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Chapter 6: Generally Speaking
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6 Generally Speaking Whereas the letters, fieldnotes, and other items reprinted in the previous chapters arise out of and specifically describe contact between the project’s members and Indian peoples, this final chapter includes documents of a more general nature, all of which feature Curtis as their main source: records of his travels, reminiscences of religious observance, lecture notes on Indian population figures, musings on Indians as a “vanishing race,” and the like. However, these too have been selected because they bear upon, and to some degree contextualize or actually represent encounters in the field. In both linking passages and at the end I offer some concluding commentary. From a Student Newspaper Item,“Curtis Tells of Indian Pictures,” 1905 At the behest of Edmond S. Meany, Curtis gave a number of public lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. The following is an extract from a report in the student newspaper, The Pacific Wave, of one he delivered in November 1905. As is obvious from its content, this lecture was given before the financial agreement Curtis made with J. Pierpont Morgan. Interestingly, Curtis told the students that, as of that time, it would require a total of “eight years endeavor” to complete his task, which was to “classify Indians pictorially.”1 Ultimately, as has been seen, the project embraced much more than just the pictorial element and took vastly longer than eight years to complete. I have been working on this series of volumes for eight years, and carried it on as rapidly and thoroughly as money will permit. The plans are that the final publication will consist of approximately 3,000 large pictures in twenty portfolios. Twenty volumes of tens [sic] will be bound separately and will contain,as additional illustrations, 3,000 full page engravings. I am going to tell you a little of this season’s work. In the early season I went 131 132 Generally Speaking to Nespelem, where we dragged poor old Chief Joseph from one resting place to another.2 From there I went to the Crow Agency in the Valley of the Little Big Horn, a region rich in mythology and legend. In my work, the subjects covered are the location of primitive homes; primitive home structures; the nature of home country; origin story; person of miraculous birth; hair dress, male and female; marriage;sacred powder [sic?];primitive foods;games;principal ceremonies;burial; medicine men; history of tribe; arts and crafts; clan formation; chiefs and religion. While with the Crows we made a trip across the reservation to what is known as Black Canyon [see fig. 23]. The canyon is a particularly picturesque spot. We had with us a splendid bunch of Indians, old and young. There was Upsham [sic], an educated Indian. Now, I want to repeat that statement. An educated Indian—the most education to a given quantity of pagan avoirdupois that I have ever seen. But don’t presume that he was civilized. You can’t, in one generation, civilize the Indian. Give him one coat of educational whitewash at Carlisle, let him graduate with great honors there, then graduate from a large Eastern college; add to that a post graduate course, and years of living in white families; let him live in the married state with an educated white woman, and still he is a pagan through and through, and will die so and go to the god of his fathers [see figs. 4 and 5]. . . . After we left the Crows, we made a visit to the Sioux of Pine Ridge agency and into the heart of the Bad Lands. The great ceremony of the Sioux is the “Hunka” ceremony [see fig. 13]. In its general features it is the great ceremony of many plains tribes. I began my southwest work among the Cahullia [sic] Indians in their palm canyon in Southwestern California. This is a wonderfully interesting group and region. Their legends are naturally interwoven with the life of the palm. To them the palm is more than a plant or a tree. It has a life, a soul, a hereafter. FromAlbuquerque,New Mexico,we started out among the Pueblos of the Upper Rio Grande. The villages visited were San Ildefonso,Poju [sic],Santa Clara,San Juan, all belonging to the same linguistic group, the Tanon. The Pueblo Indians’life is one vast interwoven network of ceremony, all of a religious nature [see fig. 7], and the greater part secret. I am going to tell...