Makepeace, Anne
2000 Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians. Oley, Pennsylvania: Bullfrog Films.
Notes: VHS, color, 85 mins. Details and study guide.Reviewed 25 Feb 2004 by:
Raymond A. Bucko <bucko@creighton.edu>
Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, USAMedium: Film/Video Subject
Keywords:
ABSTRACT: This engaging film chronicles the life and work of Edward S Curtis with an emphasis on his ongoing effect on Native communities. With multiple voices and points of view, this work chronicles Curtis' long and active life while raising ethical and cultural issues involving research among Native peoples, and one man's effort to balance personal and professional life.
Born the year when the northern Plains tribes signed the second Fort Laramie Treaty, Edward S. Curtis' life was to intertwine with those of many Native peoples in ways that continue to this day. As when a vine binds itself around another living thing, such entanglements may begin as supportive and life-enhancing but can also restrictive and life-depleting. That is the paradox of Edward S. Curtis' life and work. He sought to preserve a Native culture that had begun a radical transformation. At the same time, he helped to shape Native culture by freezing his own vision of the past with textual and photographic memories grafted onto oral memories of tribal elders and others interested in Native life.Curtis was born in Minnesota in 1868 but moved west to Seattle in childhood. He received only a sixth grade education, but became fascinated with photography and with the Native cultures of the Seattle area. His first professional experience was as an ethnographic photographer on the Harrimen Expedition. There he met ethnologist George Bird Grinnel who invited him to attend a Sun Dance in Canada. This was a conversion experience: Curtis became ever more intensely interested in Native culture and dedicated to "preserving" what he and Anglo-Americans of the day were convinced was a dying culture. He dedicated the rest of his life to creating a comprehensive 20-volume work The North American Indian, to document the past of the Native American, having little interest in their present or future. He accomplished this feat with the backing of J Pierpont Morgan and other philanthropists, and with continuous fundraising appeals and performances. Ultimately his marriage was destroyed by long years in the field, and he died penniless in 1952, his work all but forgotten.
ôComing to lightö refers to the 1970 rediscovery of Curtis' work, hidden away in a Boston bookstore basement. The title phrase refers also to the basic dynamic of photography -- the use of light, as well as to Native cultures and their conscious revival of traditional ways. The video itself is a brilliant coming to light, providing a well-researched narrative and a feast of visual representations of Curtis' photographic work and the ancestors of the Native peoples with whom he worked. Using a multiplicity of lenses, angles, focuses, scenes and voices, the film begins with Native people carrying willow branches to a contemporary Sun Dance ground. This merges into a photograph of an almost identical scene taken by Curis almost a century earlier, graphically illustrating how Native people use Curtis' work to remember family, reconstruct ceremonies and customs, and to reinforce the dignity of the past and present. Avoiding simple nostalgia, the film also heeds voices of dissent: Natives who object to photographs of ceremonies, who feel the past should be left alone. No single point of view dominates. Curtis tells of his travails and defeats as well as enthusiasms and triumphs. Native peoples speak of CurtisÆ past efforts on their current lives. Experts in history, ethnology and photography contextualize his life in terms of photographic technique (pictorialism), his ethnographic abilities or inabilities, his personal life and his professional travails. He is lauded as totally dedicated to his life's project and derided as a workaholic and absentee parent.
Most importantly the film recognizes that culture is not a static "thing" but a set of ongoing interactions. Thus the question is not whether Curtis captured the "Real Indian," but how his interaction with these people reflected light on all the cultures involved and continues to reflect this light.
This superlative movie will serve the classroom well, for its historical value as well as the many issues it raises: the nature of culture, cultural representation and revitalization; Native perspectives, and the ongoing relationship between Indians and non-Indians; financing research, professional ethics, and tensions between professional and non-professional fieldworkers; balancing work and family; photography as document and art.
Notes:
There is a wide literature on Edward S Curtis and his work. Authors who have written about his life or presented collections of his photographs include Victor Boesen (Boesen and Graybill 1977), Barbara Davis (Davis and Curtis 1985), Mick Gidley (Gidley 1998; 2003), Anne Makepeace, the director of the film, (Makepeace 2002), Christopher Lyman (Lyman, et al. 1982), Shannon Lowry (Lowry and Curtis 1994) Laurie Lawlor (Lawlor 1994), Bill Holm and George Quimby (Holm and Quimby 1980), William Handly and Nathan Lewis and Hausman (Hausman and Kapoun 1995) and most recently, Gerald VizenorÆs essay on Curtis in Handley and LewisÆ anthology (Handley and Lewis 2004). Ralph AndrewsÆ work indicates that the Boston ôdiscoveryö was certainly not new for all (Andrews and Curtis 1962).
In addition to books on Curtis, his own monumental work The North American Indian, and a myriad of works containing his photographs, his 1914 film ôIn the Land of the War Canoesö (originally titled ôIn the Land of the Headhuntersö) which was mentioned in the movie is available as a videotape and DVD.
CurtisÆ photographic images are widely available on the web from such sites as The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Reading Room Overview of the Curtis Collectionhttp://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/067_curt.html
Curtis was the subject of a Public Broadcasting Service series ôAmerican Mastersö:http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/curtis_e.html
The Smithsonian has an on-line exhibit entitled: ôEdward S Curtis, Frontier Photographeröhttp://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/Curtis/curtis-navigation.htm
References:
Andrews, Ralph Warren, and Edward S. Curtis 1962 Curtis' Western Indians. Seattle,: Superior Pub. Co.
Boesen, Victor, and Florence Curtis Graybill 1977 Edward S. Curtis, Photographer of the North American Indian. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
Davis, Barbara A., and Edward S. Curtis 1985 Edward S. Curtis: The Life and Times of a Shadow Catcher. San Francisco, Calif.: Chronicle Books.
Gidley, Mick 1998 Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gidley, Mick 2003 Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Handley, William R., and Nathaniel Lewis (eds.) 2004 True West: Authenticity and the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hausman, Gerald, and Robert W. Kapoun (eds.) 1995 Prayer to the Great Mystery: the Uncollected Writings and Photography of Edward S. Curtis. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Holm, Bill, and George Irving Quimby 1980 Edward S. Curtis in the Land of the War Canoes: a Pioneer Cinematographer in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lawlor, Laurie 1994 Shadow Catcher: the Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis. New York: Walker.
Lowry, Shannon, and Edward S. Curtis 1994 Natives of the Far North : Alaska's Vanishing Culture in the Eye of Edward Sheriff Curtis. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.
Lyman, Christopher M., Edward S. Curtis, and Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service 1982 The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Makepeace, Anne 2002 Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Bucko, Raymond A.
2004 Review of Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians. Anthropology Review Database. February 25. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1521, accessed February 10, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)