Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field

From the 1890s onward, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West. These were published (1907-1930) in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a "musicale, " and the very first narrative documentary film. Neither a eulogy to Curtis' achievement nor a debunking of …