Edward Sheriff Curtis

Edward Curtis published the twenty-volume work The North American Indian to record the traditional lives and customs of Native Americans. By the time he began his project, Native Americans had endured decades of hostility, including federal policies of forced assimilation and relocation to reservations. Yet there is no trace of this historical context in Curtis’s photographs. Indeed, research has shown that Curtis retouched many of his photographs to remove modern artifacts. In this way, Curtis presents the Native American as untouched by the modern world, a “vanishing race” that could be preserved only in images, as in this scene of a canoe paddled by Kwakiutl Indians gliding through a narrow passage between two islands.