Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis: Excerpts from Volumes I-XX of The North American Indian ed. by Barry Gifford (review)

Reviews 71 Carolyn Forché’s ambitions seem much less lofty. And her poems are accordingly less daring but more often successful. The first section of her book, “Burning the Tomato Worms,” is warm, moving towards senti­ mentality but avoiding it. However, this is the best section of her book; when Stanley Kunitz, in the introduction, describes her “imagination” as “passionate and tribal,” his terms rightly apply to her own world, her Slovak grandmother, even that European peasant world; but when she begins to give us images of the world of Indians one cannot accept her as tribal. She is not; there is a lingering paternalism in the present move of so many young white poets to give depth to experience by seizing upon the world of the American Indian. Fórche is an outsider and I think she sometimes recognizes that, although her poems are ambiguous, like her book’s title. Too, Mr. Kunitz suggests that her “Kalaloch” “may very well prove to be the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era.” The poem is about as passionate as Kunitz’ euphemisms. In short, Dorn and Forche are both highly competent, effective, and, yes, American. But they are not the future of poetry, at least as represented here. L. L. LEE, Western Washington State College Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis: Excerpts from Volumes I-XX of The North American Indian. Ed. by Barry Gifford. (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976. ix + 143 pages + plates, $5.95.) The rediscovery of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) is one by-product of the rediscovery of the American Indian that has been underway since the middle 1960’s. Curtis, a Seattle photographer, was himself part of an earlier vogue of the Indian. He reached maturity in the 1890’s at a time when many artists, responsive to the fin-de-siecle nostalgia over the passing of the Western frontier, were turning to Indian themes .The twentieth century loomed large, threatening the imminent extinction of native culture in the rush of technological growth. Here was a last chance to capture something of a vanishing America, to capture the fading glory of the red man before he reached the end of his trail. Several talented sculptors, painters and photographers rose to the challenge. None exceeded Curtis in ambition or intensity of commitment. He proposed to become nothing less than a latter-day George Catlin, preserving in words and pictures an imperishable record of a perishing race. Between 1897 and 1930 he photographed and studied some eighty native societies in Western North America, traveling from the Rio Grande to the Bering Strait. Twenty sumptuous volumes, each accompanied by a portfolio of photogravure prints, resulted from his efforts. 72 Western American Literature Collectively titled The North American Indian, they found their way into the libraries of the great institutions and the very wealthy. Curtis tried to reach a larger audience by writing a few popular books and magazine articles and producing a romantic film about the Kwakiutl with a title aimed at the boxoffice, In the Land of the Head Hunters. But his life’s work, The North American Indian, remained inaccessible to the average reader, and Curtis lived out his final years in relative obscurity. With the vogue of things Indian in the 1960’s, Curtis photographs suddenly began to pop up everywhere. Lavish picture books have been devoted to his work. All of his own titles are back in print, including The North American Indian. In the Land of the Head Hunters has appeared several times in an edited version on educational television. As a result of this concentrated attention, Curtis’ photographs are today widely familiar. His literary endeavors are not, and Barry Gifford’s anthology Selected Writings of Edward S. Curtis is apparently intended to fill the void. It is neither a picture book nor (despite the misleading cover title The Portable Curtis) a genuine “selected writings” since it consists exclu­ sively of excerpts from The North American Indian. Gifford states that these have been chosen on the basis of representativeness and interest. But in both respects his book leaves something to be desired, and the question remains: Who is this anthology intended for? Because it...