The person who has the camera and takes the photograph can often influence how we remember things. That’s why it’s always good idea to put on your best face kids, when someone’s taking your picture—you don’t want to be remembered as a sad sack.

Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) had a camera. He took a lot of photographs. Between the late 1800s and the 1930s he took some 40,000 photographs of the many different Native American peoples. Curtis’ first portrait of a Native American was taken in 1895. He photographed Princess Angeline—the daughter of Si’ahl, a powerful American Indian chief for whom the city of Seattle was named. The Princess was down on her luck selling clams to make a living. Curtis paid her a dollar to sit and have her portrait taken. He noted in his journal:

This seemed to please her greatly, and with hands and jargon she indicated that she preferred to spend her time having pictures made than in digging clams.

The son of a clergyman, Curtis was born on his parents’ farm in Whitewater, Wisconsin in 1868. He had two brothers and one sister. When the family moved to Seattle, he set up a photography studio with his brother Asahel. The evangelizing influence of his father’s occupation probably set Edward Sheriff Curtis out on his thirty year quest to document the Native Americans. Curtis literally feared the native Americans were on verge of being eradicated.

The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other… consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.

Some have criticized Curtis for creating an overly romantic image of Native Americans. Erasing modern objects (clocks, personal belongings) from photographs. Depicting them in traditional clothing. An image that did little to document the contemporary realities of their lives. Despite the criticisms, his work is a connection to the wealth of history and culture which could have undoubtedly been lost. As Laurie Lawlor has written, at a time when Native American culture was being proscribed by government, Curtis was “far ahead of his contemporaries in sensitivity, tolerance and openness to Native American cultures and ways of thinking.  He sought to observe and understand by going directly into the field.”

Apart from the 40,000 photos of over 80 tribe, he also recorded:

10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native American language and music. He compiled biographical sketches of different tribal leaders, detailed customs, clothes, food, rituals, and tribal folklore. Many of these documents are the only recorded history–though a strong oral tradition remains.

This small collection captures some of the Native American ceremonial costumes which are by turn beautiful, surreal and haunting.
 

 

 
More of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ photographs, after the jump….

Brushing Against, Little Squint Eyes, San Carlos Apaches, 1898.
 
In 1898, Frank Rinehart was commissioned to photograph Native Americans attending the Trans-Mississippi Exposition and Indian Congress in Omaha, Nebraska. Together with his assistant, Adolph Muhr, Rinehart produced a series of portraits that has been described as “one of the best photographic documentations of Indian leaders at the turn of the century.” Many of these graceful and dignified portraits were taken by Muhr, of whom former photographic curator at the University of Kansas’ Spencer Art Museum, Tom Southall said:

The dramatic beauty of these portraits is especially impressive as a departure from earlier, less sensitive photographs of Native Americans. Instead of being detached, ethnographic records, the Rinehart photographs are portraits of individuals with an emphasis on strength of expression. While Muhr was not the first photographer to portray Indian subjects with such dignity, this large body of work which was widely seen and distributed may have had an important influence in changing subsequent portrayals of Native Americans.

Frank Rinehart started his career as a photographer with his brother Alfred in Denver, Colorado in the 1870s. Together they formed a partnership with explorer and photographer William Henry Jackson—famed for his photos of life in the American West and for creating the image of “Uncle Sam.” It was under Jackson’s tutelage that Rinehart developed his craft.

Today the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection consists of 809 glass plate negatives that depict many of the Native Americans who attended the Trans-Mississippi Exposition and Indian Congress, as well as those whom Rinehart photographed at his studio in Omaha between 1899-1900.

More from the Rinehart Collection can be viewed here.
 

Calls Her Name, Sioux, circa 1989-1900.
 

Ahahe & Child, Wichita, 1898.
 

Black Horse, Arapahoe, 1900.
 
Many more after the jump…

 
You may have recently heard of Leith, North Dakota, the town of only 24 people currently at risk of Nazi takeover, because apparently the middle of the goddamn country now contains a rip in space-time, leading directly to Poland in 1939. An opportunistic white supremacist has been buying up land in Leith with the express intent of organizing a “white nationalist intentional community.” (I’d argue a lot of those already exist more discreetly in the gated communities of America, but I digress.)

Obviously, there has been some push-back from Leith citizens, including Bobby Harper, the one black guy in town, who’s clearly the most patient and laid-back man alive. But a town of 24 people isn’t the most intimidating mob, so friends and allies from nearby towns have shown up in support, most notably the above crew of Lakota and Dakota grandmothers, who stole and burned a swastika flag in protest. You have to admit, there is some serious irony in attempting to create a Nazi town in a state that shares a name with the indigenous people who lived there prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Check out the video below for Bobby Harper and his wife, who now live right behind white supremacists.
 

 
Via Last Real Indians

 
Vice online has a terrific piece on ‘Redsploitation’ movies.

Somewhere in the grey area between the noble savage and the savage-savage lies the Redsploitation film. These gems of schlock cinema feature Natives getting off their knees and kicking white ass all over the West.

For the whole scoop on really pissed off Indians in the movies check out the Vice website.

 
more vengeance after the jump…

 
Fascinating review by Andrew O’Hehir in today’s Salon of Timothy Pauketat’s, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi.  In it, Pauketat shines a light on a chapter in American history that’s long gone ignored—evaded, even.  Situated east of modern-day St. Louis and larger than London, Cahokia was once a thriving Native American metropolis, complete with plazas and pyramids, before finally succumbing to disease, dissent and destruction.  Well, there was something else:

...it also seems clear that political and religious power in Cahokia revolved around another ancient tradition.  Cahokians performed human sacrifice, as part of some kind of theatrical, community-wide ceremony, on a startlingly large scale unknown in North America above the valley of Mexico.  Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia’s mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it.  A few of them weren’t dead yet when they went into the pit—skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them.

As unsavory as that sounds to today’s ears, Pauketat goes on to draw parallels between those sacrifices, and the near-complete erasure undertaken by contemporary scholars who would have most likely dismissed the notion of a Native American city as:

bizarre and self-contradictory.  Scholarly conceptions weren’t all that far away from pop culture depictions: American Indians lived light on the land, mostly in hunter-gatherer societies augmented by minimal subsistence agriculture.  While they may have had “ceremonial centers” along with seasonal villages and hunting and fishing camps, they didn’t live in large or permanent settlements.

Pauketa’s book might serve as a corrective to the old myopic views on Native American possibility, but this ritual sacrifice business seems harder to shake.  Was it just another bread-and-circus solution to curb growing unrest?  Maybe so.  As O’Hehir concludes, “Cahokia forged a new sense of community out of these rituals, one that merged church and state, and Cahokians ‘tolerated the excesses of their leaders,’ as most of us do, as long as the party kept going.”
 
In Salon: Sacrificial Virgins of the Mississippi