Native Agency and the Making of The North American Indian : Alexander B. Upshaw and Edward S. Curtis

I

The twenty volumes of ethnographic text and pictorial photography and the twenty portfolios of large, finely printed photogravures that together comprise The North American Indian were the product of an extraordinary labor by Edward S. Curtis and an extensive and shifting team of co-workers. Although it is Curtis's name that appears on the title page of each volume, from the first published in 1907 to the last in 1930, the work is best understood as a collaborative effort; a variety of ethnographers, research assistants, academic advisors and editors, photographic technicians, and printers all contributed to making the project.¹ In addition, hundreds (if not more) of Native Americans participated in the construction of the project, not only as photographic subjects but also as translators, informants, and cultural brokers. By the time the last volume was published, Curtis's grand ambition of "accumulating the data necessary to form a comprehensive and permanent record of all the important tribes of the United States and Alaska that still retain to a considerable degree their primitive customs and traditions" had resulted in over 40,000 photographs, approximately 2,500 of which were actually included in the published volumes and portfolios.²

Although recent accounts of the encounter between photography and Native American cultures have shifted attention away from the objectification of Native subjects within romantic and racialist iconographies and toward narratives that focus on Native understanding of the photographic process and on the active use of photography by Native individuals and groups for the purposes of self-representation, as yet there has been no attempt to develop a sustained account of the extent and nature

Figure 1.

Edward S. Curtis, "Upshaw-Apsaroke." Guildhall Library, City of London.

of Native involvement in the making of The North American Indian.³ This is surprising since the collaborative nature of Curtis's project has been acknowledged and Curtis has been the subject of far greater critical examination than any other photographer of Native Americans.

The use of Curtis's portfolio portrait of Alexander B. Upshaw (fig. 1), his gifted Crow (or "Apsaroke") interpreter and fieldworker, as an illustration of the triumph of romance over reality, of genre conventions and racial typology over individuated portraiture, is exemplary of the critical failure to take account of Native agency. Upshaw, who worked extensively with Curtis between 1905 and 1909, was the son of Crazy Pend d'Oreille, a prominent Crow warrior and leader. Born in 1874 or 1875, he graduated from the Carlisle Indian school in 1897, pursued further studies, went on to become a teacher at the Indian school at Genoa, Nebraska, married a white woman, and was widely respected among the Crows as an advocate and campaigner for tribal rights.

Given the discrepancy between this biography and Curtis's theatrically "traditional" portrait, it is understandable that Mick Gidley, the foremost Curtis scholar, considers it noteworthy that Curtis depicted Upshaw "not as he usually saw him—in dungarees, with short hair neatly parted—but bare-chested and adorned with feather headdress."⁴ A similar contrast was drawn some twenty years earlier by Christopher Lyman when he juxtaposed the portrait taken by Curtis with one showing Upshaw wearing a jacket, collared shirt, and tie, his short hair neatly combed back over his head (fig. 2).⁵ For Lyman, whose work largely set the terms of reference for the critical consensus about Curtis prevalent today, the function of the Native costume in the image is to make Upshaw "appear 'Indian' to Curtis's viewers."⁶ Commenting on Curtis's images of Native cultures of the Plains, Gidley largely agrees with Lyman; he characterizes the work primarily in terms of "the formation and perpetuation of an iconography," concluding that the images must be seen as "reconstructions or, more accurately, constructions produced at the behest of a prevailing ideology."⁷ The North American Indian, it is argued, cannot extricate itself from the binary logic of savagism and civilization that underwrites narratives of Native demise, or vanishing, as...