♪♪ ♪♪ (calming music) (horse grunting) - [Allan] They're coming back from Guinea Willows on a third day of the Sun Dance.

(calming music) - I can remember at the cultural center there being a number of Curtis photographs in there like back in '75.

(calming music) There hadn't been a Sun Dance here on the Peigan Reserve for 45 years.

(calming music) We were really hungry for traditional things to happen and looking at the photographs I can recall in my mind like looking and saying, "Geez, you know, how come we couldn't have things like a Sun Dance and these kinds of things happening."

We started to talk to the elders and there were still elders that were alive that still could run the ceremonies.

We did make that happen again.

(intense music) (intense music continues) - [Narrator] 100 years ago, Edward Curtis set out to capture what he called the beautiful in Indian life and to show that beauty to the world.

(calming music) He risked everything he had and spent 30 years photographing and recording traditional Indian ways that he though were vanishing.

(calming music) (calming music continues) By 1930, when he had finished the work, most people had lost interest in Indian subjects.

Thousands of his original images were sold to a Boston bookstore for practically nothing.

Curtis's photographs, books, and recordings vanished from sight.

(calming music) 40 years later, a clerk in the Boston bookstore was looking for something in the basement.

(calming music) (calming music continues) To his amazement, he discovered hundreds of Curtis's photogravures, prints, and the copper plates that had been hand-etched from his glass negatives.

(calming music) When these images began to circulate, they told stories of the people in the pictures and of the man who had photographed them.

(calming music) - [Edward] The first photograph I ever made of Indians was of Princess Angeline, the digger and dealer in clams.

- [Narrator] Angeline was the elderly daughter of Seattle, the last great chief of the Suquamish tribe.

The city of Seattle was built on Suquamish land.

(calming music) - [Edward] I paid the princess a dollar for each picture I made.

This seemed to please her greatly.

And with hands and jargon, she indicated that she preferred to spend her time having pictures made than digging clams.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis was the most popular society photographer in Seattle, but he was drawn to the people who had lost the land they had lived on for centuries.

(calming music) Born in 1868, Edward Curtis grew up on a poor, hardscrabble farm in Minnesota.

As a boy, he had built himself a camera using diagrams in a book and a lens his father had brought back from the Civil War.

At the age of 19, he went west with his family to Homestead on Puget Sound.

He worked in lumber yards, fished, and dug clamps to support the family.

When his father died a year later, Edward moved the whole family into the bustling city of Seattle.

- [Edward] Knowing a little about photography, I bought an interest in a small photography shop.

- [Narrator] Although he had only a sixth grade education, he read everything about photography and taught himself the latest techniques.

By 1895, he had a large and prosperous studio in downtown Seattle.

He married Clara Phillips who helped him run the business and they began a family of their own.

(calming music) Curtis often escaped from his busy studio to photograph along the Sound.

(calming music) (calming music continues) - I feel as though I've grown up with Curtis' work.

I was hungry for my own culture and in so many of these photographs there are definitely things locked up in there that are available to us.

- I like these pictures with the canoes and the clam digger.

I guess especially the clam digger.

I've seen this one several times and the elders say that when the tides out, the table's on.

- We had everything we wanted when we was young, clams and fish.

Ducks, lived on duck soup.

And I always thought if they left us alone that we could survive just living near the beach, you know.

- When you look at it in a lot of the photographs, they show the traditional people in their traditional garb.

They're depicting a side of us that goes back thousands of years, but they weren't showing what Indian agents and governments and everybody else were doing to our people at the same time.

The state that Indian communities were in was really terrible.

- [Narrator] By the time Curtis began his work, Indian people had been forced onto reservations.

Their children were being taken away to military-style boarding schools run by missionaries.

- Well, they wanted you to forget your heritage.

They were gonna re-model your mind, I guess, and live like the rest of them.

- [Narrator] Curtis assumed that assimilation was inevitable for the Indians.

- [Edward] A visit to the average Indian reservation means to go away discouraged.

You find a lack of sympathy for the Indians on the part of those responsible for their management.

(calming music) - I was four years old and I was taken away and I was given a number.

All my clothes were numbered.

My toothbrush, my bed, everything had my number.

- We could not speak our language.

If we got caught, we were severely punished.

(calming music) - I lost my language.

Once you lose the language, you lose putting your everything with it because all our stories and everything, all our rules and regulations about life are in our language.

And if you don't speak our language there, you're kind of lost.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Edward Curtis was an avid mountain climber and often took pictures on Mount Rainier.

On one of his expeditions, he rescued a group of lost climbers, helped them down the mountain, and then discovered that they were all famous scientists.

These men arranged for Curtis to become the official photographer on the Harriman Expedition to Alaska, the last grand scientific expedition of the century.

- And that seems to have been a huge point for Curtis.

Here is this inspiring, hardworking, already workaholic, ambitious person, and suddenly the lights go on that there could be a bigger arena for him.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis took some of his earliest ethnographic pictures on the Harriman Expedition.

(calming music) Many native people had left their villages to work in canneries.

The houses along the coast seemed deserted.

Curtis's friend on the expedition, the naturalist George Bird Grinnell wrote.

- [Grinnell] There's an inevitable conflict between civilization and savagery.

And wherever the two touch each other, the weaker people must be destroyed.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis wondered what life had been like for the Alaskan natives before White people had come.

(calming music) (intense music) The following year, Grinnell invited Curtis to a Sun Dance in Montana.

(intense music) - [Edward] The Sun Dance of the Peigans was one of the most profound displays I ever saw in all my Indian experience.

Neither house nor fence marred the landscape and the broad undulating prairies stretching away towards the little Rockies miles away to the west was carpeted with tipis.

- When Curtis saw this Sun Dance, he thought that it was going to be the last one perhaps forever.

Everyone thought that the best academic minds believed deeply that the on-rushing White culture was just going to sweep away this entire pattern of life and that in a few years, all evidence of it would be gone.

- [Narrator] Curtis watched as the participants tied offerings to the center pole, some of them piercing their chests and offering themselves to the sun.

He was not allowed to photograph the ceremony.

- [Edward] It was at the start of my concerted effort to learn about the plain's Indians and I was intensely affected.

(calming music) - Curtis was incredibly moved by seeing these people who were in a very different other culture, nevertheless, having a profound religious sense.

And you do get a sense of somebody with a genuine respect for and love of profound religious awareness.

(calming music) - When I first discovered Curtis, I found this photograph of three Peigan chiefs out on the plains and I still hadn't come home yet, so for me this was like coming home.

I mean, I looked at this landscape and it felt so familiar, although I'd never seen it except for maybe as a young child.

And it allowed me to go on my own journey and I knew that deep down in my heart, I needed to come home.

And when I came home, everybody says, "Well, we're glad you finally made it home."

(calming music) And it's that sense of community that stunned me.

I think Curtis understood something about the power of that cultural spirit.

(calming music) (train honking) - [Narrator] Curtis went home to Seattle after the Sun Dance.

10 days later, he packed up again and left for Arizona and the Hopi Reservation.

He arrived at Hopi just in time for the famous Snake Dance.

Government agents and missionaries had been trying to stop the ceremony for years, but the railroads had turned it into a huge tourist attraction.

Every August, photographers, anthropologists, and sightseers flocked to Hopi to see the dance.

Most sightseers viewed the ritual as a weird, savage, stone-age entertainment.

Curtis saw the ceremony differently.

- [Edward] In reality, it is not a dance, but a beautiful, dramatized prayer for rain.

If the gods are angry and withhold the rain, famine and subsequent death stalked the land.

- [Narrator] The dancers sing to the snakes then release them to bring their messages to the gods.

- [Edward] After witnessing the Snake Dance ceremony in the plaza, I was profoundly moved and realized if I was to fully understand its significance, I must participate if permission could be obtained.

- [Narrator] Curtis asked the snake chief, Sikyaletstiwa, to initiate him into the Snake Society.

Sikyaletstiwa did not give him an answer.

A huge project began to take shape in Curtis' imagination.

(calming music) - [Edward] The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rights possessed by no other.

Consequently, the information that is to be gathered for the benefit of future generations must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.

(calming music) (train chugging) - [Narrator] Curtis traveled to Washington DC hoping to convince the Smithsonian institution to fund his Indian work.

When he mentioned his hope of photographing a Navajo Yeibichai ceremony, he was told that ethnographers had been trying for 20 years just to see the dance.

The Smithsonian would not endorse the project.

- [Edward] They say I'm trying to do the work of 50 men and don't believe I can do it.

- [Narrator] Curtis added a new motion picture camera to his equipment, headed for Arizona and the Navajo Reservation and succeeded in filming a Yeibichai dance.

(calming music) The ceremony is a nine-day prayer for healing.

(calming music) (calming music continues) The masks were buried until winter when the ceremony would take place.

With bolts of calico and silver dollars, Curtis paid three Navajos to help him carve new masks and stage a Yeibichai dance for his camera.

He returned to Seattle with his rare motion pictures.

- [Reporter] Edward S. Curtis, the local photographer, has a distinction of accomplishing what the Smithsonian institution has tried for years to do and failed.

Curtis overcame suspicion and broke into the sacred precincts of a guarded religious right.

- The songs and the prayer they're supposed to heal.

That sickness and illness is supposed to leave the patient and go on into another time or a dimension.

But when you take it and film it or record it or photo it, you capture that and the patient would not get healed.

I think Curtis should have respected the Navajo and just left it alone, all alone.

- You're not supposed to take those.

Even me, my son.

- Right now, (indistinct) could confiscate these pictures.

You can't take them.

- [Interviewer] They were taken 100 years ago.

- Yeah, but we're saying we could confiscate him right now.

We disagree with what your documentary is saying.

You're putting all the pictures into today's world, which is not right.

Our relatives are supposed to be let down.

It's supposed to be over.

We're not here to bring it up from what's in the past.

- If you took your video to a flute ceremony, you're probably history.

You probably be thrown over the cliff alive like we did the Spaniards in 1680.

- [Narrator] Indian people set their own limits on what they would let Curtis photograph.

(Mike speaking foreign language) - The person that's putting up the Sun Dance is the boss.

If he says it's all right to have pictures taken, it's not a problem.

And then I asked him, "What would you do if you were putting the Sun Dance?"

And he came and asked you to take a picture and that's where he said, "I tell him to go to hell."

(all laughing) - I think these people that were hired to perform for Ed Curtis, they didn't want to let Ed Curtis take the whole ceremony on film and to take it with him.

On that footage, it's all reversed.

They're holding their rattled with their left hand so they're out of timing.

All the dancers, they were going counter clockwise.

- [Narrator] For the first time, Navajos had allowed a camera to record the ceremony, but they had performed the dance backwards and had kept the most sacred parts to themselves.

The three Navajos who had helped Curtis were later arrested by the Indian agent for participating in a forbidden ceremony.

- In 1887, the government Secretary of Interior ordered all tribal cultural activity stop.

Medicine men were not supposed to practice or they'd get thrown in jail.

Tobacco ceremony, the most sacred of all tribal ceremonies, they have to hide and do it.

- This picture here is actually my husband's grandfather's, Little Plume and Yellow Kidney.

The stories that I'm hearing about them, they carried on a lot of the ceremonies.

That was all outlawed for us, but they did it and kept it going during the hard times.

And when you look at this picture, you see all the things hanging in there and you know that apparently they were the keepers.

(calming music) (train chugging) - [Narrator] One of Curtis's prize-winning society portraits came to the attention of President Roosevelt.

- [Edward] I had traveled from the West Coast the summer of 1904 at the President and Mrs.

Roosevelt's invitation to visit them at Sagamore Hill and to photograph the entire family.

- [Narrator] It was an amazing journey for Edward Curtis, a self-made photographer from the West with little formal education.

His natural charm won the Roosevelt's affection and friendship.

- [Edward] I found the Roosevelts a most vital, energetic family and enjoyed being included in their activities.

They made me feel like one of the family.

(calming music) (calming music continues) - [Narrator] Curtis showed Roosevelt some of his photographs and explained his idea of documenting traditional Indian ways.

- [Roosevelt] Your photographs stand by themselves, both in their wonderful artistic merit and their value as historical documents.

You have begun just in time for these people are rapidly losing the distinctive traits which they have slowly developed through the ages.

- [Edward] Stimulated by Roosevelt's encouragement, I was determined to produce a photo history of the North American Indian.

In the beginning, I assumed it would take about 15 years.

Little did I realize the full magnitude of the task I contemplated or the vicissitudes ahead.

(calming music) (chains rattling) (calming music continues) - [Narrator] While Curtis was in the field, his wife Clara, ran the studio, which supported the family and paid for the Indian work.

Curtis had been away from home for most of the last three years.

When he was at home, he gave special attention to his children who all adored him.

In Seattle, Curtis sold his images as postcards, published them in magazines, and gave lectures and slide shows.

Though far away in the west, he was influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and other members of the Photo-Secession Movement in New York.

- Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession and the pictorialist in general wanted to make a picture.

They didn't want to make a photograph.

They wanted to make a picture that would stand alone like other kinds of pictures, paintings, lithographs, etchings, and drawings.

That's where the word pictorialist comes from.

- [Narrator] Curtis often blurred his images with soft focus to create a misty effect or photographed people against sunsets, turning them into silhouettes and obscuring their modern clothes.

In the expressive pictorialist style, he found the perfect form for his nostalgic images.

(calming music) - [Rod] There are a lot of pictures where the people are kind of disappearing with their backs to you out of the frame and that was to symbolize the whole notion of the vanishing race.

- [Edward] The plan in mind is to make a complete publication of every phase of Indian life of all tribes, yet in a primitive condition.

- [Narrator] Curtis was borrowing thousands of dollars to support his Indian work.

At Roosevelt's suggestion, he approached J. Pierpont Morgan to ask for financial assistance.

- [Edward] Dividing the whole into 20 volumes containing 1500 full page plates.

The text to treat the subject much as the pictures do, going fully into their history, life and manners, ceremony, legends, and mythology.

- [Narrator] Morgan agreed to see Curtis, then briskly turned down his proposal.

Instead of leaving, Curtis opened his portfolio.

After seeing the pictures, Morgan agreed to provide $15,000 a year for five years in exchange for 25 sets of the volumes.

This would cover half the costs of the field work.

- [Edward] And then he said, "My staff will take care of the financial arrangements."

I walked from his presence in a daze.

- J.Pierpont Morgan, the richest man in the world, was funding a project which was recording and celebrating the lives of the poorest people in America.

And then when the volumes were subscribed to, they were subscribed to by very wealthy individuals, industrialists, railroad tycoons, bankers.

Virtually all these people had interests which were diametrically opposed to the interests of Native Americans.

The project is to some degree aimed at appealing to financial elites and I think that Curtis did have very deep contradictions in his nature, although he believed in what he called the old time Indian.

At the same time, he was thinking that Native Americans would be economically destroyed if they didn't assimilate as rapidly as possible.

(train chugging) - [Narrator] Curtis hired a small crew and set out for Arizona.

- [Edward] Eager to have the family with me, I had made arrangements to meet them at Gallup, New Mexico as soon as school closed.

There were three ecstatic children, 7,9, and 11, with their mother herding her brood for the start of a great adventure.

(calming music) Canyon de Chelly in Northeastern Arizona was to be a particular area in which I would be working.

(calming music) (bells ringing) (calming music continues) (bells ringing) Gradually, the red sandstone walls increased in height until they extended from hundreds to thousands of feet into the turquoise sky.

From dripping water through the ages, a tapestry of patterns is developed in a tracery on the walls, changing color with the sun's illumination.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Medicine men in the canyon made sand paintings for Curtis' camera.

(calming music) These photographs were later hand-colored in the Curtis studio.

- [Edward] In ceremonies, dry paintings or sand altars are made depicting the characters and incidents of myths.

(calming music) (Edward Harvey speaking foreign language) - He said that he's very happy to see these photos.

It brings back memories of his dad.

You know, I guess his dad used to do all kinds of ceremonies.

It's good to see old-time pictures of sand paintings and it makes him feel good inside.

(calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) - [Edward] There seems a broadly prevalent idea that the Indians lack a religion.

Rather than being without a religion, every act of his life is according to divine prompting.

(calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (insects buzzing) (birds chirping) - [Narrator] Curtis sent the family home and drove his wagon 100 miles west to the Hopi Reservation.

- Yeah, that's Mr.

Curtis.

I used to carry water for him and cameras.

That was a water boy a Gagadn.

Gagadn of the Hopi land.

(typewriter clicking) He camped out.

He used to hike all over and used to study the plant and I Hopi he showed him quite a few herb medicine.

And he wasn't tricky person like people went out to get information for their own goods, you know?

- [Narrator] Curtis asked the Snake Chief again if he would initiate him into the Snake Ritual.

Sikyaletstiwa showed him the captured snakes in the kiva, but did not invite him to participate.

(snakes rattling) On the morning of the Snake Dance, Curtis photographed a boy dressed for the ceremony.

- This little boy here, I used to do that when I was a kid.

It's an honor to the spirits if you present yourself this way.

My brother Elf and I used to do this.

We asked so many questions, why do we have to dress up in these stupid things like this?

And now I appreciate what I've done.

- [Riley] Curtis never barged into the Hopi house where he's got to be invited.

But he made many friends.

The Hopis help him out.

They welcome him.

(calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) - That's my mother making beaky.

My mother had long hair.

(speaking foreign language) (both speaking foreign language) (calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) - When I first saw the pictures, I didn't know who they were.

I didn't know that one of them was my grandma.

I was excited because, you know, I got to see my grandma young and she says she remembers this White man coming out and taking the pictures.

It took a long time for the pictures to be taken.

She just said, "Yeah, I remember that we had to all get our hair fixed and get all dressed up."

I think they normally wore cotton dresses.

They rarely wore this outfit unless there was a special occasion.

- On the one hand, they're being asked to dress up and sing and make their pottery for the White people that are showing up, you know, to demonstrate their culture.

On the other hand, they're being sent to jail because they don't want their kids to go to the Indian training schools.

And then what's the third hand?

Well, the third hand is their own lives.

What are they thinking?

What are they thinking about all this?

It's amazing to me that Native people were able to accommodate all these conflicting ideas and survive.

- She says sometimes it's funny what he tells them to do, you know, to grind and look at the camera at the same time because they're used to looking at what they're doing.

She said it was fun because they giggled and laughed a lot.

When they needed to laugh, they just put their head down so that they can laugh.

(woman laughing) You look back at these pictures and you really see what tradition was back then.

When I was growing up, you know, we already had regular clothing.

Tradition wasn't really that big and now it's going back towards being more traditional and we have these pictures to show us, you know, how they really were back then.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis published the first volume of "The North American Indian" in 1907.

(calming music) "The New York Herald" called it the most giant undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible.

(calming music) President Roosevelt wrote in his forward.

- [Roosevelt] In Mr.

Curtis, we have both an artist and a trained observer whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs.

He has caught glimpses such as few White men ever catch into that strange spiritual and mental life of theirs.

(calming music) - There's a man holding a medicine pipe, this picture could have been taken back in the 1500s.

The trade beads he's wearing might have been different, but that medicine pipe would have been the same, you know, because these go back hundreds and hundreds of years.

I became interested in following the traditional ways and one of the things some elders were telling me, "Well, if you're going to do anything, you have to have a pipe."

And I told him I never made one before.

It's just the difference between this is rubbing two sticks together or using a match.

(laughs) (gas flowing) I was basically on my own for the first pipe that I had ever made.

Ironic thing is, is that even my dad and my grandfather all advised me not to have anything to do with it.

Those were the people that were really influenced by missionaries.

And this old lady, Many Guns, when I had completed the pipe, she was very touched by it saying she was waiting for young people to be coming.

She was very emotional when I handed her this pipe to give it a blessing.

When you smoke a pipe with somebody, that means there's gonna be no lies, there's gonna be, you know, the world, our world, we're opening our world to each other.

(calming music) - [Edward] I discovered early on that the way to understand the Indian was to participate in his ceremonial life, the knowledge of which he guarded zealously.

I made a study of the comparative religions of the world as a basis for discussion.

If information seemed contradictory, we endeavored to talk to several of the old men, but our information was at all times drawn from the Indians.

(calming music) I returned to the Hopi villages over a period of many years, renewing my sincere request to be made a priest in the Snake Ceremony.

- They watch him, that he is true and an honest man.

He wanted to learn for himself.

- [Narrator] After six years of polite refusals, Sikyaletstiwa to have finally agreed to initiate Curtis into the Snake Society.

- My grandfather, Sikyaletstiwa, the Snake Priest adopted him, made him a regalia.

They went through the ceremony and gave him a Hopi name.

- [Narrator] As part of his initiation, Sikyaletstiwa invited Curtis along on the secret snake hunt.

- [Edward] There was no lack of snakes to be found.

There were diamond backs, sidewinders, bowl snakes, whipsnakes, but the majority of them were rattlers.

Our sacks soon became heavy with the weight of snakes.

I think they wanted to make doubly sure of my brotherly love for the snake, for they indicated I must wrap it around my neck before it was placed in my bag.

- [Riley] That feather there hypnotized the snake somehow.

The rattle snake will coil up and all of a sudden they'd be able to handle it.

- [Edward] Having experienced sweat baths for purification with various tribes, I knew only too well that the Indians seemed to particularly enjoy giving the White man the full treatment.

- If my grandfather call him, he'll come, but otherwise he stayed.

What they want him to see, they let him watch it.

And during a dance, he used to sit there.

He never take part in a dance, but he's all dressed up, but he knows the song.

(calming music) - [Edward] I was fortunate enough to be able to go through the whole ceremony, participating in the snake hunt and in fact, everything that a snake man would do except take part in the public part.

The only reason that I did not was that I feared newspaper publicity and missionary criticism.

(calming music) Hopi has become a spiritual crossroads in my work, a still place in the middle of the continent.

(calming music) These events are beyond words, but the urgency of continuing my work carries me forward.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis left the Hopi mesas behind and headed for the Grand Canyon.

He and his crew packed their gear on a mule train and started down the steep trail.

- [Edward] The pack mule, with my only camera fastened to its back, slipped and rolled down the canyon a mile.

The camera was spread out on the mountainside, seeming nothing but fragments.

12 hours steady, patient work and it was patched up so that it could be used, but such a sight.

(light drumming) - [Narrator] The following year, Curtis completed his second volume of "The North American Indian."

(calming music) (calming music continues) - When Curtis published these photographs, people had never seen this many dimensions of Native American culture.

Very few people had any idea of the real scope and complexity and even of the number of cultures that had been impacted by Western settlement.

(calming music) Many people, if they thought about Indians at all, they thought about them as something kind of troublesome and unpleasant that they wished would go away and suddenly here were these very dramatic, very imposing... These were portraits like you might see of Roman emperors, of the king or of the president, and here were these people presented with that much authority and that much dignity and that was stunning to people.

(calming music) (calming music continues) - [Narrator] Curtis had to sell subscriptions to pay for the publishing costs and other expenses as Morgan's funds only covered half the field work.

He went to New York to raise money, but his timing could not have been worse.

A financial crash crippled banks and made sales impossible.

He wrote to a friend.

- [Edward] Confidentially, the fact that the stock market has gone to the bowows is making my work a bit difficult.

I have but three weeks more here in the east and then I shall start for camp and no word can tell you how I look forward to getting out in the open.

- [Narrator] In July, he traveled west to Montana.

- [Edward] Clara and my son Harold were included in the party along with Myers, my assistant, Upshaw, the Crow Indian interpreter, and Justo, the cook.

- [Harold] Now I was to be really one of the party and living camp month after month.

That would be real life.

- [Narrator] Curtis and his son, Harold, rode out to the Little Bighorn Battlefield where Custer and all his men had been killed by Sioux and Cheyenne Warriors 30 years earlier.

- [Edward] With the Crow Scouts, I went over the ground to the point where Custer sent them back out of the fight to save their lives.

Then I took up inquiry with the Sioux Scouts.

- [Narrator] No one else had talked to Indian people who had been in the battle and then published their accounts.

- [Edward] We were working from the Indian's point of view, regardless of its differing from the view of the Caucasian.

- [Narrator] Curtis concluded that in seeking glory, Custer had ignored the warnings of the Crow Scouts and the evidence of his own eyes.

- [Edward] There is absolutely no question that Custer could have won this fight with little loss of life.

When the wise old Indian warriors that were there in this fight are asked what they think of Custer's coarse in the battle, they point to their heads and say, "He must have been wrong up here."

They can explain his actions in no other way.

- [Narrator] These words published in "The New York Herald" shocked some of Curtis's supporters, members of the Eastern elite who preferred to see Custer as a hero.

Curtis wrote a less incendiary account for Volume III of "The North American Indian."

(singing in foreign language) Curtis recorded hundreds of Indian songs in the field and later had them transcribed for publication in the volumes.

(singing in foreign language) - I was four years old when Curtis came to our home and there were other Indians who came in that particular evening that they sang.

I just remember that singing so well.

Could have been that he was recording.

He was joining in on some songs as I remember and some he was listening to the Indian people.

- [Edward] The songs were all recorded on wax rolls.

The singers and fellow tribesmen were awestruck on hearing the song repeated from what they called the magic box.

- My folks were jovial and they were laughing and singing and that wasn't too common at my home.

(calming music) - [Narrator] At the end of the summer, Curtis's son, Harold, came down with a fever.

- [Edward] Clara soon diagnosed his illness as typhoid, having nursed me with it some years before, and all thoughts and efforts were given to the boys' care.

- [Narrator] Harold was in a coma for weeks.

With Clara's careful nursing, he slowly began to improve.

- [Edward] As soon as Hal was partially well, we drove to the railroad.

It was a great relief to have the train stop when we flagged it.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Clara never accompanied her husband into the field again.

Back in Seattle, she was rarely at home.

When she was not busy running the studio, she was involved with civic and charitable activities.

13-year-old Harold did the cooking and took care of his younger sisters, Florence and Beth.

- The cost of Curtis' work to him personally and to his family was just enormous.

He was never at home.

He clearly became just driven by this project and you can explain it in terms of ambition but ambition of what kind?

Even with Morgan's support, it was going to cost far more than anyone imagined.

He needed three times as many people to work on the project and had no way to get them.

So he was draining money off the studio, which his family needed to support themselves.

- [Narrator] Curtis spent the winter working with two assistants in a cabin on the Crow Reservation.

(water trickling) - I like that picture because I had grandmothers and a lot of times they'd carry a great big canvas and then put the wood in it and then just put it over their back and go off, you know.

So I understand that sort of thing.

In Curtis's book, it mentions a couple of men here that are listed as warriors and there were no Crow war parties after 1876.

There was no way that these fellas were war party people because that was no more.

- [Interviewer] Right, so how do you think that photograph came to be?

- I think it was just posed.

They didn't actually take horses when they went on war parties.

If you're gonna go steal a car, you don't use a car to go steal a car.

You know, that's just that simple kind of thing.

So they were always going on foot.

They didn't go out in the wintertime.

(laughs) It's just that simple.

They just flat didn't.

I've never heard of anything like that.

- [Narrator] Some anthropologists in the east criticized Curtis's work as unreliable.

- Boas, I believe, was critical of Curtis primarily because Curtis was an amateur and he was treading in Boas territory.

He felt Curtis wasn't really professional.

- [Narrator] One of the treasured objects in Curtis' original negative of this Peigan lodge was an alarm clock, (clock ticking) but Curtis removed it from the image.

In framing out signs of modern day life, Curtis was following standard ethnographic practice.

Franz Boas screened out modern houses by holding a blanket behind his traditionally dressed Indian subject.

Curtis and Boas both retouched their negatives to obscure modern objects.

When word of Boas's criticisms reached him in the field, Curtis wrote to his editor, Frederick Hodge.

- [Edward] I am making a series as good and honestly made as I can and I feel that as long as I continue in this way, an attempt to avoid error by having you carefully edit the work, I should be given a chance for my life.

- I made the acquaintance of people in academia and many of them had the impression that he made up a lot of things, that he exaggerated, that he really couldn't count on his information.

It's true that he put costumes on people, but not very much.

See because he did it, people think he did it all the time.

He had a shirt that apparently belonged to him.

It seems he must have belonged to him because it appears on about 10 different guys in the whole many hundreds of photographs in several different tribes.

The shirt's not really out of place in those, but it's the same shirt, so clearly it's worn by people who are in a different tribe from which it originated.

It's the only case.

It's the only one that you can point to.

And now he's got one picture with a dozen war bonnets in it.

Did he have the whole suitcase full of war bonnets?

No, he didn't.

They were in their own thing.

(calming music) - It's important to remember that before Curtis got there, Indians had the conventions of being photographed that were taught to them by the White photographers.

You sit very still, you don't smile, you stare straight at the lens.

- I guess too at the time if you were gonna be photographed in the Victorian era, everybody has their suit and their tie on.

(calming music) Put on your best dress so they would put on their best dress and those best dress were always used for special occasions too, and these were special occasions to our people.

Well, like in this photograph of Yellow Kidney in his lodge, he's wearing a weasel tail suit.

It's just like wearing a tuxedo.

It's probably your best dress.

- I think that Curtis' view of the Indian is for the most part romantic, but I think we were more to him than happy snaps.

I hear people criticizing, "He carried around shirts," but he'd done a monumental job.

And if he didn't come along and record this, the loss would be tremendous, incalculable loss.

So when people start criticizing stereotypes, I look at my great-grandfather and he's not a stereotype.

He can't stage that.

You know, you can't stage the eyes and the determination.

And these were powerful people and he recorded them.

- When you look at the pictures, like sometimes we look at the face, we'll look at the person, but the longer you look, you know, you really have to study what's in that picture.

And the more you learn about the culture, the more you appreciate his pictures because at first it's like, "Oh, that's a bird on their, you know, on their headdress."

Then all of a sudden, as you participate in the culture, you recognize the spirit of that bird is what's on the headdress.

It's like the world comes alive again.

To me, that's the real key to what Curtis did by taking the photographs that he did because otherwise we would be in imaginary thought only because there would be no concrete for us and I think that's what Curtis' photos will contribute to us back as a people is he's gonna trigger those memory stops to start again.

(upbeat native singing) (upbeat native singing continues) (upbeat native singing continues) (upbeat native singing continues) (upbeat native singing continues) (train bell ringing) - [Narrator] Curtis came home for Christmas at the end of 1908.

His marriage was falling apart.

Early in 1909, he moved into a cabin across the Sound to write Volume V.

- [Edward] The long strain of work here was such that I was seriously worn out towards the end and the last week of the final reading and correcting a manuscript I could not leave my bed.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis moved into the Rainier Club in downtown Seattle.

His last child, Catherine, was born in 1909 and grew up without knowing her father.

(calming music) - [Edward] My greatest desire tonight is that each and every person see this poetic, mysterious, yet simple life and span the Gulf between today's turmoil and the far away enchanted round of primitive man.

- [Narrator] Curtis devised an elaborate picture musical to raise funds for the field work.

While he projected hand-colored lantern slides, a full orchestra played music inspired by his field recordings.

The musical toured the East Coast and drew record crowds to Carnegie Hall.

(audience clapping) These were the nostalgic images the public liked to see.

The program received standing ovations and glowing reviews, but the expenses were huge and the project lost money.

- [Edward] At the end of June, I gave up the effort for further money and went west and at once into camp, inadequately outfitted and short of funds to do efficient work.

The small amount used being in fact available through a second mortgage on my home.

Things are fearfully discouraging, but I am always hoping for the best.

(somber music) - [Narrator] By the end of 1911, Curtis had published only eight of the 20 volumes and his arrangement with J. Pierpont Morgan had come to an end.

Curtis wrote to Morgan's secretary, Bell da Costa Greene.

- [Edward] I have not yet quite brought myself to think the undertaking must be given up and I will fight on until some anxious creditor asks for a receiver.

- Curtis and the people with him worked at an unbelievable pace under just the most extraordinary pressure year after year after year.

(somber music) - [Narrator] Curtis took 45 to 50,000 photographs in the field, made 10,000 recordings, and published 20 volumes of text about the cultures of more than 80 different tribes.

(somber music) - [Edward] During the field season of 1905, 60,000 miles of railroad mileage were used.

- He made 125 trips to New York on the train during those years, 125 trips.

Plus rushing back and forth to Montana or the Southwest.

(train chugging) - [Edward] Our camp equipment weighing from 1,000 pounds to a ton, a motion picture machine, phonograph for recording songs, a typewriter, a trunk of reference books, correspondence in connection with the work, tents, bedding, our foods, saddles, cooking outfit, four to eight horses.

Such was the outfit.

- It's probably the largest anthropological project ever undertaken.

He must have had amazing stamina, amazing energy.

It's just awesome.

I think he had extraordinary charisma.

They all seemed to have called him the chief, which of course he liked too because he was also an egomaniac.

Sometimes he rode over people without realizing he'd done it.

The needs of the work were so great that petty, human needs like being paid are insignificant.

(dramatic music) - [Edward] For every hour given to photography, two must be given to writing.

(opera music playing) - [Barbara] At night, Curtis would sit up and he would write six or eight letters for money.

- [Edward] The everlasting struggle to do the work, do it well and fast is such that leisure and comfort are lost sight of.

But for every hour of misery, I could tell you of one of delight.

And the most stormy days have had glorious sunsets.

And for every negative that is a disappointment, there is on that is a joy.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis hoped to cash in on the growing popularity of motion pictures.

He planned a series of films on Indian life that would bring in enough money to complete "The North American Indian."

(camera rattling) He had been impressed by the costumes and dances he had seen in Kwakiutl potlatch ceremonies on Vancouver Island a few years before.

- [Edward] Their ceremonies are developed to a point which fully justifies the term dramatic.

- [Narrator] Never one to keep things simple, Curtis decided to make a film that would show every aspect of traditional Kwakiutl culture and at the same time tell a dramatic story that would attract audiences.

(water whooshing) He hired Kwakiutl people to make pre-contact costumes to carve canoes, totem poles and masks, and to recreate headhunting raids and ceremonies that had become illegal.

- One of the neat things about this film was that eventually people discovered that it was the first ethnographic film.

For years, people had thought that Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" was the very first, but Curtis beat him.

We were there first.

(camera rattling) Oh, there's that handsome man.

- Who's that guy?

- Oh, look at that guy.

Hey.

- Hey.

- [Stanley] Oh, this guy here, he's my father.

He was 19 when this was taken.

- That's my mom.

My mom was 17 years old.

She was picked for this movie because of her high ranking.

She was trained to be one of the noble women of her village.

(Native singing) - [Narrator] Everyone is here for a potlatch given in memory of Mary's mother, the star of Curtis's film, who died last year at the age of 99.

(Native singing) (Native singing continues) (Native singing continues) - What I'm doing when I'm dancing is I'm reenacting one of our stories.

You kind of look within yourself to find yourself and where you fit into the scheme of things here.

(Native singing) The government passed regulations, they're banning a potlatch.

That's when my father was born in 1895.

(Native singing) - [Narrator] When Curtis came to make his film, the potlatch ceremony was illegal.

- This White guy is going to pay them to do these dances that they would otherwise go to jail for.

And this is in the middle of potlatch prohibition and from all accounts they just really enjoyed being part of this.

(Native singing) (Native singing continues) Our people never hunted whales.

Why would we hunt whales?

We had all this wonderful salmon.

But Curtis was desperately trying to make money in whatever way so he wants to make a film that's going to be full of adventure to attract audiences.

So he includes things like this whale hunting sequence.

- [Stanley] They borrowed this whale.

- Yeah, here's the rented whale.

This is the story I really love.

Curtis took his cast up to the commercial whaling station and he rented this dead whale.

(Native singing) - [Edward] The picture is a compromise between what I would like to make if I were in the position to say the public be damned, and what I think the public will support.

(Native singing) - Curtis would be standing in the water with these great big, long rubber pants.

And he kept saying, "Come in, row faster, row faster, row harder, go this way."

So they were off course then because they knew their beach and he didn't and they hit a rock and most of the people inside the canoe had fallen off of their bench seats and they just started laughing like they couldn't stop laughing.

(water whooshing) And he just was so upset, he actually took the film out of the camera and threw it in the water.

So they had to do it all over again.

(Native singing) - [Gloria] I mean, our ancestors were real showman.

(Native singing) - If it wasn't for the film here, we wouldn't have had the opportunity to look back and see some of our older people again.

And for me to sit here and watch my father and some of my other relatives it's moving for me, you know, to see them.

(birds chirping) (no audio) (audience clapping) - [Narrator] Curtis's film opened in 1915 to rave reviews, but audiences did not flock to see it.

The first World War had just begun and Americans were turning their attention towards Europe.

(bomb exploding) - "In the Land of the Headhunters," it was a complete bust financially.

He made this film as a fundraiser and in fact, it shows a few times.

He later ends up selling it for like $1,500 and he spent 75 or $100,000 on the film.

Indian subjects just go entirely out of fashion.

Nobody's interested anymore.

He had been on the crest of the wave and now he was high and dry.

(calming music) - [Reporter] After 24 years of married life, Mrs.

Clara J. Curtis, wife of Edward S. Curtis, well-known Indian photographer, filed suit for divorce against her husband in the superior court.

- [Narrator] Curtis and his wife had been separated for years, but divorce was scandalous, shocking, and rare.

Their three older children felt closer to their father than to their mother and they remained loyal to him.

(somber music) The court awarded Clara the house, the studio, and everything in them, including thousands of Curtis' glass plate negatives.

(glass breaking) Beth Curtis, now 20 years old, was running the studio.

She was furious at her mother for divorcing her father.

Beth and an assistant copied many of the glass negatives then broke the originals so that her mother would not profit from them.

(glass breaking) (glass breaking) (somber music) Curtis had lost his marriage, his studio, and his home.

He stopped working on "The North American Indian."

He moved to Los Angeles with his daughter, Beth, who established a new studio downtown.

In the early 1920s, Curtis began working as a still and motion picture photographer on "Tarzan" movies starring Elmo Lincoln, fantasies about a White man living in the wild.

He called the movies "a circus kind of business," but it was a living.

(dramatic music) - [Edward] I am now working on the picturization of the 10 Commandments and aside from breaking the one which mentions the fact that we should keep the Sabbath holy, I am working about 18 hours a day, both on said Sabbath and on the days between.

(dramatic music) (no audio) (calming music) - [Narrator] After three years in the film business, he was finally able to escape from Hollywood and return to the Hopi Mesas.

(calming music) - [Edward] The very atmosphere seems to breathe of contentment and one has butt to close his eyes to the few things of modern life which have crept in, to feel that this is as it has been for untold generations.

(calming music) - [Narrator] The following year, Curtis published Volume XII on the Hopi.

It was his first publication in six years.

(dramatic music) - He pulls himself together and gets a little money here, gets a little money there.

Piece by piece, he pulls it back together and he goes out and does the field work on a much smaller scale in terms of his crew, but he persisted.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) - [Narrator] Curtis took his daughter Florence with him on a field trip to Northern California.

- [Edward] I asked if her husband could spare her for a couple of months.

We erected our tent under a canopy of living greenery.

The pungent fragrance of pine and tarweed and the persistent chant of crickets, dusk with its sleepy call of birds and then the stars of night enfolded us.

- I think Curtis himself was much more vulnerable in his later years, partly as a result of the divorce, partly his health wasn't so good, but I think he had a sense of his own mortality and his own fragility.

Perhaps because of that vulnerability, he becomes more aware of the fragility and the humanity of others.

(somber music) One way in which Curtis's own attitude changed towards Indians was because the California tribal groups were small, they had been so badly decimated and he would hear stories of how settlers had hunted people down and killed them off so the whole languages had disappeared.

He was very distressed at the severity, of the rapidity of the change.

- [Edward] While practically all Indians suffered seriously at the hands of settlers and government, the Indians of California suffered beyond comparison.

The principal outdoor sport of the settlers during the 50s and 60s seemingly was the killing of Indians.

- [Narrator] A few years later, Edward Curtis set out for Alaska to photograph Eskimo people for Volume XX.

It would be his last trip into the field.

His daughter, Beth financed the voyage, hired an assistant, and went along for the adventure.

- [Beth] And it truly seemed as though I was going to the other end of the world and I was finally on my way for the much longed for trip with dad.

- [Narrator] Curtis, Beth, and their assistant, Stuart Eastwood, sailed out into the Bering Sea for Nunivak Island.

They immediately encountered dangerous waters.

- [Edward] Ice thick, headway slow and there is the constant sound of grinding, shifting ice.

Not so good a start.

We ran into a thick fog and hit a sand shoal.

The engine went dead.

Each swell carried us a little further under the sand.

- [Narrator] They were miles from shore and hundreds of miles from any settlement.

No boats came out at that time of year.

They were in serious trouble.

(water whooshing) - [Edward] Beth is a brick and if she's worried, she's not letting anyone know it.

- [Beth] We are now high and dry on the sand so we go out and play around making pictures of the boat.

(water whooshing) - [Narrator] After two days, they were able to get off the sandbar.

- [Edward] Oh boy, what a relief it was to feel her floating free.

- [Narrator] They sailed 10 more days on treacherous seas and finally reached Nunivak Island.

(calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) - [Edward] Beth and I have been ashore and exchanged smiles with the natives.

They are certainly a happy looking lot.

We know now our decision to visit this island, regardless of the problems, was a wise one.

Think of it.

At last and for the first time in all my 30 years work with the natives, I have found a place where no missionary has worked.

They are so happy and contented as they are that it would be a crime to bring upsetting discord to them.

Should any misguided missionary start for this island, I trust the sea will do its duty.

(calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis was nearly 60 years old with a lame hip and painful arthritis, but he and Beth enjoyed themselves immensely.

They were especially charmed by the Nunivak children.

(calming music) - Me, my mother, didn't see my mother out there as she piggybacking me.

I was tired, that's why.

I got to go, see you.

Bye.

(footsteps pattering) (car starting) (car revving) - [Narrator] 10 years after Curtis' visit, Swedish fundamentalist missionaries founded a church on Nunivak Island.

They confiscated the masks and destroyed the Eskimo icons.

(singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) ♪ I shall know him I shall know him ♪ ♪ And redeem by his side I shall stand ♪ (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language continues) (singing in foreign language continues) (bike revving) (calming music) - [Narrator] Curtis had finished 30 years of field work for "The North American Indian."

- [Edward] Great is the satisfaction the writer enjoys when he can at last say to all those whose faith has been unbounded, "It is finished."

(calming music) - [Narrator] He sailed from Nome to Seattle and went directly to the train station.

As he was boarding a train for Los Angeles, he was arrested.

- [Reporter] Edward S. Curtis, originator of the famous Curtis Indian, was taken to the county jail by deputy sheriffs.

His divorced wife, Clara J. Curtis, alleged he has been in contempt of court for failure to pay alimony.

- [Narrator] Curtis told the judge that he had no money and could never expect to have any.

- [Edward] When I made my contract with Mr.

Morgan, I agreed that I contribute all the time devoted to research, promotion, and sales of published volumes.

The records show that for more than 17 years, I did not receive any remuneration for time devoted to the project.

- So here he was in this humiliating circumstance, he had to go up in front of people and in front of the judge and explain and he broke down in front of everybody and he wept and he said, "This is my life's work.

And it was the only work that I knew that was worth doing."

(somber music) - [Narrator] The judge eventually threw the case out of court and Curtis returned to Los Angeles.

(somber music) Volume XX, the final volume of "The North American Indian" was published in 1930.

The publication was met with resounding silence.

The depression had struck.

Few people were interested in Indian subjects and fewer still could afford the expensive volumes.

Curtis vanished from sight.

Exhausted, ill, and depressed, he moved to Colorado and was treated by an osteopath at a Denver clinic.

In 1932, he wrote again to Belle Greene at the Morgan Library.

- [Edward] Following my season in the Arctic, collecting final material for Volume XX, I suffered a complete physical breakdown.

Ill health and uncertainty brought a period of depression which about crushed me.

I could not write to my friends.

No one wants to listen to the whale of lost souls or the down and outers.

I am again writing and hoping I may do something worthwhile.

Do drop me a line.

Even a word for my old friends gives added courage.

- [Narrator] Belle Greene sent Curtis' letter to a colleague saying... - [Belle] As you will see from the enclosed letter from Mr.

Curtis, he does not ask any favor of me, but I think it wiser not to reply to it.

- [Narrator] His letter went unanswered.

(somber music) He turned his attention to gold mining and spent many seasons at his claim near Colfax, California, often in the company of his son, Harold.

He even invented and patented an ingenious gold concentrator device, but he never struck it rich.

(somber music) In his 80s, he decided to write a bok about gold mining.

- [Edward] I have been so busy writing "The Lure of Gold" that everything else is neglected.

Why anyone at my age should attempt such a task is beyond my understanding.

- [Narrator] He was also planning a trip to the Amazon, but his health failed him.

He died in Los Angeles at the home of his daughter, Beth, in 1952.

(somber music) (somber music continues) - So during the years from when he finished to when the plates were rediscovered in Boston and we began to see them everywhere in the '70s, during those years, it was as though it was lost.

(somber music) (somber music continues) - [Narrator] Partly inspired by Curtis' photographs, several Peigan in Canada revived the Sun Dance in 1977.

(somber music) (somber music continues) (somber music continues) (somber music continues) - Since then, Sun Dances started happening again in Blackfoot country on a regular basis and it's there and it's alive and well.

The whole community healing is happening at that point.

You know, it's a celebration.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) - [Edward] Now, as I look back on those years, my brain is a scrambled jumble of desert sandstorms, cyclone-wrecked camps, exhaustion and waterless deserts, frozen feet and hands in northern blizzards, wrecked river canoes and ocean-going crafts.

(somber music) On the other hand, hours of utmost peace, comfort, and joy at delightful camps.

The exaltation of accomplishment when some particularly difficult fragment of information was secured.

Many of the highlights of those years stand out clearly as though they were the happenings of yesterday.

(calming music) - [Announcer] To learn more about Edward S. Curtis, visit PBS online at pbs.org.

(singing in foreign language) (calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues) (calming music continues)