his visibility from Seattle to the national stage. Two early and rather significant images from his growing series of photographs of Native Americans are “The Vanishing Race – Navaho” and “Cañon De Chelly – Navaho”;both taken in 1904. Gerald Vizenor, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, characterizes Curtis’ photograph, “The Vanishing Race” as “…a column of natives lost in the shadows, a sentimental evanescence.” These photographs were printed in unnumbered editions, as Orotones or “Curt-tones” as his studio called them, and were sold as fine art prints even before they were included in the first volume of The North American Indian, which, when it was finally published in 1907, included a forward by none other than President Roosevelt. Curtis would continue to sell individual prints throughout the many years he worked on The North American Indian. In “The Vanishing Race” Curtis captures a single column of Navaho riders, literally riding off into a dark and rather uncertain landscape, while the “Cañon De Chelly” image is almost cinematic in its scale: a row of small figures on horseback riding beneath majestic stone cliffs. In fact, the image was so cinematic that it would influence early western films, and it was more than a little ironic that nearly three decades later Curtis would be hired by the famous director, Cecil B. DeMille (1881- 1959) to scout locations and shoot still images for his 1936 western fantasy movie, The Plainsman. Curtis carefully emulated earlier genre paintings in “Cañon de Chelly.” Many of these earlier genre paintings embraced the notion of the “Noble Savage” and often depicted a well-meaning or helpful Indian, who offers aid to the white man, and then quietly vanishes leaving land and food enough for all. As a subject, it can be found in many western themed works by artists like Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), whose own “Indians Travelling Near Fort Laramie,” 1861, also depicted a small band of Indians on horseback, and is even complete with a somewhat fantastical (or should one say phallic) rocky outcropping in the distance. In the Curtis image, one sees Native American riders in near silhouette, set again the massive rock formations of the canyon in an image that depicted the Navaho’s “primitive” connection with nature, in a setting that would certainly have still been seen as exotic in 1904. Both images sought to give visual form to the popular image of the Native American as a “vanishing race,” and both images are still highly sought after by photography collectors interested in the American West. The belief in the “vanishing race” was obviously not unique to Curtis, but was a widespread idea that was grounded in two scholarly theories, which David R. M. Beck has eloquently summarized in his essay “The Myth of the Vanishing Race.” He writes:

  [T]he view that America's continental "Manifest Destiny" was successfully completed in geographic terms, that the "frontier" had been closed by Euro-American expansion into every part of this nation; and 2) Social Darwinism, which posited that cultures battled with each other in an evolutionary contest in which one was destined to triumph and the other to fade into extinction. This theory dovetailed both with demographic evidence, embodied in a precipitous drop in Native populations, and with the federal policy of forced assimilation, which even most supporters of Indian people believed to be the only hope for Indian survival in the new century. In popular terms, these views were reinforced in wild west shows, world fairs, art, literature and a variety of other venues, all of which helped lay the foundations for the American public's long-standing misinterpretation of American Indians.

  Many of the subjects and Native American peoples selected to be included in the twenty volumes of The North American Indian were located, or had been relocated, to areas west of the Mississippi river. Many of the traditions, spiritual practices, and modes of dress that Curtis photographed, were already a thing of the past, prohibited by the U.S. government, or had already been transformed by the communities themselves. For example, the Sun Dance was outlawed by the federal government just a few years after Curtis had witnessed the ceremony with Grinnell in Montana. In many cases Curtis encouraged his models to stage, restage, or perform dances or ceremonies out of season and out of context, but Curtis believed that performing for the camera could serve as a way of preserving cultural traditions while there was still a living memory of them. In his own caption to “The Vanishing Race,” Curtis wrote: “The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn in their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, the author has chosen it as the first of the series.” As David R. M. Beck reminds us in “The Myth of the Vanishing Race,” that Native American populations continued to decline throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He writes, “violence and disease caused some tribal communities to lose as much as ninety percent of their member populations.” Begun at first contact, compounded by the repeated use of disease filled blankets as gifts, and other methods of transmission, eastern tribes were slowly forced to move or relocate to areas west of the Mississippi. Beck concludes that as “wave after wave of disease hit ... All in all, a land that may well have held seven to ten million American Indians at the time of Columbus's arrival contained approximately a quarter of a million by 1900.” In addition to the images, with their highly suggestive titles, Curtis’ promoted the popular conception of the “vanishing race” on a more nuanced level as well. Curtis consciously chose to print all of the photographic images in The North American Indian as photogravures instead of halftone printing, which was already widely available in commercial printing by the beginning of the twentieth century. For those not familiar with the process of halftone printing, it simply required adding a screen over a continuous tone image, like a photograph, and by blocking some of the light, the screen would reduce what had been an infinite number of grey tones down to a series of solid dots of different sizes, and was the same method once used in newspapers and comic books. By the time it is completed, The North American Indian will include over 2228 individually printed photogravure illustrations, and it is Curtis’ insistence on such a labor intensive process that will dramatically increase the time and cost of printing each volume. It is the one decision that will ultimately be both the projects greatest strength for the unique record he creates and its greatest weakness, causing financial hardships for himself, his family, and the many assistants, editors, and workers who often went long stretches without being paid. In 1905, The New York Tribune Illustrated Supplement ran a short article on Curtis stating that he “…has many rare pictures of striking features of some of the most secret and sacred Indian ceremonies. In obtaining these pictures Mr. Curtis has oftentimes risked life and limb…” 

  In a way the passage reveals a tension that will run throughout The Native American Indian; the tension between, his sincere interest in photographing and recording aspects of Native Americans culture, beliefs, and people, and his more pressing desire to capitalize on a subject that he hoped would have lasting commercial and popular appeal. The photogravure process clearly created a visual metaphor for the “vanishing race”, but it also undermined the financial feasibility of the project.
• 1 2018-03-16T21:11:16-07:00 The Literariness of the Curtis Photographs 1 part of Contextualizing Curtis plain 2018-03-16T21:11:16-07:00
  Cheryl Walker, Scripps College
  Though there are surely others, one reason the Curtis photographs have achieved such longevity is their literariness. In their elegance, their gravity, and particularly in their suggestion of a wider (unseen) context, such images give rise to narratives, with both positive and negative consequences. They command attention to native people and their conditions but also distract from those conditions by removing the individual from his or her cultural context, substituting instead something of wonder. It is possible, for example, to imagine Curtis’ photograph “Hopi Girl” as the inspiration for Louise Erdrich’s character Susy in her story entitled “The Red Convertible” (Love Medicine): “All her hair was in buns around her ears.” It turns out, however, that Susy’s family live in Chicken, Alaska, so the Hopi connection is occluded. Did Susy—who is first encountered in the lower forty-eight—copy her hairstyle from someone else? We don’t know her story. The narrator Lyman simply says: “We were somewhere in Montana, or maybe on the Blood Reserve—it could have been anywhere. Anyway it was where we met the girl."¹ Of course that’s the thing about art. Its appeal need not have anything to do with authenticity. Many Indians in the mid-nineteenth century admired Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” Given Longfellow’s lack of accurate knowledge about Native Americans, it might seem ironic that Simon Pokagon (a turn-of-the-century Pottawattamie writer) was called the Longfellow of his race.² But the attraction of “Hiawatha” for Native American writers was its lyrical power, not its attention (or inattention) to detail. Though he messed about with the details, Curtis, who often spent months with the Indians he photographed, was usually careful to identify their tribe and situation. His notes for the picture entitled "Hopi Girl” in Portraits from North American Indian Life (1972) state: “Soft regular features are characteristic of Hopi young women, and no small part of a mother’s time used to be devoted to dressing the hair of her unmarried daughters. The original style is rapidly being abandoned, and the native one-piece dress here illustrated is seldom seen even at the less advanced of the Hopi pueblos.”³ Curtis clearly had a preference for what he called the “less advanced” Native American people and habitats. His camera dwells lovingly on Geronimo’s head scarf and blanket,⁴ but the photo was taken the day before the famous Indian was to march in the inaugural parade of President Theodore Roosevelt. The photographer preferred to catch his subjects “in a retrospective mood”⁵ and sometimes staged their presentation. In one compilation of his photographs, he chose to place “The Vanishing Race—Navaho” first in order to make a point. “The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, [I have] chosen it as the first of the series.”⁶ By that time the narrative of the vanishing Indian had been around for more than 50 years, with Indian writers both refuting and proclaiming it. Because of its sense of urgency, it inspired activism in some quarters, but it also contributed to a fatalistic belief that Indians would not survive, a belief that has turned out to be seriously misguided.⁷ Since 1900 Indian numbers have actually increased as native peoples change and adapt to modern conditions. Though Curtis preferred the “primitive,” his photographs have been used to support various stories about Native Americans. In 1971 T. C. McLuhan published Touch the Earth, examples of eloquence from Indian speeches and writings. Accompanying these with Curtis photos, McLuhan’s aim was to bring the wisdom of Native speakers to “the White man.” “We need to establish a right relationship with the land and its resources; otherwise, the destruction of the Indian will be followed by the destruction of nature; and in the destruction of nature will follow the destruction of ourselves."⁸ These words have great resonance even today, some forty years later. McLuhan ends her introduction by saying: “The pictures in this book were taken by Edward S. Curtis in the early years of this century under the patronage and support of J. Pierpont Morgan and President Roosevelt. Curtis spent many years recording with extraordinary photographic skill a people and a way of life he knew was doomed to extinction."⁹ And yet, it is important to note that McLuhan’s book also provides a counter-narrative; it too is supported by Curtis’ images. The last section of Touch the Earth—called “If We Surrender, We Die”—includes an extract from Chief Dan George (Salish): “I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success—his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society."¹⁰ McLuhan also adds the manifesto of the Indians who occupied the island of Alcatraz in the early 1970s. “We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery."¹¹ On the last page, one of Curtis’ photographs, mistitled “Navaho,” (the correct title is "Out of the Darkness - Navajo"¹²⁾ shows three Indians on horseback emerging from the shadows. Far from vanishing, they, like the accompanying “Skokomish Woman” and “Nootka Man,” confront us directly, as though to say, we have our own story to tell. A new edition of Curtis’ work, Sacred Legacy, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2000 with a Forward by Joseph D. Horse Capture, who writes: “In Indian homes all across the country, [Curtis photographs] hang on the walls over fireplaces and dining tables, in living rooms and dens. These priceless images help modern Indian people maintain links with their past.”¹³ As past, as present, as future--as art (and sometimes as ethnography)—the Curtis photographs are full of meanings. But no one of them sums up all that can be said. It is up to us—all of us, native and non-native alike-- to provide new narratives to explore their force as well as their limitations.
• 1 2018-03-16T21:11:16-07:00 Who's "Vanishing"? - Curtis' Ideas on Race and his Work 1 Introduction to "Who's Vanishing?" by Ulia Gosart plain 2018-03-16T21:11:16-07:00
  Ulia Gosart, Independent scholar
  "Vanishing Race" is the first image in the first portfolio of photogravure images (as opposed to the illustrations) that are the heart of the 20 volume The North American Indian. The image graphically expresses a popular belief, referred to as the "vanishing race" metaphor, that American Indians were destined to disappear due to the progressive laws of historical development, and as such, must be preserved and protected as artifacts of history. The vanishing metaphor also captures the sad reality of the rapid decline of Indian population as the result of military conquest, removal, and systematic oppression. At the turn of the century 20th, the American Indian population reached its lowest number of 237,000, with the estimated population decline from the end of the 15th century to 1900 being close to 85 percent.¹
  We invite you to explore the following short essays to learn more of the idea of the Vanishing Race that conclude with the thematic quotes of some of the contemporaries of Curtis, a bibliography of key works on race, and of thematic contemporary works and a gallery.