Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated

For three decades from the 1890s onwards, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West. These were published (1907–1930) in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a ‘musicale’, and the very first narrative documentary film. While not necessarily unique, the project was bigger, better funded, and more famous than any of its time, and its images still retain their influence today. Neither a eulogy to Curtis’s achievement nor a debunking of it, this book is an honest study of the project as a collective whole: what it was, who was involved, and what it meant.

• Includes 21 photographs • Examines the meaning of the whole North American Indian project • Approaches the project from a variety of different perspectives: economical, ideological, aesthetic, and anthropological

Part I. Introductory: 1. A national undertaking; Part II. Co-ordinates for a Project: 2. Cracker Jack pictures; 3. Trading with the Indians; 4. Hustling the eminent; 5. Diffident ethnology; Part III. Indians Incorporated: 6. Adventure in the field; 7. ‘The vanishing race’ in sight and sound; 8. Bronze in action; 9. Representing the Indian.

From reviews of the hardback: ‘Astute, lucid, sophisticated, committed to its subject, and a marvel of tact and modesty.’ Alan Trachetenberg, Yale University

‘Gidley’s work on Curtis is cutting-edge, based on a thorough examination of archival sources that will delight and enlighten scholars interested in popular culture, history, anthropology, and photography. Although others have written about the work of Curtis, Gidley provides the definitive work.’ Clifford Trafzer, University of California, Berkeley

‘ … will quickly establish itself as an indispensable source for anyone with an interest in intercultural American literature.’ European Journal of American Culture

\' … it is Gidley\'s achievement to have painstaking reconstructed the various contexts and influences that formed Curtis\'s enterprise as a complex whole. He has unearthed a treasure-trove of unpublished and previously unregarded material.\' Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik