Edward Curtis and the Photography That Froze the Plateau Peoples
Near Spokane, Washington
Between nineteen oh four and nineteen thirty, the Seattle photographer Edward S. Curtis traveled through the American West and Pacific Northwest photographing Indigenous peoples, including the Spokane, Yakama, Nez Perce, and Coeur d'Alene nations of the Columbia Plateau. He did this under a commission funded in part by financier J.P. Morgan, with a stated goal of creating a comprehensive photographic record of what Curtis and his patrons described as 'vanishing races.' The twenty-volume publication that resulted, 'The North American Indian,' became the dominant visual representation of plateau tribal peoples for most of the twentieth century.
Tribal scholars and historians have spent decades documenting what Curtis actually did to produce those images. He removed contemporary objects from scenes, placing people in settings from an earlier era they no longer inhabited. He brought costumes from different tribes and different time periods to dress his subjects. He staged scenes that had not occurred. He paid people to pose as they had not lived for a generation. The photographs presented a fabricated ethnographic present, designed to confirm what his Morgan-funded patrons already believed: that the people in the images were disappearing and that the moment was being preserved before it was lost.
The moment was not being preserved. The people were not disappearing. The Spokane Tribe, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, the Yakama Nation, and the Nez Perce were present in nineteen oh four, operating tribal governments, maintaining languages, fishing the same rivers. Curtis's framing required pretending otherwise.
The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture holds a significant collection of Curtis photographs alongside materials that allow visitors to examine the gap between the image and the reality. Tribal cultural programs and archives are the authoritative sources on what the plateau peoples' lives actually looked like during the years Curtis was producing his romantic catalog of their supposed extinction.
