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  • Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan
  • Jeffrey Mifflin
Timothy Egan. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 370 pp. Cloth, $28.00. isbn 9780618969029.

Few researchers who have studied Native American cultures have inspired such a wide divergence of opinion as Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952), the quixotic photographer who devoted thirty years of his life to The North American Indian, a twenty-volume set of brown-ink photogravures and related materials published between 1907 and 1930. His aim (which became a full-blown obsession) was to document every Native American "tribe" that still adhered to traditions predating the incursion of European American land grabbers, railroads, fences, Indian agents, and missionaries. Curtis, considered by some to be a hero of ethnographic documentation, has also been criticized as a manipulator who did not hesitate to stage scenes for the camera's lens and an opportunist who paid subjects and sometimes resorted to bribery to gain access to sacred objects not meant to be seen by the uninitiated. Egan's new book does much to explain Curtis's methods and motives, the difficulties and vicissitudes of his work, and the broader contexts of his "Big Idea" (41). Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher restores him to his rightful place as a sensitive master photographer and a staunch advocate for indigenous rights.

Curtis terminated his formal schooling after the sixth grade. He learned woodcraft during forays with his preacher father to spread the Gospel to Native Americans in the Midwest and assumed responsibility at the age of fourteen for supporting his family. He earned money as a laborer and gathered food for the table while prowling the woods. The "outdoors, the open country," Egan suggests, "was a church Ed Curtis could feel at home in" (3). In 1887 he moved from Wisconsin to Puget Sound, where land opportunities had opened following the displacement of the Natives. At twenty-two, after a spinal injury, he took up photography as a way of making a living that did not require heavy labor. He married and established himself as a successful portrait photographer in Seattle. His first Native American pictures featured Princess Angeline (15–16, 21), who lived in a shack on the edge of the expanding city, the last surviving child of Chief Seattle. He paid her a dollar.

Curtis's interest in recording Native American faces, clothing, artifacts, and activities grew with the consciousness that the world inhabited [End Page 116] by Natives was rapidly changing. Deliberate attempts were being made by missionaries and governments to erase indigenous cultures. Around 1900 Curtis approached some influential contacts, soliciting financial support for a Native American documentary project. Pluck (and ingratiation) eventually landed a promise from J. P. Morgan to fund a five-year project involving location photography, interviews, and other documentary tasks. Curtis naively underestimated the time and money he would need to document eighty cultures, recklessly undertook to provide his own services at no charge, and conceded that Morgan would assume responsibility only for direct expenses associated with the fieldwork. According to the terms of the agreement, all publication costs had to be met by Curtis himself through advance sales of subscriptions to The North American Indian.

Egan details Curtis's troubles and triumphs as he crisscrossed the United States and Canada, season by season and year after year from 1900 to 1927, chronically short of cash, braving physical hardships and suspicious Natives, sidestepping repressive laws aimed at quashing indigenous ceremonies, and attempting to sell subscriptions to institutions and wealthy individuals. The book reads like an adventure travelogue. The many dangers faced by Curtis on his fieldtrips include being stranded overnight on a submerged Alaskan rock as the cold, rising tide slapped his shins; risking arrest for encouraging outlawed rituals; being threatened by Natives who believed that the presence of a white man taking pictures was the cause of a child's serious illness; bobbing and lurching in a small boat through rampaging river rapids; and having to stand still while writhing rattlesnakes coiled around his unprotected...

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