Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts. (Edward Curtis)

by 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared—more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world.

Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study.

Their humanity has been forgotten,” Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians—as either savages or victims.

to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight

They would begin shooting in 1914, a year out. Curtis felt renewed. With a fresh bounce in his step, he walked the shore of Vancouver Island, all pulsing tides and overgrowth, more than fifty pounds on his back, and slogged through the rainforest in search of people unaffected by modern life. In one of the wettest parts of the world, the Indians spoke of two broad categories for rain: male and female. "A 'she-rain' is gentle, caressing, clinging, persistent," Curtis explained in an extended note to his daughter Florence, one of the many letters to his children that picked up as he entered middle age. "A 'he-rain' is quite the opposite in all ways but that of persistence.

Polygamy was common [amongst the Navajo], but women had superior property rights, owning sheep and the houses. A man who deserted his family would be destitute -- a powerful incentive to stay married.

photography was “a circus kind of business, and unfit for a gentleman to engage in.

In the fall of 1887, Ed Curtis and his father arrived in the Puget Sound area, which was opening up to land opportunists after treaties had removed most of the Indian, and all of the British, claims to the region.

The tribes may have been numerous, but the overall population was plummeting. When the results of the 1900 census were published, the government counted only 237,000 Indians in a country of 76 million people. This was the lowest number ever, scholars and Indian authorities said, down from perhaps as many as 10 million at the time of white contact in 1492.

Upshaw—Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis’s friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, “perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized,” as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.

From the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard came a note from Professor F. W. Putnam, rapturous in his commendation of “your great work.

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

To look at the face [of Princess Angeline] and not see humanity is to lack humanity.

long months of despondency I could