Curtis’s beliefs were clear in photos such as this one which he captioned The vanishing race According to Curtis each year a woman of the tribe promised the sun she would build a lodge in return for curing the illness of a family member During the five-day ceremony itself tribe members sweat in the lodge made an offering of dried buffalo tongues to the sun and sang and danced A Massive Undertaking Curtis had been greatly impressed by everything he had seen at the Piegan camp In particular however the sun dance ceremony deeply moved him He called some portions of it wild terrifying and elaborately mystifying He added I was intensely affected 7 Curtis was so inspired by the experience he made a fateful decision He would devote several years of his life to documenting American Indian cultures It appears his motivation for such a project was twofold First he had a genuine interest in Native cultures Second and perhaps more pressing he worried that many Native nations and their cultures were fast disappearing and therefore must be documented before they were gone 10
Curtis manipulated the background of this photo taken during the day to look like the night sky 12
By today’s standards Curtis’s belief in a vanishing Native society turned out to be both mistaken and a disservice to Native Americans Native nations were not dying out Thomas King a writer of Cherokee and Greek descent explains that when Curtis came along the cultures were merely changing from what they had been to what they would become next Thus Curtis was looking for the literary Indian the dying Indian which was an imaginative construct King adds 8 As a result Curtis tried hard to capture the American Indian of the past rather than the American Indian of the present and near future He took boxes of clothes wigs props and scenery so he could make his subjects look Indian enough And as King explains sometimes he would provide one tribe of Indians with clothing from another tribe because the clothing looked more Indian so his photographs would look authentic 9 Despite Curtis’s many mistakes in dealing with American Indians King cautions people today should not be petty and ignore the immensity of the project and the personal and economic ordeal Curtis undertook 10 In fact during his visit to the Piegan village Curtis had no 13
